By Kevin Dimetres The feeling was unfamiliar. Alone, I sat on the splintered wooden bench while the passersby sized me up with skeptical curiosity. Their skin glistened with sweat, accentuating the slash marks lacing both sides of their faces. The slash marks had been deliberately crafted into their visage, haunting me with wonder. Images of […]

By James Michael Dorsey Stories have always come to me in Africa.  I can’t say if it’s the taste, the smells, or the sheer antiquity of the land; or maybe it’s just the sense of belonging I have while I am there, but the words always come. Because it is a continent lacking in written […]

By Felice Neals She travels an ancient road in Spain and discovers the value of solitude. Somewhere in the north of Spain, surrounded by a glorious, yet unfamiliar landscape, I began to notice my solitude. The steeples of Santiago had long faded into the vibrant glow of early afternoon; and yards of green grass and […]

By Steven Law When things go wrong during a Grand Canyon rafting trip, the author’s friends are there to set things right. About 260 million years ago, massive aeolian winds blew with enough ferocity to carry sand from the far-distant north and deposit it in large dunes, 500 feet deep, in what is now northern […]

By Biju Sukumaran Saline solution pools on my palm, magnifying the dust and specks of camel hair in my contacts, and cleaning them is now an almost futile gesture. But this was the least of my worries as I sit in my ger in the middle of the Gobi Desert, where our driver had pulled […]

By Pam Mandel He was tall and good looking and had attended an expensive prep school where he learned to talk pretty. He liked dancing to pop music and drinking beer and traveling. His father wanted him to be a real estate agent; he was not interested in a desk job. He was sarcastic and […]

By Anna Elkins The citywide siren filled every corner of the house—a house in Tel Aviv without a bomb shelter. During one of the siren’s low levels, I heard Tsach’s voice from the garden, “Anna, come and see.” Barefoot, I ran down the aloe-lined brick walk and came to stand next to him. In the […]

By Taylor Jennings Crossing ethnic lines to find a notorious guerrilla leader. It was early March 1999 when Ilir, my young interpreter, and I set out from Pristina in a battered Lada cast off by some other East bloc nation to find a man known only by his nom de guerre: Gjarperi, the Snake. I […]

By Laura Lee Huttenbach An unprepared trek up Mt. Kilimanjaro turns into an adventure of a lifetime. “If you ever make it home from Africa alive, I’m going to kill you myself,” said my mom. She wasn’t happy with my decision to climb Mt. Kilimanjaro without an oxygen supply. “But Mom,” I said, “it was […]

By James Dorsey From the back of a camel the Sahara seemed endless; an infinite sea of low rolling dunes baked by a swirling sun that would be at home in a Van Gogh painting. For one month I had been immersed in Berber Tuareg culture, traveling through Mali, as one of the famed blue […]