The world is filled with people of all races, religions, colors, shapes and sizes. Today it’s almost impossible to find a country that doesn’t have several different groups of people within its populace. As geopolitical consolidation progresses, and formally autonomous regions band together, whether voluntarily or not, each society does its best to keep the traditions and values of its...
Tour Host Review
Since 1999, Dudley Parkinson has been taking travelers to West Africa, a region he knows well after 12 years in the Peace Corps, and exposing them to the cultural diversity and beauty of a region not overly familiar to the U. S. traveling public.
DreamWeaver Travel follows the main dictate of eco-tourism companies with the “do no harm” philosophy. The trips themselves allow the...
Host of the Month
People everywhere tend to stereotype the inhabitants of other countries when they think of them. It’s not a demeaning or racist practice so much as it is a natural human short cut. When people think of Italy, most of them imagine dark-haired people, forgetting the blond descendants of the Germanic Langobards (“long beards”) that form a substantial part of that country&rsquo...
Festival Pick
Outside of Antarctica, Australia is the oldest, driest and most climatically hostile continent on earth. That’s why there can be few more evocative experiences than a visit to Mungo National Park in western New South Wales, in the center of the Willandra Lakes region. Mungo, declared a World Heritage Site in 1981, is renowned for its spectacular “moonscape” scenery and its import...
World Heritage Site
The Cultured Traveler has been kind of sweet on San Diego lately (Cabrillo Festival July 2003; Reuben H. Fleet Science Center, Oct. 2003), and why not? As winter approaches, San Diego, with its very mild year-round climate becomes is one of those places that Canadians and Americans from cold-weather climes dream of spending some time in.
If you’re a railroad buff, a San Diego-area visit be...
Museum Pick
Sooner or later all discussions of national parks must lead to this place. Serengeti’s prodigious animal life, native peoples, vast area and varied topography create a variety that’s unmatched by any park on earth. This is the place almost everybody thinks of when the words “Afr...
Several years ago, on a solo trek in northern India, I was joined by an eight-year-old boy wearing a tattered red vest. He startled me with a phrase in perfect English:“Excuse me, sir, but what is your hobby?”Startled, I stammered a brief but no doubt incomprehensible reply about astrophotography. The lad took my gibberish in stride.“Very...
I never dreamed that one of my most vivid images of Sicily – a place whose food, culture, architecture and scenery had whetted my travel lust for years – would be a broom, and a gnarled broom at that.
On the way to our hotel in Taormina, an exotic village etched into the cliffs overlooking the Mediterranean Sea, we’d negotiated a series of hairpin turns. Embankments...
A gaggle of female figures spilt out of the well-worn white Toyota “troopie” as it come to a halt under the shade of a bloodwood tree in northern Australia. “Ugh, it’s like travelling in an abattoir” was one comment as all sucked in the warm morning air with its distinctive tropical savannah woodland flavours. The night before...
Take a stroll through downtown Beijing, Shanghai, Chongqing or even old Canton (now Guangzhou), and if you’re from New York, London or Rome, you may feel quite at home: Dior, Prada, Banana Republic boutiques are warmly lit through the evening hours while McDonalds, KFC and Hard Rock Cafes entice you to dinner. It’s great for the millions of tourists who are drawn each year...
There was intense competition for the senses as we sat inside the church in Tenejapa in the State of Chiapas, Mexico. The chant-like murmur of the faithful conversing with their individual saints laid a bass backdrop for the high-pitched tinkling of heavy medallions swinging from the bowed necks of the kneeling authorities. The glow from hundreds of candles ablaze on the floor rose up to...
In the cool and enfolding darkness, we trudged up the barren hillside just as the light from the full moon. Mama Quilla, was peaking her bright face over the horizon. We could see the lights in the valley below us, sparkling in the night as the people of Cuzco made busy with their evening’s activities.
The fresh night air helped us clear our minds of worldly concerns and prepare us for our important work that we were about to...
The world is filled with people of all races, religions, colors, shapes and sizes. Today it’s almost impossible to find a country that doesn’t have several different groups of people within its populace. As geopolitical consolidation progresses, and formally autonomous regions band together, whether voluntarily or not, each society does its best to keep the traditions and values of...
In a symbol-obsessed city that would have invented tea-leaf reading if the Chinese hadn’t beaten it to the punch, the Sept. 21 opening of the $219 million, 250,000-square-foot National Museum of the American Indian packs about as much symbolism as a body can take:
The museum’s location on a 4.25-acre site next to the National Air and Space...
How do you begin to explain the truly fabulous images found in prehistoric caves in the Lot and Dordogne regions of France? Why are only certain animals drawn and not others? What is the meaning of giant spotted horses and negative handprints?
The cave paintings that capture the general public's imagination most were made between 17,000 and 25,000 years ago by our...
People everywhere tend to stereotype the inhabitants of other countries when they think of them. It’s not a demeaning or racist practice so much as it is a natural human short cut. When people think of Italy, most of them imagine dark-haired people, forgetting the blond descendants of the Germanic Langobards (“long beards”) that form a...
Turbaned men late at night around a bed of coals, telling age-old jokes to muted laughter, waiting for the tea to boil... Seductive female voices raised to the beat of an old wooden drum, calling their men to "ride, ride like the wind, just for me”. . .Soft feminine curves of sand, raised up and sculpted by the wind's ceaseless breath. . . Starlit Saharan skies. . . Villages where little...
Omaramutu is on the east coast of New Zealand’s North Island, close to where the movie Whale Rider was filmed. I have been leading our 18-day trip to Fiji and my native New Zealand each February since 1999 and our stay at this marae, or Maori homeland, is a definite highlight. We are welcomed with warmth and ceremony, treated with generosity and kindness, and we leave as family. Repetition can...
Since 1999, Dudley Parkinson has been taking travelers to West Africa, a region he knows well after 12 years in the Peace Corps, and exposing them to the cultural diversity and beauty of a region not overly familiar to the U. S. traveling public.
DreamWeaver Travel follows the main dictate of eco-tourism companies with the “do no harm” philosophy. The trips themselves allow the traveler a great chance to interact with the natives in each destination....
I never dreamed that one of my most vivid images of Sicily – a place whose food, culture, architecture and scenery had whetted my travel lust for years – would be a broom, and a gnarled broom at that.