Departures Ascension island

Sometime travel is not fun ... sometimes travel hurts ....

As much as I love Anthony Bourdain's Parts Unknown, I feel I will always relate to "Departures" a bit more.

I think the Anthony we got on the show ... in hindsight, was probably not the real Bourdain. It seems to be a "sanitized version" of him. Effectively it never showed problems that might occur when traveling aside from a handful of cases (e.g. the infamous Sicily episode, and even then it was made to look COMICAL.) It didn't really show the turmoil that he was probably going through, especially in the last few years of his life.

I wish this was not the case, as I feel if he had "opened up" a bit on what was going on inside ... things may have not ended up happening the way they did.

Departures never has this problem. Scott, Justin, and Andrew frequently talk about the lows of traveling and its effect on their personal lives.

One of the most memorable scenes for me was when they travelled to Ascension Island. During this episode, Justin finds out that his girlfriend is tired of the long-distance thing, and want so start seeing other people.

On the island, there is poor phone and internet service so Justin has no way to contact her to discuss this.

In this scene, which really got to me, he tries to send her an email at an internet cafe, but the session times out.

At the end of the episode, Justin and the girl break up.... and a large portion of subsequent episodes show how he deals with the breakup.

At the moment, season 1 (which includes the Ascension Island Episode) seen to be on Youtube here: