Traveling to Africa is not about the animals, it's not about trinkets and it's not about getting double miles on your frequent flyer card. Its about meeting the people. Don't get me wrong, I adore all of the above, and I see them as benefits of spending time on the ground exchanging culture and diving in to a place face first and mouth wide open. I shot a beautiful impala on a game preserve, a thrill for me as an avid outdoorsman, and got to follow the culled animal all the way through the process of seeing every part of the creature being utilized for food, tools and clothing. Very impressive stuff, and at the same farm I saw a 5 day old giraffe eating with his mom and dad.
Continue Reading South Africa: Diving into Culture.
I get asked the same questions all the time. You can probably guess them yourself pretty accurately ...
What's the weirdest thing you ever ate?
What's the worst thing you ever ate?
Does your family eat such an adventurous diet?
Do you ever get sick on the road?
Do you really do all that stuff yourself, jump off mountains, swim with sharks, eat rotted foods, or is it ever faked?
And so on ...
Continue Reading Botswana: The Kalahari.
Belize sits on the fringe of modern life at the edges of a vast wilderness of ancient rituals and traditions, forests and villages where people today live comfortably with ghosts from a distant past ... a Mayan past, since Belize is one of the few South and Central American cultures to have never been colonized by the Spaniards.
Continue Reading Belize: On the Fringe.
In Cuba I did a lot of cool stuff, but none of it compared with what you didn't see on camera. Sure I took part in a Santeria purifying ceremony. I drove some of the 60,000 vintage American cars in Cuba, all pre-1959 when cars stopped being sent to the country. I dined in some amazing paladares, restaurants squeezed into family homes, part of the free enterprise legalized by Castro in the mid-1990s.
Continue Reading Visiting Cuba.
Welcome to the final blog and final episode of Bizarre Foods.* What a great choice for subject matter as well. Take one 240 pound, 47 year old, hypochondriacal Jewish New Yorker and drop him in a jungle for 48 hours and see if he doesn't die.
Continue Reading Survivor.