Nathan Thornburgh, friend and contributing writer to TIME, recently launched a new website called Roads and Kingdoms, part travel, part journalism and part food blog.
(from R&K’s website) Nathan was passing through Mexico after a Time Magazine reporting trip to Cuba that had started with his arrest in Havana’s Jose Marti airport, because he was a journalist with contacts to Cuban dissidents. Matt, meanwhile, was eating his way through Mexico for a mezcal-fueled feature called There Are No Nachos in Mexico. They connected at the airport in Mexico City and headed straight to Restaurante Arroyo, a sprawling barbacoa campus outside of the capital city.
That conversation there in Arroyo was what they want Roads and Kingdoms to be: it started with a lot of shit-talking about the immortal music and pustulent bureaucrats of Cuba and ended with a behind-the-scenes tour of a ridiculously good Mexican kitchen, complete with tasting of worm tacos and smoked goat wrapped in banana leaves. This is what travel can be, from Southeast Asia to Siberia to North Africa and beyond: war, politics, music, and everywhere food.
“Roads & Kingdoms”, by the way, is cribbed from The Book of Roads & Kingdoms, a great early geography written in the 11th century by Abu Abdullah al-Bakri in Córdoba, now home to a mediocre football club playing in Spain’s second division.
Today, R&K featured my Muay Thai kick boxing story I shot while in Bangkok.
You can take a look here.
