Category: Message From the President

We’ve all been through it: visiting a foreign consulate in the fervent hope of persuading an official to give us a visa. Indeed, one of the pleasures of travel is to fatten our passports with colorful stamps of unpronounceable and exotic places. Doing this while on the road, gives an extra sense of importance to…

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A wonderful quote by the American writer and traveler Mark Twain expresses how to set off on a life without regret: “Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things that you didn’t do than by the ones you did do. So throw off the bowlines. Sail away from the safe harbor.…

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Twenty-five years ago I attended my first Travelers’ Century Club meeting and was enchanted by stories of landing on Pitcairn Island, motoring around the Soviet Union in a diesel Mercedes (“We filled up at farm co-ops for free because they didn’t know how much to charge us!”), and flying over Laos in a Yak-40 and…

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Since my two-year term is expiring in December, this will be my final President’s Message. First, I would like to acknowledge and thank the excellent and hard-working Officers and Board of Directors. Through them, we have made a number of accomplishments during the past two years. Among those are the addition of new chapters in…

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“What’s Your Favorite Country?” Like you, I have been asked this question numerous times. Of all the TCC destinations (my count is now 320 out of 321) the country that I mention when asked this question is Papua New Guinea. This country holds a strange fascination for me. The people of the lowland Sepik River…

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All travelers have favorite destinations that they revisit time and again. One of my favorites is the Mayan areas of Mexico, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras and Belize. In the 1970s I visited Chichen Itza and Tikal, two spectacular sites with towering temple-pyramids. My wife and I took another trip there in the ’90s. Since my…

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In January, a vote was held to determine if the southern 10 states of Sudan wanted to secede and form a new nation. As you are probably aware, the north of Sudan is predominantly Muslim, while the south is either Christian or animist. The vote was approximately 96% in favor of secession. In December, my…

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