Anthony Bourdain

I was lying in bed when my girlfriend, who was watching the Filipino network news in the sala, came to me and told me that an American, "Antony Buran," was dead. I rolled the name through the rolodex in my head and came up with nothing. She has a hard time pronouncing my last name, too, even after being with me for a decade. So when I got up late in the night and turned on CNN and saw that she was referring to Anthony Bourdain, I, like everyone else in the world hearing the news, was stunned.

Where are you going now? I was only one of Anthony Bourdain's ever-expanding audience. And like a lot of them, I felt like I knew him. He proved to us that he was so much more than a celebrity chef. I found him to be the perfect antidote to Gordon Ramsey, who seems to be on a one-man crusade to destroy the reputations of cooks and of cooking. For Bourdain, food was his foot in the door, his passport into the lives of people everywhere in the world he traveled to. He knew haute cuisine, the food served in high-end Michelin star restaurants. But he clearly preferred real food eaten by real people - street food in exotic places.

On a blog post from 2014, I called him The Detrimental Tourist, because his acerbic wit and cynical, snide asides weren't likely to attract tourists to the strange places he sometimes visited. It seemed to me that he was driven by something very dark, that attracted him to the wrong side of the tracks, the dangerous parts of the world. When he visited places like Paris, he expressed contempt for their biggest tourist attractions where people stand in line for hours to catch a glimpse of "the real Paris" - whatever that is.

I didn't share his literary tastes - William S. Burroughs, Charles Bukowski, and Hunter S. Thompson. Like them, many of his stories began with a hangover. His favorite novel was Conrad's Heart of Darkness, and his trip to the Congo was his retracing of the steps of Mistah Kurtz down the River Congo. I saw every episode of No Reservations and The Layover - his two series prior to Parts Unknown. For some mysterious reason, probably stemming from his foul language and his fondness for the underbelly of the world, Parts Unknown isn't aired in CNN International. The episodes I have managed to see were broadcast on other cable channels.

He left the world just as mysterious as he found it. And, in his last act, contributed to the greater mystery of the human heart. Paul Bowles, another of his favorite writers, wrote, "Whereas the tourist generally hurries back home at the end of a few weeks or months, the traveler belonging no more to one place than to the next, moves slowly over periods of years, from one part of the earth to another. Indeed, he would have found it difficult to tell, among the many places he had lived, precisely where it was he had felt most at home." The writer he most reminded me of is Paul Theroux, who once wrote, "Tourists don’t know where they’ve been, travelers don’t know where they’re going." Though he had been practically everywhere in the world, Anthony Bourdain never seemed to know where he was going. Farewell, fellow traveler.