Salkantay Trek to Machu Picchu (7-day)
Monday August 29, 2011 Starting point – Mollepata (9,544’) Ending point – Soraypampa (11,150’) Elevation gain – 1,606 feet Today we began our 7-day private…
National Pass / Overcliff / Undercliff / Den Fenella
About 1.5 hours (95 km) west of Sydney lie the Blue Mountains – New South Wales’ most iconic national park and a World Heritage-listed preserve. The Blue…
Mount Gower
Rising 875 meters (2,871 feet) from the southern shores of Lord Howe Island, the flat crown of Mount Gower dominates the island’s tropical landscape. The…
Kilimanjaro, Lemosho Route (8-day)
Sunday June 23, 2013 Starting point – Londorossi Gate (7,070’) Ending point – Mti Mkubwa (Big Tree) (9,186’) Distance – 4 miles Elevation gain –…
The Official Bird List
I started off with high hopes for a regular “Birders’ Digest” that would round up all of the mediocre-to-crappy-but-identifiable bird photos captured during our travels. That worked pretty well for our first few months, but once we hit Asia, it kind of fell apart. Lack of libraries and English field guides made self-identification difficult, and even if we managed, against all odds, to find an English-speaking bird expert, they may not know a useful English translation for the species. There…
Ireland
After a short week in London, we decided we’d spend the last bit of our journey touring around the U.K. and Ireland. It wasn’t something we’d initially planned, and we knew the weather might [finally] be a bit squirrelly, but we figured what the heck, right? I mean, we were right here. As with a large portion of our trip, we decided to scope out the ground transit to Ireland. It’s typically cheaper than flying, I’m (as we’ve already established)…
Bialowieza Forest
One of the highest items on my list of things to do during this trip was to visit one of the last swaths of primeval forest in Europe. The Bialowieza Forest consists of 548 square miles of designated UNESCO-protected forest, straddling the border of Poland and Belarus, with another 644 square miles of buffer zone to insulate the delicate ecosystem from the effects of encroaching human habitation. It is home to the largest population of free-roaming European Bison in the…
Amongst the Caves
Long before we embarked on our [potentially] year-long adventure, Jenn had stumbled across a company called Oxalis Adventure Tours that does caving expeditions in Vietnam’s Phong Nha-Ke Bang National Park. Oxalis has an exclusive license to operate in a number of caves in the area and runs small group sizes, ensuring a more private and personal experience. Phong Nha-Ke Bang National Park protects one of the largest and oldest limestone karst regions in the world, containing over 300 caves and…
Birders’ Digest – Vol. 6
Though we probably saw fewer colorful birds than we expected throughout Thailand, this was partly due to the intense heat and drought we were experiencing, which often drove the birds into deeper foliage. The one dedicated bird trip we did to Doi Inthanon was certainly fruitful, identifying over 50 species in a day. We kept on the move – more of a bird spotting trip than a bird photographing trip – but managed to capture a number on camera. As mentioned above, the…
Doi Inthanon National Park
We were beginning to discover that the national parks in Thailand were surprisingly difficult to visit independently. For one thing, traveling to the parks was often a multi-hour journey on aging roads that were frequently unmarked, and what signage existed was – shockingly – written in Thai. This was combined with the rather loose laws of the road that ensured travel of any distance would be a somewhat harrowing experience. Finally, when arriving at the parks, many of the trails…