Travel

For his 60th birthday, my father, who has always loved hiking, mountaineering, and the outdoors, decided he wanted to go on an adventure with his family. He settled on rafting the Colorado River through the Grand Canyon as his expedition of choice. Unfortunately, Grand Canyon trips tend to fill up as early as two years in advance, and we weren’t able to book one. Instead, we decided to raft the Colorado through Cataract Canyon. Cataract Canyon is in Canyonlands National Park, above the Grand Canyon, and has even bigger whitewater.

If you live on the west coast of the United States, India is about as far away as you can get. It really doesn’t matter whether you fly east or west, the distance and travel time will be about the same. Before 2012, I had never been to Asia, but that year I made trips across the Pacific to Cambodia and Timor-Leste. But when I traveled to India with my girlfriend, Lauren, and her family in December, it would be the furthest from home I’d ever been.

After my second year of law school, I spent half of my summer working at a big law firm in New York City and half working at Earthjustice, an environmental law firm, in its Juneau, Alaska, office. I flew to Juneau in late July and sublet a room in Douglas, a small town on an island just west of downtown Juneau. For a state capital, Juneau is a small town of only about 30,000 people. Like most Alaskan towns, Juneau gets much bigger in the summer. That effect is amplified because Juneau is a stop on the cruise ship routes, so seasonal workers flock to the city in the summer to staff the hotels, restaurants, and adventure tours that cater to the passengers.

Timor-Leste is a tiny half-island nation at the southeastern tip of Indonesia, about 400 miles northwest of Darwin, Australia. In 1975, Timor-Leste declared independence from Portugal in 1975. Within eight days, Indonesia, which controls the western half of the island, invaded. Thus began a brutal quarter-century occupation and constant violent resistance that resulted in the deaths of at least 100,000 people before Timor-Leste was finally granted autonomy from Indonesia in 1999. For three years, Timor-Leste was governed by the United Nations. It became fully independent in 2002 and is still one of the world’s newest countries.

I flew into Lima in the early hours of December 14. A desert city on the Peru’s western coast, Lima is known for its depressing weather, and sure enough, it greeted us with oppressive clouds and fog. A taxi took Kate and me to a hostel in Lima’s Miraflores district. I didn’t really know what to expect, having never been to South America, but Miraflores was unlike anything I would have anticipated. Within a five-minute walk of our hostel were a TGI Friday’s, a Chili’s, a McDonald’s, a Starbucks, and a Domino’s Pizza. We spent the our first day struggling against jet lag while exploring the area around our hostel. We ate dinner at a nice Italian restaurant a few blocks from the hostel—apparently Italian food is a hot trend in Peru.

After leaving Florence on my journey to Italy in June of 2008, my family and I drove to a small town in Umbria called Lerchi. About a 20 minute drive into the hills above Lerchi is an old farmhouse christened “La Dogana.” Nestled in the hills among the farms and forests of Umbria, La Dogana lies beneath the fortified town of Monte Santa Maria Tiberina. Monte Santa Maria dominates the horizon, its imposing silhouette overlooking the countryside in all directions.