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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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Birding Uganda’s Lake Victoria
We barreled down a red dirt road in the western countryside of Entebbe. In Uganda, the roadside was an active area where women balanced baskets on the crowns of their head wearing vibrantly patterned wraps. I closed my eyes, jostled, with each large bump, trying not to miss any of the rural farming sights, where middle aged children went to fetch water in the typical yellow jugs which seemed more fitting to hold gasoline than water. Children as young as three held hoes to help in the family gardens. The termination of the road led to a cove where a group of men gathered around empty boats. They’d been out…
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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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Ethiopia –Responsible Tourism: Getting Exactly What I Wanted –Then Guiltily Hating It
When I headed to Ethiopia, I really wanted to see wildlife. But sometimes when you get what you want, you find that it isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. Nevertheless, a good experience that made me all-the-more hardier for future travels. The title of this article seems harsh. I actually had a wonderful time in Ethiopia. But now more than ever, it’s important to make sure that [our] world travel is environmentally friendly and culturally responsible. Although crowded, the country was indeed beautiful. There were many typical interesting sights like pack donkeys and women carrying firewood. There were also tangled ideas to think about, like the Orthodox religion that…
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Possibly the Only Story You Will Ever Read About Alaska’s North Slope, Prudhoe Bay, Deadhorse, and the Alaskan Arctic [Part 2]
You can find Part 1 of this story here The inside of the Arctic Oilfield Hotel looked like a camp that you might see in Antarctica. It was complete with everything needed to keep you entertained and sane during the brutal winter: x-box room, free fancy laundry, board games, all you can eat snacks. We wore required medical grade latex booties over our shoes because it was mud season, and let’s be honest, working in the oilfield required getting down and dirty. We were the only visitors to the camp who weren’t on business. As one of the only females in town, especially a young female, the members of the…
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My Cheat Sheet Guide to the Parks of Wild Alaska
What to do in Alaska
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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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The Patagonia Chronicles Part 2: Is That Really Another Guanaco?
Puerto Natales is the closest hub of civilization and it’s 80 km to the national park. From our hostel we passed the town’s pride, a massive Milodon sculpture, and later on the cave of the Milodon. I wasn’t even really sure what a Milodon was, but knew it was big, kinda had the body of a bear and the face of a llama, and it was really old. Yeah, like 5,000 years old. But the landscape looked exactly like a place where dinosaurs, Milodons, and cave men probably ran around. There’s just something that doesn’t couple about sliding around in a ragged out truck rocking out to Nelly’s “Ride Wit…
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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,…
