if I could go back in time, I would attend Mina’s wedding in December 2013, I would have paid the 500 cfa to ride on the back of a bedouin camel in Northern Togo on New Year’s Day in 2012, and I would have been more curious about my night guard Alphonse’s life. None of these choices would have changed my life in any significant way, but because they constitute moments of self-absorption and egocentrism I can never get back. 

December 26, 2023 - On the surface, it seems like a silly act to start a travel blog five years since I moved back to the States, when...