Monthly Archives: October 2024

Dragon hill: Birthday in South Korea

Dragon hill: Birthday in South Korea
Dragon hill: Birthday in South Korea

Concluding stories of my Christmas travels in 2022…

I was determined to visit Korea before I left Japan. The chance was too good to pass up — a space traversed in a breath from the eastern side of the globe, versus leagues and hours of travel from the west.

It’s difficult to overstate the importance of this place to my family. Our time there spanned my formative years between nine and eleven years old, when I first understood myself as a world traveler, with all the stories on this blog to attest to the consequences of that … but still more importantly, Korea is where my father first laid eyes on my mother. As he hails from Virginia and she from New Mexico, they might never have met if their paths hadn’t intersected there.

Read the rest of this entry

Pony-Trekking in Lesotho

Pony-Trekking in Lesotho

En route to visiting Zulu libraries in KwaZulu-Natal, I booked a tour to Lesotho — an independent mountain kingdom completely encircled by South Africa. The promise of awe-inspiring altitudes and stark skylines had long inclined me to make the trip, all the more tempting when I imagined traversing the peaks on pony back.

Read the rest of this entry