Tim Cahill


Out there, somewhere, moonlit swells are rolling through the darkness
over a point I have dubbed "The Spot": 2,700 nautical miles
equidistant from Cape May, New Jersey, and Lisbon, Portugal, and
roughly 1,290 miles southwest of Newfoundland.  The Spot mark the
halfway point on our journey and is, by definition, the farthest we'll
stray from land on our voyage across the Atlantic Ocean.

    -- Paul Bennett, How to Sail Across the Atlantic
       National Geographic Adventure Magazine

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Standing on the deck of a thirty-eight-foot sailboat in the absolute
center of the Atlantic in the middle of the night feels more mundane
than I had assumed it would.  When I imagined this moment months ago
from my leather chair in New York City, it was much more Byronic.  I
was the plucky adventurer thousands of miles from anywhere, alone with
the sea, like the people I read about in books and magazines.
Instead, as I look out at the barely discernable line of the horizon,
I see the concrete facts that led me here: the engine we repaired in
Virginia, the rub rail we replaced in Rhode Island, the mortgage, the
dody ports whose officials we've grown adept at bribing.

    -- Paul Bennett, How to Sail Across the Atlantic
       National Geographic Adventure Magazine

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The argument for carrying a gun is cynically straightforward: sailing
a yacht in the vicinity of poor countries is like walking through the
zoo's polar bear exhibit wearing a seal-skin suit.

    -- Paul Bennett, How to Sail Across the Atlantic
       National Geographic Adventure Magazine

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Contradictions ... mostly in the form of Litton's puzzling personality
quirks.  He has fought for all sorts of restrictions to protect
fragile landscapes, yet he loathes any government agency that musters
the temerity to tell him where he can go and how to behave when he
gets there.  He inspires great loyalty, but his former employees
describe him as the sort of mercurial boss who could switch in a
heartbeat from charmming to curmudgeonly to nitpicking.  He bemoans
the loss of solitude in wilderness but made his living by encouraging
millions of people to go out and discover it.

	 -- Kevin Fedarko, Isn't it Grand?
	 Outside Magazine

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Thing is, they ALL seem to enjoy being around you.  Prostitutes are
good like that.  The best ones make you forget they're even
prostitutes, make you think you've stumbled into the greatest singles'
bar in the world.  That girl you're talking to, she'll tell you that
you're handsome and sexy and intelligent, and she'll make you believe
it no matter how fat or dumb or ugly you are because she knows you've
got a hundred bucks burning a hole in your pocket.  Back home, you'd
spend that on dinner and a movie, and for what?  A kiss on the cheek?
Down here, that gets you laid, and by a woman who pretends she
doesn't think you're a pig.

	-- Sean Flynn, Where they love Americans ... for a living
	   GQ magazine
 
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Just look around.  Stand at the edge of Parque Morazan and watch the
parade of white guys with young brown girls.  "This place," says that
American expat former cop, "has to be the number one destination in
the Western Hemisphere for horny, middle-aged moron-loser-gringos
jacked up on Viagra."

	-- Sean Flynn, Where they love Americans ... for a living
	   GQ magazine

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Sex tourism is built on that very premise: these girls, the chicas and
the Eastern Europeans and the Southeast Asians, are different from
American women, more loving, less judgmental, oblivious to your gut
and your hairline and the fact that you're the sort of guy who hires
women to have sex with him.

	-- Sean Flynn, Where they love Americans ... for a living
	   GQ magazine

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Even Lonely Planet, however, hasn't figured out a way to market its
epiphanies other than by using the impoverished language of travel
writing.  And so "palm-fringed beaches" and "lush rain forests" and
other "sleepy backwaters" are invariably counterpoised against
"teeming citites" with their "bustling souks."  Every region has a
"colorful history" and a "rich cultural tapestry."  And every place on
earth is a "land of contrasts."

      -- Tad Friend, The Parachute Artist
      The New Yorker
      
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That's when panic rose in my throat, a stifled upchuck.  What in the
name of bullcrap was I doing here?

     -- Michael Paterniti, XXXXL

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You fully expect The Girl to whisper up at the monkey -- to coax it
down, cradle it into her arms, and walk off peacefully to share the
muffin on the shores of the Holy Ganges.  Instead, her face reddens,
and she snatches a tin of tea sugar.  Curling her thin, lovely lips,
she screams, "COCK SUCKING FUCKING MONKEY!"

    --Rolf Potts, Tantric Sex for Dilettantes
    Perceptive Travel

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Part of me wants to offer to help.  But that would be, of course,
ridiculous, melodramatic.  He washes these stairs every day.  It's not
my job to hand-wash stairs.  It's his job to hand-wash stairs.  My job
is to observe him hand-washing the stairs, then go inside the
air-conditioned lobby and order a cold beer and take notes about his
stair-washing so I can go home and write about it, making more for
writing about it than he'll make in many, many years of doing it.  And
of course, somewhere in India is a guy who'd kill to do some
stair-washing in Dubai.  He hasn't worked in three years, any chance
of marriage is rapidly fading.

   -- George Saunders, The New Mecca
   GQ Magazine

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Here girls of roughly student age release their Slavic pheromones to
the music of 50 Cent, their flea-market miniskirts held together by
bobby pins and sheer will.  In the Amsterdam room, desperation and
testosterone tickle the nose in equal measure.  After several vodka
shots chased with beer, I settle into another Dostoyevskian moment -
feeding the G-string of some poor damaged blond a series of
one-hundred-ruble notes whilst mumbling something about life and
beauty and redemption.

-- Gary Shteyngart, A St. Petersburg Christmas
Travel + Leisure

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