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Travel for me has always been initiated by stories. I can’t grab my passport fast enough after a buddy just recounts his latest travel stories filling me with images of foreign destinations. Pictures can sometimes do it but usually your friend’s photos are out of focus or there’s some strange dude in the shot that ruins the whole image. No, for me, it’s always been about sitting around with my buddies as they have at me at the edge of my seat, recounting their experiences traveling abroad - enroute on a crowded train to Rajasthan, lost in the streets of Kathmandu, staring eye to eye with an elephant in the Serengeti.

You can sing as much as you want how beautiful the Taj Mahal is, wrap in as much poetic language the grandeur of the Forbidden City, but it’s not until you start divulging the time you were racing tuk tuks through the streets of Varanasi that my interest is grabbed. This is what travel stories is about. Leave the “sites” for someone else, I’m taking you to the back alleys.

A couple of years back I get a phone call in the middle of the night. It was my buddy Hugh who was living in Madrid and just came back from a night out. He proceeded to tell me how after a night of partying Madrid-style, he was pickpocketed but ended up befriending and hanging out with this gang of pickpockets and getting his wallet back. I’ve savored that story and others and I present them to you, as I talk with my buddy Hugh and he takes us to Madrid, Spain….

This entry was posted on Monday, May 15th, 2006 at 10:45 pm and is filed under Podcast. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.