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...

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...

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 and language groups     and,...

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...

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 New Guinea. The Rock Islands...

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...

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....

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 back in second...

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 . ....