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El Salvador: My Trip Write Up and Tips
Travel to El Salvador: It’s a place where grimy surfers voluntarily disappear barefoot on black sand beaches for cheap. It’s the type of place that’s getting harder and harder to find. You can order spicy chicken or fish under a thatched roof beach shack. The cook might chase your yard-bird or a fisherman might wrestle in pacific treasures into the boat that morning. It’s bubbling turquoise foam at your feet while the black sand sticks to you like Oreo cookie crumbs. If palm trees, quiet colorful towns, and ungodly amounts of papusas sound enticing, then El Salvador is for you. Mind Open to the New This is an up and…
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Philae Temple: Egypt Files Part 2
EGYPT– The place that has inspired writers and travelers for centuries– ON A SLEEPER TRAIN. I had sand on my skin, caked with sweat. The brim of an adventure hat had shielded me from the inescapable sun that had now set. I pulled the hat from my head, revealing a sticky nest of hair underneath. I ruminated how an age-old adventure could seem brand new, like I was the first to experience it out of all mankind. But I knew I wasn’t. I was on an epic adventure to Aswan and the Temple of Philae. 1854– the British instituted the original tracks from Cairo to Aswan in this year, which…
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Tarangire: Bathing With Elephants + Hunting With Lions, Tanzania
Tarangire National Park was one of my favorite places in Tanzania because of the number of wild elephants. Stepping off the plane at Kilimanjaro, we met our safari team. They had everything perfectly preplanned and ready to go. There was the company owner, who had recruited me online who I’d spoken to for a few months. He introduced himself as White. Several days later, after getting to know him a bit, I would chuckle when I read “Wilson” on his business card. White suited him. “We call him White because he is lighter skinned than us”, the driver Hamisi said. White had a beautiful caramel complexion and was from a…
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Salmon Glacier, Alaska: When Travel Comes Full Circle
What happens when travel comes full circle? That’s not what I was thinking as I chatted with a shaggy-haired 20-something as he pulled a stack of postcards out of the sun-visor of his Prius. “You look like you’re loaded down”, he called over the gas pump before the Sweetgrass boarder crossing. His words were muffled in the wind. Something about the way he said it caught my attention. “You’re headed to Alaska”. He had said it as more of a statement than a question. I too soon would learn to recognize the difference between a Canada tourist and those making the long-haul North. We’d pulled over at the last place…
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Traveling Afar to Djibouti
The camels and donkeys convoyed out without their humans together every morning into the desert only to come back home every evening before the hyenas came out for hunting. In a sense the domesticated animals represented me, leaving home for an adventure, only coming home when the proverbial jaws of danger were hot on my trail. That was what it was like to be a traveler in Djibouti. Flies harassed me to the point of rage as I arched my back in disgust after I pet a mangy kitty which turned its body to reveal a bad case of mange and a large open sore. I looked into the kitchen…
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Somaliland
I’d gone into Somaliland with an open heart and an open mind. I’d read so much good news online from the tight knit community of international country collectors. Somaliland wasn’t Somalia; it was supposed to be safe, interesting, and welcoming. Before entering Somaliland, at the gate in Djibouti, I hadn’t covered in my hijab. All of the ladies who had seen my hair now starred a hole through me as I stepped into their country. They were smiling. They were beautiful and mysterious and traveled in women-only-groups. I, on the other hand, even though I was covered, wasn’t mysterious at all. They knew exactly what I looked like without my…
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The Truth that no one will tell you About Belize
It’s the age old story of being completely underwhelmed by what you came to see and leaving with a sense of value in the experiences that were unexpected. Like you, I probably headed to Belize to see the Great Blue Hole. I might have been excited to get some R&R on Caye Caulker. But for the resort loving tourists (that I love to insult) who went to Caulker Village, bought a t-shirt and a puka necklace, and felt like they did something special, I move that they could have gone to Cancun and got the same generic experience. The truth that no one will tell you about Belize is that…
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Singapore, Bewildered: Where Ancient Tradition Meets the Modern Cutting Edge
^ This is what I thought I’d see in Singapore. I was expecting to be immediately dumbfounded by modern technologies from the cutting edge of development. What I wasn’t expecting to see was how this place, Singapore, was rooted in ancient tradition. A walk through Singapore is an assault on the senses. The hawker stands and plazas are exotic. The climate? Scorching tropical. The food? Pretty bowls of spicy, sultry goodness, flavors you didn’t even know existed. The high rises? Full of flats with tenants that are [from what I imagine due to their rent value] untouchably, stupid rich . . . like walking their orangutans from the window of…
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Scenic Bear Viewing at Lake Clark, Alaska
Very rarely do I come home and immediately start writing– but I can’t contain myself . . . you won’t believe what I did today! All my life I have been an animal lover, fascinated by wildlife behavior on nature shows. I had never actually seen a brown bear in the wild. Today my inner seven year old girl squealed as I became that wildlife photographer. Now I just had to be brave enough to actually do it. My guide, Martin, from Scenic Bear Viewing in Homer, Alaska took me out in his plane to Lake Clark National Park where we photographed wild Alaskan Coastal Brown Bears in their natural…
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Rastafarians, Scared of Snorkeling, and the Embodiment of Jerk Chicken: Jamaica, Where Things Went Wrong
I could do this. Easy. Laid Back. Island Time. Jamaica. After all, I’m the girl who will go almost anywhere, try almost anything, eat almost anything. But I’m still not fearless. Sitting at home at my kitchen table, I was the one who had decisively stated that I was going to Jamaica to face my fear of the water. Wind whipping through, what at the time felt to me like my effortless beach hair, but otherwise in pictures looking like my, my hair is stuck to the side of my face hair, I looked out into the infinite turquoise Caribbean. Chickens ran beneath my feet. A German Sheppard jumped into…
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The Patagonia Chronicles Part 3: A Flamingo, An Ice Wall, A Rock Pile, & An Estancia
Crossing between Chile and Argentina was little more than a blink of an administrative counter. We got out to lift up a chain and let ourselves over. We had been strategically planning our diesel stops on the map. All plans to purchase and keep a spare can had run dry. The scrub grass silence was broken when we took a 65 km shortcut down a cheese grater and laughed in disbelief that the lambs had long tails. They wagged like dogs. Then there was the lone flamingo. Lost far from it’s comrades in Northern Chile, the wind had grounded it. It was the only colorful thing for hundreds of miles,…
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Authenticity in Costa Rica
This is where this story began; it was hard not to miss the burning forest outside of Liberia. When the Spanish claimed “Costa Rica” they named it after the RICH land they saw. Mixed research indicates that in the 1940’s 75% of Costa Rica was forested. Suprise As of today 20,000 acres of land is deforested annually. Now, while I can’t speak first hand about the authenticity of statistics, I can speak about what I saw while there. I had these HUGE expectations of Costa Rica . . . cue the dreams of . . . forging a river crossing in a Land Rover, maybe getting stuck in the mud a time or two,…
