Published Articles
Wildlife watching is said to represent 80 percent of the total annual sales of African trips, and the African safari business is a $34 billion industry. Malawi is primed to become one of sub-Saharan Africa’s top destinations, with publications like Forbes and Vogue calling the small country one of their 2018 travel hotspots.
Stories play many important roles. They bring people together but are more than tools of connectivity: they convey information, educate and influence, entertain, preserve traditions and values. Stories bridge gaps in culture, language, age and education—and because stories give context to information while stirring emotions, they allow tellers and listeners the chance to mull over the world and their place in it.
Barasinghas are special; males are adorned with enviable horns — the animal’s name means ‘12-horned’ in Hindi, although some antlers possess 15 points. More importantly, the southern subspecies only lives in Kanha. Barasinghas nearly became extinct in the 1960s, but conservation efforts brought them back from the brink.
There sits my new favourite bird, the Indian roller, and in my viewfinder are two of the cream-and-blue beauties. They’re standing together but moving apart: one extends its head backwards, as if to laugh, while the other pushes its breast forward. They’re enacting a mating dance and I’ve never seen rollers, nor any bird like them, conduct such an intimate ritual.
We continued hiking upward. The higher we climbed, the closer we came to those ominous clouds, now enveloping the sky. I was only fourteen—and a wispy sliver of a girl—but I never let age nor size get in my way. “Loren,” I shouted, “The storm’s coming. Shouldn’t we go back now?”
Many people feel an attachment to their childhood homes, but Chinese entrepreneur and philanthropist Ma Dadong took that nostalgia to new heights by rescuing his entire native village—and transforming it into the new Amanyangyun resort. Ma’s ambitious preservation project began in 2002, when he learned that an impending reservoir construction project in Jiangxi province was threatening his hometown, Fuzhou, and its Story Millie Kerr It Takes a Village For the designers of China’s new Aman resort, there’s no place like Ma Dadong’s home.
The helicopter vibrates wildly as I scan South Africa’s Phinda Private Game Reserve for elephants. I spot a bull dashing through a cluster of trees, but when I alert the pilot and conservationist sitting in front of me, they tell me he’s not one of the elephants we’re looking for. We’re trying to locate a herd, and one female in particular; the battery in her radio collar is about to run out, so the conservationists need to replace it as soon as possible.
Thomas Hildebrandt first saw the inside of an elephant in 1990. With the mammoth carcass laid across his lab bench at the Leibniz Institute in Berlin, where the German veterinary student was working that summer, he pondered his thesis on using human-fertility techniques to save endangered wildlife. Hildebrandt, then 27, was taken aback by the mammal’s bizarre reproductive tract. The passage was 10 feet long and concealed by a folded vaginal opening as narrow as a sunflower seed.
People have been telling stories since before Homo sapiens mastered language, and, whether we realize it or not, we hear and tell stories every day. Stories come in a variety of shapes and sizes but are bound by their ability to help us understand the world and our place in it. Since they deliver emotional impacts, stories have the power to cause people to change their minds.
"The redesign champions the small African animals tourists often overlook when they go out looking for the big five,” says Geordi de Sousa Costa, design director of Cecile & Boyd.
As self-care or 'prescription' holidays quickly become a rising wellbeing trend for 2018, travel writer Millie Kerr shares her advice on why a countryside cottage is the perfect place to start...
Ever since I was little, I've fantasised about living alone in a country cottage. There would be a fire crackling through the night, a dog and cat at my feet, and stacks of books beside my quilted bed. But for a London resident like me — a person who's half countryside introvert, half urban extrovert — the fantasy never became a reality.
Our ancestors foraged nearly all of their food, but hunting and gathering fell by the wayside with agricultural revolutions. Yet in the last decade, foraging has made a comeback. It initially seemed like a passing foodie trend led by Copenhagen's Noma, but a steady rise in foraging experts and courses in the UK tells a different story.
Cold beer, hotdogs, fireworks and flags. There’s nothing as American as the Fourth of July, the country’s annual celebration of its independence from the British Empire in 1776. Most places mark the occasion with the Star Spangled Banner and red, white and blue fireworks streaming across the night sky, but a small Rhode Island town devotes three weeks to the occasion.
After 146 years of operation, Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey is closing its circus, citing dwindling ticket sales. That decline in business reflects a growing sentiment among Americans that circus-style shows involve inappropriate, if not inhumane, treatment of animals, says Julia Gallucci, a primatologist who works with People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA).
Several owl species sit tied to a makeshift wooden perch as a TV plays a loud, animated owl-themed film behind them in the dimly lit room. This is Tokyo’s Forest of Owl cafe, filled with locals and snap-happy tourists even on a weekday morning, and as the countdown to 2017 begins, its resident owls will be petted and photographed by more Japanese customers than usual as people seek good fortune for the New Year.
I directed and produced this short video featuring my Cambridge master's in conservation leadership classmates sharing what drew them to conservation, what conservation means to them, and where they think our planet will be 50 years from now. This piece dovetails with a series I developed several years ago, Conservation Calling, whose teaser lives here.
Wildlife crime is putting thousands of species at risk of extinction to feed a growing human demand for food, pets, medicine, and status symbols. Led by international crime syndicates that move animals and products through black markets, illegal trafficking is an industry that’s worth up to $150 billion each year.
In Letting Go, 30 authors from 7 countries write about their attempts to move beyond hindrances that include grief, abusive relationships, and, in my case, haunting memories of the farm my family once owned on the outskirts of San Antonio. For me, places house memories, opportunities, and the loved ones I've lost whom I imagine still inhabit the places where we came together.
The country that transfixed Blixen and Hemingway continues to attract travelers looking for the Big Five and more. Whether witnessing the Great Migration, touring Rift Valley lakes, or visiting wildlife conservancies in the country’s north, travelers experience a modern-day Kenya inextricably linked to its legendary past.