Category: Travels
What we’re grateful for
Here is the Free Press symposium, here is my contribution:
Tyler Cowen, columnist
I am grateful for how many parts of the world I can visit freely. I have been to roughly 105 countries and have not had serious problems getting to them, entering them, or leaving them. Nor have I contracted any serious illnesses abroad.
I do feel some recent growth in restrictions. For instance, I cannot go to Russia and be assured of my safety, nor would I feel comfortable visiting Ukraine at the current moment, given the ongoing Russian attacks. Nonetheless, so very much of the world is accessible to us, whenever we wish to be there.
This is an unparalleled opportunity, without precedent in the history of mankind.
My first trip to Tokyo
To continue with the biographical segments:
My first trip to Tokyo was in 1992. I was living in New Zealand at the time, and my friend Dan Klein contacted me and said “Hey, I have a work trip to Tokyo, do you want to meet me there?” And so I was off, even though the flight was more of a drag than I had been expecting. It is a long way up the Pacific.
Narita airport I found baffling, and it was basically a two hour, multi-transfer trip to central Tokyo. Fortunately, a Japanese woman was able to help us make the connections. I am glad these days that the main flights come into Haneda.
(One Japan trip, right before pandemic, I decided to spend a whole day in Narita proper. Definitely recommended for its weirdness. Raw chicken was served in the restaurants, and it felt like a ghost town except for some of the derelicts in the streets. This experience showed me another side of Japan.)
We stayed in a business hotel in Ikebukuro, a densely populated but not especially glamorous part of Tokyo. It turned out that was a good way to master the subway system and also to get a good sense of how Tokyo was organized. I had to one-shot memorize the rather complicated footpath from the main subway station to the hotel, which had been chosen by my friend’s sponsors. As we first emerged from the subway station, we had, getting there the first time, to ask two Japanese high schoolers to help us find the way. They spoke only a few words of English, but we showed them the address in Japanese and they even carried our bags for us, grunting “Hai!” along the way, giving us a very Japanese experience.
In those days very little English was spoken in Tokyo, especially outside a few major areas such as Ginza. You were basically on your own.
I recall visiting the Sony Center, which at the time was considered the place to go to see new developments in “tech.” I marveled at the 3-D TV, and realized we had nothing like it. I felt like I was glimpsing the future, but little did I know the technology was not going anywhere. Nor for that matter was the company. Here is Noah, wanting the Japanese future back.
Most of all, Tokyo was an extreme marvel to me. I felt it was the single best and most interesting place I had visited. Everywhere I looked — even Ikebukuro — there was something interesting to take note of. The plastic displays of food in the windows (now on the way out, sadly) fascinated me. The diversity, order, and package wrapping sensibilities of the department stores were amazing. The underground cities in the subways had to be seen to be believed (just try emerging from Shinjuku station and finding the right exit). The level of dress and stylishness and sophistication was extreme, noting I would not say the same about Tokyo today. This was not long after the bubble had burst, but the city still had the feel of prosperity. Everything seemed young and dynamic.
I also found Tokyo affordable. The reports of the $2,000 melon were true, but the actual things you would buy were somewhat cheaper than in say New York City. It was easy to get an excellent meal for ten dollars, and without much effort. My hotel room was $50 a night. The subway was cheap, and basically you could walk around and look at things for free. The National Museum was amazing, one of the best in the world and its art treasures cannot, in other forms, readily be seen elsewhere.
Much as I like Japanese food, I learned during this trip that I cannot eat it many meals in a row. This was the journey where I realized Indian food (!) is my true comfort food. Tokyo of course has (and had) excellent Indian food, just as it has excellent food of virtually every sort. I learned a new kind of Chinese food as well.
The summer heat did not bother me. I also learned that Tokyo is one of the few cities that is better and more attractive at night.
I recall wanting to buy a plastic Godzilla toy. I walked around the proper part of town, and kept on asking for Godzilla. I could not figure out why everyone was staring at me like I was an idiot, learning only later that the Japanese say “Gojira.” So in a pique of frustration, I did my best fire-breathing, stomping around, “sound like a gorilla cry run backwards through the tape” imitation of Godzilla. Immediately a Japanese man excitedly grabbed me by the hand, walked me through some complicated market streets, and showed me where I could buy a Godzilla, shouting “Gojira, Gojira, Gojira!” the whole time.
I came away happy.
My side trip, by the way, was to the shrines and temples of Kamakura, no more than an hour away but representing another world entirely. Recommended to any of you who are in Tokyo with a day to spare.
Now since that time, I’ve never had another Tokyo trip quite like that one. These days, and for quite a while, the city feels pretty normal to me, rather than like visiting the moon. Fluent English is hard to come by, but most people can speak some English and respond to queries. You can translate and get around using GPS, AI, and so on. The city is much more globalized, and other places have borrowed from its virtues as well.
Looking back, I am very glad I visited Tokyo in 1992. The lesson is that you can in fact do time travel. You do it by going to some key places right now.
What to read for travel
When you land in a new destination, what should you read? It’s hard to find good material with search engines because the space is SEO’d so aggressively. A Wikipedia article is fine insofar as it goes, but inevitably misses much of the texture of a place. I think it’d be neat if there was some kind of service that collated great travel writing — especially pieces that capture something of the context of a place. (See the Davies post below.) To this end, I made guide.world.
From Patrick Collison, recommended, lots of great reading (and travel) there.
Northern Ghana travel notes
You will see termite mounds, baobab trees, and open skies.
The major city is Tamale, the third largest urban settlement in the country. The town is manageable and traffic is not intense. At night it is quiet. The “main street” is just a strip of stuff, and it feels neither like a center of town nor an “edge city” growth. Some of the nearby roads still are not paved. It is a shock to the visitor to realize that the center of town is not going to become any more “center of town-y,” no matter how much you drive around looking for the center of town.
We all liked it.
The “Red Clay” is a series of large art galleries and installations, of spectacular and unexpected quality, just on the edge of Tamale. Some of the installations reminded me of Beuys, for instance the large pile of abandoned WWII stretchers. One also sees there a Polish military plane from the 1930s, an old East German train, and a large pile with tens of thousands of glass green bottles. Some of the galleries have impressive very large paintings by James Barnor, mostly of Ghana workers building out the railroad. Goats wander the premise and scavenge for garbage. If you are an art lover, this place is definitely worth a trip.
The Larabanga mosque does not look as old as internet sources claim. I consider it somewhat overrated?
The surrounding area is 80-90 percent Muslim.
A driver explained to me that Islam in Tamale was very different from Islam in Saudi Arabia, because a) in Ghana women can drive motorbikes, and indeed have to for work, and b) in northern Ghana husbands cannot take any more than four wives.
Many more people here speak English than I was expecting. Some claim that they all speak decent English. I doubt that, but the percentage is way over half.
It all feels quite safe, and furthermore the drivers are not crazy.
Zaina Lodge has a kind of “infinity pool,” at a very modest scale, with views of the forest and sometimes of elephants drinking at the nearby water hole. It is one of the two or three best hotel views I have had.
My poll will grow in size, but so far zero out of two hotel workers use ChatGPT. One had not heard of it. High marginal returns!
Accra bleg
Your suggestions would be most welcome. In addition if you have any ideas for northern Ghana, most of all Tamale and Mole national park area…
Thank you!
Design Your Own Rug!
For my wedding anniversary, I designed and had hand-woven in Afghanistan a rug for my microbiologist wife. The rug mixes traditional Afghanistan designs with some scientific elements including Bunsen burners, test tubes, bacterial petri dishes and other elements.
I started with several AI designs, such as that shown below, to give the weavers an idea of what I was looking for. Some of the AI elements were muddled and very complex and so we developed a blueprint over a few iterations. The blueprint was very accurate to the actual rug.
I am very pleased with the final product. The wool is of high quality, deep and luxurious, and the design is exactly what I intended. My wife loves the rug and will hang it at her office. The price was very reasonable, under $1000. I also like that I employed weavers in a small village in Northern Afghanistan. The whole process took about 6 months.
You can develop your own custom rug from Afghanu Rugs. Tell them Alex sent you. Of course, they also have many beautiful traditional designs. You can even order my design should you so desire!
My 1988 Southeast Asia trip
This was by far the longest trip I ever have done, at about seven weeks, and I did it by myself. I had just taught one year at UC Irvine, and I thought time was ripe to learn something about the other side of the Pacific. I just set out and decided to do it, even though most assistant professors would have been better advised to stick to their work commitments. Here are a few points and lessons from that trip:
1. I started in late June, and I recall switching planes in Seoul, and on the TV seeing the final moments of game seven of the Lakers vs. the Pistons.
2. The heat and humidity did not bother me. The storms and rain in Taiwan did impress me, however.
3. So much tourism has become much worse. I was able to do a jungle walk from Chieng Mai, and felt that the hill tribes were genuinely surprised to encounter me. I enjoyed teaching the children there the song “Old McDonald had a farm.” I also saw Koh Samui before many other tourists started to go there.
3b. I will never, ever again ride on an elephant, especially when the elephant has the option of dragging its rider into contact with low-lying tree branches in the Thai jungle. One guy from the Israeli army was in our group, and he fell off the elephant, though he was unharmed. Rider beware. The beasts are truly very, very smart, and I could tell they were enjoying this game.
4. Unexpectedly, Taiwan was my favorite part of the trip. The bus ride down the east coast, from Suao to Hualien to this day remains one of the best trip segments I ever have taken. The marble gorges in the center of the country also were A+.
5. Hong Kong bored me more than I was expecting. I spent a good bit of time watching Wimbledon there (Boris Becker), and reading Boswell’s Life of Johnson, still a favorite book of mine.
6. Rather than spending a full week in Hong Kong, on a lark I took a four-day trip into mainland China, as it was then called. I am very glad I did that. This was package tourism, as was standard for a Chinese visit at the time, but I saw China as a very poor country, full of bicycles and stank. Guangzhou of course. What impressed me the most was the level of energy shown by the children when I visited a grade school.
7. I did the whole trip with a single backpack, which I now find unimaginable. That perhaps reflects some deterioration of my capabilities. Most of all, I need to carry around more books these days, plus a laptop and iPad and various chargers.
8. The food peaks in Thailand were incredible, but the median Thai dish in Thailand was worse than my median Thai meal in Orange County, CA at the time. A lot of the meats were stringy and somewhat unpleasant. My best meal was a crab curry in Bangkok. I never got sick from the food, though I think I was queasy for half in a day in Chieng Mai.
9. The people were extremely friendly and helpful to me everywhere.
10. Favorite part of Malaysia was Penang. Southern Thailand was pretty boring.
10. I ended the trip in Singapore. I quite enjoyed that, most of all the South Indian food places, and how they ladled out the chutneys, which were new to me. At the time, my motto on Singapore was “it is so boring it was interesting.” Now of course there are many more things to do and see there, and it is just outright interesting. I have since been back seven more times, reflecting my fondness for the place. I am very glad I saw it at a time closer to “the early days.”
Overall, the length of the trip felt a bit excessive to me. But where would I have wished to cut? That said, since then I have not done another trip for longer than a month.
One big benefit of traveling is the diversity of places you can see. But another big benefit — not to be neglected — is the diversity of eras you can sample. I am so, so glad I saw what those places were like in the late 1980s, China most of all and also the hill tribes. No history books can compensate for that.
So that is a very good reason to travel NOW. And to travel to places that are going to change a lot.
Tyler Cowen travel tips
That is my latest column in The Free Press. Here is one excerpt from the middle:
I am a fan of going places where things are happening, whether good news or bad, at least if the locales are sufficiently safe. When communism fell, I rented a car and drove around Eastern Europe for one of my most interesting and memorable trips. More recently, I visited El Salvador and Argentina (repeat visits in both cases) to see what was going on with El Salvador president Nayib Bukele’s radical imprisonment policies and the free-market reforms of Argentina’s Javier Milei. I do not pretend to completely grasp the problems of either country, but my understanding is richer than before. I also found that the locals are keen to narrate their points of view, which makes the trip more interesting.
And from the very end:
Finally, I have a radical travel suggestion. Perhaps it is not for families or for the frail, but seasoned travelers should consider it. Imagine you have been to many places, and you are wondering where to go next. Select a country (putting aside danger) where you are quite sure you do not want to go, simply because it does not interest you much. Go there.
The point is that your instincts can be quite wrong about places you have not seen. What’s more, if you go with low expectations, there is a high likelihood you will be pleasantly surprised. Under my proposed method, you will not be disappointed.
When I started traveling, I thought I would love Southeast Asia most, but over time my true affections turned toward Latin America. A few years back I ended up in Baku, Azerbaijan, not because I really wanted to go, but because going through Baku was the easiest way to get to my final destination. The same was true for my trip to Pristina, Kosovo (“where can I fly direct from Zurich airport, where I have not already been?”). Both were fantastic experiences, more interesting, and also easier than I had been expecting.
So often in travel, our greatest enemies are inertia and status quo bias. Recognize that change is real, and that you need some yourself. Isn’t that why you are traveling in the first place?
Do it!
My Paris delta
I have not been here since 2019, so here are the trends I am noticing:
1. Vastly more shops are open on Sundays than before.
2. Central Paris continues to evolve into a nearly bilingual city. It is not quite Amsterdam or Stockholm, but getting there. And the Parisians do not seem to mind speaking English.
3. There are more and more non-European restaurants of many kinds. From a walking-by perusal of menus and clienteles, they seem quite good and serious on the whole.
4. It is increasingly difficult to find a gas station in the city (before returning a rental car).
5. An amazingly high percentage of young women have publicly visible tattoos. I do not understand the logic here. I do (partially) understand tattoos as an act of rebellion, differentiation, or counter-signaling. I do not understand tattoos as an act of conformity.
6. Smoking has almost disappeared here. I saw plenty of young people vaping in Reims, but not the same in Paris.
7. Paris now has Rainier cherries in June, a sign of encroaching civiliation.
8. High-quality bookshops, with beautifully displayed titles and covers, still can be found frequently.
9. I had never seen the area near the Bibliotheque National before, it is excellent. I saw this Indian guy in concert there, after o3 recommended that I go.
10. Paris is doing just fine.
Chantilly destination achieved, the Limbourg brothers are amazing
Commissioned by the Duc de Berry, the enormously wealthy brother of King Charles V of France, this exquisite Book of Hours was begun by the Limbourg brothers, a trio of Netherlandish miniature painters, in around 1411. The Duc and the Limbourgs died in 1416. The manuscript was completed by other wealthy patrons and talented artists 70 years later and contains 131 full-page illuminations. Now, in a vanishingly rare opportunity, the general public has been invited to step into this world.
Until October, visitors to a special exhibition at the Condé Museum in the Château de Chantilly, 55km north of Paris, will be able to view as independent works the 12 monthly calendar pages of the Très Riches Heures, on which much of the fame of this 15th-century prayer book rests. Its importance and influence are contextualised by an exceptional display of some 100 medieval manuscripts, sculptures and paintings loaned from museums and libraries around the world.
…as the renowned scholar Christopher de Hamel, author of the 2016 book, Meetings with Remarkable Manuscripts, explains, the Très Riches Heures are so much more than a luxury object. “The staggering originality of the design and composition is overwhelming,” he says. “The full-page calendar miniatures were the first ever made. It marks the very first moment when the Renaissance touched northern Europe.
Here is the full story. This is very likely the best and most important artistic exhibit in the world right now. It is only the third time (ever) the pages of the book have been on display for the public. In the exhibit more broadly, it is remarkable how many of the best works were created in the first decade of the fifteenth century.
All three of the brothers died before the age of thirty, possibly because of the plague.
Chantilly is about an hour north of Paris, and it is a pleasant but fairly extreme town. Think of it as a French version of Middleburg, VA? Or perhaps parts of Sonoma? It is their version of horse country, with non-spicy food to boot. The accompanying castle, by the way, also is interesting and has some wonderful art works, including by Poussin, Watteau, and Greuze. The decor and trappings give you a sense of what eighteenth century French Enlightenment nobles might have considered to be beautiful.
A major goal of this trip has been to get a better handle on the Western European medieval world, and visiting this exhibit has been a big and very successful part of that.
Reims and Amiens
Both cities have significant war histories, but they are very different to visit, even though they are only two hours apart by car.
Reims was largely destroyed in World War I, and so the central core was rebuilt in the 1920s, with a partial Art Deco look. The downtown is attractive and prosperous, the people look sharp and happy, and it is a university town. You arrive and feel the place is a wonderful success. If you had to live in a mid-sized French city, you might choose this one.
The main cathedral is one of the best in France, and arguably in the world. The lesser-known basilica also is top tier. There are scattered Roman ruins. French kings were coronated in Reims from early on, all the way up through 1825.
Amiens is on the Somme, and the 1916 Battle of the Somme, followed by a later 1918 offensive, was a turning point in WWI history. The town is a melange of architectural styles, with many half-timbered homes but also scattered works from different centuries. The town also has France’s “first skyscraper,” renowned in its time but now a rather short and out of place embarrassment. The main Amiens cathedral, however, is perhaps the best in all of France.
The town itself feels like visiting a banlieu, with large numbers of African and Muslim immigrants. It is lively, and it feels as if a revitalization is underway, though I do understand opinions on these matters differ. Real estate prices are at about 3x their 1990s levels. That to me is strong evidence that things are going well.
Restaurant Momos Tibetian has excellent Chinese and Tibetan food. The Picardy museum has some very good works by Boucher, Balthus, Picabia, El Greco, and Chavannes.
Both cities are radically undervisisted. They do attract some tourists, but for the most part you feel you have them to yourself.
My Conversation with the excellent Chris Arnade
Here is the audio, video, and transcript. Here is part of the episode summary:
Tyler and Chris discuss how Beijing and Shanghai reveal different forms of authoritarian control through urban design, why Seoul’s functional dysfunction makes it more appealing than Tokyo’s efficiency, favorite McDonald’s locations around the world, the dimensions for properly assessing a city’s walkability, what Chris packs for long urban jaunts, why he’s not interested in walking the countryside, what travel has taught him about people and culture, what makes the Faroe Islands and El Paso so special, where he has no desire to go, the good and bad of working on Wall Street, the role of pigeons and snapping turtles in his life, finding his 1,000 true fans on Substack, whether museums are interesting, what set him on this current journey, and more.
COWEN: That’s okay. What’s your nomination for the least walkable city?
ARNADE: Phoenix is pretty bad. In the rest of the world, what was the lowest ranked of mine?
COWEN: I think Dakar is your lowest ranked.
ARNADE: Dakar is low.
COWEN: I don’t find that so bad.
ARNADE: [laughs] It was partially the heat. Also, there was a safety issue, which is not actual violence. It’s just the risk of a miscommunication going very badly because when you’re in a neighborhood where they have a slum basically, where you’re one of few white people, it’s not that I feel threatened by being robbed. I feel threatened that there can be miscommunication, like, “Why are you here? What are you doing here?” That can spiral out of control if you don’t speak the language. Dakar was really tough. Kampala was really tough to walk.
COWEN: Why’s that? I’ve never been there.
ARNADE: Again, these are cities that are not meant to be walked. Locals don’t walk them. People would look at me like I’m crazy. Part of the reason, first of all, you can jump on a hack bus, so why would you walk? The boda-bodas, which are . . . you just jump on the back of a motorcycle, which I won’t do. I did it once, and I’m like, “I’m not doing this. This is a really dumb risk.”
COWEN: Yes, I wouldn’t do that.
ARNADE: I almost got killed the first time I did it, but they do it. Consequently, there’s no walking infrastructure and when you do walk, you’re at risk of being hit by a boda-boda. People will walk out of necessity but there’s just no infrastructure. Absolutely none. Then you can get hit by a car. You can get hit by a car or a motorcycle.
COWEN: Rio, for me, would be the least walkable. It’s very dangerous but on top of that, there are so many places where walks end. There’re mountains, there’re tunnels.
And this:
COWEN: What is it you think you learn least well traveling the way you do?
ARNADE: It’s interesting. I used to be a macro-type trader. I used to be very top-down. I think I, in some sense, have thrown too much of that away. I’ve gone in too blind. I could do a little bit more background reading in terms of the political situation.
One of the things I’ve learned from my project is, most people don’t talk about politics. It’s because I only talk about what other people want to talk about. No one talks about politics. Being in Beijing and Shanghai — maybe it’s not the best example because people would say there’s a reason they don’t want to talk about it. I don’t think that’s it.
COWEN: No, I agree. Most of the world. Even Idaho.
ARNADE: Yes, 98 percent of the people aren’t political and they don’t talk about politics. I got beat up on social media when people were talking about, “Oh my God, Trump’s going to be elected. The world hates us.” No, they don’t. [laughs] When that person said that, I was actually in a bar in Kampala with a woman telling me how much she loved Trump. That was a rare political conversation. Most people don’t talk about politics.
In that sense, I could probably do more reading outside of the conversations about politics because I go to a lot of these countries, I don’t know what’s going on politically because people don’t talk about it.
COWEN: What other macro views of the world have you revised due to your walking, visiting, traveling? Obviously, particular views about any individual place, but on the whole, humanity.
And I am very happy to recommend Chris’s Substack, which covers his fascinating travels around the world.
Bordeaux observations
The central core is one of the most consistent eighteenth century cities you will find in Europe. Until the visit, my first there, I had not realized how much of the town’s growth came during that time, in part because of some special trade privileges, and in part because of the slave trade. Here is some 18th century economic history of Bordeaux. The central plazas and radiating streets are splendid, as is the large Girondins monument nearby.
The main museum is subpar, with some good Redons (he is from there), and the main church is pretty good but excelled by other locales. In this sense there is not much to do in Bordeaux. There is, however, some good modern and also brutalist architecture near and across the main river bank. Check out this bridge. I enjoyed these creations, as they injected some element of surprise into my visit.
You can still get an excellent meal at the nearby country chateaus, but if you just stop for normal French food in the town it is pretty mediocre, not better than say WDC. The classic French food traditions are moving more and more into corners of the country, and away from everyday life.
Typically I am surprised by how normal France feels. People want to say “The French this, the French that…” but to me they are fairly Americanized, often speak good English, and have few truly unique cultural habits these days. They also seem reasonably well adjusted, normal mostly in the good sense, and thus of course somewhat boring too.
Walking and driving through the less salubrious parts of town is a useful corrective, but I do not feel the place is falling apart. And the best estimates are that six to nine percent of the city is Muslim, hardly an overwhelming number.
I learned just before leaving that Kevin Bryan was in town too, here are his observations. Bordeaux is certainly worth visiting, but I also am not surprised it is the last major French city I have been to in my life.
Some northern parts of Spain
Salamanca still feels part of the orbit of Madrid, but León does not. Many of the faces are more Celtic, and the mood of the city can be drab in an eastern European way. Deindustrialization can be observed. It is a real city, not much dependent on tourism, though the cathedral is one of the most beautiful in Europe.
Santander, a beach town, was much nicer than expected. There is not much to do there, but it reminds me of how perhaps Nice might have been in 1974. Fully for tourists, but somehow not very touristy? And thus extremely pleasant and charming. Places like that barely exist any more. They are either quite obscure, such as Durango, Mexico, or they are overwhelmed by tourists. Seafood was excellent, and it is a much larger city than I was expecting. Nice promenades on the water.
Hondarribia is a Basque town and fishing village that feels like it should be its own country. The half-timbered homes and unusual colors set it apart from anywhere else in Europe I have been. Small, one day there is fine, but one of Europe’s best undervisited locales?
The convent where the Salamancans wrote their great works
Convent San Esteban. It is still there, you can just walk right in, though not between 2 and 4, when the guards have off. Arguably the Salamancans were the first mature economists, and the first decent monetary theorists, as well as being critically important for the foundations of international law, natural rights, and anti-slavery arguments. It is also difficult to find issues where they were truly bad.
You can just walk right in, and you should.