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Hello there!
We certainly hope that you're well. BJ and I remain in Argentina–our 5-week excursion has now extended for almost 7 months! Spring has, in fact, sprung down here in the Southern Hemisphere, and all of the leaves are returning to the tree-lined streets and plazas of Mendoza.
You may be wondering what 'travel news' we can bring you right now, as so many of us are completely grounded. You better believe we're hard at work on developing new itineraries for the future. Wildlife safaris, Buddhist pilgrimages, Around the World journeys, and meaningful cultural outings. No harm in making your travel wish list now, right?!
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In this issue:
- Upcoming trips & private tour options
- "Treat, Spay, Love" journey to Nepal in 2021
- Bagel consulting abroad
- Our favorite breakfasts around the globe
- Wine in the Wild
- Perspective Shift: Africa's handling of COVID-19
- Plastics: 3 stories
- Favorite travel product highlight
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Upcoming trips & private tour options
Can we take a second to let you know what's in the pipeline? If a trip is linked that means you can read more on our website; if not, please stay tuned or write us if you want to be the first to know when details are available! In chronological order:
We also know that you may wish to keep it in the family for a while and only travel within a social bubble. We have trusted partners in some great destinations and can help you plan the perfect private tour (for 1 to 20 people!) We'll be building out those websites soon, but in the meantime, you can consider planning your private tour in Bhutan, East Africa (Kenya, Tanzania, Uganda, Rwanda), Sri Lanka, Egypt, and India. Please reply and let us know if you're considering a friends & family in tour in any of those areas!
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Treat, Spay, Love: Nepal 2021
Fundraising trip for street dogs in Kathmandu
The details for our next "Treat, Spay, Love" trip are here! This is a special one, as it coincides with the holiday of Kukur Tihar, a day in Nepal where they celebrate dogs. Kukur Tihar is one day of an important 5-day Nepali festival, but the second day is reserved solely for our canine comrades.
This fundraising trip will be a great opportunity to participate in a fun, unique holiday, all while providing much-needed support. ALL proceeds will go to local street dog welfare organizations.
Please head over to the page by clicking on Khaire (the very happy dog above!) or the button below. You can learn more about this holiday, more about Nepal, and how YOU can help Nepali street dogs even if you can't make it on the trip next year. The lockdown in Nepal has been particularly hard on street dogs and the angels that take care of them right now.
We won't take deposits until we are confident this trip can move forward safely, but you can let us know you're interested by filling out this form & we'll let you know when the trip is open for registration.
Also, we sure would appreciate you spreading the word about this trip, especially as posts about Kukur Tihar will start to circulate around your social media (I just saw my first one last week!)
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Bagels Abroad
Since we moved out of the U.S. almost 8 years ago, we've had the good fortune to sample so many delicious cuisines around the world. Still, though, sometimes you can't help but miss things from home. One of those things has been bagels. On the rare (!) occasion we find them, they're little more than circular pieces of white bread. That's why I was excited to see that there's some bagel consulting happening in the world!
This NYT article highlights a company that brings bagel know-how to aspiring bakers all over the world. From the story:
"There’s the baking itself: days or weeks of trial and error, with different flours and enzymes, to replicate a New York bagel’s distinctive chewiness and crust; adapting the recipe to the local humidity and temperature; and adjusting the amount of time bagels need to “nap,” or proof.
"But there’s also the marketing — how to shape expectations and build interest in a New York staple that, overseas, may be entirely unfamiliar.
“People didn’t understand why they had to pay the same price for bagels as compared to their sandwiches, because of the hole in the middle.”
 And as for us? We are currently in bagel heaven! I was inspired by a college friend who posted his bagel creations on Facebook recently; I also have to thank the trusty gas oven in our Airbnb (which I love despite its utter lack of temperature gauge or precise temperate controls). I use this recipe and it's worked out well every time. It's a heck of a lot easier than you'd imagine! I've also tried my hand at soft pretzels, homemade pizza dough, and even scones. It appears I'm making up for lost kitchen time—8 years without a kitchen made up for in just 2 months!
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Speaking of bagels...
Our Favorite Breakfasts Around the Globe
We were inspired by a recent Travel + Leisure article to consider our own list of our favorite breakfasts around the globe. From pad thai to butter tea & barley flour to breakfast 122 stories above Dubai, you can see that blog by clicking the button below.
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 Wine on the Road
Vivino wine app
If you're a wine drinker, you may already know which selections in your local shops are your favorite. But what about on the road? If you want to pick up a bottle of wine on vacation, the Vivino app is a great way to get a broad snapshot: ratings, reviews, notes and characteristics, food pairings, and even an average price. You can also keep notes in there if you want to remember the great wines you discover! All you do is take a photo of the label and the app does the rest (over an internet connection).
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Perspective Shift
Africa's successful handling of COVID-19
Travel is such a quick & effective way to challenge stereotypes and shift perspectives. Luckily while we're all staying put, we can still examine our preconceived ideas and biases in other ways. This Washington Post piece is a perfect example. I recommend reading the whole article here, but here are a few paragraphs I've pulled from the piece and put together:
News reports and opinion articles have posited that corruption and a lack of health-care infrastructure meant that Africa was a “time bomb” waiting to explode. Rampant poverty and a lack of effective governance would cause the dark continent to fall apart under the weight of a public health emergency. The world, the experts said, should prepare to offer aid, loans and debt forgiveness to African governments — in other words, they should prepare to save Africa.
No need.
Instead, the media has largely ignored the policy successes out of Africa. In doing so, Western media is reinforcing colonial narratives of Black inferiority and the inability of Black nations to govern themselves at all, much less govern better than resource-rich White nations.
As the United States approaches 200,000 deaths, the West seems largely blind to Africa’s successes. In recent weeks, headline writers seem to be doing their hardest to try to reconcile Western stereotypes about Africa with the reality of the low death rates on the continent. The BBC came under fire for a since-changed headline and a tweet that read “Coronavirus in Africa: Could poverty explain mystery of low death rate?” The New York Post published an article with the headline, “Scientists can’t explain puzzling lack of coronavirus outbreaks in Africa.”
But overall, African countries have made great efforts to contain the coronavirus, and citizens so far have escaped the nightmare predictions. African lives have been saved thanks to the hard work of many dedicated health-care workers and the collective responsibility of communities.
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Three Tales of Plastic
The bad, the inspiring, and the ridiculous
The bad:
NPR & PBS's Frontline put together an important and heartbreaking piece about the true fate of plastics in the U.S: they're not being recycled, and those little numbers on the bottom of your plastic pieces are essentially worthless–and intentionally misleading. It seems the most important R in "Reduce, Reuse, Recycle" is truly "Reduce." The audio is here (24 minutes) and you can find the transcript here if you'd rather read this story.
The inspiring:
Our friend Kimleng is a wonderful photography guide in Cambodia, and like the rest of us in the travel world, he's been waylaid by the COVID shutdown. Kimleng decided to spend that downtime teaching local children English, but not for free–the children pay in collected plastic trash. In addition to learning language skills, they're learning about the harms of plastic pollution and they're helping to clean their community. Click here to watch a 2-minute video on BBC News about this endeavor.
The ridiculous:
Campers who litter in a Thai national park are being reunited with their trash. Since people have to register to camp within the park, the Thai government knows exactly who is littering, and they're mailing the garbage back to people's homes. Maybe that policy is just the boost our U.S. Postal Service needs, huh?! Click here to read about on Travel + Leisure.
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 Travel product recommendation
Weleda Skin Food
The short story: Skin Food is an amazing moisturizer, 100% endorsed by BJ.
Get the longer story over here on our blog (or click on BJ to head over there!)
And speaking of plastic... Weleda actually pays for you to return their bottles to them for proper recycling!
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Voting away from home
You may have heard that NASA astronaut Kate Rubins will be voting from the International Space Station this year. A lot of people ask BJ and me how we manage to exercise our voting rights abroad, and it's almost as easy as voting from space!
As residents of Florida, we're allowed to vote by fax as overseas citizens; and, yes, we pay for a digital fax number all year long just to make sure we have this opportunity! We're elated to see more and more U.S. citizens exploring new ways in which to exercise their voting rights. Even though we don't live in Broward County but for a few days or weeks per year, I take delight in researching even the city and county-level positions before casting my vote, where elections can be decided by just a few ballots. So, I certainly know we're not the first people telling you this but, to our friends in the U.S.: PLEASE VOTE, even if you're not doing it from space.
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Thank you for spending some time with us today! It means a lot to us to stay connected with you during this time. To be honest, it would seem that we're getting the 7-month itch down here in Argentina, and we're dreaming about other potential home bases. We're currently eyeballing Ensenada, Mexico; if you've ever been to this city, just a two-hour drive south of San Diego, give us a holler and let us know what you think of it.
We don't have any recent selfies; if we did, they'd probably just be a reflection of us in a TV screen, watching Netflix! However, in commemoration of our engagement 9 years ago today (!), here's a photo from that day at Surprise Glacier in Alaska.
Safe (armchair) travels &
happy (face-masked) trails,
Lauren and BJ
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