Travel Tales
Mr. Snuffy | Olaf’s Corner
This is an unreal tale about an unusual creature in a far-away jungle… About 25 years ago at my old travel company, a member of the sales department picked up a call from a potential client.
Good Nature Travel Blog
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Travel Tales
Andaman Encounters | Olaf’s Corner
Kayaking the Seven Seas has given me plenty of fantastic wildlife encounters to marvel at, but what floated some hundred feet in front of my boat in the Indian Ocean on that hot afternoon was simply extraordinary. It looked like a gray, wrinkled python, with bristly hair on its neck.
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Travel Tales
Thank You, Palau | Olaf’s Corner
With long flowing hair, a bronzed muscular body and dressed only in salty paddling shorts, my co-guide, Ron Leidich, lectured us with focused authority. The subject was wartime death and destruction in Pelileu, a tiny atoll in the small Pacific nation of Palau.
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Travel Tales
Paddling the Beauty in the Dark | Olaf’s Corner
The young Buddhist monk in a saffron-colored robe offered his blessings to me and my kayak. He wished us good luck on our journey through the big cave under the mountain. He then waved the village boys over to push our small group of adventurers off the beach.
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Travel Tales
Children: Our True Hope in Conservation | Olaf’s Corner
In these uncertain days of environmental onslaught of our planet’s wild places and species, I have a hard time looking into my own children’s eyes without some concern. I believe in my heart they will not experience the wonders of nature the same way I did as a kid.
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Travel Tales
A Lonely Grave on the Russian Frontier | Olaf’s Corner
Our small group of explorers stood quietly in a semicircle facing the crenelated black stone slab of an unassuming grave. The raised white Cyrillic letters read “Vitusi Beringi: 1681- 1741.” A slight offshore wind blew ripples from the lead-colored bay below across this final resting place of my Danish countryman and explorer Vitus Bering.
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Antarctica & Arctic
Salty Asterix of the Antarctic Seas | Olaf’s Corner
It was a dark and stormy night in the northern Antarctic Ocean… We were two days out of Port Stanley in the Falklands and the freezing wind ripped through the mast rigging.
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Travel Tales
Diesel—Dead Twice | Olaf’s Corner
It became impossible to keep the heavy sled straight on the newly frozen river. The 13 panting Greenland huskies in front of us repeatedly veered off to the side of the steep canyon, causing the heavy load to topple.
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Travel Tales
My World Travel Companion, Fred | Olaf’s Corner
There is an interesting photograph hanging in our hallway that reminds me of a very special traveling companion named Fred. The wooden-framed picture shows a little Buddhist boy crouched on a stone window sill of a house in Kathmandu, Nepal, wearing his dirty flip flops and simple street clothes.
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Nature & Wildlife
Biophilia: A Passionate Love for Nature | Olaf’s Corner
There is nothing more satisfying than when our travelers experience “that one magic animal encounter moment in the wild,” whether it is a few seconds of eye contact with the infinitely wise eyes of a wild silverback gorilla in the jungle foliage in Uganda, the leviathan blowhole smell of a humpback whale close-up from…
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Travel Tales
Majestic Mountains and the Death of a River | Olaf’s Corner
The Cordillera Andina is arguably the most impressive contiguous mountain range in the world, stretching 4,500 miles from the coastal plains of the Venezuelan Caribbean through Patagonia down to Cape Horn at the southern edge of the continent. The Andes is also the world’s highest-altitude mountain range outside of Asia.
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Travel Tales
Follow Your Kinski | Olaf’s Corner
My traveling buddy and I had just spent a horrible night north of the Guatemala border.