Reading Guevara’s Motorcycle Diaries is kind of a right of passage for backpackers traveling through South America. Guevara set out on a nine month motorcycle journey that allowed…
Browsing Tag
History
-
-
If you’re traveling down the Gringo Trail, Chile might feel unexpectedly familiar. There are no ramshackle busses or alpacas wandering the streets. Instead, there are arbitrary laws, expensive cups… -
Berlin was still devastated from WWII in 1957, and you’ll find a mountain of rubble in Grunewald Forest to prove it. Debris too much to bury and too… -
Ok, Birmingham. I see you slipping in under the radar. Like the cool little brother that gets up to all kinds of trouble, Birmingham is also the city… -
Ever heard of a little Incan citadel called Machu Picchu? Anyone who travels has at least the slightest ambition of exploring the nearly 600-year-old ruins at some point… -
While Machu Picchu is awfully impressive, it does have one major problem. Everyone knows it’s great. With an estimated 2,500 visitors per day, you can get there early, take the last bus,…
![🌵 The Grandest Canyon 🌵 USA (2019) I was fully prepared to dislike The Grand Canyon. Of course, I’m not talking about the canyon itself. I more expected to be disappointed with what humans had built around something natural. Wild. Immense. After seeing the crowds at Machu Picchu or oversold hoards at Angkor Wat, I was skeptical that we’d be able to avoid the crowds. How would the US choose to cash in on it’s second most visited National Park?
But I’ll come right out with it: my skepticism about the Grand Canyon was overplayed. It’s not the deepest, nor the longest, nor the widest canyon in the world. Yet I still came away believing that it IS the grandest. It’s the greatest masterpiece of the Colorado River, some 5 million years in the making. Walls of worn sandstone, shale, and limestone create a gradient of colors that drop down from the canyon’s rim. 446 km (29 km across at it’s widest point) is a big area to get lost in. All it takes is a walk below the rim or a detour off the shuttle route to have the world’s grandest canyon [mostly] to yourself.](http://scontent-ort2-2.cdninstagram.com/vp/52d618adf800420c49391cb514de2ba5/5D93CD46/t51.2885-15/e35/s320x320/64586682_2340296216243565_2620258413058736904_n.jpg?_nc_ht=scontent-ort2-2.cdninstagram.com "🌵 The Grandest Canyon 🌵 USA (2019) I was fully prepared to dislike The Grand Canyon. Of course, I’m not talking about the canyon itself. I more expected to be disappointed with what humans had built around something natural. Wild. Immense. After seeing the crowds at Machu Picchu or oversold hoards at Angkor Wat, I was skeptical that we’d be able to avoid the crowds. How would the US choose to cash in on it’s second most visited National Park?
But I’ll come right out with it: my skepticism about the Grand Canyon was overplayed. It’s not the deepest, nor the longest, nor the widest canyon in the world. Yet I still came away believing that it IS the grandest. It’s the greatest masterpiece of the Colorado River, some 5 million years in the making. Walls of worn sandstone, shale, and limestone create a gradient of colors that drop down from the canyon’s rim. 446 km (29 km across at it’s widest point) is a big area to get lost in. All it takes is a walk below the rim or a detour off the shuttle route to have the world’s grandest canyon [mostly] to yourself.")
