As Erma Bombeck once said, when you look like your passport photo, it’s time to go home. And so it is. We’ve hit summer solstice and are on the cusp of the two day holiday – celebrated throughout the Baltics with bonfires and flowered headgear and liters of alcohol (per Read More
EB Lande
(2) Riga, Latvia
We arrive on June 14 – a solemn day of remembrance in Latvia and the Baltics in general. Everywhere we see people carrying flowers to the towering Freedom Monument to commemorate the Soviet mass deportations of June 14, 1941 – a few months after the USSR annexed the Baltic states, Read More
(1) Vilnius, Lithuania
Next to our hotel is a small cafe/bar (The Love Story) which shares space with a jeweler (young, blonde handsome, multi-lingual) who works in a glass box when he is not hopping out to mingle with the clientele – mostly well-heeled young women. It does seem strange to have a Read More
Listen up. The Walls are Speaking
How does a city go from near death to being named the world’s most innovative city? In 1990, Medellin was the most violent city in the world – with up to 40 homicides per day. The only way to get from the airport to the city was by helicopter – Read More
Cartagena: Old world, new world
Color! A quick 2.5 hours from Miami, Cartagena’s tropical mix of Bourbon Street and South Beach pulses with Latin beats, mid-day heat and intense color. Kids in school uniform on their home for lunch. The up and coming working class area of Getsemane is alive with street Read More
Tanzania 6: Parting thoughts. If you go…
If you go: We organized our trip through Expert Africa, who have teams on the ground throughout Africa. We stayed in Nomad Tanzania camps in the Serengeti – Migration camp in the south and Lamai in the north near the Mara River. Lamai was a highlight of the trip – Read More
Tanzania 5: Zanzibar
Is there a more exotic-sounding destination than Zanzibar? We hop on the tiny Coastal 12 seater plane and skip from the Northern to Central to Southern Serengeti, on to Arusha and over to Zanzibar. After 5 hours of this, the plane is no longer cute and is just a flying tin Read More
Tanzania 4: Hunters and Gatherers
The Lamai Lion Pride of 22 lions, including two adult males, lords it over the northern Serengeti on the Kenyan border of the Mara river. We come upon them twice in two days: once having devoured an eland, the largest African antelope, so full they could barely waddle 10 steps Read More
Tanzania 3: Migration
The short rains have not arrived (January/February) and so the usual migratory path of one million wildebeests converging in the southern Serengeti to drop their calves has not appeared. Since this is one of the reasons we’re here, we head up to the central Serengeti to find them. We drive Read More
Tanzania 2: Ngorongoro Crater and Southern Serengeti
Eastern edge of the Ngorongoro Crater, collapsed caldera. Jaw-dropping. Elevation 9,000 feet. We leave Gibbs Farm (reluctantly) and head up, up, up to the Ngorongoro Crater and the rough “outback” road carved into the rim to access the few lodges scattered on the perimeter, offering stunning views of eternal primitive Read More