Drink it fast or drink it slow, your lips must touch the toe – Recited before entry into the club I carry only a few things in my wallet: a credit card, my drivers license and some of my frequent flyer cards. There is one other thing I carry with me. Something that I’m extremely …
I found myself in Tokyo without a place to stay. The hostel I was staying at was booked for the weekend and every other hostel I could find online in the Tokyo area was also booked. This was a condition I found during my entire stay in Japan. It didn’t make for very good seat …
With all due respect to Robert Fulghum, you can learn a lot more traveling than you can in kindergarten. Here are some of the things I learned from traveling around the world for five years: Be patient. You will experience flight delays, screwed up food orders and lost hotel reservations. Take it in stride. I …
Latitude: 13° 18.1922’ N Longitude: 16° 36.9651’ W The Gambia is the smallest non-island country in Africa. It is also one the rare countries which borders only one other country: Senegal. In fact, on a map, The Gambia looks like a finger being stuck down the throat of Senegal (if you don’t believe me, go …
Latitude: 8° 14.4182’ N Longitude: 13° 09.7768’ W For the first time on the trip, we woke up in the same place we were the day before: Freetown, Sierra Leone. We were supposed to be in Guinea-Bissau today, but for reasons only known to them, they would not let us land. So, to compensate for …
Latitude: 8° 25.1932’ N Longitude: 13° 12.38.52’ W I had no idea what to expect when I visited Sierra Leone. The only thing you hear about Sierra Leone was its civil war which took place in the 1990’s and the horrific crimes which were committed. Children being used as soldiers, amputation as a form of …
Latitude: Longitude: We had a very short trip between Accra and Takoradi, Ghana. Probably the shortest sailing we had since the trip began. It was also one of our shorter excursions on the trip, because we had to set sail early in order to get to Freetown in Sierra Leone in time. Our objective for …
Latitude: 5° 38.1051’ N Longitude: 0° 00.0001’ W Accra completed changed everything I thought about West Africa. Since we left Swakopmund, we’ve visited a series of very poor, developing countries. The levels of development differed, but there was a certain commonality they all shared in terms of infrastructure and sanitation. Accra is at a different …
Latitude: 6° 08.5126’ N Longitude: 1° 17.0908’ E In the last two updates I said that our next stop was going to be Cotonou, Benin. Togo is clearly not Benin. What happened was a classic case of West African bureaucracy and being able to adapt. Day 15 was actually Easter Sunday. Despite the fact that …