BCAA Travel Blog

Buffeted by the wind and bucking in our seats, we hang on tight as the speedboat pounds across the glittering, blue water. Our Fijian pilot, Joseph, decked out in a crimson baseball cap and black wraparound sunglasses, only slightly darker than his skin, turns and smiles and gestures toward the horizon. “Malolo,” he says. The dreamy contours of the green island, fringed with palm trees and white sand, lies dead ahead, smouldering in the tropical heat. It is Sunday morning and we are going to church.

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On March 5, 2008, the halls at the Vancouver Convention and Exhibition Centre reverberated with the sound of First Nations’ singing and drumming as the venue hosted the fifth Aboriginal Tourism Association of British Columbia (ATBC) awards gala. The musical entertainment, which spanned a variety of styles ranging from evocative traditional dance to a blazing interlude of Metis bluegrass, helped enliven the award presentations and acceptance speeches. The theme for this year’s event was “Taking Flight,” a fitting phrase for a fledgling industry that has just begun to spread its wings.

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A few months ago, I interviewed two guys from Regina named Jason Minvielle and Mike Vaughan, who had just competed in the Mongol Rally, a 16,000-kilometre race for junker cars that starts in London, England and ends in the Mongolian capital, Ulan Bator. Gamely chugging along in their 1993 Geo Metro, the intrepid duo motored through such remote Asian outposts as Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan. The last of these “Stans” was the definitely the weirdest. The former Soviet republic had been ruled for 21 years by a ruthless, egomaniacal tyrant named Saparmurat Niyazov, who had reshaped the country according to his eccentric whims.

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There are a lot of ways to see the world. For Mike Thrower and Ruby Altmann, the best vantage point is from the seat of a high-performance BMW motorcycle. The Calgary couple, who work as contract consultants for oil and gas engineering companies, began touring with their choppers in 2004, starting with one- and two-week road trips. They have since advanced to ambitious global expeditions. In 2006, they completed a six-month, 32,000-kilometre odyssey through the Middle East and Eastern Europe. That adventure took them to several places that cautious travelers would normally bypass, such as Egypt (where they narrowly avoided a terrorist bombing), Lebanon (where they almost got caught in the war between Hezbollah and Israel), and Yemen, a fundamentalist Islamic nation in which more than 100 foreigners have been kidnapped since the 1990s. Continue reading…

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Before abandoning the subject of African wildlife safaris, I want to make mention of a YouTube video entitled “Battle at Kruger,” which some have described as the best nature video ever shot. This rivetting, eight-minute piece of footage depicts a clash between a herd of Cape Buffalo, a pride of lions and a crocodile at a watering hole in Kruger National Park in South Africa. The video has drama, suspense and a twist ending with a lesson for everyone. Continue reading…

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“This is where the miracle happened,” says Mustafa. As we drive through the gates into Samburu National Reserve, our Kenyan guide relates the extraordinary story. In 2002, a solitary lioness at Samburu stunned onlookers by adopting a baby oryx, a type of antelope that lions normally feast on. Amazingly, she kept the calf by her side for naps, nuzzling it and defending it against predators, but allowing it to return to its mother for nursing. This went on for two weeks, until a male lion from another pride killed the calf while the lioness was sleeping. When the lioness awoke to find the dead oryx, she was enraged and roared at the predatory lion, circling him 10 times before she drove him away. She later adopted another oryx. After this one was rescued by park rangers, she continued to adopt other oryx calves, repeating the process six times over the span of a year, much to the delight of tourists and the bewilderment of wildlife biologists. The local Samburu tribe named the lioness Kamunyak, “the blessed one.” Continue reading…

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One thing quickly becomes evident about Kenya–it has excellent beer. I spend my first afternoon in Nairobi drinking Tuskers beside the Jacaranda Hotel’s swimming pool. This lager, which was said to be Ernest Hemingway’s favourite beer, is made Kenya Breweries, founded in 1922 by George and Charles Hurst. The company logo–a tusked elephant–honours the memory of George, who was killed in 1923 by a charging bull elephant. Every bottle bears the slogan “Bia Yangu, Nchi Yangu,” a Swahili phrase that means “My Beer, My Country.” Enjoying a cold Tusker is as much a part of East African tradition as going on safari, which I plan to do tomorrow.

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I landed at Nairobi’s Jomo Kenyatta International Airport in the early morning after a mind-bending 28 hours in transit. It was not the ideal way to start a two-week African wildlife safari, but I at least had a day to recuperate before we were supposed hit the road. Even though my bags were the last ones off the carousel, there was still a large, noisy crowd waiting outside the terminal doors.

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A friend of mine recently asked me if I could name the top tourist destination in the world. I had to admit that I didn’t know. A few possibilities came to mind: the Eiffel Tower, the Vatican, Disneyland. But these were merely guesses. So, I did a little online sleuthing and found that Forbes Traveler magazine tried to determine an answer to this very question a year ago. It compiled a ranking of the top 50 visited tourist attractions in the world. The results are quite surprising.

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I landed my first travel writing gig purely by accident. This was many years ago when a lot of things in my life were happening by accident. A writer friend of mine had been invited to participate in a fam trip to Hong Kong and Thailand, two destinations that I, as an impoverished freelancer, had never even considered visiting. I was so new to the game I didn’t even know what “fam trip” meant (it’s short for familiarization trip). Anyway, since he was unable to join the excursion, he nominated me to take his spot. What a stroke of luck. Continue reading…

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