Welcome to the sixth edition of VoiceMap’s fortnightly newsletter, Senses of Direction.
This week, we’ve got a behind-the-scenes look at a beloved symbol of the holiday season, the Rockefeller Center Christmas Tree. There’s the unlikely story of a man who set off on his first-ever long distance cycle – all the way to India – after a chance encounter in a London pub, and a series of astounding photographs from this year’s Wildlife Photographer of the Year competition.
Lastly, there’s a reflection on travelling to Burma over the course of 53 years by Paul Theroux, “who, it’s fair to say, reinvented travel writing as an art form.”
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For your festive spirit | Rocking around the Christmas tree
It’s difficult to imagine a more famous Christmas icon than the Rockefeller Center Christmas Tree. It’s the tree where McCauley Culkin is reunited with his mother in Home Alone 2 and where, every year since 1933, America watches as its official lighting ceremony is broadcast to the nation.
Tom Darbyshire brings the history of America’s favourite Christmas symbol to life on his enchanting VoiceMap tour, with a behind-the-scenes look at how the tallest trees are located then trucked in at night to be lifted into place by crane – before being wrapped with five miles of coloured lights. He also shares snippets from Yuletide literature that beg the question: was the modern image of Christmas created in New York?
🔗 Tom’s got a special knack for making you feel like you’re right there. Listen here, or check out the full tour, Rockefeller Center Audio Tour: A Guide to its History, Art and Architecture.
For your sense of serendipity | The disappearing cyclist
Do you ever have the urge to ask a perfect stranger the story of their life? Or wonder what lies beneath the expressions that people wear for the world each day? Tom Rosenthal does.
A couple of months ago, he began recording conversations with people whose names he never learns for a new podcast, aptly called Strangers on a Bench.
In this – the seventh episode – we hear the story of an elderly man who follows his feet to a bar in Hackney, East London one Saturday morning and has a brief conversation with a couple. They ask him a simple question that – despite having never ridden any real distance on a bicycle – inspires him to cycle all the way to India.
“This is the beauty of waking up one dawn,” says the stranger. “You don’t know what’s going to happen.” After leaving England, he adopts a nomadic lifestyle that keeps him on the road for 17 years.
It’s wacky, it’s unpolished and, at times, a tad vulgar. But it’s storytelling, raw and real, and the range of this improvised 30-minute conversation is quite astounding. Rosenthal’s approach – in its reverence for the ordinary (and sometimes serendipitous) – shows us how even the most random moments can become the first day of the rest of our life.
🔗 Listen to the episode on Apple Podcasts or YouTube. You’ll also find original music by Tom Rosenthal (yes, he’s the singer-songwriter) from different podcast episodes here, and a YouTube video introducing the podcast here.
For your sense of wonder | 2024 Wildlife Photographer of the Year
This gallery of 100 winning images from the Natural History Museum’s annual Wildlife Photographer of the Year competition – which aims to “inspire a love of the natural world and create advocates for the planet” – creates a sense of place that feels at once intimate and universal. These photographs will transport you to the four corners of the world, and some might even move you to tears.
One of my favourites is Elephant Slumber, an aerial photograph of a family of elephants with a perspective that reveals their vulnerability by reducing them to outlines in the lush green bush of India’s Anamalai Tiger Reserve.
I also love Frontier of the Lynx, which portrays this wild cat stretching in the early evening sunshine in Primorsky Krai in Far East Russia. The photographer spent over six months in wait until he captured this relaxed image of the elusive lynx.
🔗 Explore the 2024 gallery here, or read about the history of the 60-year-old competition here.
For your sense of ‘true travel’ | The long road back to Mandalay
Returning to a place after several years is often uncanny. Writer and novelist Paul Theroux – “who, it’s fair to say, reinvented travel writing as an art form” – brings this feeling into sharp focus in a new article, in which he describes three visits to Burma over the course of 53 years.
Theroux wrote about his first extended stay in the country in 1973 in The Great Railway Bazaar, “a wildly entertaining book that woke up the world to what a travelogue could achieve.” Thirty-four years later, in 2007, he retraced his steps to follow much the same route as the 25,000-mile trans-Asia train journey that he’d recorded all those years ago, which inspired another travelogue, Ghost Train to the Eastern Star.
But he returned to find Burma – then Myanmar – eerily unchanged. He wrote in his notebook:
“The unreality of arriving in a distant modernized city cannot compare with the unreality of seeing one that has hardly changed at all. If a place, after decades, is the same or worse than before it is almost shaming to behold – it seems to exist as a mirror image of yourself the traveler, who has to admit: I’m the same too, but aged – wearier, frailer, fractured…”
If there was one constant to be thankful for, it was Candacraig: the accommodation in a Raj-era hill station called Maymyo where he’d received a warm welcome from its proprietor, Mr Bernhard, as his only guest.
Mr Bernard had passed away, but Candacraig was “repainted and shining, looking baronial,” and his son, Peter Bernard, had taken over. He told Theroux that after The Great Railway Bazaar was published, foreign travellers had begun to arrive at reception, “holding your book, wanting to meet my father.” The elder Mr. Bernard had spent his last years in Maymyo as a minor celebrity.
For Theroux, “It was a reminder that true travel is less about buildings and museums than it is about what I’ve come to think of as ‘human architecture’: people and their stories.”
🔗 Read this charming reflection on Theroux’s Burmese days, and how they inspired two classic travelogues and his latest novel, Burma Sahib.
Until next time, thanks for travelling with us!
Best Wishes,
Claire
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