Category: Nature
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Happy Halloween: How to Visit Yucatán’s Incredible Bat Tornado (Volcano).
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It’s Halloween, Day of the Dead, and (tomorrow) Día de los Muertos. All over Mexico (and even many other parts of the world), Catrinas (those delightful white skull faces, often elaborately colored and bejeweled) appear, the candy baskets are filled, costumes are worn. In so many ways Halloween is my…
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Chasing Aurora Borealis: Experiencing Ethereal Beauty of the Northern Lights
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My entire life I’ve longed (who hasn’t?) to see the Aurora Borealis. I even named a character in a novel “Aurora” initially, until other fictional needs required the imagery to change to something else. Growing up on Cape Cod I always thought of them as a treat reserved only for…
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Unbelievable, Otherworldly: Photographing a Total Eclipse of the Sun
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I’ve been lucky enough to see several partial solar eclipses in my lifetime, and lunar eclipses as well. But nothing prepared me for how otherworldly the total eclipse of April 8th was, and in some ways, I’m still processing it. It took a lot of planning to get there, and…
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Incredible Iguazú: What Everyone Should Know in 2024.
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Of all the places I’ve been, those with waterfalls impress me the most. I think one day, science will prove that there’s verifiable therapy when water rushes down through space to splash on rocks. Air ionization or something. Whether its a lone ribbon of spray cascading down a jungle cliff…
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Tikal’s Sunrise Tour: Is it Worth It? Know Before You Go.
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Tikal, the incredible Maya city buried deep in central Guatemala is almost as shrouded in mystery today as it was when it was first rediscovered after being reclaimed by the jungle centuries after it was abandoned by the enigmatic culture who lived there: the Maya. Why they left, why their…
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Whale Watching on Cape Cod: What Everyone Should Know
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I’ve been whale watching more than 50 times. Watching these gentle giants is one of the world’s best kept secrets, something many people young and old dream about adding to their bucket list. Keep reading for some of the most important things anyone interested in whale watching should know. 1.…
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Do You Know When to Eat Oysters?
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In truth, there’s never a bad time to eat oysters, and by “oysters” I’m not talking fried, poached, or broiled. I’m talking those salty, delectable morsels served up on the half shell, plain or with lemon or with cocktail sauce. Few treats are as delectable. Legend says they’re not just…
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Orangutans in Borneo (Kalimantan)
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Camp Leakey and the Rimba Lodge Everyone remembers where they were when Covid hit. In my case, I was in the forests of Borneo, the Indonesian section, known as Kalimantan. I’d wanted to go there since college, when I read Eric Hansen’s fascinating account, Stranger in the Forest: On Foot…
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Kawah Ijen: Indonesia’s Crater of Blue Fire
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last year, when as (bad) luck would have it, the day I landed in Surabaya, Kawah Ijen crater erupted, spewing toxic fumes so intense they killed the entire riparian ecosystem in and around the crater. Officials closed it to all human entry (not even the sulfur miners were allowed to…
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Dancing with Dragons: A Visit to Komodo Island
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Few things in my childhood filled me with awe as the Komodo dragon, the largest lizard on the planet. While it does not breathe fire, its bite is so fetid that the animal’s primary hunting method is just to waylay its prey, bite it, and wait for it to die…