Antarctic Peninsula — Paddling the Bellingshausen Sea
When I was a kid there was a TV witch named Miss Boo. I never knew much about Miss Boo except that, starring in a kids’ TV show, she was a friendly witch. And, years......
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Argentina — The Penguins of Patagonia
Like a lot of us, I’m a sucker for charismatic mega-fauna, especially when that megafauna is penguins. The conscientious way they stand guard over their chicks shows them off as better parents than I ever......
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Bali — The Cremation of a Hindu Queen
We were rambling through a temple in Ubud when we came across a platoon of Balinese making complicated constructions out of flowers. The queen had died back in the spring and her funeral was going......
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Bhutan — The Thunderbolt of Flaming Wisdom
As autumn closes in, temples throughout Bhutan celebrate with festivals. Monks blow horns. Or drum drums. Or gong gongs. Men dance. Women dance and sing. Old folks sit on mats. Children run around. Dogs bark,......
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Bolivia — Down the Andes with a Coca farmer
In La Paz, the Witches’ Market is the happening place for Llama fetuses. Peg and I weren’t shopping for llama fetuses. But we did have a few days on our hands, and all the brochures......
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Botswana — A Little Bit of America Overseas
I’d always imagined our embassies were stately affairs, welcoming, yet dignified. Tastefully appointed with paneled offices, carpeted floors and elegantly dressed diplomats discussing matters of state in precise, measured tones. Our best face forward. A......
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Botswana — Christmas In Southern Africa
Christmas comes to Southern Africa the same way it comes to every other place with shopkeepers. Stores fill with blinking lights. Shelves groan under the weight of gaily-colored boxes filled with plastic icicles. Glitter and......
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Botswana — Dr Livingstone Presumes
When the great missionary David Livingstone arrived on the banks ot the Ever-Flowing River he convinced the Kwêna people to cast aside their rainmakers in favor of Jesus. The Good News came to the edge......
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Botswana — Fourth of July at the Embassy
At our embassies overseas Fourth of July falls, naturally enough, during the last week of June. Or, if the ambassador is otherwise engaged, the third week. Sometimes even, one hears stories, the second week. ......
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Botswana — MOTH Hall
When we lived in Botswana, one of our best friends was a white South African. Back during Apartheid, Jeff had been drafted into the army and sent to Angola to fight Cubans. It was a......
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Botswana — Our Home was a Gated Community
When you live overseas on Uncle’s dime, the government assigns you a house. In Botswana, the one they assigned Peggy and me came with a-hundred-and-twenty-nine keys. At least the ones we could hold in our......
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Botswana — Pirated Movies From The Pakistani
One of the many nice things about living in Africa was the movies. In South Africa, or Morocco, or pretty much anywhere else, you could pick up the newest Tom Cruise blockbuster, or any other......
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Botswana — Things that Wouldn’t Happen in America
Our second year in Botswana started with a film festival at one of the local schools, and Peggy and I went. Quett Masire, the second president of the country was there, along with all the......
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Cape Horn — Home, but no Earring
Cape Horn, jutting like a rhinoceros horn from the very bottom of South America, is as aptly named a piece of real estate you’re likely to find. At least that’s what I’d always supposed. For......
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Cayman Trench — Enraptures of the Deep
Having preciously descended to a thousand feet with Karl Stanley and his homemade submarine, two-thousand feet beckoned and we decided to go again. Karl, if you know your who’s whoms in the world of backyard......
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Chattanooga — Seeing Rock City
If you grew up in the South, it was impossible not to See Rock City SEE ROCK CITY was emblazoned on the roof of every barn and bird house in Georgia.......
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Chilean Patagonia — Innocents on the Fu
On the map, Chilean Patagonia has looked like the southern end of Spanish America since the Fifteen-Hundreds. But the locals didn’t have maps. What they had was enough ferocity and enough knowledge of the land......
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Chinese Ambassador – 1
Once, when we lived in Botswana, we got invited to a formal luncheon. The president was at our table, along with the American ambassador and her husband, a retired lieutenant general. Three stars. I’d never......
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Chinese Ambassador – 2
To Americans brought up in the Fifties and Sixties, being invited to dine with the ambassador from Red China was like being invited to Mons Olympus to sup with the Man from Mars. We landed......
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Chinese Ambassador – 3
The night Peggy and I showed up for dinner with the Chinese ambassador we arrived five minutes early, parked next to the ten-foot high wall with the eight strands of electric wire on top, and......
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Chinese Ambassador – 4
When somebody has you to dinner, the only thing to do about it is to invite him to your place. The problem with having the Chinese ambassador to our house was that Peggy and I......
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Chinese Ambassador – 5
The Chinese ambassador came to the end of his tour. Or, maybe, got recalled for spending too much time with foreigners. Or just wanted to go home and be with his wife. However it came......
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East Africa — Mooching along with a Pig Farmer – 1
What happens in this and the next three posts started with an innocent Christmas dinner in the Okavango Delta. The Okavango is the biggest inland river delta in the world, and the loveliest. It’s in......
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East Africa — Mooching along with a Pig Farmer – 2
The only section of road from Cape Town all the way to Alexandria that isn’t paved is a stretch of one-lane dirt from Nairobi to Addis Ababa. During the rainy season, it isn’t......
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East Africa — Mooching along with a Pig Farmer – 3
We left Lake Turkana and worked our way north along streambeds. It had rained a lot, and we kept coming to marshy places where we had to back up and try again but, eventually, we......
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East Africa — Mooching along with a Pig Farmer – 4
To get from Ethiopia to Alexandria you have to cross Sudan. Which wouldn’t have been a problem if the pig farmer and I had both been British. But we weren’t. I was American and that......
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Ecuador — Doctor Hoatzin, I presume
“Don’t go to Cuyabeno” the travel company said. “The Indians down there are restless. “We don’t get a kickback from the people down there,” is what Peggy and I heard. And found a more amenable......
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Egypt — Curse of the Pharaoh’s Tomb
Viewed from the outside, the Great Pyramid at Giza looks like such a heap of stone it never occurred to me that it might be possible to go inside. To the uninitiated, it’s looked that......
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Egypt — Five Thousand Years of Pizza & Beer
Five thousand years ago Giza was a busy place. Architects and stonemasons, sculptors and painters and plasterers, overseers and freemen and slaves toiled away, doing their bits for immortality. Menkaure’s pyramid showing the hole......
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Fiji — Playing with Fire in Fiji
When I was in high school, it never occurred to me to want to go to high school in Fiji. I just wanted to be in Fiji. Then when I actually saw Fiji, high school......
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Flores Island — Mr Toad Rides Across Flores Island
Peg and I were on Bali when we were overtaken by the urge to see Komodo dragons. You do that by flying to Labuan Bajo on the western end of the island of Flores, then......
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Ghana — Paradise of Earthly Desires
There are a lot of reasons to visit Ghana. Peggy went because the Peace Corps sent her. I tagged along because I like to be with Peggy. And because I wanted to see a forest......
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Greece — Jumping Ship in the Ionian Sea
Peggy and I wound up with three other couples on a sailboat in the Ionian Sea because our friends from Australia invited us. How the captain wound up on that boat was never made clear.......
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Honduras — Into the Abyss in a Homemade Submarine
You wouldn’t think it would be possible to get expelled from reform school, but Karl Stanley managed it. Not without attracting attention, though. The attention landed him in a mental hospital where he was diagnosed......
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Honolulu — The Last Pearl Harbor Day
Last Monday was Pearl Harbor Day and nobody came. That was the news from Honolulu: “No veterans attend today’s ceremony.” Pearl Harbor Day wasn’t even marked on my buddy, Don’s calendar, although Kwanza is. And......
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In the Wake of John Wesley Powell
The Grand Canyon has had a reputation for treacherous white-water rafting since John Wesley Powell’s expedition barely made it out alive. You can see why they had trouble. Rubber rafts hadn’t been invented in 1869......
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Indonesia — The Dragons of Ramadan
The first year Peggy and I lived in Morocco, Ramadan landed in August. The entire month of August, during which the Faithful were forbidden to eat or drink anything during daylight hours . . .......
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Iran – You, too, can be a Revolutionary Guardsman
If your fashion sense leans toward revolutionary-chic, forget about berets and retro Che Guevara T-shirts. Go to the Islamic Republic, and you can return home outfitted as a fully-fledged state-sponsored terrorist. When you join Iran’s......
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Iran — Museum-Garden of Anti Arrogance
Despite what you might have heard, it’s not true that our embassy in Iran is no longer open for business, it’s just that the people working at the embassy are no longer accredited by the......
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Iran — Nobody Wants You To Go To Iran
Citizens of almost any place in the world can pick up a visa upon arrival at the airport in Tehran. Those of us who live in Britain, Canada or the Great Satan can’t even apply......
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Iran — Rock Stars from the Great Satan
Walking along the street in Iran, if you’re from the Great Satan, is like starring in your own triumphal procession, you attract so much goodwill. We were there last spring and it’s the oddest feeling,......
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Italy — Down on the Old River Styx
Back when the Underworld was in its glory days, a lot of people went to visit. Thetis, to dunk baby Achilles into the River Styx and make him invulnerable. Odysseus, to check in with Achilles......
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Kalahari Desert 1 — World’s Oldest Culture
Bushmen have lived in Botswana for at least seventy-five thousand years. They are keepers of the genes, and the ways, and the stories, of those who stayed behind when our ancestors wandered out of Africa......
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Kalahari Desert 2 — The Relocation
One weekend Peggy and I were driving along a dirt track in the Central Kgalagadi when we encountered a family of Bushmen, a dozen maybe, carrying bundles and leading a pack horse deeper into the......
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Kalahari Desert 3 — Bushmen Dance Festival
Every now and then Bushman who aren’t incarcerated in boarding schools get together and dance for each other. But only every now and then because any event involving Bushmen is difficult to organize. Bushmen don’t......
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Kyrgyzstan — Kok-Boru: the Dead Goat Game
If you had to guess which country’s national sport involved teams of horsemen tossing dead goats into cisterns, you might come up with Kyrgyzstan. It’s the centralest of Central Asia Stans, a landlocked former Soviet......
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Laos — Up the Mekong to the Whiskey Village
While I was growing up, the Georgia Department of Revenue ran public service announcements warning against untaxed liquor. Alcohol that isn’t taxed isn’t regulated and, if it isn’t regulated, there’s no telling what you might......
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Lesotho — Crashing the Border. Also, a Marriage
On the big World Map in fifth grade, Lesotho looked like nothing so much as a hole in South Africa, as if the bigger country hadn’t entirely formed yet. Which, in a way, it hadn’t.......
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Malta — Easter Week in Malta . . . and Tehran
Despite the murder of the occasional investigative journalist, I’ve always thought Malta sounded like a good place to retire. It’s a sunny, Mediterranean isle that’s just about as close to everywhere in Southern Europe or......
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Marquesas Islands — Dancing in Eden
Genesis is a bit vague about where the Garden was located, but being furnished with every tree that is pleasant to the sight and good for food, along with perfect weather and animals that don’t......
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Marquesas Islands — Vale of the Typee
I first heard about Nuku Hiva in the ninth grade. From Herman Melville. In 1842, fed up with the life of a whaler, he and a fellow sailor named Toby jumped ship on Nuku Hiva.......
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Micronesia — The Walls of Nan Madol
Nan Madol is one of the most intriguing archaeological sites on the planet, and one of the least known. At least, I spent most of my life not knowing about it. It’s a series of......
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Modeling Bad Behavior in the Land of the Coup
Madagascar is one of those places that don’t seem to have a permanent government. What they have is an ongoing series of coups that make Italy’s shifting political coalitions look like models of permanence. In......
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Morocco — Requiem for a Marriage Festival
Imichil, so the story went, was a village in the High Atlas Mountains where, on the last weekend before the snows closed the passes, Berber shepherds come down from even higher in the mountains to......
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Morocco — The Gunpowder Game
Essaouira is a Medieval walled city on the rocky Atlantic coast of Morocco. Inside the walls are winding, shadowy alleys, Moorish arches and a souk with a kaleidoscope of goods that don’t seem......
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Mozambique — Going Deep in the Indian Ocean
Mozambique was the most war-torn place I’ve ever been, and I was in Saigon in 1968. Once, when Peggy was stuck in a meeting in Maputo, Wes and I decided to head up the coast......
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Namibia — German Castle in the Namib
Heading west through the Kalahari the country becomes ever more parched. The thorn bushes give out and so does the pavement, until you’re in the Namib, one of the driest places on Earth: packed dirt,......
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Oregon Coast — Night Falls in a Ghost Forest
Listed among the things I’d rather not know about are Cascadia earthquakes. They strike the Pacific Northwest roughly every five-hundred-and seventy-five years. Roughly, because they can be as close together as three-hundred years, and the......
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Pamplona — Nobody Runs with the Bulls
For centuries, nobody was supposed to run with the bulls at Pamplona. Not that lots of people didn’t do it anyway. And they’ve been doing it for a long time. The tradition kicked off in......
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Papua New Guinea — Dancing Skeletons and Mudmen
The outside world didn’t make contact with the Chimbu Skeleton People of New Guinea . . until 1934, and nobody seems to have learned much about them since. At least nobody that Peggy and I......
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Papua New Guinea — In Search of the Elusive Bird-of-Paradise
Among the geographical possibilities that had never occurred to me is the fjord on the east coast of Papua New Guinea. Peg and I arrived at Tufi by way of a small, grassy......
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Papua New Guinea — Intruding on the Huli Wigman
People have been in the Highlands of Papua New Guinea since the memory of man runneth not to the contrary. Fifty-five, sixty-thousand years, maybe. Longer than anywhere else outside of Africa. For most of that......
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Papua New Guinea — Sing-Singing on the Sepik River
The Sepik is the longest river in New Guinea, winding from Papua across to the Indonesian side of the island, then looping back. Along the way it passes through dozens of tribes......
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Paris — Improving the Empire of the Dead
A long time ago my mother died in Paris, and I thought she might have wound up in the Catacombs, because people still do. So when Peggy and I were in the area, we descended......
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Pelelieu — Locked out in Palau
If Ireland is 40 shades of green, Palau is a hundred. Besides the four main islands, there are something like 800 Rock Islands scattered across the Philippine Sea a few degrees north of......
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Punch Bowl, Oahu — Memorials
On December seventh, 2001, veterans of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor got together to drink and make up stories about what they’d done on that day sixty years ago and, generally, to celebrate their......
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South Africa — World’s Most Breakable Soccer Players
Of the strange things that happened while we were overseas, one of the strangest was that the World Cup was in South Africa and that the American soccer team was good enough to get invited.......
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Sulawesi – Crashing the Funeral of an Ordinary Woman
The southern peninsula of Sulawesi has got to be one of the most beautiful places on Earth. Peggy and I wound up there because I’d been imprinted with the shape of the island......
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Svalbard — Polar Bears at the Top of the World
From the air, Svalbard looks pretty much the way I’ve always imagined Greenland would look only more so, because practically the whole island of Greenland is to the south. Also, all of Siberia.......
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Sweden — Fire Codes for Igloos
Something Darwinian seems to have been going on in the far north. Swedes forced to live through long, Arctic nights have developed an unwholesome tolerance for tedium. Anybody who’s suffered through the I Am Curious......
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Table Mountain — Stairway to Heaven, Almost
Table Mountain in South Africa is made from a species of very hard sandstone called, naturally enough, Table-Mountain sandstone. Rumor has it there’s another half to Table Mountain on the coast of Brazil . .......
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Truk Atoll — Diving Truk Lagoon
Of all the places I’d imagined drunken sailors, the Imperial Japanese Navy during the Second World War was not among them. But that was before Peg and I got a look at the sake bottles......
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Turkey — Digging Potbelly Hill
Göbekli Tepe is a knoll in eastern Turkey set in the foothills of the Taurus Mountains. To get there, Peg and I headed south from Istanbul almost to the border with Syria, skirted past a......
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Turkmenistan — The Gates of Hell
In the spring of 2019 when the president of Turkmenistan disappeared, everybody was hoping for the worst. But no such luck. A few days later he showed up doing doughnuts at the Darvaza Gas Crater.......
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Turkmenistan – Bye-Bye Birdie. Someday. We hope.
In the annals of human weirdness Turkmenistan is top of the line. Its capital is called Ashgabat, which means City of Love in Modern Persian. Ashgabat’s claim to fame is that it contains the world’s......
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Uganda — Chimpanzees in the Rain
In western Uganda between the Mountains of the Moon and Lake Albert, you come to the Kibale Forest . . . where people will take you to see chimpanzees. Guaranteed. “The forest is full of......
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Uganda — Gorillas in the Leaves
Partway up a mountain in the far west of Uganda is the lodge Diane Fosse slept in when she wanted human company, although that’s not much of an endorsement. Of all the things that woman......
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Victoria Falls — Prancing in the Devil’s Pool
As geological astonishments go, Victoria Falls is top of the line. The mile-wide tide of the Zambezi plunges three-hundred and fifty feet into a chasm in the basalt that underlays most of Southern Africa. It’s......
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Washington DC — Dr Romeo & the Great Benin Scare
Beware and take heed of the Bight of Benin. There’s one come out where forty went in. Good advice from an old sea chantey. As easy as Peggy is to get along with, she must......
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World’s Northernmost Bar
The bar at the northern end of the world is in Pyramiden, a failed Soviet model city on Spitzbergen Island in the Arctic Ocean. It’s situated at almost 80 degrees North, which puts it closer......
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World’s Southernmost Bar
The bar at the end of the world . . . at least the southern end of the world . . . is at Vernadsky Station in the Antarctic. It used to be called Faraday......
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Yucatan — Splashing in the Mayan Underworld
The Yucatan is one enormous slab of limestone riddled with caves. Or, maybe, just one huge cave that runs through the whole thing. Nobody really knows because nobody has been able to walk around in......
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Zambezi River — Haggling our way into Zambia
When we lived in Botswana, we’d drive up north sometimes. There was a gas station just this side of the Zambezi where we’d fill up before taking the Land Rover across the ferry into Zambia.......
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Zambia — Africa House
In 1920, a former officer in the Royal Field Artillery with and the delightfully English name of Lieutenant Colonel, Stewart Gore-Browne, DSO, moved to Northern Rhodesia and built himself an English country house at Shiwa......
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Zambia — In Search of Ngonye Falls
Here’s something useful to know. After you’ve seen Victoria Falls and waved at tourists from the Devil’s Pool, just go back to the Royal Livingstone Victoria Falls Hotel and sit on the patio and enjoy......
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Zimbabwe — In Mugabe’s Slams
In the spring of ’08 while Hillary Clinton and Barrack Obama were duking it out in the presidential primaries, Peggy and I visited a game park in South Africa. There we met a British newspaper......
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