Travels in Africa

For three and a half years the blog Travels in Africa has published weekly posts about people’s adventures in Africa. They amount to some 180 posts altogether. About 40 of these have been contributed by TIA readers; these have greatly enlarged the geographical range of the posts and enhanced the blog’s interest. TIA sends thanks […]

Continuing TIA’s series of guest contributors, this week the ghost of French explorer Rene Caillie writes in the third person about his visit to and return from Timbuktu.  He includes drawings from his stay there. If the British Major Gordon Laing was the first European to reach the fabled city of Timbuktu, the real trick […]

David Winder, retired professor of history and former journalist and born a South African, shares a recollection of the blues overheard when he was a boarder at a home while attending the University of Natal at Pietermaritzburg. She arrived late that evening and said only what had to be said. She had lost her child.  […]

Bob Baker gives us another of his delightful – and in this case instructive – tales of USIS service in Uganda. When I was a USIS officer at the US Embassy in Kampala, Robert was the Ugandan editor of a small circulation English language newspaper there. Bright, funny and friendly, he became almost a member […]

Jan Rudestam offers two vignettes from her travels in Algeria where TIA has rarely wandered: The Frontier, 1972 The guard rubbed his sleepy eyes as we pulled up to the border. Our driver had gone out of his way to bring us to this border crossing at a pass in the Atlas Mountains. He told […]

Bob Baker, USIS man extraordinaire, takes us along on some flying trips around Africa. The elegant French Caravelle twin engine jet sailed south from Le Bourget to Africa in 1968. Over the Sahara the engines stopped and we drifted down, so quiet you could hear the wind whistle past the plane. Gosh, out of gas! […]

Explanation:  On May 3 a friend sent me an email forwarding an account of an elephant giving birth in the Oliphants River inside Kruger Natinal Park, South Africa.  It’s an amazing document which I immediately wanted to share on this blog.  It seems to have been forwarded four times before it came to me.  I […]

David DeSelm may have had the best Peace Corps job you ever heard of.  Here he tells exactly what that entailed. It was my second year as a Peace Corps volunteer in Tunisia.  I was working as a preservation architect for the Tunisian Directorate of Historic Monuments, along with Tony, Richard and Eric.  We were […]

Bob Baker, who had a distinguished mutli-continent USIS career, tells us how an eager self-starter launches his reputation. In my first overseas assignment, I managed the cultural part of the USIS mission to Uganda, the USIS library, open to the public, and the film program.  Donations of books and magazines gave me an entree to […]

Michael Johnson travels the world as owner and chief  tour guide of a travel agency, Titch Travel, in Cape Town, South Africa.  On this trip he was traveling alone. Some years back I was invited to do an “audit” by The Rotary Foundation (a leading charitable trust, and an important arm of Rotary International) in […]