Guess What?

Elephant butt.   At the David Sheldrick Elephant Reserve. My travels to East Africa are sponsored by Intrepid Travel as part of their “classic journeys” campaign.” Most – but not all – of my expenses were paid for by Intrepid Travel

Some Colors

The arrowroot was purple and starchy and pasty . It was on the breakfast buffet at next to a steamer tray full of pale yellow corn on the cob. There was coffee, too, and it was quite good, and omelets made by a quiet young man. It had rained sometime during the night; from my …


…read more.

Let’s Get Lost

In literary preparation for my trip to Tanzania, I downloaded Henry Morton Stanley’s memoir “How I Found Livingstone” for my iPad. The ebook is free, it’s in the public domain now and if you’ve got any kind of reader device, you’ll find you have access to a sprawling library of classics. I was giddy when …


…read more.

The Name Casts a Spell

Here’s an audio version of this post if you’d like to hear me read it.  It includes a track, Savane, by Yukikaze from the album Africa. Thanks, Yukikaze, for using Creative Commons. It’s taken me about eight weeks to prepare for my trip to East Africa. I had to send my passport off for a …


…read more.

From A (Anarctica) to Z (Zanzibar)

How do these things happen? I don’t really know, and also, I kind of do. A long unwinding of threads, with some, “Really? But how did I get so lucky?” helps explain it, but a lot of it feels like magic. As though things I didn’t know I wanted walked right up to me and …


…read more.