The falls’ indigenous name, Mosi-oa-Tunya, means “the smoke that thunders”. And indeed, it roars, it throws up spray, it crashes and it swirls – Victoria Falls is an overwhelming sight, twice the height of Niagara Falls. So spectacular, in fact, that it already was a popular tourist attraction in 1905, when the railway from then-Rhodesia to Cape Town was completed under British colonial rule. Now a World Heritage Site, Victoria Falls attracts hundreds of thousands of visitors every year, some content to simply take in the natural wonder, others, like me, daring (or brainless) enough to bungee jump over the gorges, too.

While in Zambia on a work assignment, I took the first opportunity to escape from the dreary capital, Lusaka, and visit Victoria Falls, which are a six-hour bus ride away through flat, dry savannah. In fact, African public transportation schedules being what they are (“when it is full o’clock” is as close as it gets to a departure time), it took me and my friend Leila most of our Saturday to reach the characterless town of Livingstone, then the park.

We first heard the low rumble. Then we came across the life-size statue of David Livingstone, the Scottish explorer of Doctor-Livingstone-I-presume fame. As the first European to have seen the falls in the mid-19th century, he named them in honor of his monarch, Queen Victoria. A little further down the path, we caught our first glimpse of the cataracts. Stretching as far as the eye could see, curtains of furious white water tumbled down, divided by the rocks jutting from the crest of the falls. A massive cloud of spray rose from the gorge, hiding the depths of the chasm.

As we walked down the path that paralleled the falls and led to a narrow footbridge spanning the gorge, we noticed that all the people coming in our direction were soaked. Continuing beneath the protection of the trees, we began to feel fine drops, which, once on the bridge, turned into a literal upside-down rain, so thick was the spray. “Hence the clever stand renting out raincoats back there!” shouted Leila, as she started to run towards the other end. But the sun playing on the drizzle had created a beautiful rainbow, a sharp circle leaping over the walkway and plunging into the gorge. Later, as the sun descended over the far side of the falls, the light turned the haze into a golden cloud.

The next day, we made our way to the bungee jumping center on Victoria Bridge, which spans the second gorge a few hundred meters downstream, linking Zambia with Zimbabwe. As we reached the entrance, 120 meters above the rocks and rapids of the Zambezi way below, my knees went weak. How could my so-called friend have talked me into hurling myself off that bridge?

Feeling hollow inside, I trudged to the jumping platform, amid the traffic of indifferent African women carrying bundles on their heads. As the instructors strapped my gear on, they directed a steady stream of chatter at their (idiotically consenting) “victim”, to distract me from what was coming. I had picked the gorge swing, so I was to step off the structure, not drop headfirst. “Look straight ahead, not down, and when we count to three, just walk,” they told me.

One-two-three, the solid ground underfoot gone, a startled cry of surprise, a few endless, terrifying seconds of free fall, then I was swinging silently in the peaceful morning air, suspended alone above boiling green waters, far from the crowds of onlookers way above. Once I had been hoisted back onto the bridge, I felt relieved to have gone first.

My friend was almost in tears as the instructors gently pushed her into the void. She screamed all the way down. Bounced up. Fell again, still screaming. Later, she swore that she would “never again” perform such a jump, but it was too late – we had both earned our bragging rights in one of the world’s most amazing natural sites.

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Known in backpacker circles as a great, cheap place to get your scuba diving certification, Utila offers little more to do, but plenty to enjoy. Like the other Bay Islands, Utila is reached by a short ferry ride from the mainland coastal city of La Ceiba. Unlike the rest of Honduras, English is more widely spoken than Spanish, and the native inhabitants are primarily Garifuna, descendants of Black Caribs, giving it a much different feel than the rest of the country. Tourism has become the primary source of income, and Honduras recently made Utila a tax-free zone to encourage its further development, as well as standardizing scuba diving rates (read this as get there now before it gets overdeveloped).

Arriving at the docks is a mellow affair, with few or no hawkers, so take your time walking the several blocks of accommodations and dive shops before choosing. The main road goes in both directions along the coast as well as going straight ahead to the uninhabited North side of the island, where the road literally just ends at an empty beach. Most people come for the diving, and there are several places that offer free dives, dive courses and accommodation. We stayed at Cross Creek, one of the larger hotels and dive centers, and signed up for the beginning PADI dive certification course.

Like most inexpensive dive centers, Cross Creek is a magnet for traveling young people from around the world, either learning to dive, or master divers plying their trade. We stayed in the clean and sparse hotel, which was a single row of small rooms with fans and small beds, fronted by an open terrace perfect for hanging hammocks and lounging. There is a restaurant and bar on site, which the dive masters are required to work at to earn their keep, but often was not open. The dive course involves classroom training a couple hours each evening, and diving from about 6 to 1 each morning, including quite of bit of prep time getting the gear ready and cleaning it when you return. The remainder of the time we were free to explore the island, although often exhausted from the rigors of diving.

Utila was hot, really hot, probably the hottest place I had ever been to that point. By the end of the first day, I was walking everywhere shirtless and had given up trying to protect against the sand fly bites that now covered my body. The heat is really what creates the slowness of island life though, and you can’t really have one without the other. A siesta is normally taken in the midday, as it’s really too hot to do anything and much of the activity is in the relatively cooler mornings and evenings.

Fresh seafood and simple ingredients are the staples of the food on Utila. Most of the restaurants are single person affairs, ranging from a person’s home to a slightly larger restaurant with several tables. At some of the smaller places, there may only be one item, whatever was fresh and available that day. One of my favorite places like this was Xijing restaurant, with four shaded outside tables, and such tasty dishes as rice and beans, barracuda with fries, or if you time it just right, you can get some sweet rice, made with coconut milk, cinnamon, and sugar in a ten gallon vat over an open flame, and gone within half an hour. Other staples of the island include fried chicken, grouper, tuna and conch. Almost everything is accompanied by salad or fries (papas fritas). Dinner will cost you less than 5 USD with beer. Baked goods are a favorite at breakfast on the island, and if you’re up for a challenge, you have to find Taracina, a woman with a shack in the middle of nowhere offering the best Pan de Coco around, definitely worth seeking out.

Outside of eating, diving and relaxing in your hammock, there is deliciously little to do. You can take the single track dirt road to the Northern side of the island, which is a couple hours walk through quiet palm trees and woods, to an empty beach on the other side. There is a primitive Iguana research station that you can visit, or volunteer at and stay a while, and help protect the spiny tailed Utila Iguana. There are some small cays to the Southwest that can be visited in your spare time. You can hang out with fellow travelers and discover many things about the world. Other than that, enjoy the sunsets, and the lack of excitement. It’s what makes any island special, reminding us of what is really important in life. Be careful though, because you may not want to come back.

Expecting to slowly sip a glass of wine or two over conversation of knitting, gardening, or perhaps if it got a little edgy, how so-and-so had stolen someone else’s goulash recipe and passed it off as their own, I settled in with a mild sense of dread.

Ruth, the dark, curly-haired, woman who sat opposite me at the table, held up the small, smooth, elongated white stone I had just given her to add to her rock garden and uttered a comment in German that elicited a laugh from the other elderly woman who sat around us. Not wanting to be left out on the humor and eager for approval of my gift, I asked for a translation.
“It looks like a penis!”
“Like a what!?!” I said, quite surprised.
“Like a little boy’s penis.”

I smiled and let out a chuckle mostly to help ease the awkwardness. As they laughed, someone poured me a drink, and then another, and then another. Soon, I was off to the wine stand to buy a few more bottles and staggered back to pour the next round.

The Weinbrunnenfest is held every year on the first weekend in July. It begins on Friday and runs every evening for four days. Unlike some of the larger wine festivals in the area, the one held in Gimbsheim is comparatively small and attended almost entirely by locals who gather together to enjoy music, dancing, food, and the variety of wines produced from the local vineyards.

The next morning, I slept in a bit to recover from the previous night out with the ladies. After finally getting up, I decided to go on a bike ride to take in the surrounding landscape and pass the time until the evening festivities were to begin. Riding down the narrow streets that cut through dense housing, I began to notice something. There is really nothing all that astounding about Gimbsheim.

There’s a butcher shop, a bakery, a couple of small pubs, but that’s about it. Having travelled around Europe quite a bit, I was used to seeing the postcard panoramas like St. Mark’s Square, Neuschwanstein Castle, and the Roman Coliseum. Gimbsheim’s only comparable site was a ten foot tall monument honoring the town’s veterans of World War One.

I kept riding on the road out of town and soon found myself perspiring to peddle up the paths along the ridge. The hillside was covered in grape vines lined in perfect rows like a striped shirt. Scattering rabbits as I rode along, I eventually stopped to rest and take in the scenery.

The Rheinhessen area, Germany largest wine growing region, is famous for its white wines. While the Mosul Valley is regarded as one of Germany’s most scenic wine regions, the hills surrounding Gimbsheim make up a charming scene overlooking the Rheine River and many small towns such as Oppenheim, which ascends the hillside and is crowned by a miniature cathedral, disproportionately large for the surrounding community.

As I prepared to make my ascent back toward Gimbsheim, I took in a long breath of grape scented air and watched a farmer mend one of the rows. I hopped on the bike and peddled back down.

That evening, as I made my way back to the Weinbrunnenfest, I thought about my time spent in this small town. I realized that I was quite taken by it, but why? Until that moment, the answer remained elusive.

As travelers, we often set out to far flung places in search of something different, new, and authentic. As I walked, I reminisced about my time in Paris and how I made the rounds to all the must-see tourist sites, trying to take pictures of the Eiffel Tower that didn’t include someone trying to sell me multicolored flashing key chains. Something didn’t feel quite right.

Looking back on it, it wasn’t that commercialism and mass-tourism had ruined any possible culturally real experience. I just hadn’t been looking in the right places. Buildings, monuments, and landscapes can be great stops in an interesting afternoon of sightseeing, but its people who make an experience real and authentic.

By the time I got to the festival area, night had fallen and the bright red, blue, green, and yellow lights strung up all around lit up the faces of those seated around tables or swaying around on the makeshift dance floor. There, in the same spot as the night before, were my geriatric drinking buddies.

The worry over a potentially dull night out that I had felt the night before was long gone. Hilde, round-faced with graying hair and glasses, greeted me as I walked up. Smiling, I replied,
“Guten Abend. Can I buy you a drink?

The Norwegian Automobile Federation offers 268 camp sites and additionally there are about one thousand other camp and cabin sites as well as parking lots for caravans and recreation vehicles throughout the country and its fifteen national parks. Due to the Norwegian allemannsretten (everybody’s right), you may also park your car somewhere beside the road for just one night, which makes it easy to follow Norway’s national roads and enjoy the quiet lakes, dense woods, gentle hills, steep mountains, roaring waterfalls, sparkling glaciers and narrow fjords alongside.

While the Vikings, who had discovered Newfoundland in the “new world” long before Columbus explored the Caribbean Sea, once conquered foreign lands with their longships and terrified their southern neighbors, the descendants have become quiet and unassuming, open and hospitable to foreign guests. Blessed with the Gulf Stream, North Sea oil, and plenty of energy produced by hydroelectric power stations, the 4.7 million inhabitants enjoy one of the highest living standards in the world.

Coming from Oslo, we headed southwest for the region of Telemark, the home of skiing. In the town of Skien, we followed the Telemark Canal, which was the “Eighth Wonder of the World” and the most spectacular waterway of Europe in the 1890s. It took five years to build it and was designed to raft wood from the north of Telemark down to the seaports of Skagerrak, where the Baltic Sea meets the North Sea. Eighteen still original, hand-operated locks in eight places level out a difference of 236 feet in altitude between Skien at the south-east end of Lake Norsjoe and the town of Dalen, 65 miles further west at the end of Lake Bandak. Today, you can sail or paddle up and down the canal in the summer months or go for a comfortable, nostalgic boat trip.

“The world’s highest waterfall, I have discovered at Rjukan in Telemark.” geology professor Jens Esmark reported back to his king in Copenhagen in 1810. Well, this was a slight exaggeration, as the waters plunge only 340 feet down into the valley of Vestfjorddalen. However, the sentence made Rjukan the cradle of tourism and the first vacation resort in Norway. Visitors from all over Europe came in the summer months and checked into the hotel of Vemork or booked Norway’s first tourist cabin on Krokan farm above the thundering waters of the fall. Artists came to paint the waterfall and scenery below the cone of Gaustatoppen that towers majestically over the town. With an altitude of 6,178 feet above sea level, it is one of the highest and most beautiful mountains of the region. About thirty thousand people make the trip up to the summit every year to enjoy the fantastic view down into the valley and over the foothills of Hardangervidda that offer plenty of opportunities for hiking and cycling.

At the entrance of Rjukan’s Tinn Museum, troll faces (queer-looking giants and dwarves from the Norwegian woods) greet the visitor, and old farm houses and barns show the history of house building from medieval times to the end of the 19th century. Textiles, old prints, paintings and wood carvings represent the art and traditions of the farmers who once settled in this valley before bold scientists and entrepreneurs discovered the place and started to produce energy from the power of its waters.

A winding road brings you up to the mountains in the south, and a narrow fjellveien (mountain road) leads up to 4,134 feet and over one of the highest passes of Norway. Via the places of Tuddal and Sauland, it isn’t far to Heddal, where you can visit the biggest and best preserved stave church of Norway. Built without any nails and steel parts, the wooden building is an architectural masterpiece of the early Middle Ages. Still being the parish church of Heddal, its doors are open to tourists during the summer season.

If we had known about the annual blues festival in Notodden that takes place in early August, we would have changed our itinerary. However, we went further west to see the fjords at the country’s North Sea coast and the pulpit rock of Preikestolen, which is one of the most visited natural sights in the south of Norway. The 2.5-mile-long foot path from the parking lot took us two hours and 1,100 feet up to the mountains and the famous cliff, which juts out over the Lysefjord that lies 1,980 feet under your feet. Meandering 25 miles into the interior of the country, it ends at Lysebotn, where the cliff of Kjerag rises 3,555 feet vertically into the sky.

Next time we are going to explore Sognefjord (with 126 miles the longest fjord of Norway) and I hope for better weather conditions when we go on hikes in the national park of Jostedalspreen, the biggest glacier in Europe.

“Transport?” queried a smiling young man on a sidewalk in Ubud, an artsy town in the south-eastern hills. It’s a frequent offer on the streets of nearly every town in Bali. Everyone with a car will offer you a ride for a small price. You may say “no thank you” seven times on Monkey Forest Road in Ubud. But what’s heart-warming is that you will always receive an enthusiastic “Welcome!” in response.

As one of Indonesia’s luxury destinations, Bali is a truly service-oriented society and economy. Away from the resorts on the coast, there is less commercial zeal and more genuine friendliness. Culturally, Bali differs from other Indonesian islands, and indeed is an exception in this predominantly Muslim country with its Hindu-Buddhist history. It is this history that shapes the Balinese approach to life and the Balinese landscape.

Exploring the surroundings of Ubud on bike is perhaps the best way to take in the beautiful landscape, with all its rice terraces, temples, villages and cackling roosters. I signed up for a daytrip with Arung from Bali Moon Group. We began with a morning stop at an eclectic orchard growing everything from mangosteen, papaya and peanuts to cacao, coffee beans and tea leaves. Arung also introduced us to salak, a fruit with a brown, snake-scaled skin that looks like a nut inside and tastes like mixture of apple and pear.

After an invigorating ginger tea we were driven up to the edge of Mount Batur. The mountain bikes were unloaded and we were ready to start off downhill back towards Ubud. Arung had assured us back in the office that it was “all downhill”, but some of us were taken aback by how steep downhill can be. And the road was just a rocky path. One of the English girls on the excursion already wanted to make use of the trailing van service that carried our backpacks, but was persuaded to stick with it since it would get easier.

Our reward, when it began to level out, was a school full of excited children running towards the road to greet us. Six and seven year old boys were exploding with excitement, seemingly overwhelmed by such an unexpected visit from strangers. “Hallo! Hallo!” they squealed, vying to make eye contact with any one of the cyclists and jumping for high-fives. Wide-eyed awe and giggles rippled through the crowd as our group responded to their eagerness. It felt like the Tour de France. A few boys ran with the bikes until they were out-paced or came to the end of the village.

We cycled along rice paddies, many of them flocked by ducks feeding on leftover grains. In the rolling countryside I could hear the lovely sound of bamboo music and wind chimes everywhere. We passed through several more villages, all laid out on a sloping north-south axis and flanked by walled enclosures that are the typical Balinese. Each had an elaborately carved gateway and immediately behind it a wall, the aling-aling, to keep floating evil spirits from sweeping in through the open gateway.

In one village an old man on a moped scooted up beside me to ride tandem and indulge in conversation. His smile was wide, his questions direct. “Where you from? Where you stay? Where you go?” He exudes a pride in managing dialogue with a foreigner and brushes off the cajoling of youngsters. As we neared the open countryside he veered off back into his village and signalled his final sentence with a wave,”The Balinese people welcome you. Good time.”

Everyone, just everyone, genuinely wants to have contact and wish you well. When we came to the end of our cycle we were invited into a family home. The residential compound had sleeping pavilions for extended family members, a fountain in the middle, a temple and a low table for us to share dinner. A typical Indonesian meal is a selection of hot and cold plates, with spicy meats, peanut sauces and sautéed vegetables. Everyone was exhausted from the combination of heat and pedalling, and completely ready to feast on the buffet.

When our host came to collect our finished plates, she asked simply “Happiness?”