Shannan > Recent Status Updates

incredible how people can exist, possessing in abundance the gifts of riches, health, and leisure time, and yet without a taste for travelling. The petty comforts of life and enjoyments of luxury are indeed worth more in the eyes of some than the opportunity of contemplating the exalted beauties of nature or the monuments of history, and of gaining information concerning the manners and customs of foreign nations.

the severest toils and hardships are never sufficient to spoil my enjoyment of a journey; but to have to do with people of this sort is beyond my patience. I was incomparably more comfortable among the cannibals of Sumatra than amongst the soi-disant Christian rabble. Alas! that I should so often have to declare that some of the worst people I have ever met with have been called Christians
-Peru

“After forty days sailing, they ran through the Sunda Strait between Sumatra and Java and past the pointed volcanic island of Krakatoa which would erupt with such world- shattering violence thirty-two years later”
Love the frequent foreshadowing of places visited before events we know them for.

There is a great exploration and rebuttal of eugenics here. I didn’t realise its path into America before the 1920’s.

Compared to glacial time, the Holocene has been a sunny picnic in the park. Civilization and agriculture developed during this oasis of climatic stability.