I have had the good fortune to travel all over the world—for both business and pleasure, not that those are mutually exclusive. This blog is about my unique experiences around the globe. It is not intended as a paean to the wonders of the locales themselves, as there already exist volumes that more than do justice to the magnificence of virtually every corner of this earth. Here, I simply recount small, personal moments of surprise, embarrassment, stupidity, excitement, fear, heroics, and other stuff like that.
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Nairobi, Kenya…December 1993. Sande and I had been living in London for just over a year when we decided to embark on the first of what would be many holiday adventures beyond Europe. Over the coming years, these would include the faraway wonders of China, India, South Africa, Mongolia, Nepal, Morocco, Russia, and Oman, among others. The fact that we started in Africa—or frankly, that we started at all—is noteworthy given that Sande’s idea of a “travel adventure” was being in a hotel without hairdryers and my previous experience with “roughing it” was to leave Boy Scout camp several days early with a bad case of stomach cramps owing to my inability to cross the threshold of the odious outhouse, much less take a seat inside. (Thousand leggers crawling, flies swarming, bats hanging, and the smell—ugh!) Nonetheless, at 4 a.m. on Christmas morning 1993, Sande and I landed in Nairobi to go “On Safari.”
Over the next twelve days, we would track big game in Samburu, straddle the equator atop Mt. Kenya, camp on the vast plains of the Masai Mara, and snorkel in the Indian Ocean off the coastal town of Mombasa—a town we were quite fortunate to reach alive! But that is a New Year’s Eve story. »Read More
