What follows is a lightly edited transcript of the January 12 edition of the Frommer’s Travel Show podcast. To listen, click here.
Pauline Frommer: Welcome to the Frommer’s Travel Show. I have Eliot Stein on the line. He has written my favorite book of 2025—I know we’re early into the year, but I would be really surprised if any travel book I read this year tops this one. For sheer artistry, deep history, beautiful writing, and fascinating stories, the book is called Custodians of Wonder: Ancient Customs, Profound Traditions, and The Last People Keeping Them Alive.
Eliot, welcome to The Frommer’s Travel Show.
Eliot Stein: Thank you so much for having me, and that was such a generous, amazing introduction. Thank you.
PF: Well, it’s an amazing book. So give our listeners what the book is about in a nutshell.
ES: Sure. I’m a senior journalist here at the BBC, and I’ve spent much of the past seven years traveling around the world, profiling remarkable people who are essentially the last person or people alive maintaining a cultural wonder. So that can be a vanishing language, an age-old tradition, a custom. This book profiles 10 people in 10 different countries on five continents. And the tradition that they’re maintaining is not only old and marvelous, but it speaks profoundly about the place that they come from. This can be everything from the last Incan bridge master, who every year weaves the last suspension bridge out of grass from the Inca Empire [pictured above], in a tradition that has been maintained for more than 500 years. Or the only three women left in the world who know how to make the world’s rarest pasta, which is called the Threads of God. Or a single family of alchemists who live in southern India, who have maintained a secret recipe for a mirror that is believed to reveal your truest self.
PF: Well, it’s interesting. You’ve picked out three of the ones I wanted to discuss with you in more depth. So let’s start with, and tell me if I’m pronouncing this correctly, Arizapanna?
ES: That’s right. His name is Victoriano Arizapanna, and he is the last bridgemaster from the Inca Empire. So the Inca Empire, as listeners may know, disappeared 500 years ago. But it was one of the most astounding empires in history. It was the largest one ever in the Americas. It was a two million-square-kilometer civilization that stretched north to south.
PF: Two million square kilometers, that encompasses, what, seven or eight modern day countries in the Americas, right?
ES: Exactly. It went from the southern corner of Colombia in the north down to the northern tip of Argentina. And it was hemmed in by the Andes, which is the largest mountain chain in the western world. And the reason that this empire was able to flourish was because of its incredible road system. So a lot of people have heard about the Roman road system, but what makes the Inca road system so fascinating is that it stretched from the snow-capped peaks of the mountains down to the steamy rainforests of the Amazon. And the way that the Incas were able to weave together this civilization through such tumultuous topography was through a series of suspension bridges.
PF: Right. And just before we leave the size of this, this was bigger than the Roman road system, you say in the book. In fact, it stretched, you say, 40,000 kilometers, which is the circumference of the entire globe. Just the amount, the sheer majesty of this engineering achievement just hit me between the eyes when I was reading this. I had no idea.
ES: That’s right. And most people, they might not know about the Inca civilization because it “came and went so quickly. It was really only at the height of its power for about a hundred years, and then it quickly vanished with the arrival of the Spanish and disease.
But the key to their power was this road system, and specifically they had these 200 suspension bridges that were woven from grass. This thing called Coyaicha, which is essentially Peruvian feather grass. It’s kind of like straw.
Every bridge was overseen by a bridge master. The bridge master’s job was to maintain the bridge, to reweave it, because, you know, this isn’t metal. This is something that has to be rewoven.
And today, there’s only one bridge master left who is the last in line from an unbroken chain that’s been carried on his family for more than 500 years. So every male in this family has been a bridge master. And in a tiny village called Winchiti in the Southern Peruvian Highlands, every year, four communities come together, 1,100 people, and each community is responsible, and each household within the community, for a certain amount of braided straw or braided grass. And the bridge master, who you’ve correctly named as Victoriano Arizapana, his job is to oversee the whole process. So he gets all of the straw, all of the woven grass together from each house, each community, and then he uses them to braid into six giant cables that stretch dramatically over this massive, massive gorge with a rushing river underneath. It’s seven stories high, 30 meters across, and he risks his life by dangling barefoot over these four cables on the base with two on the top, and weaves straw by straw the entire thing in a process that takes about six hours.
It is absolutely one of the most incredible, awe-inspiring things I’ve ever seen.
PF: I got to say, it sounded more awe-inspiring than Machu Picchu. I mean, were you the only outsider there to witness it? I hate to ask this, but has this now become a tourist attraction or no?
ES: There were definitely other Peruvians there from outside these villages. I was the only person who looked like they were not Peruvian there. There was actually one moment where they need every kind of able-bodied man to help with the braiding of these things. And I was actually asked to join in, which was a funny moment for me. But yeah, I think I was the only foreigner, only American for sure, that was there, yes.
PF: Fascinating. And what is kind of tragic in his story, and in several of the stories that you recount in this book is he does have children, but whether or not they take this over is up in the air. And I felt, and this may be because I have kids and they are so different from me, a lot of these folks who are upholding these traditions don’t feel that kids today [will want to do so] because they’re so into their phones. There’s a lot of talk about people being very distracted by technology, that this technology is making them people who cannot take over these traditions. Am I reading anything into this or is that fair to say?
ES: That’s exactly right. You’ve so smartly touched on a really interesting through line in this book, which is that so many of these age old wonders, these traditions that have shaped us and the places we come from, they’re fading for so many reasons, one of which is it’s economics. The heir to the world’s rarest pasta, Paola Averaini, she told me verbatim, you can’t make a living doing this anymore. There’s no future in it. And she had a really, really moving quote in her chapter where she says, so many things that once were no longer are. And that stuck with me. And I think it’s true for a lot of these stories in the book. But yeah, it’s technology, it’s ease of travel, it’s globalization. So many of these things are sort of disappearing as people choose to migrate to cities, choose to pursue other career paths.
And you touched on how this struck you being a parent. And I chose to embark on this project when I learned that I was gonna be a parent for the first time because of something that I think you probably feel too. But so many of these custodians, it’s their dream in life to pass on their life’s work to their child. And that’s really the struggle with these custodians, is that there’s no apparent heir apparent to these marvels. So what I was really trying to do with this book is not to comment on judge or judge whether these things should be preserved in the future, but really to just kind of chronicle a moment in time and sort of have my book serve as a time capsule for these things, which probably will fade away in the coming decades or years.
PF: Well, there were certain things that I think are tragic, that they will be fading away. We may not need grass bridges in the future, because as you say in the book, right next to this grass bridge, there’s I think a steel and stone bridge now. But interestingly, you make the point that most of the local folks there still use the grass bridge for spiritual reasons in a certain way, that they feel the energy of their ancestors as they walk across the bridge, that they feel a deep connection with their roots when they do this.
And I loved your description of walking across the bridge. I think you said it’s like walking on a tight rope over a waterbed, that it’s very bouncy. It’s not that stable feeling, even though it’s stable.
In your first chapter where your hero is a man from Mali in Africa who plays this ancient instrument, which we can talk about in a moment. But in Mali, there wasn’t written history. There was always oral history. I was a history major in college, and I was, I guess, a very bigoted one because I always felt: ‘oh gosh, these poor communities, civilizations that only had oral history. What a tragedy because those things are going to fade away. People will screw up the stories.’ You know, they may not know the actual history unless it’s written down. But in your portrait of this tradition, it becomes clear that there is great power and beauty and efficacy in having a human being be the history vessel. Because these humans who know all the history then serve many roles in their community. They are the negotiators. They are the people who officiate at weddings and at birth ceremonies. And having a living avatar of history, I think makes their cultures richer. So, can you talk a little bit about that gentleman?”
ES: Yeah, and I couldn’t agree with you more. So this is a gentleman named Balakuyate. And this is the first chapter of the book and easily one of my favorites. Balakuyate comes from Mali.
So the Mali Empire, very similar to the Inca Empire, it was the greatest civilization in West African history. And at its height in 1300, it was the single richest kingdom in the world. But today, if you ask most anyone on the street, if they know anything about the Mali Empire, outside of West Africa, of course. Most people would probably maybe be able to mention the fabled city of Timbuktu or this guy Mansa Musa, who was the ruler for a certain time of the Mali Empire and is generally considered to be the richest guy in the history of the world. But at the start of the Mali Empire, 800 years ago, this one ruler united a bunch of different sort of warring fiefdoms together in peace. And when he did, he bestowed to one person this instrument called a balafone. A balafone is the precursor of a xylophone, of a marimba. It’s got wooden slats that you hit with a rubber mallet and it makes this beautiful, enchanting sound.
[The king] asked this one person to not only play this sacred instrument, but as he did so, to recall and recite the history of the kingdom. And in an astonishing tradition that has been passed down for 27 generations, 800 years, within this one family, every member of the Cuyate family who’s a male has grown up to not only master the balafone, but memorize the entire encyclopedic history of this kingdom.
It’s a tradition called a jelly. A jelly in the local Mandinka language means blood, because it’s said that just as a human being can’t have blood, a community can’t have a jelly. So there are different balafones today, but the original balafone that was originally bestowed to this one jelly still exists. It exists in a 150-person village that has no electricity or water in Niagasola, Guinea. It’s called the Soso Bala, and of the 678 UNESCO-enshrined cultural wonders of the world, which include things like Indian yoga, Argentinian tango, this is the only one that has remained within a single family.
But the heir apparent to this tradition, Balakuyate, the future guardian of this instrument, no longer lives in West Africa. He lives in Medford, Massachusetts. So I spent a very, very long time connecting the dots from West Africa, and this one ruler, to an address in Medford, Massachusetts, and I sent Bala, this person I had never met before, a hopeful email one day asking if he would be so kind as to meet me and perhaps even allow me to go back to his village, to see where this thing took place so that I could tell the story of his family, which had really never ever been written before.
Within 30 minutes of sending that email, I got a call on my cell phone from an unknown number, and I picked it up, and the first thing this person said to me before even introducing themselves was: “I’ve been waiting for an email like that for 20 years”.
So I met Bala in Medford, Massachusetts. We traveled back to Bamako, the capital of Mali, and then we caravanned with his extended family to Niaga, Sologhini, and I became one of the first foreign journalists in history to see this instrument.
But I think one of the things that you touched on so poignantly and smartly in your question here, Pauline, was about the power of this tradition and the civilization and the fact that the Mali Empire didn’t have a written language. What was so important to me in each of these chapters, and especially things like the Mali Empire, the Inca Empire, was to be completely invisible in this story and to use any sort of platform I have to let people from this community tell their own story, especially when for so long, you know, the Inca, the Mali, other groups, their stories have been told by other people, whether it’s North African traders, whether it’s French colonialists. But really, the story of these jellies and the story of the civilization is best told through the people themselves. And so, what’s so beautiful about the jelly tradition is that it is a literal voice for a group, a civilization that for so long has been “otherized”, has been cast through a colonial lens. And what was most important to me is just to get the story right. And I was thrilled beyond belief when I finally sent the finished book and chapter to Bala and he was so proud of it that he’s actually currently back in Africa with the book, showing it off to local authorities. I think I did his story justice and that makes me more happy than anything else.
PF: You did, but I have to argue with you when you say you made yourself invisible in the book. Part of the reason I wanted to have you on the Travel Show is this is very much a travel show book and you talk about what it was like living with his family and eating the food of that region, which I thought was fascinating that in many places where you eat with your hands, you do it in certain ways. Here you roll it up into little balls and that’s how you eat. And you talk about a goat’s head that was a big delicacy where you dipped your bread into the eyeball of the goat. I think it was a goat that was killed, yeah. And so to me, this makes it very much a travel book because you stand in for the reader and take us to these wondrous places that we may never, ever get to. But you make us want to go to see that village. I mean, you just bring it to life.
ES: Well, thank you. Yeah, I don’t disagree with you. The struggle for me, every travel writer or travel journalist has their own style. I’ve never been comfortable writing in the first person. I think that was probably the biggest obstacle for me to overcome. These stories, and through no naval gazing of my own, these stories are remarkable because of the custodians. Each of them have incredible, incredible depth. And the easiest job for me was to write this. The hardest part for me was to know when to insert myself and to move the story forward.
So I guess I say when I wanted, when I tried to be invisible and kind of dissolve into the background, it was a conscious choice to only insert myself when I felt that it added something to the story for the reader. But for so long, you know, I’ve read travel books, travel stories from people who look like me, that are kind of these flag-planting judgements on other people and cultures. I come away thinking “man, if only this person would just get out of the way and let the people tell those stories themselves”. And that’s really what I hope to do here.
PF: I didn’t mean to undercut that. I think you did. I think you succeeded in that. But there were also moments when you put yourself in it and stand in for the reader, I thought, in a very effective way. My favorite parts of the book was about the pastas of Sardinia, but also because you’re a former guidebook writer to Sardinia, you bring this surprisingly dark, really fascinating culture to life. Sardinia, as you say in the book, by constitutional law, is considered a different ethnic group than the rest of Italy. And I had no idea. It’s one of the parts of Italy I haven’t been to. Can you just draw a bit of a picture of Sardinia?
I’ll let people read about the pasta in your book. But in January, right now, there are these festivals where everybody dresses up like monsters, right? I mean, tell a little bit about that and about the bandit history of the island.
ES: Oh, I’m so thrilled you asked this question. I used to live in Sardinia, and I can speak about it for hours. But I think when most listeners perhaps hear the name Sardinia, they probably evoke this picture of turquoise beaches and luxury resorts from the coast of Smeralda. That’s not—I mean, the beaches, yes—but that’s not really what Sardinia is about at all. Sardinia is, it’s the island in Italy that is not Sicily. It’s the most isolated island geographically in the Mediterranean, which adds to its character. It’s remained in the center of the Western world, but far enough away from the mainland to remember things that the rest of Europe has forgotten. So, it is almost this Tolkien-esque enchanting landscape, where there are 7,000 Bronze Age castles that exist nowhere else, from this mysterious Bronze Age civilization called the Neuragic culture, that anthropologists still have no idea why they were built. There are these things called giants, giants’ tombs, fairy caves. It’s completely, completely enchanting.
PF: To piggyback on that, you talk in the book about how 80% of the people living in Sardinia have Neolithic roots there. In fact, even the land is older than many parts of Europe geologically. And so, it’s the people and the land and these ancient ruins that bring you back farther in time than many parts of Europe do.
ES: Absolutely. And even the people there themselves live longer than almost anywhere else on earth. It was the first designated Blue Zone where people are said to live longer than other places.
For a young person fresh “out of college, which was myself, and if you’re someone who believes that old people have the best stories and that wisdom accrues gradually, it was very formative for me to live there as a young person and plant the seeds for this reverence for age-old wonders that still guides me today. But Sardinia, to get back to your wonderful question, it was the only corner of modern-day Italy that was never conquered by the Romans, specifically the mountainous interior. So again, people think of beaches, they think of luxury resorts, but it’s this mountainous rebellious island in the center of Europe. And in the center of this mountainous area, there’s a part called the Barbagia, so named because the Romans threw up their hands after many, many times of trying to conquer the people there and dubbed them barbarians. So the Barbagia still exists, and within the Barbagia are these age-old rites and customs that feel otherworldly. It’s every January, as you say, people in certain villages dress up as monsters, and it’s believed to be this pagan exorcism of sorts.
Up until the 1950s, women would go around that were called the Accabadora which in Sardinian, which, as a side note, is the oldest living form of Latin and still the native language on the island. They would go around, and when people were dying to put them out of their misery, they would just hit them in the head with a hammer.
PF: Wow.
ES: And from this ancient rebellious core of the island comes this pasta, which you can read all about in the book, but it’s dedicated to a bandit. And bandits for, you know, you think of things like mafia in Sicily or the Camorra in the area of Campania. Banditry in the center of Sardinia was kind of the rule of law for so many years. But instead of being seen as a violent way of life, it held together communities, and it was seen as a noble way of resisting foreign oppression, foreign colonialism. Sardinia, if you look at its history, it’s this tangled web of foreign powers that have come and gone. But Sardinians, in trying to take power back themselves, have resorted to banditry and kidnapping, and a way of trying to resist foreign influence.
And all of this is told through the tradition of these so-called Threads of God pasta, su filindeu, and these three inheritors who are desperately trying to maintain this centuries-old tradition that unites an island.
PF: Right. And they create this pasta that is so difficult to make that even when they teach the recipe to others, it’s mostly about the touch. And that was common to several of your stories, that it’s not just knowing what the technology consists of. It’s something that just takes so much practice to be able to do. And this pasta is used in a very important religious ceremony once a year, and it may be disappearing.
I gotta ask you, in the book you say they give you a little piece of the dried pasta and you bring it home and you hadn’t eaten it by the time you published this book, I think. Have you ever eaten it or is it still just in your pantry?
ES: That’s a great question. My last day there, one of the inheritors gave me this piece of [the pasta], which looks like shattered lace. She gave me several of the shards and I have not dared try to cook it yet. But I do still keep it in the pantry all alone with nothing else around it. And from time to time, I do open up that pantry just to make sure that it’s still there. But I don’t feel worthy of trying to make this pasta.
There’s several examples in the book of things I’ve come home with, but each of them hold a certain power that I don’t feel comfortable kind of staring at it or looking at it or certainly trying to consume it myself. But it’s nice to have a reminder of it.
PF: Yeah, absolutely. And I’m sure the book itself is a wonderful reminder of all these incredible adventures you’ve had.
But not just adventure for the sake of adventure. I think you’ve really brought some important things to life. I remember years ago, there was a New Yorker article about the development of the typewriter. Early typewriters were much easier to use. The keyboard [design] made more sense, but early typists kept breaking these typewriters. So they mixed up where they put the keys to slow typists down. And that is what we have inherited, sadly. And reading your book made me remember that progress isn’t always progress. Progress is sometimes just change. And the beauty of some of these customs, the way that they stir the soul and make life better and are being lost, it’s a very moving book. It’s a very, very moving book. So thank you so, so much for appearing on The Frommer’s Travel Show. I really, really appreciate it.
ES: Thank you so much for having me and for such beautiful, elegant words. I so appreciate that it resonated with you.
A new episode of Pauline Frommer’s travel podcast, The Frommer’s Travel Show, is published every Sunday. Custodians of Wonder is published by St. Martin’s Press.