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....

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 landing strip decorated...

“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 travel...

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...

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 all that...

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...

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 last...

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....

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 largest...