A personal essay in the NY Times Escapes section on soaking in undeveloped, natural hot springs:

http://travel.nytimes.com/2009/03/20/travel/escapes/20Rituals.html

Iceland may be bankrupt, but at least there’s still pizza.

For the annals of food history, I give you – told now for the first time – the abbreviated story of how pizza first arrived in Iceland:

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2009/03/15/TRL815SDNC.DTL

I have a cover story in last Sunday’s NY Times Travel section about a wonderful cross-country train journey I took last month. I also shot the pictures - The Times has posted 35 of them online - and recorded passenger voices that the paper turned into a nice multimedia feature. Check it out:
http://travel.nytimes.com/2009/03/08/travel/08amtrak.html

I’ve posted many more photos of the spectacular coast-to-coast trip here:
http://www.worldwebeyes.com/Amtrak/index.html 

It was, simply, awesome.

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I have a pair of cover stories in this week’s San Francisco Chronicle Travel section on Suriname. I traveled there last year, and spent a month exploring various aspects of the country. I attended a Passover seder in Paramaribo, and an intertribal gathering of Amazonian shamans in a remote forest settlement near the Brazil border. (I wrote for Wired on Amazonian tribes in Suriname and Brazil using GPS and Google Earth to fight for land rights, and a piece on an innovative Western-traditional community healthcare project ran in Utne Reader). I spent a week with monkey researchers in a rainforest preserve and then flew into an isolated airstrip nearby a gold mining boom town near French Guiana.  Finally, I visited Maroon communities up the Suriname river.

Here are the Chronicle stories:

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2008/12/07/TRCR13EL21.DTL

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2008/12/07/TRCR13EL21.DTL

The Chicago Sun-Times on Sunday, November 16 ran my photo from the Obama home in Kenya as the entire front page of a special commemorative (and collectors) issue, which included a farewell letter from (Senator) Barack to the people of Illinois.

I just returned from a month-long trip to Kenya. watched and celebrated the election last week with the Obama Family, in Kenya. 

Barack’s victory reverberated into his ancestral home village of Kogelo at dawn local time, heralded by crowing roosters and then declared in chorus by members of his extended family who danced around their modest homestead, chanting in their tribal tongue, “Our son / has won! Our son / has won!”

Below are articles I filed for Slate and U.S. News and World Report (and the Chicago Sun-Times) on Obamamania in Kenya and what it now means to be an Obama in that country. But the stories say nothing about how blown my mind was last Wednesday, sitting in the homestead where Barack’s father and grandfather are buried, while his sisters, brothers and numerous relatives celebrated the unlikeliest of moments in their family’s history.   

In Dreams From My Father, Barack wrote about the impact of his first visit there, in 1988: “I saw that my life in America – the black life, the white life, the sense of abandonment I’d felt as a boy, the frustration and hope I’d witnessed in Chicago – all of it was connected with this small plot of earth an ocean away…. I felt the circle finally close.”

“That’s it, man,” Barack’s half brother Malik said to me. “Now we can walk around and feel free. Really free.”

As Barack delivered his acceptance speech in Chicago, digesting the steak his family had reportedly dined on earlier in the evening, his family in Kenya prepared to slaughter a bull. Later, as we sat together in plastic lawn chairs - watching elder women sashay to African beats and chop carrots, and villagers parade through the homestead shaking branches and chanting - his uncle Said told me: “It wasn’t until the speech that I realized what had happened, that we came to terms with what we knew was possible all along. What I saw was a man who could call attention to the world - who could say, ‘No, this is not how things should be, we should do it another way.’ Then I became deeply moved.”

Before I left the home and this sleepy village suddenly etched onto the world map, I talked with Auma, one of the sisters Barack acknowledged in the speech. “You heard what he said,” she told me. “He can’t do it alone. He needs you, too. This is your opportunity - take advantage of it. This is your time.”

-Andy

The U.S. Election/Obama visit was just one part of my month-long journey through many aspects of Kenya. For more pictures of Obamamania, of African wildlife, of multinational refugees living at the Kakuma Camp along the Sudan border and Turkana tribespeople inflicted with AIDS, check out the gallery here:
http://picasaweb.google.com/worldwideeyes/Kenya# 

Slate article: http://www.slate.com/id/2203232/

Frankly, upon hearing about “shark and stingray feeding” I imagined some Polynesian marine park where tourists dangle bait off the side of a boat while oooing and aaaing at a safe distance from the fearsome creatures. Shark and ray feeding in Bora Bora is nothing of the sort. At first the water color itself had me oooing, a seemingly artificial hue of pale blue so brilliant and with visibility so transparent that in the shallow water the floppy stingrays clearly appeared like freaky alien watercrafts gliding across the white sand. The boat anchored around them and my guide hopped out with a bucket of small dead fish. I followed, with snorkels on head. His tossed bait soon attracted a feeding frenzy: suddenly a dozen white gulls were flapping above us, while the ominous dorsal fins of as many prowling sharks clustered on the surface. The stingrays and schools of striped yellow fish circled in the midst. It was like being fully immersed in an aquarium exhibit, the glass wall nonexistent. Things then got even wilder. With bait in my hand, the fish and six-foot-long stingrays rushed into me – the sharks and birds disappeared - slimy bodies now all around, flopping, jostling, elevating high above the water, the rays’ ugly sucker mouths puckering up to my sunburned face. Apparently the creatures are habituated to visitors and unlikely to sting – good to know. The bombardment had me drunk on some cocktail of adrenaline and giddiness  – woahing and oh-my-goding, while also cursing and laughing, as if being harassed by bees while a puppy dog licked my face.