After reviewing well over 100 of the companies we have listed for Africa, African Safari Company stands out as a leader in the field. Besides the basic safari adventures it offers, the company also has several unique “specials:” “Ultimate Elephant Safari,” “Ultimate Southern Africa Birding Safari” and “Africa's Super Predators and Mammals” are just a...
Tour Host Review
Crow Canyon is a leader in archeological programs. Its main focus is the Pueblo Indians of the Four Corners region and its onsite research facilities foster understanding about the local Indians of today, as well as the past, providing conservation and preservation of the area’s historic sites. Crow Canyon has conducted two dozen archeological investigations in the Mesa Verde region, includi...
Host of the Month
Summer in Easter Island, 1,800 miles south of the Equator, hits its height in January and February. Its inhabitants celebrate the long days by putting on a pull-out-the-stops festival that includes everything from floats and beauty queens (some of them topless) to kids’ parades, dancing, singing, competitions and general merrymaking.
Surpr...
Festival Pick
Before 1976, when California cabernet sauvignons and chardonnays won a stunning victory in a blind tasting in Paris against the France’s premier wines, most U.S. wine drinkers looked to Europe for superlative wines.Besides the wines of Bordeaux, Burgundy, the Cotes du Rhone and Graves in France, knowledgeable American oenophiles also looked to Hungary’s Tokaji region, home to a distinc...
World Heritage Site
The Aztec warriors who faced Cortez’s musket-armed soldiers in 1519 must have created contrary impressions in their foes’ minds. Since landing at Vera Cruz and beginning their march inland to the Valley of Mexico, the Spanish had heard the Aztecs’ many rivals and vassals incessantly spinning tales of Aztec cruelty and arrogance. But whatever the Aztecs’ fa...
Museum Pick
1. Coming into Focus
In the 1830s, mountain man Jim Bridger bragged that in the Rocky Mountain region trappers called Yellowstone Country, he could begin his bath by jumping into a hot, steaming river, extend it by wading downstream to soap up in warm water, and then move further down to rinse and finish his ablutions in a tepid pool.
Bridger was a notorious bo...
National Park Pick
Yellowstone: The First National Park
Written By Patrick Totty Posted on Nature
In the 1830s, mountain man Jim Bridger bragged that in the Rocky Mountain region trappers called Yellowstone Country, he could begin his bath by jumping into a hot, steaming river, extend it by wading downstream to soap up in warm water, and then move further down to rinse and finish his ablutions in a tepid pool.
Bridger was a notorious boaster, liar and tall-tale teller, so folks back east tended to dismiss his stories as so much hot air about hot water.
But rumors about Yellowstone lingered, reinforced by the...
The letter writer says it as well as we could. When you cut out the middle man, you often wind up cutting off your own nose.
It’s no news that the airlines have a great antipathy toward travel agents. Especially after 9-11, when they began selling their tickets at fire-sale prices, airlines resented the idea of having to pay...
Earth’s furthest Polynesian outpost is a species-rich island off of Africa.In 1947, the Norwegian Thor Hyerdahl attempted to prove that the South Sea Islands had been settled over thousands of years by peoples traveling west on rafts from South America. Setting off from Peru on a reed craft built from the same material used by boat builders on Lake...
Thousands of years of history and hundreds of millions of man hours went into the preparation of this issue. Well, not the issue precisely, but its theme: the incredible megalithic statues and structures that the articles in this issue describe.From the first urban settlement at Turkey’s Catalhoyuk and the standing stones scattered throughout Great Britain, to Malta’s carved structures and the Incan wonders of Machu Picchu and Sacsayhuaman, we trace...
More Americans trace their heritage back to German Ancestry than any other nationality. Over seven million Germans have come to American shores through the years, and today some 60 million Americans (one out of four) are of German descent.
The greatest immigration from Germany was between 1830 and 1930. However, the very first Germans arrived in 1608 at Jamestown, Virginia. They were mostly craftsman and established the town together with English...
Malta had one traffic light in 1990 when I had my first encounter with the megalithic temples. I was a well-traveled visitor with a lot of curiosity about the "glimpses of a mysterious past" advertised in the tourist brochure. I expected to see stumpy foundations in an excavation trench. Not so! In those days they didn't tell you that they were writing...
Before the European colonial era, art among most sub-Saharan Africans was something people created as a matter of course. There were no self-aware, self-defined “artists” – people who did only art. Instead, people created masks, figurines and statues in the normal course of religious and daily life.
In some ways, African artisans were like the folk artists of New...
Summer in Easter Island, 1,800 miles south of the Equator, hits its height in January and February. Its inhabitants celebrate the long days by putting on a pull-out-the-stops festival that includes everything from floats and beauty queens (some of them topless) to kids’ parades, dancing, singing, competitions and general merrymaking.
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Yellowstone: The First National Park