TRAVELS & ADVENTURES
I was a teenager in the 1960s, a tumultuous decade characterized by the assassinations of JFK, Bobby Kennedy and Martin Luther King. There was the March on Selma and the passage of the Civil Rights Act in 1964. Who can forget Woodstock? And then there was the War in Vietnam.
It's a Sunday in November off 2007 and we're cruising the streets of Madurai, India. One would expect things to be relatively quiet early on this day of the week. Not in Madurai!
I'm fascinated by turtles! First of all, I've always been amazed by their cartilaginous shells that act as shields for their protection. It has been determined by scientists that the earliest known turtles date from 220 million years ago which makes these creatures one of the oldest reptile groups, antedating lizards, snakes and crocodiles.
Sometimes the best things happen when they are unplanned and you least expect them. That's what happened to Cliff and me on our second day in Lhasa, Tibet when we went to the Jokhang Square.
We're on safari in the Masai Mara in Kenya. Until this trip to Africa, the only big game animals I had ever seen were on television or in a zoo; however, now the zoo is live, in real time and with no cages. Our goal is to see the "Big Five" in this famous reserve where Out of Africa was filmed.
Did you ever find yourself in a place that was totally unfamiliar to you? Did you ever try your best to ask other people to help you find your way to no avail? Did you ever feel like you were going to miss a deadline to get a boat back to the mainland while on a foreign island with no place to stay?
It's early in the morning and we're cruising down the Karawari River in Papua New Guinea, stopping at villages along the way. Why do this by boat? Because there are no roads that connect any of these villages! This is the reason that 600 languages are spoken on this island off the coast of Australia.
My wife, Lisa, and I had just toured Israel. We decided that we would regret it if we came all the way to the Middle East without going to Petra, Jordan. It was clearly time to take a trip to The Treasury!
An amazing thing happened to us while we were touring the Galapagos Islands in April of 2009. La Cumbre Volcano on the Isla Fernadina began to erupt while we were sailing from the Isla Isabela to Punta Moreno. Here's what happened...
As a young man, I can still remember sitting in the auditorium of my medical school listening to the Dean calling out our draft numbers for the war effort in Vietnam based on our birthdays. Mine was 315-whew!!! Little did I know at the time that I would develop a fascination with South East Asia.
