Travel

I have not yet been to Japan even once. Yes, I know this seems improbable, given my Japanese history and language immersion during college, karate years, Japanese Buddhist husband, and current obsession with Iaido. True, though. And so, naturally, I am …

This is shaping up to be the travel day to end all travel days. The morning began with a few-hour drive from the Cheetah Conservation Fund to the airport in Windhoek. Thankfully only a small portion of the route qualified as what Abraham liked to call …

I’m sitting on the veranda at Babson House early in the morning with a cup of coffee, listening to dozens of different bird calls echoing across the Namibian bush. Then I hear another sound. At first it blends in with everything else — a low rhythmic r …

All photos of entire CCF portion can be found HERE Lynn and I are now at the Cheetah Conservation Foundation (CCF), and as I started to type this, we were sitting on the veranda of Babson House, looking out over two cheetah brothers lounging in the aft …

We had an easy day and a late morning. Many people stayed back at the lodge to pack, but a few of us went with Abraham over to a small settlement just inside the park gates. Once there, Abraham encouraged us to talk with the guard and ask him about his …

A “uni-oryx”! The dunes of Sossusvlei are the kind of place that almost doesn’t look real. Photographs help, but when you actually arrive the scale of it all is hard to comprehend. These dunes sit inside Namib-Naukluft National Park, which covers rough …

Today we drove from Swakopmund to Sossusvlei, a journey of roughly six hours across the Namib Desert. Or as Abraham described it: “Today you will experience an African massage.” He was referring to the road. The road — if we are being generous with tha …

Today we drove north along Namibia’s Skeleton Coast, a stretch of shoreline famous for fog, shipwrecks, and one of the most overwhelming wildlife spectacles on earth. The drive itself is long and starkly beautiful — the Atlantic on one side, the desert …

We said goodbye to Cape Town and flew north to Namibia, landing in Walvis Bay — a place where the Atlantic Ocean meets the Namib Desert in a way that feels almost improbable. From the air, the landscape looked like someone had taken a giant paintbrush …

Slideshow of all photos from Cape Town portion HERE. After several days of early departures and tightly scheduled adventures — Table Mountain, penguins, Cape storms, and our rather thoughtful “difficult discussion” about poaching — the final full day i …