We weren’t going to tip over, at least I didn’t think so. But when our “guide” clonked out and bounced onto the rubber floor our raft of four plus him started twirling in the fizzy white water like an alka seltzer dissolving in a glass.
This was my first time on Nepal’s Rapti river and my rafting experience was very limited, although fortunately on a few rivers in Alaska that seemed as cold and wild as this one. But I was no paddle captain. Thank goodness that the other two rafts – both behind us – seemed OK. Until we saw in the distance what we had been looking for, but what was now suddenly a mortal threat:
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Now few believe in the power of language that I do, and Manvar Singh’s excellent time line of the word “indigenous” developing from the 16th Century into various versions including Maasai anagrams is almost fascinating. But what does it really have to do with the Maasai being kicked out of Loliondo?
Tired but infuriated I watched the House Havoc to its end. Then just as my brain sensed a wee bit of insight a client sent me the Times’ 
I don’t like crowds… of people, that is. I take my rovers into tens of thousands of wildebeest, sometimes hundreds of thousands. My cars are often the only ones in view.
Out there in the milky skies of a not-so-distant horizon I see the first sparkles of a mammoth explosion rising up from the yet slimy volcanoes just below ground: the travel bubble bursting.
If you’re planning to take an airplane sometime in the next month or two… well, consider driving… or swimming … or just using your xBox. I didn’t mention trains, because in London anyway, they’re on strike.
I think the world’s economic and social systems are collapsing. That probably doesn’t surprise you as an off-the-cuff remark, sarcasm probably cast out not too seriously.
Things aren’t 
I was supposed to be in Paris with my wife celebrating our 50th anniversary. I’m in Dublin where I’ll be writing more about this interesting, unexpected journey due to Covid in later days. But today I just gotta write about Marriott!
Six dollar-a-gallon is less painful than radiation burns. Devil in the details, of course, so celebration of America’s “ban of Russian oil” should be suspended until all the details are known. But my African friends think my ardent support for this is hypocritical. One of my favorite commentators, Joy Reid of MSNBC, last night echoed that sentiment. They’re all wrong.
As this (hopefully last) phase of the pandemic ends the tourism that’s left standing in the fields of Africa is fit for a king. In fact only kings. A safari post-pandemic will cost you twice what it was pre-pandemic.
Travelers’ frustrations are growing. … What a stupidly simplistic statement: everybody’s frustrations are growing. But I’m talking about travel and I’m about to scold you if you travel.
If Boris Johnson hadn’t closed down his country and if scientists were organized well enough to give us a quick determination that the disease caused by Omicron is – as claimed by the South African Chief Medical Officer – mild, and/or that existing vaccines offer as much or better protection against Omicron than the flu vaccine does for the flu… the world would be in a much better place, today.