The only other time my husband, Jim and I saw a whale in the wild, it was an orca that came up to our boat flashing its shiny black tail so close I gasped out loud. We were in, or I should say off the coast of Victoria, British Columbia. It was thrilling, but full disclosure, it was one whale and we’d traveled 90 minutes in very choppy waters to see it. So my expectation when boarding the Dolphin Fleet whale watching boat in Provincetown on Cape Cod last month was for a similarly look-hard-and-don’t blink experience. Wrong. Thirty-five Humpbacks, 9 North Atlantic Right Whales,… Read More…

“Crack House” was the phrase that sprang to mind when I pried open the door to board the Metro Plus commuter train to Simon’s Town in Western Cape, South Africa on Saturday morning. Yep, it looked like a scary place. By the end of the journey, one of my fellow travelers reminded me that first impressions aren’t always correct. Let me explain. First, there were no lights in the car and, as it was sitting in the station, no sunlight either. Not that much light could have permeated the scratched and fogged windows anyway. So I could see very little, but I could smell and… Read More…

It would not be entirely accurate to say that I had dinner at the Moyo Restaurant in Cape Town on Tuesday night. I ate there, but in fact, I had bought my meal from a street vendor at the V&A Waterfront, a humungous recreation district of shops, clubs and residences in the middle of the city’s working harbor. Before taking my order, Moses introduced himself to me with a warm handshake and then set out to prepare my quarter chicken and chips. It had been raining off and on all day so I asked if there was a dry table somewhere nearby where I could sit and eat…. Read More…

The smaller the world gets, the harder it it is to discover something truly unique. So I was excited when on a recent trip to Morocco with Access Trips, I was able to visit the Assous Argan Oil Cooperative about 40 miles east of the coastal city of Essaouira. Previously unknown to me, I learned the Argan tree grows in only a few places in the world and only produces a nut here in Morocco.  The tree drops its fruit in the waning months of summer after which it is roasted and pressed and turned into some really delicious oil. Did I say delicious? I… Read More…

I’ve written before about my affection for the photo series Earth from Above by Yann Arthus-Bertrand. So I was alert when I read this quote from Joseph Corbett of the US Postal Service. “Once you’ve seen the world from above, you never look at it quite the same way again.” He’s right of course. Corbett makes this observation by way of introducing a new series of postage stamps that show us the world as viewed from airplanes and satellites. The artists who put together this beautiful collection of stamps have taken familiar subjects and given us a new perspective by with a top down angle…. Read More…

Over dinner, when I asked my travel companion, the Belgian journalist, Raphael Meulders, what he enjoyed most about our day traveling in northwest Ethiopia, he hesitated about two seconds and answered, “the people”.  I know just what he means. We had a day full of moments that made me feel as if I’d just stepped into a National Geographic special. Our bus stopped to wait while cows and goats were shooed from the street and we gaped at the monkeys in the trees, pelicans on Lake Tana and the colorful centuries-old murals at the church of Ura Kidane Mihret. But it was the people we… Read More…

Several centuries ago, long before power tools, an Ethiopian king by the name of Lalibela had the big idea to build a church out of the side of a  mountain. He didn’t see the challenges, or if he did he didn’t let them get in his way. King Lalibela saw the monumental rock as a source of building material and perhaps he even drew inspiration from Christ’s promise to the disciple Peter, “Upon this rock, I shall build my church.” And so King Lalibela did build a church. Well, let me modify that. Many, many workers did the chiseling and in time, there were 11… Read More…

By far, my most exciting transport experience has been flying with acrobatic pilots, which I have been privileged to enjoy twice: Over the Arizona desert with Gil Monte, a flight instructor for Lufthansa and once off the coast of New York, with Air National Guard show performer John Klatt. But I don’t think I was ever in as much danger as I was on Thursday when I arrived in Zimbabwe and decided to ride in an open-air, game-viewing  vehicle through the streets of Harare. When seated two feet above the roof of the cab, tree branches or anything else you might otherwise blithely drive under,… Read More…

Like the opening scene in the Mel Brooks comedy, High Anxiety, where all the passengers on the airplane have their faces plastered to the windows so they can look at the scene below, I too, kept my eyes outward on my flight on Thursday on Ethiopian Airlines. I was flying from the capital, Addis Ababa to Harare in Zimbabwe. This would be my first time visiting sub Saharan Africa so I was very excited, very eager to get an eyeful ASAP. Unfortunately, the view of Africa from 37,000 feet doesn’t look that much different from the 37,000 foot view over other continents. Still, my Ethiopian experience,… Read More…