Results tagged “Jerry Camarillo Dunn Jr” from Intelligent Travel Blog

To compile his new book, My Favorite Place on Earth, Jerry Camarillo Dunn Jr., interviewed dozens of famous people -- from Natalie Portman to the Dalai Lama -- about the places they loved most. He's been guest-blogging about his experiences here on Intelligent Travel. Click here for recent posts.

In choosing a travel companion, you might look for a curious mind, a sense of adventure, or a working knowledge of planes, trains, and donkey carts. But most important is a sense of humor. When the frustrations and absurdities of travel pop up, you both just laugh and carry on.

In My Favorite Place on Earth, I talked with 75 celebrated people about the places they love most in the world, and I made sure to talk with funny folks, from actor Will Ferrell to Matt Groening, who created The Simpsons.

Robin Williams spoke about his hometown, San Francisco. "One famous neighborhood is Haight-Ashbury," he said. "It's like a Civil War re-enactment done by Timothy Leary. The sidewalks are packed, and there are still shops from the Sixties."

Jerry Seinfeld reminisced about playing on a softball team with other up-and-coming comics in New York's Central Park. "We were doing this childlike thing in the middle of this most grown-up of places," he said. "On a Tuesday afternoon you'd be in jeans and sneakers, running around playing ball, and you'd see the skyscrapers with all the real people working for a living. You couldn't escape the fact that you had just dodged this huge bullet in life: 'I'm not up there working!'"

To compile his new book, My Favorite Place on Earth, Jerry Camarillo Dunn Jr., interviewed dozens of famous people -- from Natalie Portman to the Dalai Lama -- about the places they loved most. He'll be guest blogging about his experiences here for the next few weeks. Click here for recent posts.

Sometimes we reach a crossroads in life and take an unexpected turn that changes everything. It happened to custom clothier Manuel Cuevas - known simply as Manuel - the designer who turned Johnny Cash into the "Man in Black" and put Elvis in a jumpsuit.

"We all have one place that makes us think: Wow! What happened to me there changed my life!" he says. Coming from Mexico to Los Angeles as a tailor at age 21, Manuel soon was making clothes for Frank Sinatra and the Rat Pack. But he grew bored with tuxedos. "Some were black and some were white, but it never went anywhere from there. I thought: This isn't my idea of designing. This is just monkey see, monkey do. I need to find something different.

"In the early fifties, a girlfriend asked me to go to the Rose Parade in Pasadena . . . There were people riding horses, and I had never seen anything so flamboyant in my whole life. The colors! The glitter! The embroidery! To see macho men dressed up in clothes with flowers on them, wearing hats all adorned with rhinestones - it just freaked me out. I thought, Oh my God, that's what I want to do!

To compile his new book, My Favorite Place on Earth, Jerry Camarillo Dunn Jr., interviewed dozens of famous people -- from Natalie Portman to the Dalai Lama -- about the places they loved most. He'll be guest blogging about his experiences here for the next few weeks. Click here for recent posts.

"Cultural, authentic, and sustainable"- the triple aspirations of the Intelligent Travel blog - are watchwords for some of the accomplished people you'll read about in My Favorite Place on Earth.  

I think of Jean-Michel Cousteau, whose favorite spot wasn't undersea but a lost corner of Peru, where 25 years ago he met a remarkable man. "Chief Kukus [of the Achuar, a group of the Jivaro] had nearly as much impact on me as my own father," Mr. Cousteau told me. "He taught me his values...His village stood on a river in the deep forest...There were a lot of birds in the trees, and monkeys all over the place. The people hunted with blowguns and poison darts, but in a sustainable way. They only killed what they needed, what nature could provide.

"Chief Kukus showed me some trees he had planted that were about ten feet tall. He told me: 'I'll never see them grow big enough, and my children won't either - even my grandchildren, probably not. But my great-grandchildren, they'll be able to use those trees that I have planted.' He pointed to one in particular and said, 'That's going to make a good canoe.'

"For me, the chief expressed the unwritten constitution of the future. In our modern culture we deal only with the present - now now now. We say we care about our children and grandchildren, yet we do nothing about it. But the Jivaro people had the right concept. They knew how to live in harmony with nature in a sustainable way."

Like Jean-Michel Cousteau, the world stands to learn much from traditional people who have managed to survive in one place for a long time. I think of the Earth as "one place" - and I hope we take the long view.

Photo: via the Ocean Futures Society