Come to Mali

…on The Road to Timbuktu and the Rivers of West Africa.

Legendary Cities

TDI’s textual archaeologists have been digging, and they have unearthed a rare find: an epistle by the writer Mary Lee Settle on the lure of ancient cities. We think it captures the essence of where we travel, why we travel, and how we travel, and it bears quoting in full. She writes:

How many miles to Babylon
Three score and ten
Can I get there by candlelight?
Aye, and back again.

FROM THE NURSERY RHYMES THROUGH the fairy tales and into the yearning to travel that comes after - the city is there, the one that has caught the rhythms of dreams and silence. I can go. I can find it - Baghdad, Ecbatana, the Cities of the Plain, Troy and Carthage and Trebizond and Petra and Lhasa -whatever legendary city has been in my mind and sometimes in my dreams since childhood. I must unearth it, or crawl through labyrinths, or dive, or go by donkey, or simply sit and dream.

A legend is a story that no one can take away from you. It is secret. It must be as far away in place as Shangri-La, as deep in time past as the dreams of Miniver Cheevy and in time future as adolescent hopes - neither mundane here nor mundane now. It is a place to be discovered on one’s own, whether in reality, as Heinrich Schliemann did when he followed his own dream to the Troad, or in poetry.

The Extraordinary Beauty of Namibia’s Desert Landscapes

From the London Times, we get a rapturous travel report on the breathtaking Namibian desert:

Before long I’m transfixed by the ever-changing shades of the golden, grassy savannahs, dwarf plants eking out an existence along the misty coastline and the multitude of uses these plants offer local tribes.

But we can do better than words. Here’s what it looks like:

And this is just one moment of one day in our month-long voyage along the Atlantic coastline of Africa from the Cape of Good Hope to the Rock of Gibraltar.

How Trade Shaped the World

The New York Times reviews William J. Bernstein’s impressively comprehensive “A Splendid Exchange: How Trade Shaped the World,” a new history published in the last month. “‘A Splendid Exchange’ is a splendid book,” the reviewer concludes, and so much of this book’s territory is TDI’s as well:

Ancient Mesopotamia was richly endowed with fertile soils and water from the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, but it lacked stone and wood for building, and metals like copper for tools and weapons. The Sumerians, however, had surplus food to trade, so they could bargain for stone from near the headwaters of the rivers, wood from what is now Lebanon and metal from Sinai, Cyprus and elsewhere.

The scope of ancient trade was immense. A single Bronze Age shipwreck around 1350 B.C. near Bodrum, a Turkish coastal town, yielded no less than 10 tons of copper and a ton of tin ingots along with other merchandise like ivory. (The ideal ratio of copper to tin for making bronze is 10 to 1.)

By Roman times vast armadas ferried Egyptian grain, Greek wine, Spanish copper and silver, and a hundred other commodities around the Mediterranean. India has yielded rich troves of Roman coins that reached that subcontinent to pay for spices the Romans coveted, especially pepper. Chinese silk — literally worth its weight in gold — traveled through the heart of Asia on the Silk Road to reach markets in the West.

As the West collapsed at the end of antiquity, so did its long-distance trade. Few Roman coins dating later than A.D. 180 are found in India, as the Roman economy began to run out of gold and silver. The Arabs came to dominate the major trade routes of the Indian Ocean after the rise of Islam. And as Western Europe revived economically, a lively trade developed between rising powers in Venice and the Middle East. (Venice supplied slaves from the Crimea and Caucasus in exchange for spices and sugar.)

When the Ottoman conquest of Constantinople slammed shut the sea route to the Crimea, Europe began seeking other routes to reach the resources of the East and eliminate the middleman. Columbus sailed west in 1492 and stumbled onto the New World. Vasco da Gama reached India in 1498, having rounded the southern tip of Africa. The modern world began, thanks to trade.

The history of global trade is so long and so vast that Mr. Bernstein could have easily produced a toe-breaker of a book. Happily he has not. By treating many aspects thematically rather than strictly chronologically, he shows in fewer than 400 pages of readable type how people and nations have faced the same problems over and over and often solved them the same way.

The poor soil and scant rain of ancient Greece, for instance, meant that the terrain’s ability to grow grain was limited, but grape vines and olive trees grew in abundance. To export its wine and olive oil, Athens developed a pottery industry to supply the jars in which those products were transported. As Greek trade, and colonies, flourished across the length and breadth of the Mediterranean and the Black Sea, naval power was needed to suppress piracy. To control choke points like the Dardanelles and Bosporus, which led to the rich grain lands of what is now Ukraine, the Athenian empire developed.

A good book to take on board for one of our Grand Voyages, without a doubt.

Meet Tristan. He’s a bit of a loner.

Want to get away from it all?
You know the “it all” of which we speak.

The “it all” is pretty comprehensive across the globe these days, and unless you’ve got the constitution of an ox, $20 million not otherwise occupied, and some time to kill on a waiting list, it’s unlikely that you’ll be getting beyond the gravitational pull of the planet’s “it all” any time soon.

The good news is that, after 40 years sailing around the globe, Travel Dynamics International knows where the “it all” isn’t all that. In fact, the “it all” isn’t very much at all in these places.  It’s hard to get “it all” when you’re 2,088 miles from the coast of South America and 1,750 miles from the coast of South Africa: in other words, smack dab in the middle of the south Atlantic with nary a cellphone tower around.

We’d like you to meet a friend of ours. His name’s Tristan. Tristan da Cuhna, to be proper, and we should be proper, since he is British, after all. That’s his picture up there, at the top. Attractive gent, isn’t he? A bit austere, but dignified, with a noble profile. He doesn’t really understand the meaning of “it all,” because he’s the most remote inhabited island on Earth.

Tristan only got television reception in 2001. In 2005, finally, Tristan got a UK postcode which is very fortunate because its main town, Edinburgh-of-the-Seven-Seas, was getting confused with its northern namesake — and that’s a few degrees of latitude further than a British postman wants to travel.

Tristan’s population of 271 has a total of only 8 family names: there are the Glasses, the Greens, the Hagans, the Lavarellos, the Repettos, the Rogers, the Swains, and — as of 1986 — the Pattersons. And they serve up a fantastic dinner: the entire island survives on lobster fishing, and because Tristan is so remote, so inaccessible to the overfishing trawlers, they grow big here: 40-pounders are not at all uncommon.

We’d like you to meet Tristan on our voyage “The Route to Distant Islands.” We’ve scheduled this itinerary so that you can also meet one of his good friends, South Georgia Island:

They may be distant, but I think you’ll find Tristan da Cuhna and South Georgia Island are both excited to meet you.

High on Delphi

They went to Delphi, the Earth’s center, to visit Phoebus’ Oracle, and prayed to him to grant them his aid in their misery, to give them some oracle that would restore their health and put an end to the evils of their great city. The ground, the laurel tree and the quivers which the god himself carries, all trembled together and, from the depths of the shrine, the sacred tripod uttered words, making the listeners’ hearts quake with fear… (Ovid’s Metamorphoses, Book XV)

Up on the slopes of Mount Parnassus, in the time before Time, the young god Apollo slew the monster Python and founded a shrine commemorating the event. It was the omphalos, the navel or center of the world, and Pegasus swooped in and stamped his hoof and cracked the ground from which came forth the Castalian Spring, pluming underground waters bearing a sweet perfume. (Of the last, so said Plutarch.) Down in an enclosed subterranean chamber, the Pythian Sibyl sat on a three-legged stool, breathed in the vapors surrounding her, swooned into a trance, and uttered delirious visions that would be translated, by the Pythian Priestesses, into prophesies that would command the fortunes of the kings of the world.

The Sibyl was a huffer.

In 2001, geologists discovered that two geologic faults intersected directly beneath the ruins of the Delphic Shrine. About every hundred years, earthquakes rattle the faults, heating the adjacent rocks and vaporizing the hydrocarbon deposits stored in them. The result: ethylene vapors, which, inhaled in concentration, produce a sense of disembodied euphoria. It is no longer a myth or a tall tale: that’s how the Pythian Sibyl received her visions from Apollo. Read more about the Delphic Oracle’s drug use here and here.

See Delphi and get a whiff of myth on Travel Dynamics International’s Landmark Sites of the Mediterranean: Greece, Sicily, North Africa, and Spain from November 9-28, 2008.

Unbelievable striped icebergs in the Antarctic

If you are lucky, as you’re sailing with us aboard the Corinthian II in Antarctica, you might catch a glimpse of these absurdly beautiful banded icebergs. Formed by the pressurized compression of ice, plus rapid melting and re-freezing, they are truly stunning to encounter. Click here for some astonishing images.

Africa Rising

A major article in the Boston Globe reports,

By many standards, Africa is doing better than it has in decades. The number of democratically elected governments has risen sharply in the past decade, and the number of violent conflicts has dropped. African economies, and African businesses, are starting to show impressive results, and not just by the diminished standards the rest of the world reserves for its poorest continent. The runaway inflation that crippled African economies for decades is on the ebb, and foreign investment is rising. Last month, the World Bank reported that average GDP growth in Sub-Saharan Africa has averaged 5.4 percent over the last decade, better than the United States, with some countries poised for dramatic expansion.

“For the first time in a long time, you have the potential that a handful of countries could break from the pack and become leopards, cheetahs, or whatever the African equivalent of an Asian Tiger would be,” says John Page, the World Bank’s chief Africa economist, referring to the nickname given East Asian nations like Taiwan and South Korea because of their double-digit growth in the 1960s, ’70s and ’80s.”

Meanwhile, over in Mali, the Bamako beat is taking the world by storm. Travel Dynamics International is very excited to show you Africa — the real Africa, changing and growing — during our extraordinary cruises to this fantastically varied continent.

We are all Homer’s children

Argentinian critic and translator Alberto Manguel has done something quite unique, and necessary for our time. He realized that writing a biography of Homer is impossible. Yet he understood that The Iliad and The Odyssey are, in fact, the foundations of Western civilization. But unlike most of us, who just accept that phrase — “the foundations of Western civilization” — he interrogated it, and traced the ways in which Homer’s narratives have been used, re-used, appropriated, and re-forged over these last 2,500 years. He’s written a biography of Homer’s works. A history of the poems. Read the review in The Washington Post. And then take Odysseus’s journey yourself — in a great deal more comfort and luxury.

A Gift from the Gods: to Your Children

Last summer, The New York Times‘ travel section published a lovely piece by Jennifer Conlin on her “Zeus Trip”: a summer vacation in Greece specifically planned to teach her kids about ancient history and mythology. It’s written with deft tongue-in-cheek, as she learns, by trial and error, how to keep her kids interested and learning, rather than bored and flippant.

She needn’t have worried, she needn’t have stressed, if she’d left the planning to us at Travel Dynamics International. Our family learning adventure, “Voyage to the Lands of Gods and Heroes,” is the model for ancient mythology-themed trips for kids. We design two separate sets of excursions: one for adults, and one for children, led by professional youth counselors who bring the legends of Theseus, Hercules, and Odysseus to life. Meaning you can have your cake and eat it too — you get to have your own elegant cruise in the Mediterranean, and give your kids or grandchildren a summer enrichment experience they’ll treasure for the rest of their lives. It’s a formula that’s a proven success: this trip has sold out for the past five years in a row.