Of all the places I’d imagined drunken sailors, the Imperial Japanese Navy during the Second World War was not among them. But that was before Peg and I got a look at the sake bottles...
Göbekli Tepe is a knoll in eastern Turkey set in the foothills of the Taurus Mountains. To get there, Peg and I headed south from Istanbul almost to the border with Syria, skirted past a...
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...
In western Uganda between the Mountains of the Moon and Lake Albert, you come to the Kibale Forest . . . where people will take you to see chimpanzees. Guaranteed. “The forest is full of chimps,” they...
Partway up a mountain in the far west of Uganda is the lodge Diane Fosse slept in when she wanted human company, although that’s not much of an endorsement. Of all the things that woman...
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...
Beware and take heed of the Bight of Benin. There’s one come out where forty went in. Good advice from an old sea chantey. As easy as Peggy is to get along with, she must have offended...
The bar at the northern end of the world is in Pyramiden, a failed Soviet model city on Spitzbergen Island in the Arctic Ocean. It’s situated at almost 80 degrees North, which puts it closer...
The bar at the end of the world . . . at least the southern end of the world . . . is at Vernadsky Station in the Antarctic. It used to be called Faraday Station...