76-Second Travel Show: "Traveling with Beard & Darth Vader's REAL Mask"

Episode #007

F E A T U R I N G * 4 0 * B O N U S * S E C O N D S

Links: Christoph Rehage's unreal travel video, The Longest Way -- see it on YouTube; New York's Metropolitan exhibit "The Art of the Samurai" (through January 10); a couple good beard resources: Christopher Oldstone-Moore's "The Beard Movement in Victorian Britain" and an article "Growing a Beard." Music: San Francisco's mighty Tender Few.

SSTS viewer Leif Pettersen, and blogger at KillingBatteries.com, wrote in about beards -- he's thinking of growing a "vast, luxurious one" but wonders about hygiene and its effect on his "attractiveness" on the road.

I made my travel beard debut along with my first-ever head shaving while updating Lonely Planet's Central America guide in 2003. It was a big sprawling, "terrorist" beard by the end of the trip -- my mom didn't recognize me when I got back.

I learned two key things:

1. There's a bald club. I didn't realize it but bald people -- shaved bald, at least -- stop each other on the street and exchange tips. At least it happened in San Cristobal de Las Casas, Chiapas, in southern Mexico, where a gringo stopped to note that "you lose heat far quicker without hair up there; wear a hat." I did.
2. The street-respect the wildly bearded garner. Not talking moustaches, soul patches, the dreadful goatee or trimmed George Michael beards (see right). But real beards. They can only mean two things to passerby on the sidewalks del mundo: a) you're a sciencey genius (see here for more on scientists and beards); b) you're a freak. Either way, you win. No one messes with geniuses or freaks.

I've had plenty of "accidental, organic" beards since 2003 -- like the one I grew for episode seven, in solidarity with Leif. And generally draw the line against anything manicured. If you need to trim it, make it look pretty, cut the thing off.

But one warning. Beards sometimes take a life of their own, evident in the anonymously created (now defunct) Twitter account @mikebarishbeard -- tributing the frequently rich facial decor of travel writer Mike Barish.

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Bearded in Kamchatka, Russia (before it was a Williamsburg staple)