MEMPHIS, TENNESSEE—Blind Mississippi Morris is rocking. The beat that booms from the bass drum behind him jolts his body from left to right, Blind keeping time, back and forth, as if he were a 250-pound, six-foot, denim-clad metronome. Chipper in his chair onstage at the Blues City Café’s Band Box, he’s grinning, ear to ear, the gap where his two front teeth used to be as wide and open as a pair of saloon doors on a Saturday night.
One hundred years of Delta blues unwind inside Blind’s calibrated mind for music, and when he lifts the harp to his lips, he...
Tijuana guided tours open a window into the city’s culture and cuisine
"Try some crickets," Derrik Chinn says, holding out a little baggie filled with grillos seasoned with chili and lime juice. They're good, in a crispy-anchovy kind of way. Even my 12-year-old, weird-food-averse daughter, Avery, dips her fingers into the snack bag for seconds.
We're wandering through the Mercado Miguel Hidalgo in Tijuana's Zona Rio, a fashionable neighbourhood known for its shopping and restaurants. Chinn, our American-born guide, is pointing out the local flavours. He grew up in Ohio but...
IHOP Over Idaho – On a mother-daughter road trip, a foodie mom confronts her fast-food demons
Cross-country road trip – Day 33. We’re in Twin Falls, Idaho, and the rain is coming down in sheets. My 10-year-old twins and I have just spent more than three hours slogging from the Best Western to the Sleepytime Inn and everywhere in between, looking for a place to spend the night. But there’s a softball tournament in town, and all the motels are full of girls and their parents lugging duffels full of sports gear.
As the rain clatters hard on the car roof and the dampness begins...
The threatening sound of hoofs stop us in our tracks.
“We’re too exposed,” I think to myself, as my husband, daughter and her friend crouch low in the forest. Do we hunker down deep in the underbrush and hope the horse passes us by? Or do we make a run for it and risk the crunch of autumn leaves giving us away? We’ve lost all sense of direction and the map isn’t much help now.
How did we get into this spot? It all started with a drive to Red Deer, where a quick turn off Gasoline Alley took us to Heritage Ranch. There we met Joel Martens...
Spend a day prowling with the puffin patrol: Volunteers gather to help stranded pufflings get home to ecological reserve
Witless Bay, N.L.-"I can guarantee you that your wildest puffin fantasies will be realized here this morning," tour guide and famous Newfoundland singer Con O'Brien vows as a hundred of us set sail on a whale and bird sightseeing cruise.
I already know what's going down, so am first to leave the sunny upper deck of the aptly named Atlantic Puffin to get a spot on the main deck when the time comes.
GET REAL: Montreal’s Authentically Inauthentic Chinese Food
A middle-aged businessman sat alone in a maroon booth at a linen-swathed table in an upscale Chinese restaurant. A plate mounded with glistening morsels of chicken was placed before him. As he literally rubbed his palms in anticipation, he asked his Mandarin-jacketed waiter for chopsticks, and then, upon his return, a knife. “I love this sauce!” he exclaimed, almost to himself, but loud enough that, seated nearby, we could measure his enthusiasm. “It’s not sickly sweet like the General Tao’s everywhere else.” The waiter...
Vancouver’s stunning Asian banquet – A Chinese culinary adventure awaits, no passport required
The fat dumpling sags seductively at the end of my outstretched chopsticks, proof of its delicate wrapper and perfectly soupy interior. As instructed, I’ve lifted it carefully by the nub that sits at the apex of its 18 perfect folds, sliding the base through a saucer of inky black vinegar sauce. When the soup dumpling bursts in my mouth, revealing all of the hot, porky perfection within, I mumble my best multilingual culinary compliment: “Mmmmmm.”
It’s minus 20, and 35 centimetres of snow have blanketed Montreal over the past 24 hours – it’s the biggest blizzard of the season so far. The airport shut down soon after I landed, and the cobblestone streets of Old Montreal, where I set up camp, are as slick as a Wet Banana slide. The city has come to a full stop, and all is quiet but for the distant rumbling of incoming snowplows and the scraping of shovels on icy pavement. I’m in town to embrace winter like only a Montrealer can. I have no choice.
That’s how I end up in an abandoned lot in the Mile-End...
The road to Cox’s Cove (a half hour from Corner Brook) ends in a riot of old sheds, wharves and shacks next to a pebble beach lined with orange fishing dories. When I drive into the village to find Darren Park, a fisherman who offers Newfoundland’s only dory fishing excursion, the tide is out. Hundreds of gulls call and tussle on the sandbar at the edge of the Bay of Islands. Cribbing from old wharves sags into the exposed mud.
Along the main street that twists among houses flung around this rocky coast, I see no signs for Four Seasons Tours...
The first paths into Fort Chipewyan were forged by dog sleds. Life moved slowly then, but the creation of an ice road changed everything.
Living off the land
The tundra’s silence was broken by a swoosh of sled runners and the excited yips of dogs as Robert Grandjambe’s sled surged across the frozen muskeg outside Fort Chipewyan in north-eastern Alberta, Canada. He slowed his team of Siberian huskies to a stop at the centre of a lake, cleared a hole in the ice and fished the way his father taught him to – with a net...
FRIGID RAIN LASHED AROUND US AS WE BANGED on the station doors to be let inside. Behind us stood hundreds of other passengers, all frustrated after being unceremoniously herded off the Eurostar train. Just that morning, we were happily chugging our way to Paris, thrilled to be ticking off an item on our collective bucket list, when suddenly we found ourselves braving the elements with no clue as to what was going on. My sister and mother had flown in especially for this once-in-a-lifetime trip. I suppose now is a good time to mention that Mom has stage IV cancer and...
Low-lying clouds seem to have swallowed up the backcountry, obscuring my view of the famous Bugaboos Spires, a collection of pointy peaks that are part of the Purcell Mountains in southeastern British Columbia. The temperature is cool for mid-July, and though nature remains stunning — the overcast sky makes colours pop, from the orange and lime-green lichen atop the boulders to the pink stripes of algae that streak the snow — a chill settles in as my tired legs descend a steep hillside.
And then I see it. On the far side of an alpine...
That’s what it says on The Bluebonnets T-shirt. They do.
I absorbed the all-female blues rock band’s full sonic force while at the front of the red Continental Club stage, a former la-dee-da supper venue that has slid from its 1950s heydays into a gloriously down-at-the-broken-heels, beloved music destination on South Congress Ave. in Austin.
“Come closer,” said bass player Dominique Davalos, urging a group of google-eyed guys, a few wearing embroidered cowboy shirts, to inch against the stage, enough to see the bright buckles on guitarist...
The two-ton monster stares at us through the front door of our tiny tent, its long, curved horn pointing like a dagger. If that’s not enough to stir us from slumber, four of its buddies have us surrounded. Without warning a scuffle breaks out between two of them, with plenty of snorting and foot stomping sending bits of dirt and gravel flying against our tent. Never again will we complain about not getting close enough to rhinos.
Marakele National Park
We're camped in South Africa's Marakele National Park, a beautiful spot in the...
Finding Dory [For an old-school East Coast angling adventure—and a rewarding scoff of freshly caught cod— climb aboard one of Newfoundland’s traditional fishing boats]
Holding a four-pound bronze codfish up by the gills, Darren Park declares, “That’s a prime Tbone fillet, right there.” Like many Newfoundlanders, Park takes pride today more than ever in hooking a single specimen of that most edible of fish, the great cod. From the way he says it, and because we share family histories in the fisheries, I suspect Park and I hold a sense of privilege and good fortune at still being...
Coasteering in Snowdonia, Wales, the Ultimate Adventure
Looking for an action-packed excursion in Wales? Check out coasteering, a sport that follows a rocky coastline both in the water and out. It's a crazy mix of swimming, scrambling, leaping and caving - and Wales is the birthplace of the sport.
I'm balanced on a stone, eyeing a water worn gully between slippery rock walls and debating the best way to get down to it. "You can use my shoulder as a stepping stone," says Chris Thorne, owner of Snowdonia Watersports and the guide for our group's coasteering tour in Anglesey,...
Une croisière sur l’Amazone, vous dites? Oubliez les îles enchanteresses encerclées de plages sablonneuses! Naviguer sur le plus long fleuve du monde, c’est pénétrer au cœur de la forêt tropicale humide, au milieu d’une végétation luxuriante et d’une faune riche et variée. Une expérience unique!
Toute une expérience aussi pour les navires de croisière qui remontent ce fleuve mythique, long de 6500 km, et qui se ramifie en plusieurs branches. Plus le navire est petit, plus il peut s’enfoncer loin au cœur de la forêt.
Finalement, je commence enfin aà écrire après plusieurs années aà voyager avec mon mari ;, en étant que le photographe attitrée, j’ai moi aussi pris le goûut d’a écrire mes expériences et mes sensation sentiments de voyage., Ppartager a toujours été présent dansfait partie de ma vie, que ce soit sur le cote de la mode, de la photographie et même de lales vidéos sur YouTube.
Je me souviens très bien de la journée où qu’on a parldiscuté d’aller en Irlande, je revenais d’e faire un voyage aà Hawaïii pour mon travaille comme d’agent de...
An Old-Growth Battlefield – Can We Save our Ancient Matriarchs?
A moss-covered boardwalk led us through a rainforest of immense trees and wild growth in the Walbran Valley west of Port Renfrew on Vancouver Island, British Columbia. Bright green moss and fungi clung to fallen trees and logs. Huckleberry and thimbleberry bushes sprouted. Delicate sword ferns carpeted the forest floor. Moss hung from branches like beards. I half expected a Jurassic Park-esque velociraptor to charge through the undergrowth.
I was following TJ Watt, a renowned big-tree hunter. Also a...
Where the Wild Things Are - Science and Sightings in the Great Bear Rainforest
It’s just after 7 a.m. and I’m standing in a 12-person passenger boat that’s skimming the Johnstone Strait, headed for Knight Inlet in the Great Bear Rainforest. I’m on a daylong, grizzly bear-watching excursion with Tide Rip Tours, and with every tiny island our group zips past, my excitement builds. It’s been a long-held dream of mine to visit this vast and remote tract of temperate rainforest, named for the majestic bruins that thrive there.
Spanning 64,000 square kilometres (an area 11 times...
THIS SOUTH AFRICAN WINERY GAVE ITS WORKERS AN OWNERSHIP STAKE
The South African wine industry is notorious for its brutal conditions. To improve workers' lives, Solms-Delta decided it was time to "extend the pie"
The Cape region of South Africa has been producing wine since the 1650s. In recent years the industry, which employs some 300,000 people and contributes R36.1 billion ($2.7 billion) to the economy, has become known for delicious, inexpensive wines. But the story behind those bottles might put you off your Pinotage. Farm workers on local vineyards earn a minimum...
