Africa

I'd planned a package trip with a friend, but when he canceled I made plans in Paris for a truck-tenting trip to the three major areas of Tanzania: the Serengeti, Ngorongoro Crater, and Lake Manyara. The Dutch group spoke English, but I had the advantages and disadvantages of being the only person in a two-person tent that I had to put up and take down daily. Slamming my wrist on a chair in the back of a truck gave me my first hint of arthritis. The trip ended in Arusha with a British group climbing Mt. Kilimanjaro, tough!

Two brothers and I met in Paris and flew to Tunis, where we shared rooms and bed-partners; I did some independent travel to the interior of Tunisia, and we had incredible meals in Puymirol, Eugenie-les-Bains, and Bordeaux in France.

A couple I'd met on the ship to Antarctica put together a 30-day Abercrombie and Kent 14-chartered-flight private-plane tour of South Africa, Botswana, Namibia, Zimbabwe, and Zambia. On my own I traveled around Johannesburg and got to Bophuthatswana. A very expensive trip.

Marine Expeditions in Canada, now defunct, offered a very inexpensive (like $3000 for 50 days) ship repositioning from the Antarctic to the Arctic: starting in Ushuaia, landing on three islands in the Falklands, South Georgia, Tristan da Cunha (passing Gough and Inaccessible), St. Helena, Ascension, Cape Verde, three islands in the Canaries, two islands of Madeira, and landing in London, from which I took the Channel Tunnel to Paris.

A friend found a cheap round-trip that started in London with the London Eye, the Millennium Exposition, and a great Art Deco exhibit at the Victoria and Albert Museum. Then we flew to the middle of the Indian Ocean for a very British Mauritius and a very French Reunion, with glorious surf.

The same friend as above wanted to see lemurs, and lemurs and aye-ayes we saw as we flew, mostly, to the extreme north, south, east, and west of this enormous, heavily populated, and hugely untouristed island.

The same friend, enchanted with a tour that took us into the original Lascaux and Altamira caves, engaged an expert on prehistoric Moroccan drawings and sculpture all around the country, almost hitting the border of Algeria. Though I'd been to many of the same cities 37 years ago, I'd forgotten lots.

The border between these two were closed when I'd gone to Tanzania 23 years earlier, but I was a fan of Isak Dinesen, enjoyed a balloon over the Masai Mara, and even returned to the Ngorongoro Crater, where we were held in place for about an hour by a pack of a dozen lions lying against our Land Rover. It was proven to me that repeat visits could be equally exciting.