Where I've been, in no particular order.

I grew up in Guatemala City. The first things I remember are marbles in the dirt and my mother making ice pops in the kitchen and my father, who worked harder than anyone I've ever known, leaving for New York to make enough money to take the rest of us with him. My younger brother. My older sister. Me.

We left everything. The family we knew. The streets we knew. The smells of a city I still recognize in my sleep. All of it traded for a colder country with bigger sidewalks and better odds.

Guatemala isn't a place I visit. It's the place that built the version of me that got on the plane.

Brooklyn. From age six until somewhere around forty-three, give or take. The longest I've lived anywhere.

Catholic elementary school. Cousins everywhere. Subway maps memorized before I could read a book. The mean streets thing is a cliché but the streets were mean and they were also funny and they were also the best teachers I ever had. The land of opportunity isn't a poster on a wall — it's a real thing, if you happen to land in the right corner of it.

I did almost everything in New York that New York lets you do. And then one day it became clear that if I didn't leave when I had the chance, I never would. I'd be eighty in a diner on Court Street regretting every country I never saw. So I left.

I'm still a New Yorker. That doesn't wash off.

First real trip after the Navy, where I'd been to a lot of places for three or four days at a time and seen none of them properly. My brother and I rented a minivan with a bed in the back and drove the entire country, sleeping in the van the whole way.

Icebergs. Black sand beaches. Mossy lava fields that looked like a planet I hadn't agreed to visit. Waterfalls that would be a national park anywhere else and were a sign by the road here. The northern lights one night, faint at first, then not faint at all.

The food was bad and everything cost three times what it should. None of that mattered. It was the closest I've felt to being somewhere genuinely else.

Everyone tells you the same things about Japan before you go. The trains. The toilets. The vending machines. They're not wrong, but they're talking about the surface, which is the part Japan lets you have for free.

What I didn't expect was how quiet the cities are. Tokyo at rush hour, a million people moving in the same direction, and almost no one talking. I ate ramen at a counter at one in the morning next to a salaryman who hadn't said a word the entire meal and then bowed slightly when he left.

The Taj is everything you've heard. Stand in front of it for the first time and the photographs you've seen your whole life arrange themselves into something real. The north is its own country — the Himalayas in the distance, weather changing twice a day, food so layered with flavor I kept asking what was in it and kept getting answers that didn't translate.

Saw the India-Pakistan border ceremony. Two countries performing for each other every evening at sundown, soldiers high-kicking past a line in the sand. Watched it from the cheap seats with a thousand strangers, half of them cheering and the other half cheering louder.

The thing nobody talks about is the desserts. Gulab jamun. Jalebi. Kulfi in a clay cup on a hot afternoon. I went for the temples and the mountains and I came home thinking about the sweets.

Traffic that looks impossible until you're in it, and then it looks slightly less impossible. Chaos that organizes itself if you stand still long enough.

The egg coffee is the thing nobody warned me about. Strong coffee, sweetened whipped egg yolk on top, served in a small ceramic cup set in a bowl of hot water to keep it warm. It tastes like dessert and breakfast at the same time and I had two a day until I left.

Ninh Binh is the part of the country that looks like a movie set. Halong Bay is the part that looks like a postcard you bought ironically and then realized actually exists. And Vietnam, for what it's worth, is where I found my groove with the dating life. The chaos extended to other parts of the trip. No complaints.

The mountains aren't beautiful. That's the wrong word. They're indifferent. They were there before any of us and they'll be there after, and standing in front of them you stop having opinions about your own life for a while, which is a relief.

A porter half my size carried twice my weight and smiled at me when I stopped to breathe. I gave him a granola bar at the end. He gave me a piece of dried yak meat. We were even.

Bali is the part of Indonesia people know about. Bali is also the part of Indonesia I live in, so I'll start there.

It has the right mixture of everything. Beaches, sunsets, jungles, rice fields, locals who actually seem to like having you around — which is not true of every country I've been to and I'm not going to pretend it is. There's enough Western infrastructure that you can eat well and go out when you want to. There's enough of the rest of it that you can live the healthiest life you've ever lived, if that's what you came for.

I got stuck here during covid. It turned out to be one of the best stretches of my life. Found friends I still have. Found love I still have. Found a version of myself I didn't know was available.

Bali is the favorite. I don't think that's changing.

Buenos Aires was fine. Patagonia took my soul and didn't give it back.

The hiking doesn't get better than this anywhere I've been. The food is the kind of casual excellent that makes you suspicious — a five-star steak at the neighborhood place, served by someone who didn't seem to think they were doing anything special. The Malbec made me reconsider what wine was supposed to taste like.

The people were fine. The politics and the currency situation made me want to leave roughly every other day. Even so, this is the place I want to go back to most. Not even close.

You don't visit Antarctica. You get permission to be there for a little while. A small ship out of Ushuaia, two days across the Drake Passage, the boat rolling sixty degrees one way and sixty degrees the other and half the passengers green and the other half pretending.

Then the water flattened and the icebergs started and nobody on the ship spoke for about an hour. A penguin walked up to me on a beach and looked at me for a long time and walked away. That was the entire interaction. It was enough.

My brother and I went because of the movies. Dune. Lawrence of Arabia. Indiana Jones for Petra, which we'd both wanted to see since we were kids. The trip delivered on every one of them.

I'd never known the desert could feel the way it does there. A partial eclipse one afternoon, the light going wrong in a way the brain couldn't quite file. Camels we actually rode, not for a photo. A tent in the middle of nothing. Hiking without guides because we wanted to feel like we'd earned it. Petra at the end, the building carved into the cliff face exactly the way you've seen it on a poster, and then bigger, and then quieter.

One complaint. No booze.

Cairo is a shit show. Dirty, loud, the food was bad, the people were rude. If it weren't for the pyramids and Luxor and four thousand years of history doing the heavy lifting, I wouldn't have given the country a second look.

But the pyramids. They're smaller than you think and bigger than you think at the same time. Smaller because you've seen them on a tea towel since you were a child. Bigger because you stand next to one and the bottom block is the size of a small car and there are a million of those blocks and they are still, four thousand years later, stacked.

The call to prayer carried across the city five times a day and that part I liked. The sunsets were orange in a way I haven't seen anywhere else — orange like fire, not orange like a postcard. That part I liked too.