It was my final day in Kashgar, China. I had all the photos I needed and was ready for a good meal before catching my flight out, when I noticed a tiny man sitting outside, …
October 9, 2012
Go Abroad!
Giving Face in Kashgar
Shark Calling in Papua New Guinea
I became interested in shark calling when I met shark enthusiasts like myself who had visited the remote island of New Ireland off the coast of Papua New Guinea. I arrived at the village of …
October 8, 2012
Shoestring Travel: Rome
After several days in Berlin, the next stop on our fabulous European adventure was Rome. Neither of us had ever been to Rome before, so we were quite excited to see some of the Eternal …
October 5, 2012
The Merry Cemetery in Maramureş, Romania
In the twenty-four years of my life I spent in Romania, I never had the occasion to visit a unique place in Transylvania called the Merry Cemetery. So, about two months ago, I called my …
October 5, 2012
La Vida Tranquila: A Family's Pursuit of Paradise
(Originally appeared as a 9/4/12 blog entry at HuffingtonPost.com.) In 1998, I left a boyfriend who admitted he couldn't commit to anything more than putting food in the cat's bowl. We were in our early …
October 4, 2012
Riding the Frecciarossa
Venice: the absence of cars and Vespas… well, you just have to be there to understand the city's magic. From our tiny – but not "tony" – locanda (inn) near central San Polo, Kay and …
Benin, West Africa: Begging for an Education
In the first century A.D. a Christian mystic named Augustine said, "The world is a book, and those who do not travel read but the first page." Those words have guided a great deal of …
October 2, 2012
Shoestring Travel: Berlin
After venturing around London, we hopped on a plane for Berlin to continue our European adventure. (To help with the story, here’s a little background on our adventure: My husband just graduated from the University …
September 28, 2012
Carnaval en Rio – Firsthand
My head was pounding. Fireworks crackled overhead. Hordes jeered, screamed, waved and then broke into joyous whirls of samba. The smell was unbearable, an open sewer ran beside our Sambódromo warm-up lane, and yet thousands …
September 28, 2012
Aboriginal Taiwan
Recently, I traveled to Taiwan to learn about its food. I sampled a range of delicacies, but was most struck by a culture completely unknown to me: the aborigines of Taiwan. The original settlers of …
September 27, 2012
Shoestring Travel: London
After spending a year living in Edinburgh, it was sadly time for my husband and I to pack our bags and head back to San Diego. However, we weren't going to leave Europe without one …
September 21, 2012
Tonlé Sap, Cambodia: What's in a Word?
Winston Churchill once said the Americans and British are two peoples separated by a common language. The more countries I visit, the more this seems to be true around the globe. For better or worse, …
Nusa Lembongan, Indonesia: The Untold Story
On a recent vagabonding extravaganza, I took a recess from Western society for 10 months to explore the world. During this rebellion, I found myself enticed by the Indonesian archipelago, and of course, the ever-alluring …
September 17, 2012
Greenland: The Beauty of Climate Change
I looked out the window of the plane as it approached the southeast end of Greenland at twenty-odd thousand feet and was happy to see the cloud cover was clearing. I could see the coastline …
September 14, 2012
On Safari in Lake Manyara National Park
Three turns into the park, our Land Rover was forced to a stop as two large bull elephants sauntered across the road. Their tusks protruding forward, as if they were divining rods steering them into …
September 13, 2012