The Frontier Canteen Edition

Chris Wallace is one of my favorite travel writers. He wrote a book on Peter Beard (buy it here). I also loved this piece on Hong Kong. -Colin (CJN)

Chris here.  I’m writing from Kenya, where I am about four-fifths of the way through my trip from Cape Town to Cairo. Today is a big travel day, a 30-odd hour travel day, in and out of various lounges and departure halls, security checks, immigration queues, airport bars and jetways — all the various stages of being processed and tagged while in transit. 

Why is this interesting?

It’s been a good moment for me to think about those places in between the borders of existence, about the rowdy frontier bars, and all the liminal spaces I’ve spent time between realities. In the last several weeks I’ve stayed at more than a few places on a fringe (including, I’d say, the airport hotel in Nairobi.) Places that are not quite in the city, not quite anywhere else. It is the neither-here-nor-there-ness about these sorts of places that I appreciate. It’s like getting lost between levels on a game, outside of time or reality or one-system rules. Standing on the cusp of something, with all the wobbling-vertigo-feeling that comes from being between things.

Many of the places I’m thinking of are on the edge of the metropole before it gives way to the wild. Very often there will be some hint at the nearby wilderness evident in these spots, but often only as a decorative touch.  (I’m thinking of the flora at some of the hotels where I’ve stayed pre safari in Kilimanjaro, Tanzania, or in Karen, Kenya.) Things that seem impossibly exotic upon arrival, and merely cute reminders on the way out. 

The frontier hotels and taverns that I most respond often have a rowdy, base-camp feeling about them — boozy, braggy energy from people who are hyped for what is to come or ecstatic from what has happened to them that day. These are the Mos Eisley canteens — gathering points on the edge of the bush where expeditions will gather or decompress on the edge of adventure. 

One of my all-time favorite frontier canteens is a restaurant called The Duck, in Maun, Botswana, just outside of the airport. Because there is no food court in the Maun airport proper, people will cross the dirt road to gather at the indoor/outdoor cottage that is The Duck while waiting to board a flight into the delta or the Kalahari (or can be found there recounting the adventures they’ve just returned from). The braggadocio and festivity in there is a delight, and the food incredible. I could be misremembering my few visits, but it seems to me that everyone in The Duck always looks a bit dusty, weatherbeaten from the road, and absolutely delighted. Something in their demeanor says, This is living.

Another great example is the Cupola hotel, in the town of Sa Pa in northern Vietnam, where the feeling of anticipation borders on ecstatic, though that could be the altitude. Sa Pa is an incredible place, with lots of wooden structures huddled together at the edge of some of the most beautiful mountain regions you can imagine. The kind of place production designers might have come up with for a sequence in a Star War. A place that make you want to gather a motley crew for a daring ascent, or an unadvisable adventure — all things I love reading about, if not exactly doing myself, another reason for this love affair I have with the in-between places of my life.  

That’s all for now, as I think my plane is boarding — time to go enter another time outside of time, if only for a short while. (CW)

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Thanks for reading,

Noah (NRB) & Colin (CJN) & Chris (CW)

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Why is this interesting? is a daily email from Noah Brier & Colin Nagy (and friends!) with editing help from Louis Cheslaw about interesting things. If you’ve enjoyed this edition, please consider forwarding it to a friend. If you’re reading it for the first time, consider subscribing.