Letting places tell their stories
www.discover-interesting-places.com
Travel, and its stories
My idea of a good trip is to let it unfold, like a story.
I am severely against being told anything about a play or a film before I see it. Not the twist, not the theme, not what the critics made of it. I want the thing to arrive in its own order, at its own pace, and to find out what I think of it while it is happening.
Journeys are the same. Arrive with the whole itinerary settled and the guidebook's opinions already installed, and you spend the week confirming what you were told rather than discovering anything. You will see the sights. You will not meet the place.
It is not so different from how I work. Walk into a business or a region with the answer already decided and you will find evidence for it — that is what people do. Walk in and look properly, and it tells you something nobody had thought to mention.
So I travel with few plans, ask a lot of questions, and follow whatever turns up. It is how I ended up spending an evening in a New Orleans neighbourhood eating barbecue chicken and black-eyed peas, listening to a DJ called Red River Red, on a night when the whole of America was trying to make its streets safe again.
No guidebook sends you to an evening like that — although Argentinian tango later that night was a given.
We left the French-style bistro that hosted a weekly tango gathering to head after midnight for the Circle Bar on Lee Circle, where a clock on the ceiling sat permanently at a civilised hour, so you could reassure yourself the night was still young. When the Circle Bar closed for good in 2020, OffBeat Magazine called it an insider's place — the sort locals treasured and hoped the tourists would never overrun.
Then, on the ride back to my car, a diversion.
Who plans an evening dancing tango among the antiques of a charming shop in the French Quarter?
Or what followed: re-enacting Pablo Verón's street tango from The Tango Lesson, right there on Canal Street, to a CD playing on a car radio with the doors open.
Where I write it down
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