Category: Travels

Is real estate in Roatan undervalued?

By a lot.  I was briefly on the island, and also visited Próspera there (I thank my hosts for their time and efforts, and I believe Vitalia will be posting my session with them on-line, much of it covering life extension and crypto).

I have been to plenty of both Latin America and the Caribbean, and I was struck by how safe the island is.  Most anything of significance is priced in dollars, and you can pay with dollars, even in small restaurants.  The core language is English, although Spanish seems to be increasing rapidly, due to migration from the mainland, itself a good sign for Roatan.  Population is about 100,000 on a small island, but I didn’t encounter any traffic problems.  Electricity and water seemed to be reliable.  The local seafood is of very high quality.

At the top end I found this home selling for over 3m.  I was in Jonesville, an extremely charming small town right on the water with picture-perfect views.  Here are some home and lot prices.  Below 400k at the top end, something wonderfully placed for below 90k, and empty lots in the 70k range.

Much of the Caribbean I don’t find so attractive, as it can be too dry or scrubby, but Roatan is truly beautiful.  The views from some parts of Próspera are among the best Caribbean views I have seen.

From conversation, I infer that better direct flight service and better facilities for private planes are holding back real estate prices in Roatan.  Neither of those seem to be insurmountable problems.  Maybe the Honduras label puts some people off?

For dining, by the way, eat the Garifuna offerings at Punta Gorda, such as Garifuna Living Foods.

Comayagua, Honduras

Comayagua is one of the very nicest and most classic of Central American towns.  It is safe (yes, this is Honduras), walkable, delightful, and comes to life later in the day in the main square.  It is full of colonial buildings and some churches.  I didn’t see any North American tourists, and the surrounding countryside is lovely.  Population is about 100,000.

A few years ago Honduras switched its main international airport, so a flight to the capital Tegulcigalpa actually brings you much closer to Comayagua — visit there instead!  Here is Wikipedia on the city.

As for food, go to Hotel Helechos (central in town, but oddly no one has heard of it), walk out to your right and immediately there is an amazing baleadas stand.  The pupuseria on the corner of main square is excellent.  In general, Honduras is the country where the quality difference between roadside and street food, compared to the restaurants, perhaps is greatest.  And it doesn’t favor the restaurants.

Salta (and Jujuy) notes

The food is excellent.  Don’t worry about choosing the right restaurant, just try to eat the simple things.  Corn products.  Beans.  Baked goods such as empanadas.  Don’t waste your time on the steak.  The food stalls in the Mercado Municipal are a good place to start, and many items  there cost fifty cents to a dollar.  The “sopa de mani” (peanut soup) is especially good, and almost identical to what you find in Bolivia.

The overall vibe in Salta reminds me of both northern Mexico and the older parts of the American Southwest.  And the adjacent parts of Bolivia.  It is hot, the cities are surrounded by beautiful scenery, and it still all feels rather wild.  Salta is also much safer than Buenos Aires, and you don’t see many beggars here.  In B.A. they are now asking for food rather than money.

There’s not much to do in Salta, as the central sights in town are the two mummified remains of young Incan girls in the archaeological museum.  They are memorable, as it feels like they are staring right back at you.

Spending time here will cure you of utopianism, and also of pessimism.  Whatever issues you might think are really important, most people here really don’t care about them or even know about them.

American brands at the retail level are not to be seen.  Nor will you run across Chinese or Indian merchants.  Perhaps a Syrian or Lebanese is to be found, but not in any great numbers.

Tyrone is accompanying me, and I asked him what he thinks.  As you might expect, he had only stupid rudeness in response.  Tyrone said that northern Argentina is the true essence of the Argentinean nation, and that everyone interested in Argentina should visit here.  In fact, having visited North Macedonia, he wishes to rename the country South Bolivia — were they not once part of the same Viceroyalty?  Is it not enough to share the same soup?  Do they not have broadly the same accent, devoid of all that B.A. slurring?  Was not the country born here in the north?  That is where the decisive battle for national independence was fought and won.  Do we not all agree with theories of deep roots?  It is not just who moves to your nation, but it is about how and where your nation was founded.  And for Argentina that is in the north, and with violence and corruption and economic decline.  Tyrone even wishes to hand over the rest of Patagonia to the Chileans, so that Argentina may better recognize its true self.

In the twisted view of Tyrone, the creation of the modernist city of Brasilia was a big success.  The real failure, hermetically hidden by some charming Parisian and Barcelona-style architecture, was the attempted modernist outpost of Buenos Aires, an immature and underdeveloped excrudescence from the real nation of chocro, horse saddles and the quebrada.  It tricked a few Johnny-come-lately migrants during the early 20th century, and neglected to tell them they still would be ruled by the ideas and the norms of the north.

Imagine thinking that you could govern a nation with high modernism and Freudian psychoanalysis — what folly!  And now, Tyrone tells us, we have the Milei revolution, attempting to replace one Viennese modernism — that of Freud — with the Viennese modernist revolution of Mises.  Good luck with that one, Tyrone says.  What kind of fool would think that the future of South America would be determined by a war across different Viennese modernisms?  Those mummified corpses still will rule the day, whether or not the feds balance the budget in the short term.  Desiccated ever-young girls are in perpetual deficit, no matter how the daily fiscal accounts may read.

I had to stop Tyrone right then and there, as he was explaining why the current hyperinflation probably was a good thing, as the only path to true dollarization and at least one symbolic unification with North America.  Tyrone was shouting that such symbolic unification nonetheless was impossible, and thus the corpses had brought in Milei to restore fiscal sanity and prevent dollarization and thus protect the true Incan and Andean nation.

Such thoughts are not allowed on Marginal Revolution, and so I am now trying to persuade Tyrone to visit Iguassu, in the hope that I can induce him to take a quick swim in those falls…

I hope the rest of you will visit northern Argentina nonetheless, and put all that nonsense aside.  The empanadas await you.

What I think

From an email I sent to a well-known public intellectual:

I think the chance that the bodies turn out to be real aliens is quite low.

But the footage seems pretty convincing, a way for other people to see what…sources have been telling me for years. [Everyone needs to stop complaining that there are no photos!]

And to think it is a) the Chinese, b) USG secret project, or…whatever…*in Mexico* strains the imagination.

It is interesting of course how the media is not so keen to report on this.  They don’t have to talk about the aliens, they could just run a story “The Mexican government has gone insane.”  But they won’t do that, and so you should update your mental model of the media a bit in the “they are actually pretty conservative, in the literal sense of that term, and quite readily can act like a deer frozen in the headlights, though at some point they may lurch forward with something ill-conceived.”

Many of you readers are from Christian societies, or you are Christian.  But please do not focus on the bodies!  I know you are from your early upbringing “trained” to do so, even if you are a non-believer.  Wait until that evidence is truly verified (and I suspect it will not be).  Focus on the video footage.

In any case, the Mexican revelations [sic] mean this issue is not going away, and perhaps this will force the hand of the USG  to say more than they otherwise would have.

Doha travel notes

Qatar is a greatly underrated tourist destination.

The Museum of Islamic Art is one of the finest museums in the world, with a collection of unsurpassable quality, drawing on Islamic creations from as far away as Sumatra and the Philippines, as well as the more familiar Persian, Indian, Turkish, and Central Asian items.  The I.M. Pei building offers fantastic views, and there is an Alain Ducasse restaurant on the top floor.

The National Museum of Qatar is more didactic, but still I found it spectacular, including the architecture and external sculptures on the front side of the building.  Usually I dislike audiovisual displays in museums, but their films on the history of Qatar — shown on very large Imax-like screens — were spectacular.  The costumes and jewelry displays are hard to top.  “Culture” and “growth” seemed to be the organizing themes of the exhibits.  The progressions were logical, and at the end of it all I came away thinking that Qatar has had cultural sophistication for a long time, and is not just a place where they throw a lot of money at art.  I fell for their propaganda, but now I am going to read up and see just how true that is.

In value terms, the government of Qatar is the largest buyer of art in the world.  The country has other notable museums as well, but I did not have the time to visit them, as sometimes their hours are irregular, or they are private collections which require special appointments.

In most public spaces you will see some attempt to make them look creative or aesthetic.  By no means do all such displays succeed, but they are always trying.  Many of the contemporary buildings, or sculptures along the road, are worthy of inspection.

In the water you still can see wooden dhows, and on the roads you might see a man in desert gear shepherding his camels across the road.  The main souk has a whole section devoted to falcons and falconry.  The souk at dusk is magnificent.

Overall the place feels cheerier and homier than does Dubai.  Everyone I met was friendly.  English is the lingua franca, and most of the people here do in fact speak reasonable English.

Cultural Village” and “Pearl Island” are hard to explain, but they are parts of town worth a visit, moving at times in Las Vegas and “Venetian” directions.

The nearby development of Lusail (is it a separate city?) has some iconic buildings and is worth a visit, check out the medical center, it looks better in real life than in the photos.

Doha sparkles when it comes to food.  The Parisa Persian restaurant in Souq Waqif (don’t go to the other Parisa restaurant, supposedly it is worse) was the best fesanjan I ever have had, excellent decor too.

Saasna is one local high-quality place for Qatari food.  Not cheap, but excellent ingredients.  The dishes skew in the Saudi direction (“lamb shank on saffron rice,” or “beef stewed with wheat”) rather than Persian.

Good Indian and Chinese places seem to abound, I even saw an apparently high-quality Miami restaurant.  The breakfast at the Mandarin Oriental Hotel was first-rate, most of all the pistachio labneh.

Based on n = 6, this seems to be one of those countries where they ask if you want lemon in your sparkling water, you say no, and they give it to you anyway.

On Fridays, the country does not open until 1:30 p.m., so if you are doing a short visit try to avoid that day.

The on-line visa form was easy to fill out, and I received a positive response within seconds.

Going in August, as I have done, is not crazy.  Sometimes the temperatures reach 47 degrees or higher, but somehow it is manageable, or at least it was for me.  Perhaps more people are around other times of the year?  In any case you should go, as Qatar ought to join the list of must-visit destinations, and it is easy enough to combine it with other trips, given the use of Doha as an air hub.

How to eat well in Sri Lanka

Food here is excellent, but eating well involves some counterintuitive advice.

For one thing, there are few “undiscovered gems” along the roadways.  It is just not a thing here, and several Sri Lanka residents have confirmed this to me (one person suggested there used to be lots of them, but they have faded).  During my extensive road travels, I saw many many closed, empty, or otherwise deserted roadside restaurants.  The open ones had few or no customers.  So don’t put a lot of time into searching for them.  You will do just fine eating at the obvious restaurants, including hotel restaurants.

Often breakfast is the best meal, as you can sample hoppers and string hoppers.  If they will cook a hopper for you with an egg (and spices) inside, do that.  Think of it as a spongy carbohydrate turned into a kind of crepe.  The egg inside should not be overdone, but the woman cooking it for you has done this 7,834 times before, so probably it will be just right.

When you get string hoppers, it is all a matter of composition.  Put the right spices, sauces, and sambals on top.  Ask for assistance.  The quality of the string hoppers varies only marginally, it is really all about your skills at composition and at asking for aid.

Hoppers and string hoppers are pretty much always very good.  You want to keep on ordering them.  And yes, food in Sri Lanka is somewhat of an exercise in repeated monotony, but it is a very appealing repeated monotony.

Vegetables in Sri Lanka are first-rate, and if you visit the vegetable markets in and near Dambulla you will come away impressed.  If you are served just ordinary broccoli or cauliflower, without spice or garnish, it will be as good as anywhere.

The best vegetable to eat Sri Lankan style is the green beans.  Never turn them down.  Overall, Sri Lanka is one of the very best countries for vegetarians or vegans.  You’ll see many other kinds of curry, such as with jackfruit or manioc, and they are not bad, but once you have tried them you will be returning to the green beans.

The lentils are consistently superb, arguably better overall than in India, though in fewer styles.  Keep on ordering them.

Thou shalt not refuse any curry served with cashews in it.

If you are at a buffet, sample any item that has a small green leaf in the sauce.  Sample any item with an unusual name, with “tempered cowpeas” being one but not the only example.

Beware of buffets designed for Russian or Chinese package tourists, though usually there will be hoppers or string hoppers somewhere to be had.

Coconut roti is a wonderful snack, but you should not eat too many of them, either at once or across the course of a lifetime.

There is the usual array of tropical fruits, high in quality, though to be frank most of them bore me at this point.

Both pork and bacon are excellent (and common) in Sri Lanka.  The pork is much better than the beef.  So far I’ve had better luck with shrimp than with fish, though I don’t feel I’ve cracked the cultural codes yet for seafood.  Some love Sri Lankan crab, but I haven’t had the chance to explore that direction.

Western-style baked goods are by no means a total disaster here, and it is not a mistake to try them.  The high quality is supposed to stem from the earlier Portuguese influence, at least if you can believe llama Chat.

Aqua Forte, in Galle, is a Michelin star-quality Italian restaurant with affordable prices.  The chef is from Trentino.  The cured raw fish with pistachios is one of the best courses I’ve had in years.

In Colombo, Monsoon is a good Asian fusion place, get the beef rendang.  Shang Palace is a good Chinese restaurant.

In sum, you can eat very well here at great prices and booking doesn’t ever seem to be a problem.  You do need to be willing to double and triple down on some items, but don’t worry — you’ll like them!

Addendum: The perceptive reader will note I have covered only the food of southern Sri Lanka.  That is also the part of the country — by far — that you are most likely to visit.

Sri Lanka travel notes

Have you ever been to a perfect spot and wished “there should be an amazing hotel right there, except I want the hotel without any accompanying crowding or corruptions of tourism?”

If that is your desire, Sri Lanka is the country for you.  (Who cares if that is an apparent violation of the laws of economics and location theory?)  If you have visited Sri Lanka, likely you will know what I mean — it is simply so nice.  So much the right blend of exotic and comfortable.  It feels so unspoilt, so fresh, and so natural.  So easy on the visitor, as if it were a well-run state of India with a big dose of Buddhism and a vaguely Caribbean vibe, and without the extreme population density.

Here was my Kandalama hotel, let the link rotate through all the images.

Here is my current hotel, only about 30 or 40 feet away from one of the world’s major Buddhist temple complexes, medieval and mostly dating from the 12th century.  None of it is close to expensive, no matter how high the quality.

Galle, on the southern coast, is a lovely colonial city, largely intact, with notable Dutch, Portuguese, and British buildings, as well as mosques.  It is ringed by an old fort, and has numerous good views of the ocean.  Everything is walkable.  Russians are the single largest tourist group there (no visa required), and yet the town does not feel overwhelmed, even on the cusp of August.  Try Galle Fort Hotel, which is also a UNESCO heritage site.

There is an aesthetic look to so many things.  If a farmer builds a tree house so he can monitor his crops at night without being stomped by elephants, the tree house will be pretty nice, even though the farmer is poor.

So much of Sri Lanka feels like the 1980s, in a way that is good for you but not good for them.  On the plus side, education, literacy (92%), and social indicators are high.  Life expectancy is higher than in the United States.  You can drive around deep into the rural areas, and you just won’t see extreme poverty.  Nor are the drivers crazy, so the travel isn’t stressful.  The country never seems internet-obsessed.

The total fertility rate is currently about 2.0, a blessing in the short run but likely a disaster over time.  At about 4k per capita income (about 14k PPP), Sri Lanka cannot afford to grow old before it becomes wealthy.  And I can assure you, it is not on the verge of becoming wealthy.

The important buildings — and there are many of them — are all of earlier vintages.  The hotels of Geoffrey Bawa — in a style sometimes called “tropical modernism” — are of special interest.  Simply tracking down all of the Bawa hotels would be a good way of organizing your trip.  Sri Lanka is one of the few countries in the world where the very nice old architecture and the very nice newer architecture bear some aesthetic relation to each other.

Did I mention this?:

In 2022, with its GDP contracting by 7.8%, Sri Lanka was one of the worst performing economies in the world. Annual inflation was around 60%, and the currency depreciated by over 80%. These quantifiable measures of pain were exacerbated by severe shortages and uncertainty in accessing fuel, gas and medicines. Daily power cuts became normalized.

Living standards remain lower, yet visible signs of those earlier troubles are gone.  The infrastructure now works once again, yet the country feels psychically scarred by the recent economic collapse.

One Sri Lankan MR reader, with whom I chatted, argued that the country has no person or not even a group “in charge” at the wheel.  So small problems drift and sometimes turn into major crises.  The country’s “immune system” simply is not functioning.

It is striking that none of the major parties have good ideas, as there is mainly corrupt oligarchy or Marxists.  Liberalism is nowhere to be seen.  Behind the scenes, Sri Lanka is a country that outside parties (most of all China and India, earlier the colonial powers) have cared about far too much.  It never feels like there is a stable political equilibrium upon which to build, because the outsiders have so much power.

Internally, they still have not generated a true consensus on what the country is about, and if they are all willing to live in peace with each other.  As one of my drivers put it succinctly: “I don’t like the other religions.”

With textiles and tea as the major exports, the country shows no signs of moving up the value chain. Nonetheless Sri Lanka remains richer per capita than India.  And easier to handle, albeit far less dynamic.  Someone could write a very Sri Lankan version of “the complacent class.”

How good is Buddhism for economic growth anyway?

I will do a separate post on food in Sri Lanka.

Pristina notes

Imagine a third-tier Ottoman city, accidentally elevated to the status of a national capital, and you have Pristina.  Furthermore, that is a pretty good thing!  The town is charming, walkable, and has first-rate street and cafe life.  There is one good monastery nearby and some quality Brutalist architecture.  My favorite site was the National Library of Kosovo:

National Library of Kosovo – Pristina, Kosovo - Atlas Obscura

Here are additional views of the building, is it fair to call it one of the greatest Communist achievements of Yugoslavia?  1982.

Government debt is only about five percent of gdp.  I am not sure how accurate is the data, but growth rates are not so bad.  The country has about 5k per capita gdp, but about 15k PPP-adjusted, that is a large gap and maybe the truth lies somewhere in between.

Might this be the cheapest country in all of Europe?   I had one good meal in a nice restaurant with nice decor for only five euros.

Tiffany served the tastiest and also most representative meal, there is no menu and they simply bring you what they have.  The food is in general excellent, though not varied.  Be ready for meats, sausage, cheese, tomato, kebab, green and red peppers, and bread.  There is pasta too, but few other foreign offerings.  I didn’t see any Asian food whatsoever, or any international fast food chains, or any Starbucks.

Throughout the town you find scattered statues, such as the obligatory Mother Teresa, and the others of very masculine heroes, often labeled explicitly as “heroes.”  The quotient for sexual dimorphism is reasonably high.

It is quite safe, so more people should visit.  In three days I saw zero tourists.  It is not a “thrills destination,” but where else can you ponder all the historical reasons why, for so long, a “Greater Albania” has proven impossible?

Cheat sheet of neighboring countries:

Serbia: Feels imperial, “seen better days,” no longer a transport hub, looks toward Moscow.

North Macedonia: Stands a bit apart, closer to Bulgarian culture, less recent historical trauma, more right-wing and pro-U.S., keen to integrate with the West.

Albania: Tenacious, spent decades lost in the wilderness, never been able to “play its hand” on that Greater Albania thing, did it ever recover from the fall of Venetian Albania?

Few parts of the world are more interesting, or unsettling.  All of these are great countries to visit.

Claims made by intelligent Alaskans

I am not endorsing these, or claiming these propositions are the entire story, but I heard a number of interesting claims during my trip.  Here are a few:

1. Ranked choice voting has worked relatively well for Alaska, by encouraging more moderate candidates.

2. Faculty at U. Alaska are not rabid crazy, because the locale selects for those who are into hunting and fishing, and that keeps them from the worst excesses of academic life.

3. The oil-based “UBI” in Alaska keeps down government spending, because voters feel that any money spent is being spent at their expense.

4. Health care costs are a major problem up here, mostly because there is not enough scale to support many hospitals.

5. When air travel shuts down, due to say ash from Russian volcanos, the local blood bank runs into problems either testing its blood donations or getting out-of-state blood.

6. East Anchorage has perhaps the largest number of languages in its high school student population of anywhere in the United States.  Some of this stems from the large number of different kinds of Alaska Natives, some of it stems from having many Samoans, Hawaiians, Hmong, and other migrant groups.

7. Resources for Alaska Natives are often held through the corporate form (with restrictions on share transferability), rather than tribes, and this has worked fairly well.

8. Starlink has had a major impact on the more remote parts of Alaska, which otherwise had internet service not much better than “dial up” quality.

9. For a while there were direct flights from Chengdu to Fairbanks, due to Chinese interest in the “Northern Lights” phenomenon.

10. The population of Anchorage turns over by about ten percent each year, with only some of this being driven by the military.

11. For a human, a moose is a greater risk than a bear.

Personally, I observe that the university in Anchorage is more pro-GPT than other academic groups I have had contact with.  Might this be due to their distance from the center, their frontier mentality, and the possible scarcity of skilled labor here?

Travel philosophies for the well-traveled

How should you choose your next trip?  I can see a few general philosophies on the table:

1. Prioritize those countries and regions you haven’t visited yet.  For me that might mean Montenegro, Lithuania, Bangladesh, and Saudi Arabia.  But the downside is waking up one morning and saying “Hey, what the hell am I doing in Sardinia!?”

2. Get to know some of your favorite places truly in depth, most of all major cities that are easy to reach and often are connected to free or paid invitations.  For me that would imply more trips to London, Paris, Tokyo, Berlin — you get the picture.  Under this view, the returns to variety are diminishing.  And have I ever regretted stopping in on those places?

3. Try to visit “events,” especially temporary events.  Right after the Berlin Wall came down, I did a big car trip around Eastern Europe.  Loved it.  Perhaps these days I should be stopping in at Neom, flying to Lviv, and so on.  Those historical moments will never be recaptured.  And usually such trips are memorable.

4. Do more trips with the friends you value most, and go wherever will maximize their interest and participation.  You already know the world, people are what make life special, and now it is time to “give back” your expertise.

How to decide!?  WWGPTS?

There is also the approach I discussed with Nabeel:

5. Figure out, within the bounds of safety and reasonable expense, where you really don’t want to go.  Then go there!  Expectations and surprise are everything, right?  And how else are you to develop a truly diversified portfolio?  Won’t you this way learn the most?

I am indebted to Ben Casnocha for a relevant conversation here, though without holding him liable for any of these views.

Addendum: GPT-4 opts for #3:

As an experienced traveler, if I were to pick only one of the philosophies, I would choose to visit events and historical moments (Philosophy 3). The reason for this choice is that it allows for unique, once-in-a-lifetime experiences that capture the essence of a particular time and place. Such trips often become memorable stories that you’ll cherish for a lifetime.

By prioritizing events and historical moments, you immerse yourself in situations that reveal the true character of a destination and its people, as well as provide valuable insights into the forces that shape societies and cultures. Additionally, this approach can lead to a greater appreciation for the world’s interconnectedness, as you witness firsthand the impact of global events on different regions.

While this philosophy might not cover all aspects of a well-rounded travel experience, it offers a powerful way to engage with the world and create lasting memories that will enrich your life beyond the confines of a single trip.

What should I ask Jonathan Swift?

Yes, I would like to do a Conversation with Jonathan “G.P.T.” Swift.  Here is Wikipedia on Swift, excerpt:

Jonathan Swift (30 November 1667 – 19 October 1745) was an Anglo-Irish satirist, author, essayist, political pamphleteer (first for the Whigs, then for the Tories), poet, and Anglican cleric who became Dean of St Patrick’s Cathedral, Dublin, hence his common sobriquet, “Dean Swift”.

Swift is remembered for works such as A Tale of a Tub (1704), An Argument Against Abolishing Christianity (1712), Gulliver’s Travels (1726), and A Modest Proposal (1729). He is regarded by the Encyclopædia Britannica as the foremost prose satirist in the English language.[1] He originally published all of his works under pseudonyms—such as Lemuel Gulliver, Isaac Bickerstaff, M. B. Drapier—or anonymously. He was a master of two styles of satire, the Horatian and Juvenalian styles.

His deadpan, ironic writing style, particularly in A Modest Proposal, has led to such satire being subsequently termed “Swiftian”.

So what should I ask him?  I thank you in advance for your suggestions.

My excellent Conversation with Paul Salopek

Here is the transcript and audio, here is the summary:

Paul Salopek is a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and National Geographic fellow who, at the age of 50, set out on foot to retrace the steps of the first human migrations out of Africa. The project, dubbed the “Out of Eden Walk,” began in Ethiopia in 2012 and will eventually take him to Tierra Del Fuego, a distance of some 24,000 miles.

Calling in just as he was about to arrive in Xi’an, he and Tyler discussed his very localized supply chain, why women make for better walking partners, the key to crossing deserts, the most difficult terrain to traverse, what he does for exercise, his information prep for each new region, how he’s kept the project funded, why India is such a good for walkers, which cuisines he’s found most and least palatable, what he learned working the crime beat in Roswell, New Mexico, how this project challenges conventional journalism, his thoughts on the changing understanding of early human migration, and more.

Here is one excerpt:

COWEN: What’s true is true. How is it that you crossed the desert? You’ve been through some of the Gulf States, I think.

SALOPEK: Yes, I’ve been through several deserts. The first was the Afar Desert in north Ethiopia, one of the hottest deserts in the world, and then the Hejaz in western Saudi Arabia, and then some big deserts in Central Asia, the Kyzyl Kum in Uzbekistan.

You cross deserts with a great attentiveness. You seem to want to speed up to get through them as quickly as possible, but often, they require slowing down, and that seems counterintuitive. You have to walk when the temperatures are congenial to your survival. Sometimes that means walking at night as opposed to the day. It means maybe not covering the distances that you would in more moderate climates.

Deserts are like a prickly friend. You approach them with care, but if you invest the time, they’re pretty inspiring and remarkable. There are reasons why old hermits go out into the deserts to seek visions. I was born in a desert. I was born in the Mojave Desert of Southern California, so I’m partial to them, maybe even by birth.

COWEN: Do you find deserts to be the most difficult terrain to cross?

SALOPEK: No, I find alpine mountains to be far trickier. Deserts can be fickle. Deserts can kill you if you’re not careful. Of course, water is the most limiting factor for survival.

But alpine mountain weather is so unpredictable, and a very sunny afternoon can turn into a very stormy late afternoon in a very quick time period. Threats like rock falls, like avalanches, blizzards — those, for me, are far more difficult to navigate than deserts. Also, I guess having been born in the subtropics, I don’t weather the cold as well, so there’s that bias thrown in.

COWEN: What do you do for exercise?

Recommended, interesting throughout.