World Travel: An Irreverent Guide

I am a storyteller. I go places, I come back. I tell you how the places made me feel.

After a while, even the most beautiful scenery threatens to become moving wallpaper—background—but other times, it all seems to come together: the work, the play, all the places I’ve been, where I am now, a happy, stupid, wonderful confluence of events.

“Mexican food is about taking the time to do it right, about hours of slow simmering. It’s about hands, people making things, everything, by hand, that day. It’s about people talking to you with their food, telling you something about themselves, their country, their area, their town, their family. And it’s about some of the best, fastest-served street food in the world. And yes, there will be tacos.”

“Most of us are lucky to see Paris once in a lifetime. Make the most of it by doing as little as possible. Walk a little, get lost a bit, eat, catch a breakfast buzz, have a nap, try and have sex if you can, just not with a mime. Lounge around drinking coffee. Maybe read a book. Drink some wine, walk around a bit more, eat, repeat. It’s easy.”

“Who gets to tell the stories?” asked Tony on the Kenya episode of Parts Unknown, which he made with his CNN colleague W. Kamau Bell. It was the last episode for which he recorded narration, and the winner, in 2019, of an Emmy Award for television writing. “This is a question asked often. The answer, in this case, for better or for worse, is, ‘I do.’ At least this time out. I do my best. But in the end, I know: it’s my story, not Kamau’s, not Kenya’s, or Kenyans’. Those stories are yet to be heard.”

“Krampus Day: a day where people dress up in furs and demon outfits to honor Saint Nick’s evil counterpart, Krampus. He’s sort of like Santa’s enforcer. You’re not on Santa’s nice list, but on his naughty list? Krampus comes over and fucks you all up.”

Best known for its intense heat, Sichuan [cuisine] is actually a wonderfully sadomasochistic interplay between pleasure and pain, between the scorching, searing bite of the dried red Sichuan pepper and the cooling, more floral relief, the tingling, numbing component of the tiny black Sichuan flower pepper.”

“All of us, when we travel, look at the places we go, the things we see, through different eyes. And how we see them is shaped by our previous lives, the books we’ve read, the films we’ve seen, the baggage we carry.

“When you’re in the restaurant business, you really feel, especially after a shift, you can’t talk to normal people. You need to see people who understand what kind of a strange and terrible world you live in, you know?”

“The caipirinha, man, this indispensable icon of Brazilian beach culture, is known to start with fresh lime. Muddle and mash with more lime juice, sugar, ice, the magic ingredient, cachaça—that’s basically the distilled liquor of the sugarcane. Shaken, not stirred, and you’ve got yourself one of the world’s truly great cocktails.