I was shocked and deeply shaken when my pal Mick handed me a London newspaper with a terrifying front page story about wanton bloodshed in Uganda. The timing and the news could not have been much worse for me. It was January 23, 1984, the day before I was scheduled to fly from London to Nairobi, Kenya, on my way to Uganda to hike the spectacular but notoriously difficult circuit trek of the legendary Rwenzori Mountains, better known as the…
I will never forget the day I set sail along the “line of death” with Libyan dictator Muammar Gaddafi to challenge the US Sixth Fleet. It was January 25, 1986, and it started out like any other day in Tripoli, Libya’s capital, where I was one of about 20 foreign journalists covering a worsening dispute between Colonel Gaddafi and U.S. President Ronald Reagan. The Americans were making threatening noises about Gaddafi’s alleged role in a plane hijacking and two deadly…
I’ve had some very interesting wildlife experiences in my lifetime. I’ve seen dozens of giant Nile crocodiles basking on the shores of Kenya’s Lake Turkana; got way too up close and personal with a few poisonous snakes; and had a few nervous encounters with black bears and a young grizzly in Canada’s Jasper National Park. I’ve watched lions stalking game, feeding on a fresh kill and even having sex in front of my young children as I blushed, speechless. I…
There are some adventurous moments that intrepid travellers occasionally experience which are seared into their memory forever. Moments so exotic, so far removed from their day-to-day life back home, that even decades later those memories seem to jump off the page as if they were written in italics. Chasing such experiences is like an addictive drug for hard-core backpackers, which I certainly was in my younger and not-so-young-anymore days. The episode I am thinking about occurred in January, 1982, while…
When I travel in the developing world I pretty much jump at every tantalizing and slightly crazy opportunity that pops up. Cross the Sahara Desert on the back of local trucks in 1972? Hell yes! Ride the broken-down barge up the mighty Congo River in 1982? Absolutely! Climb up to and over the spectacular 5,540 meter (18,176 foot) Kongma La mountain pass in 2014 instead of taking the easier and less interesting route on the way to Everest Base Camp?…