Capturing the Moment

I always tell people who are interested in coming to Africa that South Africa is a good, easy place to start. Cape Town is a like little Europe, and the whole country has wonderful animal parks with easy roads and great infrastructure. Kenya on the other hand has pot hole filled roads, layers of fine dust that gets into everything, and corruption in the government which leads to the bad infrastructure. However, Kenya provides something that countries in Southern Africa don’t quite have, that wild Africa feeling where the animals still rule. The beauty of the wild animals, the incredible views like the endless savannas, the rift valley, and volcanic geology, and also amazingly nice people are what make Kenya so special. Over the last few days we have driven through herds of zebra and wildebeest in the savanna, we sipped a cold coke out of a glass bottle while overlooking the rift valley, but the most memorable things have been our interactions with people in different communitie...

Acacia Camp Dining Room Friendly Eland Baseball4Africa season 10 has started here in Kenya. Jim, Jack, and I spent the first day at a quaint hideaway on the edge of the African savanna wildlands called Acacia Camp. Accommodations were rustic, highlighted by ants covering the toilet, but the meals were plentiful, and animals strolled through the grounds. We dove into the 400lbs of baseball equipment brought by the three of us and divide it up so each new team would have a full bag of equipment. It always amazes me to see how much equipment is needed for this sport; helmets, bats, balls, gloves, uniforms, and catchers gear. We also had to piece together the dismantled trophies which proved difficult at first. We also took a couple of nice long walks into the savanna to see some of the local wildlife. The usual suspects of zebras, giraffes, wildebeest, a gazelles all made appearances as well as a rare sighting on foot of fringe-eared oryxs and some skittish wart hogs. I was...

Low Clouds and Sunrise over the Bluff Isle of Hope Frame Whenever I get back to Savannah I always try to take in a sunrise over the marsh from Bluff Drive on Isle of Hope. I have scored some of my favorite sunrise photographs from the vantage. Today I was lucky again, with beautiful sunrise colors bouncing off the low lying clouds and then reflected in the flat calm water.   Savannah is one of those places that gets prettier and prettier everyone time you visit. It happened again this trip. The iconic bluff drive on Isle of Hope

  Alaska Summer: A Look Back   I had always thought if I went on a cruise it would be to Alaska. It just seems that so many things can be seen by ship in Alaska; glaciers, whales, birds, and waterfalls tumbling out of the forest. Little did I know until a month before that I would be moving to Alaska to live and work aboard a small adventure cruise ship called the Wilderness Explorer. Halfway through my first interview with Un-Cruise they shifted my job focus from expedition guide to expedition leader. It turned out to be a challenging, but amazing job. As expedition leader I was in charge of coming up with the itinerary each week, as well as what adventures we would do there, when the adventures would go out and who would go on them. I had a wonderful staff of guides who I also managed. Not only did I have to come up and manage the schedule but I also had to figure out how to keep everyone up-to-date about upcoming activities. Something I quickly realized is that I co...

Aurora borealis Aurora near Juneau, Alaska The Aurora borealis in all of its glory showed up on my very last night in Alaska. I was wrapping up a wonderful week-long trip including bears, humpbacks, calving glaciers, and ice gardens, but it seemed that Alaska wanted to send me out with a bang.   Around 12:30am our deckhand woke me up with the message of Northern Lights. As the expedition leader I am who gets to wake up and make the call to either wake up all of the passengers if its good, or let them sleep if its not. Either way it usually means a long night. So I put on some warm clothes, splashed some water on my face, and walked up on deck to a very mediocre show of the Northern Lights. But it was good enough so I made the announcement for people to get up and outside. As the passengers started trickling sleepily out of the cabins the lights dimmed a bit, but then to my great pleasure they came back with a vengeance. They became started dancing across the sky, almost li...

Stranded Berg   My last week in Alaska was a big one, including hunting bears, northern lights, and a trip into Glacier Bay National Park. The schedule that I came up with for the week was a little rigorous, taking us to six glaciers over the course of two days to maximize our chance of seeing calving and for different glacier activities. We first woke up at the beautiful Margerie Glacier and the almost all black face of the Grand Pacific Glacier. Little chunks were falling off but the real calving show came from the huge Johns Hopkins Glacier were we went next. Walking Amongst the Ice Fun with the Polar Plunge Dan exploring Lamplugh Glacier   After the amazing calving experience at Johns Hopkins we headed off to Lamplugh Glacier for some good ol' fashioned polar plunge fun into the icy waters. Feeling alive and refreshed from the sub 40 degree water we filled up on lunch and then headed out for hikes, shorewalks, kayaks, and skiff tours around the glacier. ...