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. Then...
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...
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 other...
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...
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...
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...
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,...
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...
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 the...
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 met. Only that...