Results tagged “National Geographic Explorer” from Intelligent Travel Blog

Rainer Jenss and his family are currently on an around-the-world journey, and they're blogging about their experiences for us at Intelligent Travel. Keep up with the Jensses by bookmarking their posts, and follow the boys' Global Bros blog at National Geographic Kids.

If you've been following this blog since we left on our around-the-world trip back in July, you might have noticed that we haven't exactly had any serious mishaps, accidents, illnesses or diversions to our original plan for any reasons other than personal choice (yes, I'm knocking on wood big time).  Compared to most travel stories I've read, our journey thus far might seem quite uneventful in comparison.  I just finished Dark Star Safari by Paul Theroux, and he had all kinds of amazing tales from his Cairo to Cape Town overland trek. The biggest drama of our travels between these two points came when a herd of elephants trampled through our campsite one night in Tanzania. Interesting and memorable, but not exactly New York Times bestseller material.  

Not that this is a bad thing, mind you. When traveling with two young children, you tend to plan things out further in advance and take more precautions for anything and everything that might go wrong. This is not to suggest that a little improvisation every now and then wasn't necessary or welcomed. For various reasons, not the least of which was logistic, we decided to forgo a visit to India - opting instead for a "spring break vacation" in the Indian Ocean aboard the new Lindblad National Geographic Explorer. This meant two weeks of prearranged activities, destinations, and all our meals accounted for. Boring? Maybe for some, but we were thrilled to have nothing to plan for or have to handle ourselves for two whole weeks! The only major decision we had each day was whether to snorkel or scuba dive.

What caught our attention about this particular cruise was its amazing itinerary: Zanzibar, Mozambique, Madagascar, and the Seychelles. As a scuba diver, I've heard that the Indian Ocean offers some of the best marine life found anywhere, so we were intrigued. Couple that with the famous beaches of the Seychelles and exotic wildlife of Madagascar, and we were sold. Our sojourn to Europe would just have to wait fourteen more days.

World-renowned primatologist and environmentalist Jane Goodall turns 75 today. Dr. Goodall is best known for her long-term observation of the chimps in Gombe Stream National Park in Tanzania. She established her first camp there in 1960 under the patronage of prominent paleoanthropologist Louis Leakey. As a long-time National Geographic Society grantee and explorer-in-residence, Goodall was awarded the NGS Hubbard Medal for her work studying and defending the natural world.

Her patient observations of Gombe's chimps--David Greybeard and Flo among many others--enabled her to correct a slew of misunderstandings about chimps prevalent at that time. She discovered chimp were omnivores, not vegetarians, as previously thought. She observed them using tools in the form of twigs and blades of grass inserted into termite mounds to fish the bite-sized critters out; prior to this discovery, tool use was considered a trait limited to human beings. She also brought to light chimps' complex and at times violent social relations. Many of her discoveries forced the scientific community as well as general public the world over to rethink humans' relationship, genetically and ethically, with the natural world.