An hour North of Rome you’ll find the little town of Bomarzo. At first look it doesn’t seem like anything special, but a few meters from the town is the Sacred Wood, also known as Parco dei Mostri (Monster Park). It might sound like the type of place that you’d […]
Resting my feet after an afternoon’s worth of walking the hills of Girona in the middle of one of my favorite places in the world, Costa Brava, I stopped at a sidewalk café to quench my thirst with a bottle of Spanish beer. I sat there listening to some music […]
The end of every year brings with it the predictable avalanche of “Best Of” posts from every corner of the media world. Best movies of 2012. Best books of 2012. Best of my travel posts of 2012. Best political moments of 2012 — though not exactly a top 10 list […]
How to Not Get Locked Up Abroad I have written about safety on the road before, but this is a slightly different topic. Instead of focusing on how to avoid being robbed or scammed, National Geographic wants me to give my tips for how to avoid getting arrested and imprisoned […]
The close of 2011 signals the onslaught of the waves of “best of” year-end articles as far as the eye can see (for instance, my “Middin’ to Average Moments of 2010” last year). I rarely aspire to the norm and was recently pondering what post to add to the madness. […]
Seriously, I do not understand the whole air conditioning use in otherwise incredibly hot Third World countries. It defies rational understanding and I challenge you to come up with a good reason for this small bit of insanity. Basically in almost every hot Third World country it is apparent that […]
In a variety of places in the Third World (plus China and some others), you can buy pirated DVDs for amazingly cheap prices. In Kenya, I found some DVDs of the Boston Legal TV series, where the covers made me chuckle. I was walking through a market in Colombia a […]
Fast forward a little bit and I am on an overnight bus in Colombia. Actually, you don’t have to fast forward too far, this was only two weeks after hearing this amazing teddy bear news. I look across the aisle of the bus as the day turned to night and we all got ready to sleep and what did I see…..
Last night I had a brief Twitter conversation with a few friends as a result of one of them posting this article, Abalone diver taken by great white sharks in Australia. It leads to the question: What are the real risks of shark attacks while scuba diving? As most of […]
I suppose there aren’t any cold showers in hell, now that I think about it, but regardless, I hate cold showers. Hate. Hate. Before I first started on my RTW overland trip in December of 2008, I couldn’t remember the last time I took an intentionally cold shower. Like anyone […]
He asked us where we were from. We told him and asked in return. “I live in a tree in Africa.” We chuckled. Not that funny, but I’ve heard worse. We assumed he was joking, so we asked him to tell us about his tree. He did. Without cracking a smile. We asked what he was doing here, if he lived in a tree in Africa. He said it wasn’t difficult to get to. And we realized that we needed to try to find a way to end this conversation as quickly as possible.
I was watching some kid kick a soccer ball on a cobblestone street and thought to myself that I had the exact same moment. Some kids were playing soccer in an alleyway. I took out my camera and started taking pictures. One of the kids, the extrovert, then got the soccer ball and started posing for me. Kicking the ball up the air and throwing his hands up.
