Another country, another city tour. Barbados was on the home stretch of the cruise and I went on a city tour that included a few historic stops. The cruise terminal has some nice beaches within walking distance and some quiet parks as well that were perfect for a few discreet drone flights. Another uneventful stop:
Reaching the Pitons in St Lucia entails traveling over and through some hilly terrain along the coast for a couple of hours. The journey is mildly stomach-churning, but I had a good driver that made it pretty tolerable. Also, the views of the coast were gorgeous and made the time go by pretty quickly. Close […]
Riding around in a bus with some complimentary booze… well, that was kind of the day in Antigua. There’s some interesting history with the Yacht Club there with rich people coming to try and outdo each other every year. Antigua is probably even prettier than the last two stops. Gorgeous from land and from the […]
Even with a post utterly lacking in content, I feel like I get stalled just trying to throw together a title. That’s my starting point on this thing… Trying to catch up with at least one post per country is pretty challenging with these quick little ports of call. St Kitts was another lush jungle […]
A few suggestions for proper “River Tubing”: minimum water depth of 12 inches, water should be actually flowing, river debris should be minimal. None of these things were true for the tubing on offer in Dominica… so you had this brigade of local dudes shoving this gaggle of sunburned dizzy tourists, flipping them over into […]
Like most of the ports of call on this cruise, St. Martin still has a lot of damage from recent hurricanes. Specifically, a well-known “clothing-optional” beach, “Orient Beach” was pretty much leveled in a storm the prior year and was being reconstructed. That didn’t stop a few determined beachgoers, but for the most part the […]
A leisurely stroll can be had in Road Town, but you’re gonna be making your way through traffic, construction, and debris from recent hurricanes. This third stop on the two-week cruise was in the British Virgin Islands. The place is pretty hectic near the port. Regardless, I still found it worthwhile to spend an afternoon […]
The web analytics don’t lie. Nobody cares about beautiful pictures of comfortable travel. Aspirational vistas of pristine beaches and the imaginary lives lived on them make for very poor click bait. People click on danger, on suffering. That’s a fact. So what the hell am I supposed to do with a bunch of pictures from […]
This was not the usual type of trip, and the blog entries will likely reflect that. I spent a couple weeks on a Caribbean cruise, visiting eight new countries and four territories. I booked with MSC, an Italian cruise line with some very different ports of call from the American lines. To my knowledge, this […]
Sudan capped off a tour of the horn of Africa that was full of misplaced assumptions before visiting. We’d figured Addis Ababa would be without issues. We thought Eritrea would be a repressive and unpleasant place to visit. We thought Somaliland might feel somewhat unsafe. With Sudan, well, we actually thought this might be the […]
No trip to Africa would be complete without at least one missed or cancelled flight. Most of our regional flights here have been on Ethiopian airlines, bringing us between Ethiopia and Eritrea, Somaliland, and Sudan. One exception was the hop from Somaliland to Djibouti. Months ago, planning our itinerary, I knew that two local carriers, […]
Kurdistan is a a geopolitical region in the north of Iraq, as well as several other neighboring countries. It has some of the cultural distinctions of a country, but it is most definitely not a country. Another distinction of Kurdistan, specifically Iraqi Kurdistan, is that it’s the safest region of the country. In the north […]
There isn’t an award for the hardest visa to acquire. It’s a subjective call that people are going to rank differently. But any list of difficult countries to visit would be incomplete without including Eritrea. Referred to by some as the “North Korea of Africa”, Eritrea has strict rules about who can visit and where, […]
Ethiopia is the first stop on our tour of northeast Africa. We had three nights booked in Addis Ababa and no organized plan ahead of time. All the other stops on this trip required fairly extensive visa applications and organized tour planning and Ethiopia was basically just left over. Looking at the stuff people do […]
We finished our quick little South American tour in the same place we started, Buenos Aires. Like Peru, and maybe even moreso, we know this is a place we’ll be returning to. It’s a major hub that will bring us to some of the other places in the region that we want to visit further. […]