Allis Ubbo, Olissipo, Olisipona, Al-Usbuma, Lixboa, Lisboa…each of these names for Lisbon represents a different period of occupation: Phoenicians, Romans, early Christians, Moors, later Christians, Pombaline. Entering NARC and millennia past And each period can…
“Wonderful, wonderful Copenhagen,” sang Hans Christian Andersen about the 19th century town in the old film. And he didn’t even see the modern Danish design and the sleek metro, as we did - returning to…
Forget the modern city of Copenhagen for a moment. Let its sleek trains transport you some 800 years back in time and into the countryside. Yes, the coffee shops, markets, and housing of Helsingør and…
Greenland is supposed to be the snowy icy sister to Iceland. Its ice sheet covers 80% of its huge land surface! And only 50,000 people reside along thousands of kilometers of coastline. For sure, each…
Our destination, Disko Bay, was spectacular, but the ferry journey to it along Greenland’s western coast was also memorable. The Journey: Ferrying from village to village Sarfaq Ittuk Ferry cabin Our mobile, floating home for…
Though preceded by others for millennia in mastering the challenges of Greenland, the Inuit and Norse arrived a thousand years ago with very different aims. The Norsemen (Vikings) As the Sagas tell us, in 982 AD,…
Why go to Guinea-Bissau, one of the poorest countries in Africa? Only freed from Portuguese control about 50 years ago, the country was then riven by civil wars and dictatorial rule. Signs of economic weakness…
The Gambia is a sliver of a country, essentially several hundred kilometers of the Gambian River, a ragged slice out of the middle of Senegal. Why, we wondered. We discovered that the British in the…
It’s a startling change to shift, within one day and one country, through a transition zone between the Sahel, the desert of northern Africa, and the sub-Saharan woodlands of central Africa. We moved from the…
We were fortunate to visit many tribal villages across Senegal, especially in the desert and dry savannah areas of the country before the rains. In them, we met with chieftains, elders male and female, as…