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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
“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...
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 way...
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 made when...
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...