Continuing my review of the the past decade…

2006 kicked off with a trip to South Korea. Traveling with a group of American journalists, we caught the attention of school kids everywhere we went. They would rush over and want to practice their english on us. The reception was warm and welcoming. Anyone in our group with blonde hair and blue eyes was especially popular. We had our own paparazzi, too. Korean journalists following the American journalists everywhere. One night we saw an on-the-street interview with a member of our group on the nightly news, dubbed in Korean. Americans seemed to be truly loved in South Korea. It was a feeling that I hadn’t experienced abroad so strongly for several years.

The street markets in Korea were a favorite of mine. Always colorful and always full of the smells of street food. Some of that yellow twine in the top photo has been wrapped around the handle of my suitcase ever since this trip. It makes for an easy way to identify my bag on the airport carousel — even though it’s showing the wear of many thousands of miles of transport.

One of the more memorable events from this trip was an overnight visit to a buddhist temple. We dined with the monks, took tea, made paper lotus lanterns and were schooled in buddhist philosophy. I’ve written about the dining experience on this blog before so I won’t go into it again here. Suffice it to say that I’ll remember that night for a long, long time.

There were several US trips in 2006 as well, including a post-Katrina visit to New Orleans. Then, in the Fall, I got to experience Spring again by crossing the equator and visiting Chile. Here’s a shot from a great old neighborhood in Santiago:

I spent a day in the port city of Valparaiso as well. It’s a picturesque town that spills down mountainsides in a riot of color. Funiculars take you up many of the hillsides but I generally preferred to walk. After many hundred steps up the side of one mount, I followed the sound of some odd music to find this fellow with his parakeet selling toys from his music box:

Santiago is one of two places from which you can fly to Easter Island (the other being Tahiti). One of the most remote inhabited places on earth, I had always wanted to visit it to see the stone heads, or Moai. The flight was about 5 hours straight west over the Pacific. There was a little screen in the seatback in front of me where I could watch the image of a tiny plane as it neared the Chilean coast, then headed out into the blue. The screen remained simply blue with that little plane pointed forward until, more than 2000 miles later, we miraculously landed on the tiny island. For four days I explored the nearly treeless landscape that strangely reminded me of the Flint Hills 60 miles west of my home back in Kansas. Except these hills were surrounded by ocean and were inhabited by those mysterious heads.