The birding trip had drawn to a close, and we hopped on the bullet train from Tokyo to Kanazawa, a small city on Honshu’s western coast. There was no need to take reading material for the journey because the view outside…
We moved on again to Okinawa, the largest island in the Ryukyu chain. The airport corridors were filled with displays of orchids — thousands of them — and the main terminal had a big aquarium with an array of colorful fish and…
We flew to Ishigaki-jima in the far southwest of the Ryukyu Islands very near Taiwan, and the Chinese influence is quite evident. The inhabited coastal areas of the island were full of boxy buildings with peeling paint, bland white tile…
Our next birding stop was the larger island of Kyushu, where we stayed a couple of nights near the Mi-ike Forest Reserve, another gorgeous place filled with trails winding through mossy woods. Our target birds here were the Asian stubtail…
Early the next morning I awoke to birds chirping. Forest birds. Yet we were still on the ferry in the Pacific Ocean! Thoughtfully, the crew played recorded bird sounds over the ship’s intercom to wake passengers gently before we docked…
After a three-week trip to Japan, I am now completely enamored with the country. The Japanese are extremely polite and make visitors feel very welcome, even when some of those visitors don’t deserve such courtesy (more on that in a…
Not to be too harsh, but I can describe The Gambia in one sentence: it’s a charmless, rusty, dusty, crumbling trash heap that would be absolutely pointless to visit were it not for the birds. Lots of Europeans, particularly Brits…
On our second day in The Gambia, we assembled with four Brits who were scheduled to join us on our trip upriver, and getting to know them turned out to be the best thing about our Gambian experience. Today’s guide, also…
Upon hearing the word Uganda many people think of Idi Amin and his terrible regime, but the days of political turmoil are thankfully over. However, I did notice on the map that several areas were marked “roads here may be mined”…
Flying by bush plane to Fort Portal, the landscape as we flew south grew greener, more tropical and more mountainous, and we landed on a grass strip on a hilltop where a crowd of locals had gathered to greet us. This is banana…