Rowdy Planet
Will Durant
The South creates the civilizations, the North conquers them, ruins them, borrows from them, spreads them: this is one summary of history.
01
Stories
Stories that matter. The people, fables and legends that have shaped our world. And the pervasive humanity that percolates us all.
02
Coordinates
One specific historical or cultural geo-location that left an everlasting impression upon us. Don’t miss these coordinates.
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42-Hours In
Bite sized itineraries to places that we found most interesting. Spend 42 hours. Or 2 weeks. Make your own journeys from there.
Shiva in Crete? It was an especially hot summer afternoon in mid-June when we landed up at Knossos, the sprawling excavated Minoan Palace on the island of Crete in Greece. We had been in Greece for almost 3 weeks by this point. It had been a fascinating journey through time. As the guide walked us through the Palace, narrated the Cretans worship of the bull, showed us weapons that looked like Tridents, art with brown-skinned people mixed with fair-skinned people, a female goddess with snakes around her body, and the Legend of the Minotaur – a half-bull, half-man, that thought just hit us like a lightning bolt.
Will Durant
It may be of some use to those upon whom the passion for philosophy has laid the compulsion to try to see things whole, to pursue perspective, unity and understanding through history in time.
That event began an intimate obsession with history. A subject, dry with dates, names and artifact descriptions, that most of us hated in school, but one that manages to fascinate us given our perspectives as an adult. We started with the short, crisp, to-the-point yet a little Europe-biased Ernst Gombrich’s History of the World. We poured through Susan Bauer’s History of the World series. We obsessed over the Durant books, The Story of Civilization, that documents 110 centuries of human history in 11 volumes, not remembering most of it, but appreciating every word of it. The Travels of Ibn Batuta. Mark Kurlansky’s Salt, A World history. The Encyclopedia of World Maps as drawn over the centuries. Anything and everything we could find.
This also began our obsession with visiting the places where history was created. To touch and feel the walls, the stones, the statues. To feel the bitter cold of a January evening in Auschwitz or the searing heat at the Battle of Thermopylae in August. To listen to the locals unearth the myths that might have been reality at some point in time. To stand frozen in space-time wondering how time itself has transpired through humanity and its deeds.
We hope that through our experiences, our narratives and photographs, you, the reader, will find the impetus to travel to these locations, and to absorb the diverse cultures, histories and viewpoints.
HISTORICAL & CULTURAL
The Quarantine began in medieval times when Ragusa (Dubrovnik) started isolating people in the Lazareti. Initially a Trentine, it eventually became the Quarantena via Venice.
Anthony Bourdain
Travel isn’t always pretty. It isn’t always comfortable. Sometimes it hurts, it even breaks your heart. But that’s okay. The journey changes you; it should change you. It leaves marks on your memory, on your consciousness, on your heart, and on your body. You take something with you. Hopefully, you leave something good behind.
TRIP SUGGESTIONS
SlovakiaA coordinate based approach to exploring. Get your Google or Apple Maps out, plug in the coordinates we provide, and look around, read about the place, see how it fits into the Atlas of Time, and plan for your visit.
In these narratives, we talk about one specific historical, cultural or gastronomical geo-location that left an everlasting impression upon us.
Bill Bryson
“I can’t think of anything that excites a greater sense of childlike wonder than to be in a country where you are ignorant of almost everything.”
BLOGS & ARTICLES
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Guerilla Photography
A walk around Bruges (Brugge)
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Rowdy Planet is a family of four five from the San Francisco Bay Area. Like you, we love to travel with the fascination of the history and culture of its people always in our minds.
Other outlets
Rowdy Planet has an Instagram account and a Twitter account as well. Our Samoyed, Kulfi, has his own website and Instagram account.