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...
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...
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...
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...
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....
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...
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...
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...
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. [caption id="attachment_1522" align="aligncenter" width="500"] The...
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 northern...