No, this isn’t the Serengeti. The Etosha Pan is a huge 2,000 square mile salt pan in northern Namibia that has an amazing abundance of African wildlife that flourishes in a desert – lots of elephants as you see, giant eland, huge oryx, kudu with the  ...

Yes, an ostrich. Ostriches are the world’s largest, heaviest, and fastest running birds on earth today. A full-grown adult male can weigh over 300 pounds, and it’s kick is so strong it can kill a lion. A pride of lions led by lionesses, or a coalition ...

July, 1984. The KPNLF – Khmer People’s National Liberation Front – was the Anti-Communist guerrilla movement fighting the Soviet-backed Vietnamese Communists in Cambodia. When I was first there in 1961, Cambodia was then a land of serenity, with a ge ...

This astounding road is how you traverse the Dades Gorge on the Road of a Thousand Kasbahs in Morocco. Kasbahs are fortified villages of the Berbers, who have lived here since the end of the Ice Ages 12,000 years ago (related to the Lapps of the Scandinavi ...

In a hidden corner of Europe, the Radovna River pours off the Julian Alps to carve out the Vintgar Gorge with crystal clear water. A mile-long walkway with towering limestone cliffs on either side is your access. Nearby is the gorgeous Lake Bled, with Ble ...

The extraordinary rock-cut necropolis known as the Hypogeum (hi-po-gee-um) is the only prehistoric underground temple in the world. For over a thousand years (3500-2500 BC), the temple and burial complex (eventually housing 7,000 skeletons) was carved out  ...

In the early 1600s, some 150,000 Armenians fled persecution from the Ottoman Empire to settle in Isfahan, Persia under the protection of Shah Abbas.  There they created an extraordinary trading network that stretched from Amsterdam to Manila, becoming pro ...

Lhasa, Tibet, 1986. Built in the mid-1600s, the Potala in Lhasa, Tibet was the home of the Dalai Lama as the incarnation of Avalokiteśvara, the Buddhist deity of compassion, until the Communist Chinese colonized Tibet in 1959. The Potala is one of the wo ...

There is a paradise of islands of staggering beauty and idyllic weather year round, that’s a tax haven and the cost of living is low, that’s self-sufficient in food and everything grows in abundance, that’s so peaceful and serene crime is virtually u ...

Humanity – Homo sapiens – began evolving from our Homo ergaster hominid ancestors in East Africa around a quarter-million years ago. In all that time since, only one group of us is directly descended from those first of us, still living in East Africa, ...

Charlatans like Erich von Daniken convinced many gullible readers of his books this “monster” was of an alien in a space suit. Real archaeologists know it’s of an ancient tribal shaman, to be found among the greatest profusion of prehistoric rock art ...

It would be hard to find a more exotic restaurant than The Rock, perched on a coral outcropping off Michanwi Pingwe beach on the east coast of Zanzibar in the Indian Ocean. Start off with what I found to be the world’s best (and largest) piña colada, t ...

Khasab, Musendam, Enclave of Oman, October 2006. The sharp tip of Arabia, known as the Musandam Point, sticks into the Persian Gulf, separating it from the Indian Ocean. The Strait of Hormuz is only 30 miles wide from Musandam Point to the coast of Iran,  ...

Ngorongoro Crater, Serengeti, Tanzania. Ngorongoro is one of the world’s great natural wonders, created over two million years ago when the cone of a gigantic volcano collapsed in on itself. The crater floor is over 100 square miles, teeming with Africa ...

On the remote north side of the island of Malekula in Vanuatu, there lives a cannibal tribe called the Big Nambas. The men wear a penis gourd wrapped in pandamus fibers, and eat “man long pig,” cooked human enemies. You have to trek over mountains of t ...