The jaunt to Kangaroo Island off the coast near Adelaide was brief but thoroughly enjoyable. Green, hilly pastures inland contrast with scrub vegetation closer to the sea and giant yuccas punctuate the landscape. The island’s economy depends heavily on sheep, cattle…
Still in the vast state of Northern Territory, we flew down to Alice Springs in the arid Red Centre and assumed we’d be leaving the flies behind in humid Darwin up on the coast. Wrong. They were worse! I fully believe the…
We flew into Darwin to explore the Northern Territory, Australia’s Top End. It’s HOT country, with humidity exacerbating high temperatures. And it’s rugged country, too. We had rented a 4WD vehicle at the airport, yet the guy at the counter…
Next we drove up to the top of the Atherton Tablelands at roughly 3,000 feet above sea level. The drive through the dusty town of Mareeba took us through very dry country dotted with huge termite mounds the size of boulders. Much of the original, pre-settlement…
Back in 2005 I spent a month touring the eastern two-thirds of Australia (Western Australia remains on my wish list) and was cast under the antipodean spell of this vast, expansive country. Visitors are richly rewarded with landscapes, plants, animals…
In Costa Rica, every town has four things: a soccer field, a church, a bar, and a Chinese restaurant. It’s also the land where drivers maneuver along curvy, rutted mountain roads with the steering wheel in one hand and a…
We descended from the cloud forest in Monteverde to Carara National Park on the Pacific Coast. It’s in a transitional zone where the hot, dry tropical forest to the north meets the wetter tropical rainforest to the south, creating great…
Our next destination in Costa Rica was Tortuguero National Park, a roadless area of rainy jungles and floodplains where several rivers empty into the Caribbean Sea. It was incredibly muggy and buggy, and I had miscalculated by booking us into…
Parks, gardens, temples and shrines (such as Yasaka Shrine in the Gion District, above) abound in Kyoto. We spent one morning touring many of Eastern Kyoto’s famous gardens and temples, and all but a few were jam-packed with school children on…
We took the train from Kanazawa to Kyoto and checked into the Seikoro Inn, a ryokan in eastern Kyoto a little bit south of the Gion geisha district. A ryokan is a traditional inn similar to the family-run minshuku we…