CROSSING TIME ZONES
I never knew my mother’s mother, who died in 1969 in her mid-forties, but I’ve been hearing stories about her all my life. She grew up in Bergen, on Norway’s west coast, and fled to Sweden during the Nazi occupation by riding a tandem bicycle through the woods together with a friend. She met my [...]
I’m standing on a forest road in the Scottish highlands along with 10 or so companions, scanning the slopes for signs of the bird we’ve come here to see. Instead, what appears out of the woods is our guide, Mark Denman. He’s been creeping about quietly, hoping to spot a capercaillie, the world’s largest species [...]
Scandinavia is known for its innovative design, but hoteliers in Sweden know how to take things one step further. First it was the original Ice Hotel in Jukkasjärvi, then the Jumbo Hostel inside a decommissioned jet at Arlanda Airport. Now it’s Treehotel, which opened in the small northern town of Harads [...]
For many people, if you mention the word cactus, the image that comes to mind is that of the saguaro, the towering, multi-armed icon of the Sonoran Desert. Standing tall over the surrounding shrubs, saguaros square off resolutely against both the scorching sun and the brief but intense annual monsoons. They reach for [...]
It’s hard to beat the view from La Cusinga Lodge. Nestled on a hillside on Costa Rica’s still-wild southwest coast, the lodge occupies its own private nature reserve just south of the village of Uvita. Seen from the lodge buildings, the vista takes in a dense expanse of verdant rainforest [...]
When you arrive in Torres del Paine National Park in the far south of Chile, chances are some of the first animals you’ll see are the guanacos that roam the plains and lower hills of this Patagonian wilderness.
A member of the camelidae family, guanacos are one of the two wild relatives of the [...]
There’s a lot of coverage in the media about threats to different ecosystems around the world – not to mention the planet-wide threat of global warming – but except on rare occasions, the threats facing irreplaceable cultural heritage sites tend to garner much less attention.
“Coral reefs, the Amazon, and polar bears are getting a [...]
There are few waterfalls as majestic as Iguazu – or Iguaçu, if you prefer the Portuguese spelling – Falls along the border of Argentina and Brazil. The falls are actually anywhere from 160 to 275 separate cascades (depending on the water level) with heights of roughly 263 feet (80 meters).
Sometimes also spelled Iguassu, the [...]
Of all the castles I saw on my October 2010 trip to Scotland, one of the most evocative was Kilchurn Castle in Argyll. Part of that was due to castle itself, a picturesque ruin situated on a marshy tongue of land jutting into Loch Awe. Part of it was due to the weather, [...]
“Hello, madam, rickshaw? Where are you going? Hello, madam! Hello? Hello!” The rickshaw-wallahs swarmed around disembarking passengers at the bus depot in Delhi, India, their singsong English aimed at likely clients. As an obvious non-Indian and a young woman traveling alone, I attracted more than my fair share of attention. I shouldered my backpack and [...]
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