All in exotic travel

Gorillas in the Missed

Fyllis Hockman
Active Travel, Off-the-beaten path destination, Personal essay, Wildlife , adventure travel, exotic travel, small group travel
by Fyllis Hockman

"It can be a difficult journey. If you have a cold, cough or sniffle, don’t even bother lining up. Good hiking boots and a walking stick are a must. Bring plenty of water. Be sure to stay at least 25 feet away. Remember these are wild animals. If we need to carry you out, that will cost an extra $300." 

I was already intimidated by the pre-trek briefing and we hadn’t even started on our mountain gorilla expedition, which was part of a 16-day tour to southwestern Uganda sponsored by ElderTreks. The 25-foot rule, I learned, was for both their protection and ours. Sharing 98.4 percent of our DNA, the gorillas are very susceptible to human-borne illnesses. We were carriers and they had to be protected from us. They were wild animals and we had to be protected from them. A fair quid pro quo. Thus, eight humans a day are allowed to visit a gorilla group for no longer than an hour. Works for us; works for them. 

Gorilla trekkers ascending one of many steep climbs.

This is not exactly a drive-by photo op. With a vigorous trek of 1-7 hours, depending upon where the gorillas are that day, you have to REALLY want to see them. But even with visitation restricted to an hour, it is usually well worth the effort.

What If Something Happens?

What If Something Happens?

Sally Mckinney
Art and Culture, Off-the-beaten path destination, Personal essay, Religion, Transformational Travel, adventure travel, cultural immersion, exotic travel

by Sally McKinney

Squeezed between napping young people in a tour van, I doubted that this Virgin del Carmen dance festival weekend was a good idea. I’d finished my bottle of water. The driver was swerving down rough roads toward a Peruvian village 3,200 meters high. Weak and dehydrated from several medications, I felt nausea with each lurching switchback.

Bathing an Elephant

Jane Spencer
adventure travel, exotic travel, travel essay

by Jane Spencer 

 

“Guess what?  I rode an elephant in Nepal!”

My five-year-old grandson was not impressed.  “You rode one of those dirty, smelly things?” He’s very sensitive to unfamiliar odours and textures. 

“Well, we gave her a bath,” I elaborated, over the phone.

Weeks later, I was still thrilled with my visit to Chitwan National Park in Nepal.  The park, located in the terai or subtropical lowlands of the country, is a UNESCO World Heritage Site with a diversity of ecosystems (forests, ox-bow lakes and flood plains), animals (rhinos, sloth bears, deer, crocodiles), and birds (hornbill, kingfishers and peacocks). Elephant numbers there have grown to fifty.  They live in a protected environment in exchange for safari labour, with a guarantee they won’t be transported to zoos or hunted for ivory. 

It was my first safari and my first contact with elephants. Our group of four was guided to a platform with stairs which we took turns mounting, before lowering ourselves into a box frame roped around the elephant’s girth.  The elephant trainer, or mahout, wielded his sharp metal hook and shouted an order, then we were off into the grasslands to search for one-horned rhinos, and maybe, if we were lucky, a Bengal tiger.

Today’s Learning Objective: Kill a Goat

Laura Fuller
Art and Culture, Family Travel, Life Lessons, Transformational Travel, adventure travel, cultural immersion, exotic travel

by Laura Fuller

 

Ron’s blue eyes were bloodshot and watering when he returned to the group.  His cheeks were sunburned, his hair sun-bleached. He shoved his hands in the pockets of his white hooded sweatshirt, an act of 13-year-old toughness.  He and Mary had volunteered to eat the goat’s kidneys, not because they’d wanted to, but because peers’ opinions outweigh adolescent reason. Mary now smiled proudly in a pack of incredulous girls. Ron fought to put the texture of warm, raw goat kidney behind him and move on with his life, but I could see that he was struggling to gain control of his gag reflex.  Kyle offered to walk with him back to the tents, stoically, so as not to make Ron feel weak.  

I watched them walk away, their shadows long in the evening grass, and turned back to the other 20-some seventh-graders, all of them perplexed as to how to receive this cross-cultural gift. They were outlined against a horizon of royal blue Tanzanian sky, high above tufts of trees and shrubs on the rocky terrain below. The high rocks on which we stood began to glow reddish in the setting sun. This, I predicted, was both the height and the conclusion of my short, ridiculous teaching career in Dubai.  

The kids had all chosen to observe the ritual slaughter of this goat, not wanting to be cowardly among the courageous or rude to the Maasai guides.  After sixteen hours of Serengeti driving from the nearest city, we were lucky to have the Maasai patrolling our campsite’s perimeter every fifteen minutes at night to ensure our safety.  They silently taught our students to carve spears and showed us the soft cave in the bush where they held their councils. 

The seventh-graders, from Dubai – who actually came from all over the planet – were upper-class, elite, and as such, polite and appreciative. They were first inquisitive: goat slaughter? And then horrified: goat slaughter. 

Conspiracy on Malta?

Elyn Aviva
Art and Culture, Historic Travel, Off-the-beaten path destination, Sacred Places, cultural musings, exotic travel, travel essay

by Elyn Aviva

We were on Malta, a tiny island at the crossroads of the Mediterranean, within sight on a clear day of Sicily and Mount Etna, and we were confused.

Since our first day on the island, Gary (my husband) and I had been experiencing generalized confusion. For example, we had been told that everyone spoke English—after all, Malta had been an English colony for over 150 years—but street signs were unpronounceable, and our taxi driver didn’t seem to understand a word we said. He replied to our frantic queries in something that sounded like a mixture of Arabic and Italian. And it turns out it was. Sort of. Maltese is a Semitic language, brought by Phoenician settlers 3000+ years ago, so it sounds vaguely Arabic. And because Italy has had such a pervasive influence on Malta—in part because of proximity, and in part because for decades the only television channels available were Italian—Italian words and cuisine are prevalent.

But our linguistic confusion was superficial. Much more confusing were the temples, the fat ladies, and the cart ruts. We had come to Malta to see the massive Neolithic stone temples, recognized by UNESCO as World Heritage Sites. Some of them date back 5,500 years—or maybe 10,000 or 12,000 years, depending on whom you believe. Ggantija, on Malta’s tiny neighbor island Gozo, is thought to be the second oldest temple in the world, after Göbekli Tepe in Turkey. It predates the pyramids by millennia. Some writers believe the Maltese temples are oriented to astrological alignments that existed 12,000 years ago, not 5,500—and might even have been built by extraterrestrials.

Horny at the Taj

Adam Jones-Kelley
Art and Culture, Historic Travel, exotic travel

by Adams Jones-Kelley 

 

Love can make you do many things.

It can make you laugh.

It can make you cry.

It can make you build the Taj Mahal.


The epic tale surrounding the construction of the Taj has all the trappings of a Hollywood fiction – tragedy, romance, betrayal, murder – but this fable is true, and is one of history’s great tragic love stories.

The story goes that at the ripe old age of 15, Prince Khurram, who would later become Shah Jahan, fifth Emperor of the Mughal Empire, married 14-year-old Arjumand Banu Begum, and fell desperately in love. He gave his beloved the name Mumtaz Mahal (Jewel of the Palace,) and over the next seventeen years they had fourteen children, six of which survived past childhood.

The seventeenth child died during birth, taking her mother with her.

The Shah was so devastated by the death of his wife that he locked himself away for eight days with no food or water. Legend has it that during this time the image of the Taj Mahal came to him in his dreams, so he emerged from isolation, organized a board of architects, and within a year construction commenced.

Legend of the Betelnut Princess

Kristin Mock
Off-the-beaten path destination, cultural musings, exotic travel, travel essay

by Kristin Mock

This is not the betelnut princess I imagined. This woman is sitting outside her one-room apartment tying waxy betel leaves around smooth, ivory-colored nuts while her daughter does math problems out of a textbook and sips a cup of mango juice. She has been tying betel leaves for hours, flinging them onto a waxy mountain of wrapped-up nuts piled high in a cloudy glass case, snatching one every once in a while and placing it between her lips. It is this, the stained lips, the tell-tale pink with a hint of scarlet, the color I’d come to learn as the betelnut smile, that holds my curiosity most as she hands me a paper bag.

We are on the tiny tropical island of Xiao Liuqiu, a wet and humid place off the southwest coast of Taiwan. After driving home on the two-person motor scooter we’d rented that morning, Matt, a Canadian adventure writer who lived in Taiwan for seven years, and I sit on a wooden swing outside of my purple bungalow overlooking the sparkling lights on the shores of the South China Sea, and I learn the legend of the betelnut.

Fat and Happy

Fat and Happy

Ariel Bleth
Art and Culture, Personal essay, Transformational Travel, cultural immersion, exotic travel

by Ariel Bleth

 

“Promise you will stay one more year.  We are so happy with how you relate to us.  And you are happy, yes?  You are getting fat.”  Looking at Mama Ami, I know she is quite serious.  How would she know that where I come from, being called fat isn’t exactly a compliment? My mind jumps full speed into a rapid analysis of how much I may have changed in the months since my arrival in Nigeria – a diet primarily of okra or bitter green soups with starchy porridges; the occasional dish with beans and crayfish but general deficiency of good protein; the dearth of fresh produce in our market, the lack of refrigeration and my waning interest in learning the labor intensive traditional methods of preparing their dishes – anything was possible. Snapping out of it, I let myself simply feel pleased that they are comfortable with my presence.   

Truthfully, I wasn’t sure how comfortable I would be here – a country of over 200 different ethnic groups, a mixture of Muslims and Christians, an international image well ensconced in corruption and scams.  But here I was, living in a small town, working for a local organization whose office was housed on the family compound.  The business’ fish tanks and hatchery edged one side of a large dirt yard otherwise surrounded by the homes of the cousins, their families, and the elder mamas.  Sitting on the porch with Mama Ami and her husband Joshua, I know she is right - I am happy.  The contentment has been unfolding so slowly I barely noticed it; made up of hundreds of tiny milestones of recognition and inclusion.

Communing with the Garifuna in Belize

Fyllis Hockman
Art and Culture, Spirituality, cultural immersion, exotic travel

by Fyllis Hockman

Garifuna healer, Erdangela Polonio. Buyei, Belize. Picture this. The large thatched-roof, sand-carpeted temple was barren except for the obviously ill child curled up in the single cot by the wall. An old woman could be heard chanting from within her sacred chamber, candlelight flickering around the corners of the sheet separating her from the long hall. Her healing incantations, I later discovered, were addressed to the spirits who may have had reasons of their own to inflict the child.

Intrigued? Okay, here’s the story. Spirits are big in the Garifuna community of Belize -- which by the way is a Central American country that thinks it’s a Caribbean island.  Garifuna, you say? Never heard of them. Part of the melting pot civilization which comprises Belize, the Garifuna share the land with Creole, Mayan, Spanish, Mennonite, Chinese and other neighbors but their language, customs, foods and religion are unique. So are their spirits.

Now there are only about 7000 Garifuna currently in the country, but the spiritual population is a lot larger. “Our ancestors are all about us,” Lawrence, our guide, told me: “Just as we must eat and drink to live, so must they be nourished as well.” This is something the ancestors take very seriously.

So if they perceive they are being neglected, the dead return, most often through dreams, to remind the living that they are in need of nourishment. If this message goes unheeded, the spirits may get angry and make a family member sick. The ancestors do not take kindly to being ignored.

Turning Japanese

Turning Japanese

Jennifer Morton
Art and Culture, cultural immersion, exotic travel, travel essay

by Jennifer Morton

 

“No photos with coat,” she instructs my photographer husband with a smile. The petit, pigeon toed, doll-like figure clad in a silky red, black and white kimono is ever so polite but adamant about him not taking any photos of me while I am wearing the box-shaped overcoat.

Photos in the kimono are allowed and encouraged but almost forbidden if the kimono-clad woman is wearing an overcoat. I bow slightly and smile while nodding affirmatively. I feel and look like a modern version of an obedient Japanese woman.

It’s my 40th birthday and I’m about to hit the streets of Kanazawa, the small castle city on Japan’s main island of Honshu that is northwest of Osaka. I am a bit nervous to be going out amongst the Japanese people: a Westerner with pink hair wearing the beloved kimono.

So you probably want to know what I am doing in the kimono under an overcoat in Japan, and who says I can't be photographed in an overcoat. Actually, it started two hours ago. When I arrive for my one o'clock appointment, I notice the foyer is lined wall to wall with shoes and slippers, like many Japanese households. It is customary to remove footwear and swap your shoes for a pair of slippers before entering.

Haruka, the young owner of the kimono rental shop greets us with many bows and the familiar “Irrashimasse” (welcome), a word that is used by many shopkeepers as you enter their shops or to entice you to enter their shops.

We duck through the noren (door covering), and enter the main sitting area. A low set table with red cushions as seats is in the middle of the room. Pictures of kimono-wearing woman, mostly Japanese, adorn the shelves and table tops.

Haruka shuffles through the paper-panelled sliding doors and disappears up a dark staircase. I follow her, using my hands to climb my way up the steep passageway. The room at the top is bright and airy. This is where the kimonos live.

The shelves are covered with delicate fabrics and laid out in color–coded piles. Haruka points out which ones are for springtime--pastel pinks, soft blues, yellows and purples; some with delicate features or intricate designs lie before me. I’m drawn to the pinks.

I choose a soft, pink silk kimono that gradually darkens as the material reaches the calf area. The fabric is designed with sporadic branches and leaves, similar to sakura (cherry blossom). I feel like a little girl playing dress-up.

Once Upon A Vine: A Unique Gathering of Grapes

Fyllis Hockman
Culinary Travel, Wellness, exotic travel, travel essay

by Fyllis Hockman

Relais San MaurizioAlright, we all know by now that drinking red wine is supposed to be heart-healthy. So then, shouldn’t slathering a glass of Merlot on your body be good for the skin? Such is the theory, sort of, at the Caudalie Spas. There are currently only four in the world, and I am luxuriating in a ‘vinotherapie’ massage in the Relais San Maurizio Hotel in the heart of the Piedmont region of northwestern Italy. The vintage is being absorbed into the skin rather than ingested into the bloodstream.

As is also true in Bordeaux, France, Rioja, Spain and New York City (Hmmm; don’t exactly think of the latter as a major wine-producing area…), here wine is king! And the appreciation of its many attributes – which, as those who know me can attest, I try to experience as often as I can – is a venerated practice. So it seems appropriate that the consumption of wine extend beyond traditional imbibing.

Shifting Sands in Rajasthan, India

Barbara Aman
Voiuntourism, adventure travel, cultural immersion, exotic travel, holiday volunteering, travel essay

words + photos by Barbara Aman

We arrived late at night at the field office of the nonprofit, a crumbling cement structure with a few rooms and a few rusted bed frames with torn, flattened pads. I was here to document the progress of a multinational water-supply project in this drought-challenged desert region in India’s western Rajasthan state. No luxury hotel here.

Up before sunrise the next morning we first visited water catchment areas, where large areas were dug out a few feet down, the women wielding picks, the red dirt transported away with beat-up metal bowls by all available family members--typically grandparents and grandkids, who often worked together. The elder male stood at a distance, dressed in white--as if a maharajah from the past, leaning against his wooden cane--while the women, dressed in brightly patterned red saris, toiled behind him.

It’s the women and girls who are most affected by the water shortage here. Many in the villages spend up to five hours a day walking to and from the closest well or storage tank, carrying water in their beat-up metal pitchers. Water for drinking, cooking, washing--it falls to them to fetch it, however far away it may be. Male/female roles are strictly cast here: Whatever it takes to keep the home and family running, it’s up to the females to get it done.  At one point, Michael, my partner, had teasingly picked up one of the full water containers and placed it in my arms, and my legs almost crumpled. I could not imagine how these tiny women could carry these on their heads.

The next stop was a completed water catchment and storage area and as we drove up I could see the bright white paint job on the 12-foot round tank, jutting up about 2 feet from the ground, the lower half nestled tidily in the hard clay soil. A young woman stood atop it, quite shyly, covering her face with her tattered sheer sari while balancing her metal water jug adeptly atop her head. Her eyes seemed to bore through me, even in their shy state.

Jumping the Bull: Lies And Other Tall Tales in Ethiopia

Jumping the Bull: Lies And Other Tall Tales in Ethiopia

Maureen Magee
Off-the-beaten path destination, Travel Humor, cultural immersion, cultural musings, exotic travel

by Maureen Elizabeth Magee

I tell lies when I travel.  My mother would call them “little white lies” and I only tell them to spare the feelings of others. 

Oh, alright. That wasn’t exactly honest.  I tell lies when I travel in order to spare myself the piteous looks I receive when I tell the truth.  A woman traveling alone is not as rare as it once was but, depending on where she goes, there is still a curiosity factor. The farther afield she wanders, the more curious the local folks will be.

“Where is your husband?” That is the first question.

Now, I never mind admitting that I am single – I am an optimist and the inquirer just might have some terrific friend I could meet. Of course, if I answer truthfully and admit to two divorces I could appear to be a poor risk.  So I hang my head, and in a tragic voice, I whisper, “Gone.”

Which is not a lie, not really.  They are all gone, those husbands. 

Seven Years Younger: Life On Ethiopia Time

Seven Years Younger: Life On Ethiopia Time

Maureen Magee
Art and Culture, Historic Travel, Life Lessons, Off-the-beaten path destination, cultural immersion, cultural musings, exotic travel, travel essay

words + photos by Maureen Magee

Time zones, the International Date Line and jet lag all contribute to my feeling disoriented when traveling. Date lines especially – leaving home on a Tuesday and arriving on the Monday before I left definitely throws me for a loop.

But what about when the traveler leaves home in 2011 and arrives in 2004?

It happens all the time – when traveling to Ethiopia. Once you disembark in Addis Ababa, you will be at least 7 years younger.

My first trip to this time-estranged nation was in September, 1999.  The airport was festively decked out with banners proclaiming some kind of celebration, followed by “1993!” I couldn’t speak or read Amharic, so the actual celebration was a mystery – but I figured it must have been a heck of an important party, if Ethiopians left the banners up for 7 years.

My guide greeted me with a standard “Hello”, followed by a joyous  “Happy New Year!” After 24 hours in transit, I was too tired to question this and thought, who knows – maybe in Ethiopia, everyone is welcomed with a New Years greeting – even if it is 9 months later.  One never knows in other cultures…

Discover the Exotic on a Road Trip

Discover the Exotic on a Road Trip

Vera Marie Badertscher
Art and Culture, Life Lessons, Off-the-beaten path destination, U.S. History, cultural immersion, exotic travel, travel essay

by Vera Marie Badertscher

“None of your business,” she said. The short, curly, white hair bounced as she shook her head, but the brown eyes smiled in her beautiful, tanned and weathered face. Half Navajo, Suzie (not her real name) has lived in Rio Grand pueblos in New Mexico all her life. We were sitting in a rambling adobe house near the village where she lives with her husband. Grandchildren and daughters dropped in from time to time as we talked. The smell of cedarwood smoke curled around us, and tin-framed pictures of saints glinted on the walls.

Peru: A feather for any birder’s life list

Rachel Dickinson
Active Travel, Off-the-beaten path destination, Wildlife , adventure travel, exotic travel

by Rachel Dickinson

You might characterize me as a casual birder, which is one-step up from an armchair birder. I am married to a man who once headed the Sapsucker team for the Cornell Lab of Ornithology in the World Series of Birding so just through sheer osmosis I should be a much better birder than I am. But that would mean I’d have to pay attention.

Nicaragua: Can you keep a secret?

Nicaragua: Can you keep a secret?

Ellen Barone
Eco Travel, Off-the-beaten path destination, Wildlife , cultural musings, exotic travel, travel essay

words + photos by Ellen Barone

Here's the truth: I want to tell you about Nicaragua and its wild, deserted Pacific beaches, active volcanoes, colonial cities, coffee plantations, and verdant mountains— but then again, I don't.

Writing about delicate cultures like Nicaragua, where complex political, geographical and economic realities have resulted in hardships on one hand - and a simpler, more grounded way of life on the other - always brings up mixed feelings in me.

The Alignments in Carnac, Brittany, France

The Alignments in Carnac, Brittany, France

Elyn Aviva
Historic Travel, Religion, exotic travel

words + photos by Elyn Aviva

We drove around a corner and encountered an astounding sight: row after row of standing stones, stretching to the horizon. “Pull over!” I demanded. Barely waiting for Gary, my husband, to stop the car, I opened the door, jumped out, and ran over to the green metal fence that separated the stones from me. I shook my head in disbelief, in awe. So many stones, lined up and going—where? Why? They fit no category I knew: they were an enormous puzzle of countless granite megaliths pointing to the sky, rooted in the earth. Hundreds, thousands of stones lined up in slightly wavering rows that went on for kilometers, as if the stones were frozen in the act of marching—somewhere. What was the point? What did they mean? What were they for? The stones made no response.

Nowhere in the world has as many megalithic sites as Brittany, and Carnac is in the center of them. The amazing profusion of ancient remains includes isolated standing stones, rows of alignments, earth-covered tumuli, quadrilateral and oval enclosures, and table-like dolmens, each with its own energy and story.

The dolmens with their elaborately engraved interior walls are intriguing, but the 6000-year-old alignments fascinate me. Many of the original stones have been hauled off for re-use in nearby farmhouses and fences, but nearly 3000 menhirs (Breton for standing stones) remain. They are lined up in three sets of slightly undulating rows facing approximately northeast/southwest and extending for kilometers. Starting in the northeast are the Kerlescan alignments, followed by the Kermario alignments, and ending in the southwest with the Le Ménec alignments. The different sets contain from eleven to thirteen rows, and include from approximately 600 to nearly 1200 standing stones. Each set ends in the southwest with an ovoid or quadrilateral stone enclosure (or what remains of one). The cumulative effect of so many stones, so many alignments, extending for such a distance, is awesome.

Kenya: Rules of the Wild

Kenya: Rules of the Wild

Ellen Barone
Life Lessons, Travel Humor, Wildlife , adventure travel, cultural musings, exotic travel, travel essay

words + photos by Ellen Barone

It was a few days into my first African safari when I learned the Fourth Rule of Safari Travel: When you think you’ve spotted a lion, casually ask the guide “What’s that?” rather than blurt out “There's a lion!” because 9 times out of 10 the ‘lion’ will be a termite mound.

Later on, I’d learn other rules: No. 7, If you’re squeamish about eating flesh avoid restaurants with the word Carnivore in their title; No. 13, Never run out of the safari tent, half naked, screaming “there’s a creature in my bed” before you’ve determined it isn’t a hot water bottle put there by the room steward to take the chill off a high-altitude night; and No. 17, Avoid standing up suddenly in an open-top Land Rover with a metal roll-bar above your head.

Cambodia Off the Beaten Track

Cambodia Off the Beaten Track

Don Mankin
Historic Travel, adventure travel, cultural musings, exotic travel

words + photos by Don Mankin

Our narrow wooden boat churns upstream powered by what looks like a motor from a small lawnmower. The wide, almost empty river is straight out of “Apocalypse Now.” I feel vaguely like Martin Sheen looking for Colonel Kurtz as I scan the sparsely populated river banks. The small boat has barely enough room for the four of us -- my wife Katherine, our guide, the operator and me.

We are heading to a small, isolated village buried in the jungle about 45 minutes up a tributary of the Mekong River, deep in the heart of Ratanakiri province, a mountainous region in the far northeastern corner of Cambodia. This is as far away from our home in Los Angeles as you can get in this world -- geographically, culturally, and in pretty much any other way you can imagine.

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