Bourdain's No Reservation is about to end. It started with a deer caught in the headlights followed by a camera creating panoramic shots of a "tell all" author out of words ditching out complains, hang overs, addict nostalgic remarks, and constant innuendos for lack of content.
Most people won't come across the hang over episodes. They have been shelved away among the massive trend of reality TV trying to discover itself as it grows up.
But at the end, Reality carries with it the profound power of Time. What is nothing like the Seinfeld's script for a pilot series, it has the power of discovery. Reality over time becomes history.
Travel can be a very simple or a very complex act. You can travel for many reasons. Travel to see the past, to experience new things, for personal quests of your profession, for achieving some bucket list, or just for the luxury of leisure. But even the simplicity of leisure can be expanded to a very complex endeavor. Leisure is a very well established philosophical movement of thought and practices from the old Japan. Later, it was even ex-communicated by Communism as a malaise.
This is why the simplicity of reality can have dramatic implications. Now you can be led by many TV travel agents that expose the world to the past or that idolize cultures which makes them easier to chew.
In the other hand, No Reservations is so real that the world has embraced it. The show is no more Anthony Bourdain leading us. It has profoundly become a phenomenon where the world is the one taking Bourdain inside to share its secrets.
And we find Anthony Bourdain engaged in every corner of the world having us walk behind him suffering the encounter of whatever he may find, and what he finds is the world as it is in its pure greatness. There is no magical curtain of wonders, no warning of what is to come, and no rest until his final thoughts at the end of each episode.
Even after he had taken us everywhere, and when we thought we had seen it all, Anthony Bourdain takes us to the last frontier of food: The Amazon. From prehistoric fish to never seen fruits and spices, all is still exchanged on the first Portuguese colony in the new world. A small town 100 miles up river from the sea where different and rare types of money and foods exchange hands still serving as the only link between worlds. No even Bourdain has seen this immense variety of goods. The Amazon is so rich that is still as if a Conquistador had just landed on the New World for first time.
No Reservations is closing its doors. Our last frontier is disappearing once again. It might as well be as if the Portuguese are closing their ancient city. It might as well be as if the jungle ends up overrunning the cities for another millennium to cover us in a sleep. It might as well just be that the best of our Reality is once again becoming our History.
