Even before leaving for a Southern Africa safari in September 2019, my two friends, Cynthia and Jim Lyon, and I had already booked a trip to East Africa for September 2020. All three of us love to travel, and nothing nourishes our souls more than a wildlife trip. Who knew that a global pandemic would ground us for most of 2020?

As spring wound into summer, our hopes of traveling to Kenya were quickly dimming, but we still fanned a little flame of optimism. In early July 2020, it was...

In pandemic mode, temporarily cut off from our travels, all that we have left to satisfy our adventurous spirits are our memories… and planning for the next trip.

As longtime friends and travel companions, we plan our own trips over several months, sometimes years, scouring blogs, asking others about their experiences and always reading everything available in ITN! We travel together about once a year to places that aren’t of interest to our other travel companions. We...

For more than a hundred years, Timbuktu (Tombouctou) has been used as a metaphor for the most isolated place in the world. Unlike the fictional Shangri-la (invented by James Hilton in his novel “Lost Horizon”), however, Timbuktu is a very real place.

A bit of history

Its reputation for faraway isolation developed during the 19th century, but it did have a golden age, based on trade and scholarship, from the 12th to the 16th centuries. The University of Timbuktu was...