By ELIZABETH WEIL, New York Times

A hundred years ago, when Robert Falcon Scott set out for Antarctica on his Terra Nova expedition, his two primary goals were scientific discovery and reaching the geographic South Pole. Arguably, though, Scott was really chasing what contemporary observers call a sufferfest. He set himself up for trouble: Scott brought Manchurian and Siberian ponies that quickly fell through the snow and ice; he planned, in part, for his crew to “man-haul,” meaning that the men would pull sleds full of gear, instead of relying on dogs. Even when Scott’s men faltered, they continued collecting specimens, including rocks. The expedition ended terribly; everybody who made the push to the pole died. Miserable, starving and frostbitten, one of Scott’s last four men killed himself by walking into a blizzard without even bothering to put on his boots.

A self-portrait that Sarah Marquis took (her camera was on a cart filled with gear) north of Mongolia, during the first month of her trek across Asia and Australia. Credit Sarah Marquis

In the taxonomy of travelers, the word “explorer” suggests a morally superior pioneer, a man or woman who braves the battle against nature to discover new terrain, expanding our species’ understanding of the world. “Adventurer,” by contrast, implies a self-indulgent adrenaline junkie, who scares loved ones by courting puerile risk. The former, obviously, is the far better title, but it’s tough to claim these days. The world is Google-mapped. Reaching the actual virgin territory of space or the deep ocean requires resources that few possess. In short, the noble fig leaf of terra incognita has fallen away and laid bare the peripatetic, outsize bravado of Scott’s kindred spirits. The resulting itineraries are pretty strange. We now have guys like Felix Baumgartner sky-diving from a balloon-borne capsule at 128,100 feet.

Baumgartner falls squarely — and for more than four minutes, breaking the speed of sound — into the adventurer camp. But then there’s Sarah Marquis, who perhaps should be seen as an explorer like Scott, born in the wrong age. She is 42 and Swiss, and has spent three of the past four years walking about 10,000 miles by herself, from Siberia through the Gobi Desert, China, Laos and Thailand, then taking a cargo boat to Brisbane, Australia, and walking across that continent. Along the way, like Scott, she has starved, she has frozen, she has (wo)man-hauled. She has pushed herself at great physical cost to places she wanted to love but ended up feeling, as Scott wrote of the South Pole in his journal: “Great God! This is an awful place.” Despite planning a ludicrous trip, and dying on it, Scott became beloved and, somewhat improbably, hugely respected. Marquis, meanwhile, can be confounding. “You tell people what you’re doing, and they say, ‘You’re crazy,’ ” Marquis told me. “It’s never: ‘Cool project, Sarah! Go for it.’ ” Perhaps this is because the territory Marquis explores is really internal — the nature of fear, the limits of stamina and self-reliance and the meaning of traveling in nature as a female human animal, alone.

Meeting Marquis is strange if you’ve only seen her trip photos. In those, she is filthy, her hair is a rat’s nest and her eyes are introspective, beseeching and very alert. In person, she’s beautiful and charming; she always has a smile for waiters and cabdrivers, and her bangs are so well cut that they make her seem French. (Marquis’s hairdresser squashed her idea of shaving her head for her recent trek, saying, “After all the work we’ve done?!”)

Marquis grew up in Montsevelier, a village of 500 people in the Jura Mountains, in what Marquis describes as “the northern part of Switzerland — it’s not the nice part.” Her father, who worked as an engineer, paid Marquis one franc for every 100 slugs she picked out of the family garden. She befriended the family ewe, Moumou, and trained the pet rabbit to come when called. She liked people less. “My mom had nine sisters, and my dad had eight sisters and brothers, and those aunts and uncles all had three or four kids, so it was a big, screaming family, and for me it was a nightmare,” Marquis told me when I met her last winter in Washington. At age 8 she ran into the woods with her dog and spent the night in a cave. Marquis’s mother called the police, but when Marquis returned, her mother didn’t scold. Fighting Marquis’s wanderlust was hopeless.

When she was 16, Marquis answered a classified ad for a train company that promised free travel. She loved the idea of seeing Paris and Milan, but once Marquis started work, her colleagues, almost all of whom were older men, harassed her relentlessly. On the first day one man claimed he could smell that Marquis had her period. The experience was a boot camp — punishing but character-strengthening. “I learned how to build myself,” she said. “I built the tough skin I needed for later on. I learned how men worked.”

Marquis’s desire to travel began to coalesce around the question of whether she could survive by herself in nature. First, she decided to ride a horse across Turkey. On that trip, she ate apricots off trees and slept with her head on her saddle. Muslim women bathed her in warm goat’s milk. But after that, Marquis’s itineraries veered away from romance and pleasure into solitude and suffering. In her early 20s she flew to New Zealand and set out on a four-day backpacking trip with some noodles, a huge radio and three or four books — “everything except what I needed.” The outing, by typical standards, was a fiasco. Day 1 it poured; Marquis didn’t know how to set up her tent, and she was freezing and bored because, she now said wryly, “at night there was nothing to do.” But near the end of the trip she had a sort-of epiphany. “Something happened,” she said. (Articulating her reasons for pursuing her travels is not one of Marquis’s strengths.) “Over the years I’ve had this feeling again and again.” Chasing that inexplicable sensation is why she walks.

Marquis spent the winter after that trip earning money by bartending in Verbier, a fancy off-piste ski resort in the Alps. The next summer she returned to New Zealand. This time she walked into the South Island’s Kahurangi National Park without food to see if she could survive for 30 days. That trip, too, was a trial. Marquis failed at spearfishing, consumed only mussels and lost 20 pounds. But she not only recaptured that inchoate feeling she craved; she also glimpsed the savageness of her desire. “That was the first time I actually got in touch with the wild,” Marquis said. “You know when you’re really, really hungry? You have to teach yourself that food is not a big issue. You just need sleep and sweet water.”

Marquis returned to Switzerland and embraced the cycle — work for money, then leave on some extreme challenge she devised for herself. She canoed through Canada’s Algonquin park without knowing how to portage; she was attacked by beavers camping near water in Patagonia; she hiked the 2,650-mile Pacific Crest Trail. She remained captivated by what she describes as “this wild call from inside me” and decided to walk 8,700 miles around Australia.

For that trip, Marquis lined up her first sponsor, the North Face. She doesn’t think she impressed the company by her pitch. She believes it gave her a few backpacks, a couple of tents and some clothes because, she said, “when I told them what I was going to do, they thought, We can’t let that little thing go out without gear.” To supplement the inadequate supply of noodles she could carry, Marquis brought a slingshot, a blow gun, some wire to make snares and a net for catching insects. In the warm months, Marquis ate goannas, geckos and bearded dragons. In the cold months, when the reptiles hid, she subsisted on an Aboriginal standby, witchetty grubs — white, caterpillar-size moth larvae that live in the roots of Mulga trees. (Raw, Marquis said, they taste like unsweetened condensed milk; seared in hot sand, they crisp up nicely.) Throughout, Marquis tried to minimize human contact. She hid her femininity with loose clothes, big sunglasses, hair piled up in a hat. When water was scarce, she collected condensation, either by digging a deep hole and lining the cool bottom with plastic or by tying a tarp around a bush. If those techniques didn’t yield enough liquid — and they rarely did — she drank snake blood. At night Marquis slept close to the trunks of trees, touching the bark in a way that she describes as “almost carnal.” She fell in love with a particular twisted and wind-bent Western myall tree on Australia’s Nullarbor Plain.

On June 20, 2010, Marquis’s 38th birthday, she set out to walk from Siberia through Asia and, once back in Australia, trek to her beloved tree. The video of Marquis walking away from her starting point in Irkutsk feels like the setup for a horror film. “Hello, O.K., so here we are,” she said just before turning away from the camera. “Time to go now!” On her back is a 75-pound pack, and trailing behind her, overflowing with gear secured by bungee cords, is a custom-made cart that looks like a cross between a wheelbarrow and a giant roller bag — her dry-land sled. After Australia, Marquis couldn’t handle slaughtering more animals; she says it felt “like killing a friend.” So she decided to carry rice and hard biscuits (the latter inedible without “a nice, hot cup of tea”), which meant she would need to pull a cart. It now weighed 120 pounds.

To prepare for the expedition, Marquis spent two years walking or snowshoeing 20 miles a day, wearing 75 pounds. On the trip itself, she carried, among other things, five pairs of underwear, a large pocketknife, wide-spectrum antibiotics, tea-tree oil for massaging her feet, a solar-powered charger, a beacon, a BlackBerry, a satellite phone, Crocs, a compass, a tiny emergency stash of amphetamines (“that’s the backup backup backup of the backup; in case you lose a foot and you need to get out and not feel a thing”) and pink merino-wool pajamas (“you put them on and you feel good, you feel gorgeous”).

Read the full article HERE.

From DCist

“Show me where the Europeans are, Jorge.”

Cardozo’s International Academy. Photo by Ronnie R./DCist

Inside an International Academy classroom at Francis L. Cardozo Education Campus, a teacher directed a student to place a sticky note on a projected painting of Christopher Columbus arriving in America. The exercise was part of a U.S. history lesson on the explorer that included English vocabulary words like clothing and gun. “Barco” one student said aloud, trying to help another student who was directed to identify the ship.

These students are part of Cardozo’s International Academy, instituted at the D.C. high school this year to better serve an influx of children in need of English Language Learner (ELL) support. Part of the Internationals Network for Public Schools, the research-based program is tailored for students who have newly arrived in the U.S.

Dr. Tanya Roane, principal of Cardozo for the past three years, said the school has seen a “huge shift in demographics” over the past year. The International Academy was started to “address the needs of our students,” she told officials, including Chancellor Kaya Henderson, at a presentation yesterday.

During Roane’s first year at Cardozo, 133 ELL students qualified for support. By August 2013, that number had grown to 177, and by the end of the year the number was over 265. The vast majority of the students who arrived after the school year began were at a beginning level.

Last October, school officials, including Chief of Special Education Dr. Nathaniel Beers, observed the INPS academy at T.C. Williams in Alexandria. “The things that we saw in that building — the engagement of the students, the way they were having academic conversations — were things that, when I had come here, despite all work that the teachers were doing, the types of conversation were much less rigorous,” Beers said. “We needed to change that.”

Just one month into the school year, 164 in-boundary students are enrolled in the Academy, with 200 spots available. Associate Principal Megan Sands, who oversees the program, expects the Academy to be at capacity by December. What happens after that — and how to scale the program in different ways for different schools — will be explored in the coming months.

The students are primarily from El Salvador, Honduras and Guatemala, but also from the Dominican Republic, Ethiopia, Mexico, Burma and Vietnam. The most commonly spoken language is Spanish, with Amharic, French, Rohingyar, Vietnamese and Tigrinya also represented. A whooping 75 percent of the students are male, and many have been in the U.S. for less than one full academic year.

Grouped into teams, the ninth and tenth grade students are taught in English while paired with a fellow student who speaks the same language to provide support. The goal, Sands said, is to increase the heterogeneity of the Academy, which forces students to use English.

Read the full article HERE.

By Kimberly Sutton, Your Houston News

Conroe’s Burger Boy owner Mike Nguyen remembers tasting his first hamburger after arriving to the United States more than 24 years ago from his native Vietnam.

Conroe’s Burger Boy owner Mike Nguyen. Nguyen remembers tasting his first hamburger after arriving to the United States more than 24 years ago from his native Vietnam. Now he’s the owner of one of Conroe’s longstanding burger stands.

“We heard about hamburgers in Vietnam, but I didn’t know what it looked like,” Nguyen said. “I tasted it and have loved it ever since.”

Now, at age 40, married and with two children, Nguyen heard the Burger Boy restaurant was for sale after the Greek couple who owned for more than 20 years wanted to retire. He bought the small, nostalgic restaurant in 2007 because he was looking to own a family business. He has always enjoyed working in the restaurant business and loves hamburgers, he said.

“I still love burgers. In my mind, that’s how I ended up with Burger Boy,” Nguyen said.

He promised the former owners that he would run Burger Boy as best as he could, and by the looks of things, he is doing very well.

The restaurant received no demerits in its most recent health inspection and Nguyen attributes it to “always keeping the kitchen as clean as possible.”

“I listen to the health inspector,” Nguyen said. “If they order us to fix something, we fix it. That’s why I am here, from early morning to late close.”

His restaurant is his family’s livelihood and Nguyen puts his all into it.

“I like to make people happy, and overall, I try the best I can,” Nguyen said. “I’m here, I run the place and work hard and try to make the best food for everybody that comes here.”

Burger Boy has an extensive menu, everything from cheeseburger baskets to Philly Cheese Steaks to Greek gyros.

“We have good seafood, catfish and shrimp and pretty good salads,” Nguyen said. “But, most people come here for hamburgers.”

He also sells a lot of milkshakes, maybe because he uses real ice cream.

“It’s pricier, but has better flavor verses the powdered one,” he said. “A lot of people come for the butterscotch milkshakes. We also have banana, pineapple, chocolate and vanilla. We go the whole nine yards on flavor.”

Nguyen loves his business and he loves Conroe.

Read the full article HERE.

From Shields Gazette

For untold millennia the area has been inhabited by indigenous peoples such as the Ba Na, the Ro Mam, the Xo Dang, the Brau, the Gia Rai, and Gie Trieng.

JUNGLE DWELLER … what are the Nguoi Rung? (Shields Gazette)

But it is not only these ancient tribes-people who inhabit Kon Tum. The area also plays host to a bizarre group of creatures called the Nguoi Rung, or “Forest Dwellers”.

On the August, 23 and 24, 1947, a number of Sedang, Jarrai and Banhar people reported sighting some of the Nguoi Rung near their villages.

Investigations into the sightings proved inconclusive, but from that point forward, the mysterious Forest Dwellers appeared regularly – if not frequently – to farmers, soldiers and fishermen alike.

In 1982, Professor Tran Hong Viet, who later lectured at the Pedagogic University of Hanoi, stumbled across a footprint of a Nguoi Rung and made a plaster cast of it.

The print measured 16 centimetres by 28 centimetres. The length wasn’t extraordinary, but it was much wider than a normal human footprint.

The toes, too, were longer than human toes.

Trang Hong Viet found the print on the slopes of Chu Mo Ray Mountain – a mountain which, not coincidentally, lies in the heart of Kom Tum Province, where the creature had appeared during the 1940s.

But who are the Nguoi Rung? A tribe of humans that had managed to isolate themselves from the rest of humanity for ages, or perhaps an undiscovered species of hominid like the Yeti or Bigfoot?

It’s hard to run with the idea that they’re human beings.

The height of the Nguoi Rung varies widely.

Some are said to be very small – almost dwarf-like – whilst others may reach a height of 7ft or more.

More tellingly, the creatures are always said to be covered in a thick coat of brown or black hair and walk bipedally like humans.

They are also said to be able to make fire and to have a real liking for mussels and snails.

It seems that the Nguoi Rung are not badly disposed to humans.

Read the full article HERE.