Safaris, Belize (Via Hollywood), Bhutan, Mongolia, and More: Our Discussion of Frommer’s Comfort in the Wild, Part 2

Foreign.

Welcome to the Fromer Travel Show.

For those of you who listen often, you know, we have been talking with Jane Wooldridge.

Jane is a longtime staffer at the Miami Herald.

In fact, she was on a Pulitzer Prize winning team there of investigative journalists.

She also was the former president of the Society of American Travel Writers.

But I have her on the program because she is the author, I am very proud to say, of Fromer's first coffee table book.

It is called comfort in the 100 plus idyllic nature destinations.

No roughing it required.

Hey, Jane.

Welcome back to the Fromer Travel Show.

Hi.

Hi.

Thanks so much for having me back.

So just in a nutshell, the book is about ways to get into nature without roughing it.

And last week we talked about ranch vacations.

We talked about expedition cruises.

We talked about staying in a geodesic dome in Bryce Canyon or a tree hotel in Sweden where you're at the top of a tree in what looks like a bird's nest for the night.

Now let's talk about what I think everybody thinks about when they plan a deep nature vacation, which is safaris.

Safaris are the classic way to get close to nature, to get close to critters.

So let's talk first about how do you figure out what safari is best for you?

Well, I think probably the number one thing is if you have unlimited time and ability, because very few people do well.

Right.

But what calendar matches your calendar?

What animal migration matches your migration?

And I think most people think about the great migration when they think about safari.

And migration's a remarkable thing to witness, but it is not the only thing out there in the animal kingdom.

And what the migration is, is it's the wildebeests and the antelopes and the zebras, all the animals that followed the water flow in Africa, they need to be near water.

And so as the rains come in, some parts of Africa are green and wet and verdant and the animals can graze.

And as the rains go out, the animals need to follow those patterns, those weather patterns.

They tend to be somewhat reliable.

But, you know, we all know that weather has its own mind.

And just because it's not supposed to be cold in Miami, sometimes it is.

Just because it's supposed to be rainy season doesn't mean it is.

Sure.

So if you want to follow the migration routes, that's the first thing to think about is, okay, well, the great migration.

Usually the most reliable times are July and August.

If that's high on your list, then that's what you want to do.

But if you are not wedded to that particular experience, there are lots and lots of places and ways to see animals on safari.

South Africa doesn't really have a migration.

It's too far south.

And you can see animals in the reserves and national parks of South Africa.

You can see elephants, you can see lions, you can see zebra, you can see a lot of the big game animals.

Not during, outside the migration.

Sure.

It's not limited to that.

So it really has to do with what's your calendar going to align with what you want to see.

If you are in for the giant herds of Cape buffalo, then maybe you want to go to South Africa or to Kenya or Tanzania because you will see the great herds.

If you want to see the leopards up in the trees, this is a whole different thing.

And you're not going to see giant herds of leopards.

That's a different, different experience altogether.

Yeah.

I had always been told you go in summer, but because of my kids schedule, they were still in school, we ended up going to Tanzania in December, which is a green season.

And I was worried that it would be harder to see the animals, but it's also the time when they have children.

So we saw a lot of baby animals, which to me couldn't have been better.

I thought it was the best time to go.

Even though I don't think it's the classic time to be in Tanzania.

I think that there is always something special to see.

Yes.

And often people do go in December because their kids are out of school.

The Ngorogoro Crater, which is in Tanzania, is non seasonal, which is to say the crater is there and the animals that live in it are there all year round.

And so that's a place where you can see what that location has to offer in abundance at just about any time of the year.

So I really think what's your idea of a safari?

And then pick a place that fits that in your calendar.

I do think that using a travel agent for safari is probably a really smart way to go because you're spending a lot of money to do this.

Especially if you're more than one person, you're spending exponential amounts of money and you want to make sure that the experience you had matches the experience in your head.

And for that to happen, you want somebody who is widely experienced in a number of different destinations in sub Saharan Africa who either lives there or has a team that lives there.

You don't want somebody who's never really lived on the ground there.

You want people who really Live there.

You want a safari specialist.

Now, in the book, we highlight Green Safari's Chisa Busanga Camp.

Why is that?

What's so special?

What they did is they created actual natural nests on a plane so they look like giant birds nests.

And there are only four of them, so you're not with, you know, a bazillion people.

They actually have.

This is one of the things that amazed me is they have one that's mobility accessible.

The other three you climb stairs to get to.

But one of them has sort of a ramp scenario where you can get there if you have mobility issues and you are sleeping in this nest.

I always wanted to sleep in a bird's nest, but I didn't really want, like, the eagle coming in and chewing my head off or something.

And this, this is a bird's nest with a duvet and an ensuite bathroom.

I don't know what could be better than that.

You can sit up here in your nest and take your coffee and look out and see the lions wander around.

This is a part of Africa that gets.

Is very large but gets fewer visitors than other parts of Africa.

So this just absolutely hit my radar as I could get to sleep in a bird's nest.

There aren't a ton of other people around.

I can get close to the animals.

So for me, this is a total winner.

Yeah, it looked amazing.

And you also have in the safari section, something that people may not think of as a safari, but is the Tundra Buggy Lodge.

What is that?

So if you think about wildlife viewing as the safari experience and you're not just thinking about Africa or the Amazon, polar bears are.

We've read a lot about polar bears in recent years.

The ice is melting.

Are the bears endangered?

Apparently the bears have now figured out how to go catch and eat reindeer.

So they're less endangered than they were even though the ice is diminishing.

I was reading that.

I was reading that actually, scientists are saying the polar bears are getting fatter right now, that they're doing okay.

Well, maybe not fully okay, but some are getting fatter.

Well, you know, I think we all know that the rule of the universe is adapt or die.

And the polar bears are figuring out, aha.

Over out there, you know, not in seal territory, but just over.

That next hump is a reindeer herd.

And I can eat that.

Yeah, the Tundra Buggy Lodge.

It's not posh.

It is comfortable.

It is heated.

This is the most important thing.

And it has a lot of windows and so you can sit it's like a train almost.

It has multiple cars.

You can sit out there and see polar bears right from your window.

But you don't just sit in this lodge and go nowhere.

Each day you go off on a tundra buggy ride, which is basically a giant caterpillar like kind of conveyance with big tracks on it for the snow, but warm quarters for the people.

And so you can go out.

They take groups out onto the ice where they can get really close to the bears.

And part of the reason this is really interesting is if you go on an expedition cruise to the arctic, you may or may not get very close to those bears.

Because the rule number one is a lot of distance between humans and bears.

You don't want to endanger the humans.

You don't want to endanger the bears, because if the bears come after you, they have to shoot them.

You don't want that to happen.

In the tundra buggy, you're protected.

The people are protected.

So the buggy can go reasonably close to the bears.

The bears seem to not care in the least.

You know, they didn't get the memo.

They don't really care.

Great big thing in the snow.

What do I care?

I've seen it before.

And they will go about their regular play, but what happens is juvenile males play with each other like they're fighting.

It's how they learn to fight as they, you know, roughhouse with the boys.

And so you.

You can see this usual natural behavior at pretty close up, which you cannot do a lot of other ways with polar bears, because polar bears, they can eat you.

Yes, yes.

No, that sounds spectacular.

Okay, so from the tundra to the jungle, and to the jungle with a Hollywood connection, Tell us about the Blancano lodge in Belize.

Blancno is just this delightful place.

It's Francis Ford Coppola created, and his wife, who is now gone, created this village.

And it's spread out enough so that you don't feel like you're on top of other people.

It's along a brook and in beautiful grounds.

But it is a thatched hut.

A thatched hut with every conceivable modern convenience, mind you.

But it is really way to be part of this jungle.

And one of the things that I especially loved about it was that you have these giant toucans that might be sitting right off your porch or right in the tree next to you at dinner.

And I always think that toucans look like a cartoon bird, like, can this possibly be real?

But they are.

They're completely real.

And I Keep looking at them going, but aren't they.

Isn't their beak going to pull them over or something?

They just don't look like they could fly like that, but they can.

And at Blancano, you can have a front row seat to those birds, to other kinds of jungle wildlife.

You don't get the cats up close, obviously, to the.

To where the people are, but you do have farm experiences there.

You can take horseback rides.

And that was one of the things that I love is I love the idea that I can take a horse and go off into the jungle and, you know, you don't know what animals are going to come up.

And it's quite safe, but it's beautiful and feels somehow really clean and natural to be there and to be an observer without being intrusive.

Right.

And I gotta say, the photos make it look like a movie set.

I mean, these are gorgeous rooms.

He has quite the sense of style.

He is.

Well, that was his.

It was his.

His late wife, actually, apparently was the person who did all the styling.

And she had quite an eye.

You do feel like this is a place you really just want to stay and be and that some.

But again, I hate this word authentic, because I think it gets overused.

But it feels like it belongs there.

Everything there feels like it belongs there.

Not like somebody imposed it on the place.

Yes.

No, it has a real sense of Belize to it, I thought.

It does.

And before we leave jungles, I love the fact that you start your description of the Shintamani Wild Lodge in Cambodia by ziplining into the entrance.

That's how you arrive.

It is how you arrive.

It was one of my favorite places in the book.

I really did not know I'd been to Cambodia before, been in this part of the world before, before I went to Shintamani.

But the idea that they have you zipline in.

I talked with the.

The founder, Bill Hensley, and he said, we want to get you out of your comfort zone.

We want you to be really in this place.

And so you come zipping across and you're.

Even if you've ziplined before you.

This part of your brain is going, what was I thinking?

Thinking.

And then you zipline into the cocktail hut and there, here comes your lemonade with a little bit of spike in it.

And you're going, oh, that's what I was thinking.

What a good idea.

That, again, was a place that's really quite magical.

And then you can do activities that show you how this place is under threat.

And you can go out with a bush Patrol and see the poachers who are taking away wildlife or trees.

And so there's a full experience here.

Not just the luxury of being in the middle of nowhere with great service, but also the real luxury of experiencing something that if we don't take care of, it, could disappear.

Yeah, yeah.

You could say the same in a certain way.

In the islands chapter, you talk about a place called the Fogo Island Inn, which is in Canada, and that, too, was created to kind of be an anchor for that community.

Right.

I think there's always a.

You know, we talk a lot about over tourism, and you can certainly have too much of any good thing, but for rural communities, no.

Tourism can also be just as detrimental.

If people can't afford to live the life that they have in a place, if there's not a way for them to make a living, then, you know, the place becomes abandoned.

And Fogo island was created by a woman who had grown up there, gone away to the tech world, made a lot of money, and instead of, you know, investing it in the million other ways that one with a lot of money can invest it, she created this inn where not only do people have jobs, but they really work hard to connect visitors with the place.

So you have an individual guide when you go there, and their first thing is they take you to some part of the island that you're not going to find by yourself and introduce you to people who live there who are making a living in the way that they have for generations.

And so it's this rocky island.

In.

The middle of nowhere.

It is the middle of the Atlantic almost.

It juts out into the Atlantic, and it is very remote.

And this enables the people who live there to continue a life that is traditional for them, that those who stay there want to continue.

I mean, obviously, if you want to hightail it to the city, you can do that, but it enables them to continue that life, and it enables those of us who haven't had that experience to find out a bit about what it's like to live in these remote places.

Yeah.

All right, let's keep on remote.

We've done jungles, We've done safaris.

Now let's talk about the desert.

We have a whole chapter about desert experiences, and the one that called to me was a place called the Three Camel Lodge in Mongolia.

Can you talk about that?

I can, because I realize that I was there in its first year of opening, which was 100 years ago, practically.

I had become really engaged with this idea of Mongolia, and these people who had Ridden on horseback.

And believe me, Mongolia is remote now, and it was even more remote then.

And it always struck me that this is.

How do people survive in these rugged desert places?

And this is actually on the edge of the Gobi Desert.

This is the place where the dinosaur.

Great dinosaur digs have been made.

And they also have incredible bird watching.

It does get green a bit in the summer.

And that's why the nomadic people go there, because their various livestock can live there.

One of the things that, you know, you have gurs and the camp itself is a gr.

Camp yurt.

Gur.

Same word.

It's a collapsible round tent.

And in a period of an hour, somebody can put up this giant tent at 3 Camel.

The tents are there all the time.

They don't take them down and put them back up, which has a sense of a little bit of stability about it.

They're remarkably warm because the wind does come whipping into that part of.

I mean, you're into this giant open plane that it's a great place.

And the people there, they're really happy to see you.

They don't see that many foreigners, and they're like, oh, isn't this interesting?

And even when I was there years and years ago, people knew things like what the score of the Lakers game was the night before, because they're sitting in their truck.

I know the nomads are sitting in their truck listening to the game on the higher note.

So we're linked in ways that we do not expect to be linked, even though, you know, the.

I'm asking the.

The gentleman of the house.

When I was there before, we went around and saw some of the nomadic camps, which you do when you go to places like this.

And I had asked him, well, what does camel cost?

And he said, well, about what a computer costs in your country.

Want to make a trade.

And I'm thinking, great, so I am going to get that camel in my suitcase.

I don't think so.

But that idea that people are much more connected than I expected them to be and humorous, funny, you know, living in a very different way from what I live.

But we still have these common parameters.

Yeah.

In that part of the book, we have a lot of pictures of the people there because I think that's such a big part of the experience as well as the nature.

And they're beautiful, you know, really lovely in traditional dress and open and smiling and.

Yeah.

I do have one bit of advice for anybody who goes there.

There are two delicacies that you will be offered.

It's rude not to accept, but find a place to discard, because one of them is marmot, which is, you know, a vermin, and they cook them from the inside out.

They put stones in the inner and it cooks.

And the other is fermented mare's milk candies, and they're quite sour and they're hard.

And everybody wants to give you one of these.

One of these yogurt treats, and you're like, oh, how lovely.

Now, can I please find a place to hide this under my seat or something?

Wow.

So they cook the varmints from the inside out.

I've never.

I didn't even know that was a way to cook.

That's fascinating.

Well, that's how I saw it done.

And then I was expected to eat part of said varmint.

And gamey.

Definitely gamey.

Wow.

All right.

Well, Chapter nine is about lodges that are in gorgeous nature areas, including the place we, at least I associate with happiness, Bhutan.

You write about the Gangti Lodge there, and, boy, does that look like a special place.

Bhutan is a special place.

It's another one of those places where the nature and the lifestyle and the people are all sort of part of an ecosystem that is very close to nature, but also very close to the culture of what that place is.

And so you see the monks at the monastery clanging the bell, clanging these giant bells.

And the spirit of the place is just part of the whole experience.

It is called, as you know, the happiest place on Earth, Bhutan.

And they have a gauge called the National Happiness Index.

Yes.

And that's how they judge, how they judge themselves.

Are people feeling good about themselves?

Do they have enough to eat?

Are they comfortable with their neighbors?

Do they feel good about their surrounds?

And that's the Western terminology of, you know, how they judge their universe.

So it's all the elements of wellness, which is natural wellness, health, and just the things that you do every day that it's easy to take for granted in my daily life, but there's less taking it for granted there.

So all of that culture gets imbued with the experience of being in the hillsides and the Himalayas, of walking in the mountains, in the forest, and there's none of that sense of, oh, I smell something off.

There's no industry.

There's nothing that makes you feel like you're anywhere.

But the way the universe intended you to see it.

Yeah.

We've been talking about places where you can get deep into nature, but we also have a chapter of shorter experiences.

Say you're a real city slicker and you don't want to leave the city for that long.

There are day long experiences that you can have and one of them takes place in Armenia.

The winemaker's table.

So in this happens, particularly in this place in Armenia, though it does happen even here in the US and you go off into the mountains in a really secluded long view.

Birds circling overhead.

Not vultures.

Birds and watching the world unfold in front of you.

And a local farmer who specializes in making wine pulls out a table and puts out a feast of things that he has grown or his neighbors have grown and the wine that they make and their family has made for generations.

One of the things I didn't know is that winemaking actually started in Armenia.

This was not something that had hit my radar, but in fact it did.

However, many centuries ago, even before the Franciscan monks got hold of wine, they were doing this in Armenia.

And so you have this experience that really feels like you're in here.

It's of the soil you got there over the soil.

You get there, you're eating the bounty of the soil.

You're looking out across the fields, the mountains.

And I really.

It makes me hungry to think about it.

Yeah.

Yeah.

So we've been talking about Jane's wonderful book.

It's called Comfort in the Wild.

Jane, what do you hope people will take away from the book?

I hope that they.

It will inspire them to go outdoors and do something or stay a place or see a place they might have been unlikely to see at another time that they will.

If you live in a city, the outdoors can be a little intimidating.

And this is really meant to give people access to a world that is not intimidating, but can feel that way.

Give yourself permission to go out and smell clean air and just stand and feel the sun on your face.

Great.

And let me say, Jane not only profiles a lot of incredible places to stay, but she also gets very practical.

She'll talk about what to pack for an expedition cruise.

In the book, she talks about how to find affordable safaris.

And there are things in all price ranges in the book, which I'm proud of.

So I think this is a book for anybody who wants to get out into the wild, but who isn't like a hardcore sleep on the ground type.

I think I was late to realize in my life that you could go out and really enjoy wild places without being miserable.

And so I'm happy to share that with other people.

Well, great.

And you have.

Thank you so much, Jane, for appearing on the Fromer Travel show twice in a row.

Well, thanks so much, Pauline, for having me.

And I've enjoyed it.

And I enjoyed being part of a collaboration with you to make this book.

Well, we're so proud of it.

It's really a beauty.

And if you have friends who you need to give gifts to, I can't think of a better gift or gift yourself.

You're going to find this is a book that you can create travel dreams on.

It's going to introduce you to places you may not have considered going, but really should.

So with that small commercial ended, I thank you so much for listening.

If you like the Fromer Travel show, won't you give us a 5 star rating?

If you don't, it's been nice knowing you.

Thank you for listening.

And to those who are traveling, may I wish you a hearty bon voyage.

Sour candy on the table?

Lazy afternoons in your sweatpants Watching cable Well, it feels so far away.

All.

The channels seem the same.

Trying to remember all the songs we like to play?

Cause those lazy afternoons don't come so frequently these days?

Oh, it's been so long And I cannot help but wonder Are you ever coming home?

I like you with your sour candy in the booth House on the lake oh, but I hate, I hate, I hate, I hate, I hate, I hate the way it tast.

I can't get you off of my.

Mind.

Looking out the window where we spend so much of our time.