As a hiker and long-time resident of the Blue Ridge mountains, I have an up-close and personal relationship with our native black bear population. Actually, not that up close, of…
Category: <span>Travel</span>
These posts feature quirky travel experiences and thoughts on culture, science, nature and the environment.
It was never a good idea to drive a defective British roadster into the desert, but the promise of adventure was irresistible. It was June, 1987. Ronald Reagan was president and the Berlin Wall had not yet fallen. I was 24 years old, heartbroken from a failed romance, ready to take a risk I would normally have never considered. Here’s an entirely-true love story of a young man, his absurd motorcar and a thousand-foot cliff.
I met Jens a week after walking across the Pyrenees from France. It was September, and we were in the heart of Basque country, following the ancient pilgrimage trail to the city of Santiago de Compostela which lay over four hundred miles to the west. I’d noticed Jens earlier in the day, an old man tottering along the path, sweating despite the relative cool, his tall figure supported by a pair of trekking poles upon which he leaned precariously. As I’d hurried past him I’d nodded and given him the traditional pilgrim’s greeting: “Buen Camino!”
He’d been too occupied by the strenuous act of walking to return the greeting, but he had returned my nod. His age made him an exception on the Camino. Most of the other hikers were middle-aged or younger. Though he bore himself with youthful pride, his gait gave him away. It was the shuffle-sway-shuffle of an octogenarian. Jens was far older than his fellow pilgrims, but despite his age, he was still a large man with broad shoulders and a strong back. He carried a small blue pack, but he wore no hat, and his face and scalp were dangerously red.
One of the most memorable places I ever stayed was a little guesthouse in Mek’ele, Ethiopia. It was December, 2019, right about the time a novel coronavirus was claiming its first victim at a fish market in Wuhan, and about a year before Mek’ele was overrun by rebel Ethiopian forces who brutally rounded up the young men of military age and executed them while gleefully filming the murders with their cell phones.
Once, in the Navarro region of Spain, I witnessed a fleeting moment of unparalleled beauty.
Jeanne and I were six months into a three-year around-the-world journey when we were both struck down by a mysterious illness. Self-quarantining in an AirBNB in Colombo, Sri Lanka, we…
Watching the not-so-peaceful transition of power here in the USA reminds me of our time in Arabia when the Sultan of Oman unexpectedly died. At the time of his death…
“I’m sorry sir, but there is a problem with your room and we will have to move you to another room,” says the heavily-accented voice on the phone. I look around the room. We’ve just arrived, and I can see no problems. Everything looks fine to me.
“What’s the problem?” I ask.
The man replies in a serious tone, “There will be a voice in your room.”
I can’t see the scene behind the overturned tuk-tuk, but I can see the reaction of the people who are rushing out of the storefronts. At first they hurry toward the accident, but when its scope is revealed, they stop in their tracks. It’s as if there is an impenetrable force-field of horror radiating from something on the pavement. Nobody can approach closer than about fifteen feet, and soon there is a perfect geometric circle of onlookers. Many turn away. A few drop to their knees. A woman screams. The young men are ashen-faced and dumbstruck, fingers knit, hands clutching the backs of their heads in the universal gesture of helpless despair.
We can’t experience the true nature of rural/farm life in Ethiopia because we are such obvious anachronisms that the village locals change their behavior when we are around. Most people…