A dozen musicians sit in a semicircle on the outdoor stage, each one playing the kompang, a Malaysian hand-drum. Backed by synthesizers and a western trap set, they run through a repertoire including traditional Malay folk songs, Middle Eastern music and even Dean Martin covers.

The vuvuzelas are not just a collective drone in a literal sense or an audio sense. As phenomena, they become a metaphor underlying my whole trip. Everything else I experience while traveling in Düsseldorf—the sites, the history, the people, and the way in which childhood memories come spiraling back to the current moment—begins to feel like a grand set of resonances harmonizing the vuvuzelas.

I tell Peggy I’m drinking the hell out of pu’erh these days. It connects me to the earth. And Tang Dynasty sages. I imagine living as a hermit 1000 years ago in some remote cave somewhere, uninhibited by tech workers, Virtual Reality sycophants, people on the bulletproof coffee bandwagon, or any of the usual bullshit in Silicon Valley.

The Northern Adriatic: A part of the world drenched in military history, political skirmishes and ethnic composites leftover from fallen empires. Germanic, Slav and Italian influence fused into a breathless aura of ghosts. Expired novelists, poets and exiled artists seemed to stalk the landscape. I was in the right place.

With a sweeping gesture, left to right, he proclaims: “This is Langkawi. Empty roads and no one’s in charge.”

When I arrived at the H.R. Giger Museum in the medieval village of Gruyères, I was immediately transformed. The place stuck out like a decapitated thumb.

Thumbs up for Charlie Chaplin getting banned from the USA.

The ghost of Timothy Leary dissolved my melancholy at Pittormie Castle. And I was stone sober. Pittormie Castle in Scotland was originally the home of the first Duke of Fife in 1593 before King James VI gave it to Ludovic of Lennox...

Myricae was the Latin name of Tamerici — Tamerisk in English — everyday invasive shrubs, but ones that produced gorgeous flowers. All of which was a metaphor for Matera.

Inside the truck, the original custom Helios soundboard from the late 1960s, in all its dirty analog glory, was now fully restored, along with decades-old half-inch tape decks. Upon entering, one could almost smell the history.

The public portion of the airport terminal was just one large room. I didn’t even see a clock anywhere. A connected row of faded plastic orange chairs, circa Taco Bell 1975, sat in front of one window, overlooking the small runway.

The primary focal point was Hesse's typewriter, sitting atop his writing desk, calm and still, as if meditating. On this very typewriter he wrote Magister Ludi, Narcissus and Goldmund and The Journey to the East. Standing in its presence, I felt like I was looking at the Bodhi Tree in India, where the Buddha achieved enlightenment.

If Edgar Allan Poe skulked his way down Whyte Avenue in Edmonton, he would have stopped for women’s clothing at Nokomis.

The ravens helped fortify an alchemical process, inspiring me to banish some repressed misery from my college days 17 years earlier — the last time I’d visited Banff.

Žižkov was an old working class neighborhood, riddled with at least a century of arts, literature and political resistance. At the time of my visit it still seemed grungy and grainy and gorgeous and murky and sentimental.

At the table, I opt for pasta as the slim-suited waiter takes my order. Not because I want pasta. Not because it's the only item on the menu I can identify. But, rather, so I can claim that I ate Italian food in a French restaurant in a German train station in Switzerland.

Here in Geneva, everything started to click. I could almost imagine the opposite halves of myself beginning to alchemically fuse. The counterculture piece of myself no longer felt incongruous with the business traveler part of myself.

Tam opened her cooking school in August of 2008 and named it after her daughter Amita, which means “eternity.”

I was drinking on a Saturday night, in a Québec City bar called Jules et Jim. Dark, smoky and its subterranean walls adorned with old movie photos befitting a place named after the classic François Truffaut film...