Big thanks to JMU for having us down to Virginia for a rockin’ few days last week! A definite highlight was our Image & Text Workshop with visual arts and creative writing students who came together to collaborate on illustrated travel pieces. Look at ‘em go! A very cool bunch who deserve extra points for [...]
People are always searching for authenticity—in art, in food, in music, in their relationships, and especially in travel. Today the NY Times ran an article by Holland Cotter about a remote region of Mali called Dogon Country: “In Mali, Art as Real as Life Itself”. It’s an ode to authenticity in art and travel, but [...]
On the morning of March 21st, we woke up to the horrifying news that senior officers in the Malian army seized power in a coup. This morning we woke up to even more sad news: Timbuktu fell to Tuareg rebels in the north. The coup was shocking because for the past 20 years Mali has [...]
I’m writing from the north of the Sahara in Merzouga. It took us 14 hours of driving to get here yesterday from Marrakech, through flooded gorges, dried riverbeds, over the Atlas Mountains– all of which pales in comparison to the 52 days it would take us to cross the Sahara on camel back to get [...]
Only have time for declarative sentences with exclamation points! Monkeys in Ifrane! Horses and gunmen near Beni Mellal! Boats in Essaouira!
So it turns out life in the documentary world is a little intense TOTALLY INSANE. That said, I’m loving learning this much about how movies are made while hanging out in some of my favorite towns in the world, like Chefchaouen where we were yesterday: Maybe it’s that I’ve already got an eye out for [...]
Hello from Morocco! I’m going to be here for the next few weeks with a documentary film crew, traveling up and down the country. While I don’t have much film experience (ahem, ok no experience at all), I do have experience living and working in Morocco (aka eating couscous, bargaining like hell), so that’s how [...]
Packing light is always a priority for me when traveling. That said, I believe you can always look as well put together on the road as you do at home, so you won’t ever find me in quick-dry zip-off cargo pants no matter how “practical” they may be. (Don’t even tell me they’re good for [...]
Having used our fair share of Lonely Planet guidebooks through our travels, we’re super excited by their wonderful recent review of To Timbuktu! To Timbuktu is a breath of fresh air from a sometimes contrived, bloated genre…Weinberg’s charcoal illustrations perfectly complement Scieszka’s caught-in-the-headlights style prose… Her constant use of dialogue and innovative ways of introducing facts without [...]
Just wanted to wish everyone Happy Holidays! As told in the book, we celebrated our first holiday season together in Beijing with a beer bottle menorah among other treasures. I am both proud and a little bit embarrassed to say that the tradition has lived on. For example, here is us in Morocco in 2009 [...]
