I write on Substack at csandw.substack.com. I’m a travel writer, photographer and lifetime traveler. I’ve visited 120 countries and territories. My most recent book is a collection of thirty essays from 3QuarksDaily called Out There, published in April 2021. I’ve also written books about travel to the Arctic, to Chernobyl and a collection of stories from around the world. My wife and I live in Georgia and spend most summers in a cabin on Lake Saimaa in Finland. I write at CommonSenseAndWhiskey.com and curate 20,000-plus photos from around the world at EarthPhotos.com. Email BillMurrayWriter [at] gmail.com.
Website: http://csandw.substack.com
by Bill Murray It is time to go home. You can pull down the window shade for some relief; then it’s only 100 degrees. An Air Burkina Fokker F28 has sidled up to join us on the tarmac in Bamako, Mali. Not quite home yet. “Pull the strops around your west,” explains the flight attendant.…
by Bill Murray It wasn’t effortless but we managed to mollify, sidestep and defy enough authorities to be legally resident in Finland for the month of July. Never mind shoes and belts off and toothpaste in a plastic bag. No, do mind; do that too. But add PCR test results, Covid vaccination cards and popup,…
by Bill Murray If you’d like to start at the beginning, read Part One here. On a piercing-bright, dripping-humid Irrawaddy delta morning in the 1990s, wild, screeching fowl wheeled over trucks full of boys in Chinese dragonheads banging on the side panels, driving in circles, celebrating the new year. The year of the pig had…
by Bill Murray Aye Chan Zin, a 22 year old competitive cyclist, once raced from Yangon to Mandalay and back. He fell and lost both incisors to gold teeth. “Road very bad out there,” he grinned, goldly. Aye Chan was a child of privilege, a third-year vet school student with parents with government jobs. His…
by Bill Murray They call it the Sargasso, this grass. It is the bane of Belize, an invasive floating weed that keeps pitchforks flailing along the waterfront. The Sargasso Sea, we know where that is. But this grass is from Brazil, Réné says. It’s a new challenge from a new place. It isn’t challenge enough…
by Bill Murray Larger than life writers always have that one extra experience, the one that puts your trip to shame. Lawrence Ferlinghetti did when, having achieved the Russian east coast via the Trans-Siberian railroad, he was ordered clear back across the continent because of paperwork. His calamity leaves most of us with nothing to say…
by Bill Murray Former Finnish President and Nobel laureate Martti Ahtisaari once gave a talk in our town and we went to see him. The distinguished gentleman who introduced him at Atlanta’s distinguished Piedmont Driving Club listed among Ahtisaari’s achievements “helping to achieve independence for Nambia.” We visited Nambia a few years back, and found…
by Bill Murray Politics as the family business works out better for some than for others. Last year Turkish President Erdogan had to fire his son-in-law Finance Minister. And the Trumps, well … you know. But things are working out pretty well for the Rajapaksas of Sri Lanka. The President is Gotabaya Rajapaksa, nickname “the…
by Bill Murray In this column I write about international travel, especially travel to less understood parts of the world. This month, with such travel still a wee bit constrained, we start a two-part look back at Sri Lanka, April/May 1999: There are certain things a guidebook ought to level with you about right up front, before…
by Bill Murray This column is about travel to less understood parts of the world. In yet another travel constrained month, how about a little political tourism here in Georgia, where none of us really understands the sordid late-Trump morality play swirling around our dual Senate runoffs. We still have thirty days to go. Unlikely…
by Bill Murray The northern Indian province of Sikkim, between Nepal and Bhutan, borders Tibet. To visit, non-Indians require an “Inner Line Permit/Restricted Area Permit” issued by the Government of Sikkim Tourism Department. It’s because of history. China chased the Dalai Lama from Lhasa over these mountains and off the throne in ’59. India took…
by Bill Murray “Please take that back, sir.” The receptionist at Residence Inn by Marriott, Lexington, Kentucky, recoiled when I slipped my reservation confirmation onto the tabletop. Regrettably, they can not touch things at Residence Inn by Marriott. Surely we understand. After sheltering in place since March, we’d driven off in search of … we…
by Bill Murray In last month’s column we sailed from Walvis Bay, Namibia, to St. Helena Island, 1800 miles from Angola, 1200 from Brazil, in the middle of the South Atlantic Ocean. This month we continue north to Ascension Island. When the Brits exiled Napoleon to St. Helena in 1815 they denied the emperor newspapers,…
by Bill Murray Once we thought we’d look into a cruise. As skeptics in principle, we agreed we’d have to choose carefully. We wouldn’t join an enforced entertainment experience with a thousand shipmates enduring professional smiles. We wouldn’t just pocket a few easy off-the-beaten-track conquests (although these look promising). The fun of those is getting…
by Bill Murray Anguilla is a sandbar ten miles long. It’s three miles wide if you’re being generous, but generous isn’t a word that pairs well with the endowments of a small, arid skerry of sand pocked with salt ponds. A seventeenth century history of the West Indies cursed Anguilla as a place “filled with…
by Bill Murray While everybody dreams of getting out of town, here’s the story of a mostly hapless road trip my wife and I took several years ago: Ashray Raj Gautam waited in the dark before dawn. Men worked under the hood of his Toyota Corolla while we stuffed our things in its trunk. We…
by Bill Murray News from the leisure travel world is worse than grim. More than half of the 16 million travel industry jobs in the United States have been lost. On 14 April last year the TSA processed 2,208,688 air travelers. This year that number was 87,534. It’s the same everywhere. Da Nang saw a…
by Bill Murray A fine young man with a Yesus Kristus medallion bouncing around beneath his mirror drove us the seven or so kilometers into Mt. Kinabalu park, through the sleeping village of Kundasang. Farmers congregated at a warren of tin-roofed stalls along the main road. It looked like a good day for green tomatoes,…
by Bill Murray Two minutes after the explosion the fire station alarm rang. The firefighters who scrambled from sleep to the scene, along with the regular overnight shift at reactor four, were among the first fatally irradiated. Unquestioned heroes, they battled the blazes until dawn with no special training for a nuclear accident, in shirtsleeves,…
by Bill Murray First thing we have to do, we have to find Robert. The men smoking outside the concrete block terminal are not Robert so I ask around inside. The man behind the check-in counter might as well be collecting Arctic tumbleweeds. No flights are pending; no one is checking in. He does not…