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These two poems were written and read to us by our fantastic guide on two successive mornings in the Mount Hagen area of PNG. By MW = Michael Moge Agilca Kundumb Keping Wandau (Or Michael of the Moge tribe, Agilca clan, Kundumb sub-clan, Wandau Keping family) Day (1) in Kange Country White clouds of fog […]

(Reis) We pulled into a muddy lot in the Middle of Nowhere in the Papua New Guinean Highlands. We climbed out of our private Public Motorized Vehicle (ironic, huh?), and nimbly stepped through the mud to a set of rundown grass/mud/stone stairs. We climbed with great care, not wanting to slip and fall. We entered […]

(Greg) We have been on the road for almost a year, putting ourselves into the middle of some of the wildest, most untouched places on Earth. We are pretty salty veterans, so I thought it unlikely that we would be wide-mouthed and pie-eyed by anyplace or any people again. Then we came to the Sepik […]

My daughters are looking at pictures they just took of young kids in a river village. While laughing proudly at their work, they sing a song they made up about Pho, a Vietnamese noodle soup, sung to the tune of Shoshaloza, a popular South African song. I am writhing on a small bed in that […]

(Dana) In the 1970s, littering was an epidemic in the US. Discarded food wrappers everywhere. Automobile passangers routinely tossed garbage onto anonymous forests and fields as they zipped past. Those who tossed didn’t see it land, so it didn’t exist anymore. Right? Then came what must have been one of the most influential public service […]

(Greg/Dana) “You’re not bringing the kids there, are you?” our great friend Ruth Sherman asked as she gently warned us about Bhutan when we discussed our draft itinerary with her a few years ago. She had been here but even her first hand experience and soft admonition did not deter us from our plan. Now, […]

(Andrew)  The Kingdom of Bhutan is a beautiful, land-locked Himalayan country of 700,000 people bordered by China/Tibet, India and Nepal.  It is primarily a rural country; its three largest cities are the capital of Thimphu 80,000 people; Paro (where the international airport is) 8,000; and Bumthang 6,000. Bhutan is a subtle country and you have […]

(Dana) No way.  I can’t imagine.  Subjugates women.  Not for me.  These are just some of the thoughts that I – and probably most of my female friends – would have voiced about arranged marriages.  But spending time in the villages of India has given me an appreciation of why 99% of marriages in this […]

(Greg) A tigress and her two cubs wait, thirsty, to cross a road inside a reserve while local pilgrims trek to and from a temple inside that same reserve. The tigress and her cubs are forced to wait, getting thirstier and more desperate. At dusk, 6 rambunctious, drunk young men coming rolling down the mountain […]

(Reis) While in the hills of the Indian Himalayas, we were exposed and introduced to a whole new culture. But one of the things we have learned is that you have to think like the culture, to understand and feel it. So of course, the 6explorers did just that. The Kumaoni culture lives in the […]