There is a certain amount of time one must give to grief when the news is as bad as Anthony Bourdain’s death. We must also give extra pause to the fact that his death allegedly occurred by hanging himself. No one knows why yet. No one can even guess why a culinary hero and famed traveller like Bourdain would commit suicide.
Like many others, Tony was a hero to me. His rebellious attitude, snarky writing, deep conversations and no-bullshit way of presenting facts endeared me to him. I remember watching his Stories on Instagram that always featured skylines of different cities from hotel rooms and driving cars with some soothing music in the background at all times. I remember watching his show Parts Unknown as customary research wherever I was travelling next. I have seen his websites Explore Parts Unknown and Roads and Kingdoms grow into my favourites since being launched some time ago. Suffice to say that the man had a huge impact on my life.
A week since the since the news broke, I want to take this moment to celebrate his life and legacy rather than his death through the two things that defined him – travel and food.
Why We Need To Travel Like Bourdain:
Few people have managed to get to the heart of a place as Anthony Bourdain hasIn No Reservations: Around the World on an Empty Stomach, Tony wrote, “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.”
Anthony Bourdain began travelling in earnest only as a television host. Instead of doing the tried and tested format that his peers put out, Bourdain went into unchartered waters and produced a show that was an amazing blend of travel narrative and food stories with a journalistic bent of mind. Indeed, some of the most memorable episodes of his show Explore Parts Unknown feature Bourdain in places like Iran where he squashes all notion of locals being anti-American, like Laos where American shelling during the Vietnam war flattened the countryside and Cuba where he captures the joie de vivre of his fellow Habenaros.
This is an important lesson for travellers today. We need to make more informed choices about where to go and what to see. Never decide your holidays based on someone else’s Facebook photos or because that’s where everyone is going. Make your own list of places after deciding on your interests. Not only will you have a more fulfilling vacation this way but you will also find that travelling to lesser-known places is more than worth its weight than going to tourist hubs.
Choose destinations carefully and decide what you do once you reach there even more carefully. As Bourdain famously said about Paris, “Most of us are lucky to see Paris once in a lifetime. Please, make the most of it by doing as little as possible. Walk a little. Get lost a bit. Eat. Catch a breakfast buzz. Have a nap. Try and have sex if you can, just not with a mime. Eat again. Lounge around drinking coffee. Maybe read a book. Drink some wine. Eat. Repeat. See? It’s easy.”
So if you’re going to Paris (or any other destination) next time, try not to hit just the tourist spots. Take some time and enjoy what the place has to offer outside from your to-do list. You’ll be surprised how friendly locals are when you take an interest in their culture and the incredible adventures those can lead to.
Also Read: 10 Of My Favourite Under-The-Radar Spots To Visit In France
Bourdain never set an agenda for the places he visited or insisted on dining only at established restaurants. In fact, he even made former President Barack Obama join him at a roadside stall in Hanoi for one of his episodes. He loved Vietnam more than even I do. And he definitely went more off-track than any of us can ever hope to go. But we can try. When you arrive at a destination, learn more about the place from locals, understand it through its museums and learn its culture through its food. That’s the only way to truly immerse yourself in a place. And for heaven’s sake, do not rush through places.
Take more time in each place than you think you’ll need. Tour companies will trick you with ‘panoramic tours’ but when you travel by yourself, look for more authentic experiences such as the Black Cab Tour in Belfast that tells you Northern Ireland’s bloody history like nowhere else. Take calculated risks and venture to places on someone’s recommendation or attend a cultural event that you know nothing about. The insights you’ll gain from these experiences will never come from anything else.
One final point: travel to places that others think are dangerous. I went to Jordan just as the Syrian civil war had escalated and travelled to Turkey a couple of weeks after the coup and airport blasts of 2016. I encountered nothing but helpful people and could not be happier about going to those places at the time I did. Many times, places get a bad rep for no real reason. The only way to break out of the negative news cycle is to go there and spin your own positive story for the rest of the world.
Bourdain was a big advocate of travelling to so-called dangerous places. Little wonder that he sat with children in Gaza and broke bread with them or visited places like Iran and Cuba that had the US administrations’ disapproval writ large. As he said in Medium Raw: A Bloody Valentine to the World of Food and the People Who Cook, “If you’re twenty-two, physically fit, hungry to learn and be better, I urge you to travel — as far and as widely as possible. Sleep on floors if you have to. Find out how other people live and eat and cook. Learn from them — wherever you go.”
Also Read: How To Travel Right, According To Anthony Bourdain
Why We Need To Eat Like Bourdain:
There was no dish that Anthony Bourdain would not try that was prepared by his hosts“Your body is not a temple, it’s an amusement park. Enjoy the ride,” Bourdain wrote in Kitchen Confidential: Adventures in the Culinary Underbelly. He certainly lived by those words. From eating the beating heart of a snake on television to trying many other things that mortals like us can’t stomach, Bourdain ate any kind of food served to him.
He believed that as long as food came to him prepared by his host with respect, the only way to pay it back was to take the food as an offering and eat it in their presence. This is also how I first encountered pork while travelling.
While waiting for my ferry to take me to Pho Quoc island in Vietnam, I got ravenous and went out looking for food. Unfortunately, it was past lunch time and all the food joints had shut down. I came across a woman selling what looked like banh mi and asked what she had. All she had was pork dishes. She asked if I wanted it and saw my hesitation. She offered the entire pork banh mi to try and literally kept it in my hands. I tried returning but she wouldn’t take it back. She called her daughter and asked me to try the sandwich right there in front of her. More than the weirdness of tasting pork for the first time, I was amazed at how happy she was when I finished the banh mi. She refused to take money for it and instead kept talking in Vietnamese something I couldn’t understand except that she was happy I ate her sandwich.
After that, I made it a point to try local food wherever I went. You never know what you might fall for. I still miss Georgian khachapuris and Turkish simit with a stabbing urge sometimes. I have yet to find a place that serves decent Vietnamese coffee in my hometown Mumbai.
Quoting again from Medium Raw, “That without experimentation, a willingness to ask questions and try new things, we shall surely become static, repetitive, moribund.”
Also Read: 7 Free Things You Can Do Anywhere In The World
So here’s what I suggest: stop eating at tourist hotspots, find a place where you see more locals than tourists and ask to have the food items they are having. At a restaurant, it’s fine to customise your dish if you want to cut down on meat and save the planet. But don’t do that if you’re eating from a street stall or if there are too many people waiting for their order with you.
Don’t have a holier-than-thou attitude about your own cuisine and hunt for the nearest Indian restaurant. Every destination is known for some special dish. Make sure you try it when you’re there.
Always remember to respect your surroundings before making any demands. You wouldn’t ask your host members in a yurt for any fancy dish or insult a sushi chef in Japan who has spent his entire life filleting the fish in a certain way for some completely off-the-menu dish, right? Instead, try to let go of your old habits in new places.
In other words, enjoy the ride my friend.
Images from Anthony Bourdain’s Facebook page. Follow me on Facebook, Instagram and Twitter to stay updated with the latest news. Subscribe to my email list on the right to stay in touch.
