That’s how our guide on Robben Island introduced himself, sitting on our tour bus, before he’d told us much else. He said it plainly, the way you’d mention what neighborhood you grew up in. He wasn’t performing gravity. He didn’t need to.

Robben Island, sitting a few miles off the coast of Cape Town, was where the apartheid government sent the political prisoners it wanted out of sight and, ideally, out of mind. Nelson Mandela was one of them. He spent eighteen of his twenty-seven years in prison on that island, before he was eventually moved to facilities on the mainland and released in 1990. Our guide had lived a version of that same sentence, on that same island, and now he spent his days walking tourists through it, narrating his own history.

I kept thinking about that as we moved through the site. The limestone quarry where prisoners were made to labor, damaging their lungs and eyes permanently. The cell block that was narrow and cold, even in the sun. We even stood beside where our guide had slept, eaten, and relieved himself.

Upon leaving, we were surrounded by the words of Nelson Mandela in the gift shop. One line stayed with me:

“Everyone can rise above their circumstances and achieve success if they are dedicated to and passionate about what they do.” — Nelson Mandela

It’s the kind of line that could end up on a poster in a school or break room to offer inspiration. However, in this context, it lands very differently. Robben Island was a prison for those who attempted to do just that, to rise above and speak out against their circumstances. Perhaps the whole apparatus of apartheid was, in a sense, a long argument that one’s circumstances are tied to their destiny.

The Population Registration Act of 1950 divided the country into legal racial categories: White, Coloured, and Native (later officially termed Bantu, and today generally referred to as Black African; a fourth category of Asian was later added). On top of those categories, it built the entire architecture of daily life, where you could live, what school you could attend, what job you could hold, who you could marry, whether you needed a passbook to walk through your own city after dark. From the outside, we often picture apartheid as a simple binary of White versus everyone else. It wasn’t. The system was explicitly and deliberately stratified, with White South Africans at the top, an intermediate category of Coloured South Africans (people of mixed Khoisan, European, and enslaved Southeast Asian and East African ancestry, concentrated in the Western Cape) occupying a middle tier with marginally better access to jobs, schooling, and housing, and Black Africans positioned at the very bottom of the hierarchy the law constructed. Apartheid did not just divide Black from White. It ranked its victims against one another, attempting to divide people even further, and that ranking has unfortunately still outlived the law that created it.

I carried those thoughts with me for the rest of the trip, the way you carry a stone in your pocket without quite meaning to. A few days later, on the drive toward Franschhoek, I found myself talking with our driver about all of it, apartheid and its legacy, trying to understand different perspectives and to hear different stories. Somewhere in that conversation, he mentioned a 100% Black-owned winery not far from where we were headed. I said we had to try it.

The Franschhoek Valley and the town of Franschhoek are absurdly pretty. And don’t get me wrong, I loved it, with its white gables and oak-lined roads and mountains that look arranged on purpose, but it’s also one of the clearest physical records left of who South African wine was built for and who actually built it. The Cape wine industry is more than 350 years old, dating back to the earliest Dutch settlement at the Cape, and for most of that history the people—making the wine, pruning it, picking it, hauling it, learning its chemistry by feel because no one would teach it to them formally—were overwhelmingly farmworkers with no path to ownership at all. Under the “dop” system, workers were paid partly in wine itself, a practice with roots in the Dutch East India Company period and formally prohibited in legislation beginning in 1961, though it persisted informally for decades afterward. It did more than create dependency. It created generational hardship inside communities that were simultaneously denied the education, capital, and land ownership that might have let them leave.

This is the area Paul Siguqa grew up in, as the son of a woman who spent her working life in someone else’s vineyard. Paul’s mother, Nomaroma Siguqa, was a Cape wine farm laborer for most of her life, and she raised her children in a small cottage on land that would never belong to their family, in an industry that had, in every practical and legal sense, already decided what people who looked like them were for. Not owners. Not winemakers. Labor. But Nomaroma had other plans. She told her son, plainly, that she would be the last person in their family to work someone else’s fields. It wasn’t phrased as inspiration. It was a decision, made by a woman with no legal or economic reason yet to believe it was possible, in a system engineered specifically to make sure it wasn’t.

Paul didn’t walk straight into wine; he built toward it sideways. University first, at Stellenbosch Business School, a few miles and a world away from the farm he grew up on. Then a communications company, then an events company, then years working for media companies in Cape Town and Gauteng. A career that had nothing to do with grapes and everything to do with the discipline and perseverance to eventually afford the thing you actually want. Then, after fifteen years of quietly saving money, never telling most people what he was saving for, he found something finally within reach. In 2019, he purchased Klein Goederust, a ten-hectare winery dating back to 1905 in the heart of the Franschhoek Valley. Winemaker Rodney Zimba, also the child of a farmworker, left a secure position at an established estate to help lead it, not just producing wine but effectively reconstructing a working estate from the ground up, restoring a 120-year-old cellar and replanting vineyards that had gone to seed. Over the following two years, the two of them poured more than 23 million rand into renovation and restoration.

On December 3rd, 2021, Klein Goederust opened its doors as a 100% Black-owned winery, with a small, deliberate range: a shiraz, a cabernet-merlot blend, a chenin blanc, a dessert wine. Paul kept the farm’s original name out of respect for its history, even as friends questioned why he would keep a name with no connection to his own family on the first Black-owned wine estate in Franschhoek. His answer, in short, was that he hadn't renamed the place. He'd accepted it as he'd found it—history and all—and his job now was to add his own identity to it rather than erase what came before. He did that literally, adding the Southern ground hornbill, his family’s clan totem, to the farm’s logo, resting it beside the fleur-de-lys that nods to Franschhoek’s French Huguenot founders. Two histories, on the same crest, refusing to cancel each other out.

Now, at the center of Klein Goederust’s output sits its Méthode Cap Classique, South Africa’s answer to Champagne, made the same traditional way, with the second fermentation in the bottle. Theirs is named Nomaroma, after Paul’s mother, and it was the first thing we tasted. It was exceptional. I’ve had a fair amount of proper Champagne in my life, the famous houses, the ones with centuries of marketing behind every cork, and Nomaroma stands next to them. Elegant, precise, confident in a way that has nothing to do with volume or vintage prestige and everything to do with a winemaker who knew exactly what he was going for and had something to prove with every bottle.

But the symbolism is there, too. This is a bottle named for a woman who spent her working life making wine profitable for other people, in a system that positioned her, as a Black woman in the Cape Winelands, near the very bottom of a carefully ranked hierarchy of who was even permitted to belong there, and who was never once allowed to put her own name on anything that came out of that labor. Now her name is on the label, in the same valley, on land her son owns outright.

Paul put the arc of it plainly in an interview with the New York Times in October 2022:

“If it’s possible for a child of an uneducated farm laborer to be a farm owner, then it’s possible for the child of a domestic worker to become a doctor, a scientist and whatever it is that they want to be.”

It isn’t a metaphor for him. It’s a sentence built entirely out of his own life, and it reaches past his own story on purpose, toward every child of a domestic worker, a farm laborer, anyone the old hierarchy ranked and then told to stay put.

Robben Island and Klein Goederust lie just an hour apart, yet they represent opposite ends of South Africa's story. Robben Island is a monument to constraint, a system built with real legal precision to limit exactly how far people like Mandela or Nomaroma Siguqa were allowed to go. Klein Goederust sits on the same soil that system once used to enforce those limits, and it is, in its own quiet way, the argument against it. One is a record of what was taken. The other is proof of what can still be built back, if someone is stubborn and patient enough to do it, one farm and one bottle at a time.

This isn’t a tidy resolution. South Africa’s land question is nowhere near settled. White South Africans, who make up less than a tenth of the population, still own most of the country’s commercial farmland more than three decades after the first democratic election, and Klein Goederust remains a rare exception in a valley where it is still, genuinely, notable. One winery, no matter how moving its story, doesn’t rebalance 350 years of dispossession. But I also don’t think you have to choose between holding the full weight of that history and recognizing what Paul and Rodney and Nomaroma actually built here. Both things are true in the same glass.

If you’re in Franschhoek, go. Ask someone to pour you the Nomaroma, while your palate is clear and the story still fresh in your ears. Let it be excellent on its own terms first, because it is, and let the history arrive after, the way the best stories do: quietly, once you’ve already decided you’re paying attention.

Mandela’s words were painted on a wall on Robben Island for schoolchildren, South Africans, and people in general who need reminding that circumstance is not the same thing as destiny. Nomaroma Siguqa never needed the wall. She just needed freedom and one more generation.

Her son poured the rest.

I think that’s one of the real lessons of traveling, maybe the only one that actually matters. Talk to the people who live somewhere. Let them tell you their stories, even the hard ones, especially the hard ones. Take their recommendations over the ones in the apps and the guidebooks, because a local isn’t guessing at what’s worth your time; they’re handing you something they’ve already decided matters. Try, even for a minute, to live inside their history instead of just observing it through a car window. I try to do a version of this work myself, sharing what I’ve learned, offering context from my own trips, and I still can’t know what a driver who grew up two hours from Franschhoek knows. Research gets you facts. A recommendation offered freely, in the middle of a hard conversation, gets you the lived truth.

I need to make a confession: I have been absolutely loving watching the World Cup this year.

I’ll say upfront that I am not, by any stretch, well-versed in soccer. I couldn’t diagram an offside trap for you if you paid me. I’m genuinely lost when it comes to fouls and their fairness. But I’ve watched my share of it over the years, mostly by osmosis. Family members played, and I worked on two books about Argentine tango, which meant being semi-knowledgeable, at least from a distance, about Argentina’s other national treasure. I’ve also been in Buenos Aires when the entire city shut down to honor the game. You don’t need to know the rules to understand that kind of devotion.

So, I’m writing about it as someone who has been quietly, happily swept up in the whole thing: the games themselves, sure, but also everything that’s been happening around them.

But first, I have to acknowledge the amazing athletic ability and skill on display by the players. I’m constantly in awe of all of them. Messi has an uncanny ability to stand back and assess the game, then burst into action and score a goal. Mbappé is just a super-fast player who waits on the left side of the field, then zooms past the defenders to catch a pass and kick the ball right into the goal. Then there is Bellingham, who seems to be everywhere at once, contributing defensively and offensively. And I, of course, have to mention Haaland, the internet’s sweetheart and the game’s Viking, muscling through his opponents while his memes enchant the world. Those are just the standouts; there are so many more great players.

Now, as we get farther along in the tournament, there are, of course, people saying negative things. The Egypt/Argentina match is a good example. But say what you want about FIFA as an institution (my husband produced a TV show about it, El Presidente, which digs into just how messy things were in FIFA’s past); the tournament itself has a way of pulling the whole world into the same conversation for a few weeks, and for the most part, it’s pretty positive. That’s rare. Not many things do that anymore. This year’s World Cup has leaned into that idea more than most, expanding to 48 teams and, with it, opening the door to countries that have never had a seat at this table before. One could say it was just to increase FIFA’s revenues, but one could also say it gave more teams a chance.

This is the part that’s gotten me the most. Curaçao and Cape Verde both qualified for their first-ever World Cup this year, and it’s hard to overstate how unlikely that is. Curaçao has a population of around 158,000, making it the smallest nation, by both population and land area, ever to qualify. Cape Verde isn’t much bigger, a scattering of volcanic islands off West Africa with about 530,000 people. Between the two of them, they broke the record for the smallest World Cup nation twice. I must admit, while watching them, I was always rooting for them, and they were good. Cape Verde nearly beat the reigning champions, Argentina.

And the ripple effects of these two teams in the World Cup have been wonderful to watch. Most of the world had never heard of either place before this year. Now people are looking them up, seeing the turquoise water and saying, “wait, that’s gorgeous.” Travel interest in both countries has been climbing right alongside their run in the tournament. Fans have fallen in love with the dances, music, and spirit of both countries. I loved seeing the videos of Curaçao fans dancing their way through customs at the Kansas City airport, boombox and all. And who doesn’t love Cesária Évora from Cape Verde?

If the underdog stories are the heart of this World Cup, the fans have been the soul of it. Norway made its first World Cup quarterfinal in decades this summer, and their supporters have brought a tradition with them called the Viking Row: fans sitting shoulder to shoulder, rowing an invisible ship in unison while a drum keeps the beat. It started small, a handful of people in Boston. It spread to the subways of New York and onto airplanes across the world. By the time it reached Miami for the Norway vs. England game, thousands of fans in horned helmets were doing it together on Collins Ave. in South Beach, drawing in tourists and locals who had never rooted for Norway a day in their lives. Watching footage of glamorous South Beach suddenly go full Viking for an afternoon is the kind of thing that makes you understand why people build their vacations around this tournament.

We got a taste of it ourselves right here in Los Angeles. With SoFi Stadium hosting matches, watch parties popped up everywhere: bars, breweries, rooftops, and even city parks with free screenings on giant LED screens for anyone who wanted to bring a blanket and show up. We sat in a packed bar watching the USA play, surrounded by fellow fans all enjoying the camaraderie.

And then there’s been the corporate side of it, which has somehow turned out to be just as entertaining as anything happening on the field. British Airways and Norwegian Air, two carriers with no official World Cup sponsorship, made a public bet on Instagram ahead of the Norway–England quarterfinal: whichever country lost would have to swap its Instagram logo for its rival’s for a day. It should not have worked as well as it did. It, however, worked so well that SAS jumped into the fun too, launching its own guerrilla campaign around the Viking Row, promoting a plane named “Bele Viking”, rowing fans straight to Miami for the match.

My favorite thread of all, though, is the logo saga. FIFA requires host stadiums to cover any branding from companies that aren’t official tournament sponsors, which meant Levi’s Stadium in Santa Clara, CA spent the tournament wrapped in white tarps and rebranded as the “San Francisco Bay Area Stadium.” Instead of fighting it, Levi’s leaned all the way in, changing its Instagram profile picture to a photo of the covered-up sign and draping the same white sheet over storefronts in Paris, London, Mexico City, and beyond. Not to be outdone, Gillette, whose stadium in Foxborough, MA, required nearly 65,000 individual seat logos to be taped over, covered its own signage in a thick layer of shaving cream for the cameras, which they later “shaved” off. Even the condiments got swept up in it: stadium staff taped over the labels on ketchup bottles because Heinz isn’t an official sponsor, and people online joked they were the “Epstein file condiments.” Heinz responded by rolling out a limited-edition “Unofficial Stadium Ketchup,” then teamed up with Heineken on a six-pack pairing one bottle of ketchup with five beers, calling it “the match we’ve all been waiting for.” Somewhere in a FIFA brand-compliance meeting, someone had to explain that the censorship had become better marketing than the sponsorship ever was.

I don’t think I’ll ever be a die-hard soccer fan. I’ll probably go another four years without watching a full match. But there’s something about a tournament that can make a tiny Caribbean island feel like the center of the world for a week, get two airlines to publicly roast each other for sport, and turn a denim company’s compliance headache into its best ad campaign in years. It can fill a bar in Los Angeles with strangers cheering the same goal (the kind of scene that happens for a Dodgers or a Lakers game, but not usually soccer), send thousands of fans rowing an invisible ship down a Miami street in horned helmets, and somehow make a Norwegian striker’s memes the internet’s shared inside joke. That’s not really about soccer anymore. That’s just the world, briefly, agreeing to pay attention to the same thing at the same time, coming together, and having some fun.

What I keep coming back to is how much this tournament has brought a divided world together, football fans and non-football fans alike. There has been controversy, plenty of it, and there will probably be more before the final whistle blows. But there has also been an enormous amount of joy. Strangers becoming friends over a shared chant. Fans learning a few words of a language they’ll never need again, just to greet the people sitting next to them. An entire planet, briefly, curious about each other instead of suspicious. I’ll take that trade.

A note as I was finishing this: I learned that Jayden Adams, the South African midfielder who helped lead his country to its first-ever World Cup knockout stage, died this past Saturday at just 25. It’s a stark, sad reminder that behind every joyful headline in this tournament are real young people living real lives, on and off the pitch. My thoughts are with his family and everyone who loved him.

In America, there are fireworks this week.

There is a crowd on a lawn or a rooftop or a beach, faces tilted upward, children with their hands over their ears. There is the smell of charcoal and sunscreen and whatever is left of the afternoon. Someone has a flag. Someone else has a cooler. The anthem played earlier; everyone stood, some with hands over their hearts. And for a moment, without quite planning to, an entire country felt like one entity.

July Fourth is one of the great spectacles of American life — loud and joyful and unapologetically itself. It is also, like most national holidays, something more than it appears. Beneath the fireworks is the story a nation tells about itself. And traveling the world has taught me that every country tells a version of this story, in its own voice, in its own way — and that if you pay attention, what they choose to celebrate reveals something essential about who they believe themselves to be.

I have been fortunate to witness national celebrations in many countries, and no two feel quite alike.

The French celebrate Bastille Day on the fourteenth of July — the date, in 1789, when the storming of a prison became the spark of a revolution. The centerpiece is a military parade down the Champs-Élysées that is, by any measure, an act of theater: jets trailing smoke in the colors of the tricolor, thousands of soldiers in precise formation, the President watching from a reviewing stand. Then, what feels like the entire city makes its way to the Eiffel Tower to listen to music and watch fireworks. I know this because my sister and I once spent an entire Bastille Day camped out in front of the Eiffel Tower, staking our ground, watching Paris fill up around us, waiting for nightfall. The fireworks that followed were, without question, among the most spectacular I have ever seen. France is saying something about itself: we are old, we are powerful, we endure, and we know how to put on a show. There is national pride here that does not feel the need to apologize for itself.

South Africa’s Freedom Day, celebrated on the twenty-seventh of April, has a different weight entirely. It marks the date in 1994 when the country held its first fully democratic elections — the day millions of Black South Africans voted for the first time. This is not a celebration that has had centuries to soften into tradition. For many people alive today, Freedom Day is living memory. The joy in it is inseparable from the suffering that preceded it, and the pride is quieter, more complicated, and in some ways more moving for that. When a nation celebrates something it nearly did not survive, the celebration carries a different kind of meaning.

India’s Independence Day falls on the fifteenth of August — the date in 1947 when, after nearly two centuries of British colonial rule, one of the world’s oldest civilizations finally governed itself again. The Prime Minister hoists the flag at the Red Fort in Delhi and addresses the nation; across 1.4 billion people, the day is marked with parades, school ceremonies, kite flying, and a reverence that comes from knowing how much was lost to get here. India’s independence is inseparable from partition — the violent division of the subcontinent that accompanied it, the millions who died or were displaced, the wound that never entirely healed. And yet the celebration continues, year after year, holding both grief and pride in the same moment. A civilization five thousand years old, reclaiming its own name.

Argentina declares its independence on the ninth of July — and I have been there for it. Buenos Aires takes the date so seriously that one of the widest avenues in the world is named after it: the Avenida 9 de Julio, a river of traffic and light that bisects the city with the Obelisco rising from its center. If you have been in Buenos Aires on that date, you will have understood immediately that Argentines do not celebrate quietly. This is a country of extraordinary passion, where national identity runs in the blood as surely as tango and football. The story Argentina tells about itself is one of resilience. It is a nation that has survived political upheaval, military dictatorship, and economic collapse, and still comes out singing. On Independence Day, that refusal to be diminished becomes a celebration: music, asado, the blue and white of the flag everywhere, a people reminding themselves and each other of who they are.

There is one celebration I was supposed to witness and did not. We had planned to be in Israel last spring for Yom Ha’atzmaut — Israel’s Independence Day, marking the founding of the modern state in 1948. The trip was canceled, as I wrote about earlier this year, long before the region descended into what it has since become.

Yom Ha’atzmaut is unlike any other national holiday I know of, for one reason: it is preceded, by design, by Yom Hazikaron — a solemn memorial day for Israel’s fallen soldiers and victims of terror. The country spends the day in grief. Sirens sound; the nation stands still. And then, at sundown, the mood transforms completely into music, dancing, fireworks, celebration. The shift from mourning to joy happens within hours, built deliberately into the structure of the holiday itself. Israel is a country that has decided it cannot have one without acknowledging the other. Perhaps no nation has made that acknowledgment more explicit, or more structurally unavoidable. I still hope to be there for it one day.

And then there is the Fourth of July, which is all of these things and none of them, simultaneously. The United States is two hundred and fifty years old this year, ancient by American standards, young by others. It celebrates a revolution that was, at the time, a radical and uncertain gamble. It has since become something both beloved and contested — a holiday about freedom written by men who owned slaves, celebrated by a country still working out what freedom actually means, and for whom. The fireworks are real. The complexity is also real. Both things are true at once, and perhaps that is the most American thing about it.

Every nation needs its stories. Every people needs the ritual of gathering together and saying: this is who we are, this is where we came from, this is what we survived — and we are still here. What strikes me, having stood in other countries while they celebrated themselves, is how universal the impulse is and how particular the expression. The content changes. The need does not.

Traveling teaches you to watch these moments without assuming you already know what they mean. The French parade is not American bombast; it is French pride, which is a different thing. South Africa’s Freedom Day is not analogous to our own — it cannot be, because the history is not. Argentina’s passion is not performance; it is survival expressed as joy. India’s quiet reverence carries five thousand years of civilization and two centuries of occupation in a single flag raised at dawn. And Israel’s deliberate pairing of grief and celebration asks a question the rest of us rarely think to ask: can you truly celebrate what you have not first mourned?

The world is full of people standing under fireworks and flags, feeling the strange and powerful thing that is belonging to a place and a people. On the Fourth of July, we do it too. We are more alike in that impulse than in almost anything else — and more interestingly different in the particular history each celebration is keeping alive.

Happy Fourth of July! And Happy, 250th Birthday America!

When I tell people that my stepson was traveling through China, their eyes widen in a particular way. Not alarm, exactly. More like the expression you make when someone mentions they’ve done something you would never do yourself.

China? Really?

Yes, really.

He is eighteen years old. He just finished his first year of college. He is making his way through one of the world’s largest and oldest civilizations with a group of fraternity brothers — which, honestly, should surprise no one who knows him.

He has had a business importing wheels from China since he was a teenager. While his classmates were navigating high school, he was learning the rhythms of international shipping, the patience of cross-cultural negotiation, and the particular discipline of doing business with people whose language and customs are entirely different from your own. China was never abstract to him. It was a place he was already, in some way, in relationship with.

And yet, to most Americans, China remains deeply — almost willfully — foreign. We know it is large. We know it is powerful. We know it is, depending on the news cycle, either an economic rival or an existential threat. What we do not often know, because we have not gone, is what it actually feels like to be there.

He is fixing that, at least for me. Every few days a message arrives — a photograph, a video, a string of images that land on my phone like dispatches from another dimension. He is not scared. Not even slightly. He says it is safe. Modern in ways he did not expect. Easy to move through, even without the language. He is getting foot massages, eating things he cannot name, and visiting sights that have stood for a thousand years while the civilization around them has been completely reinvented.

He loves it.

There is something disorienting and delightful about watching an eighteen-year-old take China in stride while the adults around him treat it like a controlled substance. But it points to something real. The fear most of us carry about China is not based on experience. It is based on distance — geographic, cultural, political. And distance, as any traveler knows, is the soil in which fear grows best.

It helps to sit with the scale for a moment. China is home to 1.4 billion people — roughly four times the entire population of the United States. One in six people alive on this planet is Chinese. The country has more than 100 urban areas with populations exceeding one million; the United States has about ten. Shanghai alone holds more people than the state of New York. Beijing has more than Los Angeles and Chicago combined. And China is roughly the same physical size as the United States — meaning all of that humanity is spread across a landscape that Americans might otherwise imagine as simply vast and empty. It is not empty. It is home to one of the world's oldest continuous civilizations and has long supported one of the largest human populations on Earth.

Up close, the story is different. Up close, there are people offering you tea. There are ancient temples that put your own country’s brief history into humbling perspective. There are cities so dense and alive that they make New York feel like a small town. There is a food culture of almost incomprehensible depth and regionality — Sichuan is not Cantonese is not Shanghainese, any more than Cajun is New England. There is a relationship with technology so woven into daily life that cash has become almost quaint, everything flowing through apps and QR codes, and a digital infrastructure that is, by most measures, ahead of our own. And there are people — ordinary, warm, curious about the young Americans in their midst — who do not map onto the geopolitical abstraction we have made of their country.

What strikes me most, watching from home, is not just what he is learning about China. It is what China is teaching him about himself. He is eighteen, far from home, navigating a world that does not share his language or his reference points, making decisions daily, solving problems in real time, discovering — as every traveler eventually does — that he is more capable than he knew. That is its own rite of passage. No ceremony, no diploma. Just a young man in a country that is nothing like his own, finding out that the distance between where he is from and where he has arrived is much smaller than anyone told him.

I am following along from my living room, through the photographs. China, for now, by proxy. It is, I have decided, a perfectly fine way to travel — as long as someone you love is doing the real thing, and reporting back faithfully.

It was on the Mara that I met the founder of Holding Hands Africa. We exchanged numbers and shared photos, and then the questions began — she asked about Skylark Journeys, I asked about her WhatsApp identity: Holding Hands Africa. After I returned to the United States, our conversations continued, and we connected over a shared idea: traveling with a purpose.

My husband and I have been travelers our whole adult lives, though most of our travel has been for work. Only recently has it shifted toward pleasure, and with that shift has come an uncomfortable reckoning. The travel industry sells us destinations the way stores sell products, and American culture has learned to consume them accordingly. Travel has become conspicuous consumption: we book flights, stay in beautiful lodges, eat exotic food, visit iconic places, and post our extraordinary lives on social media. But what do we, as tourists, actually owe to the people and places we visit?

The answer most of us give — without admitting it — is nothing. We have been consumers. We move through places the way water moves through a pipe: touching everything and leaving very little behind (other than our trash, to be discussed at later date).

But travel can also open our eyes to things that are harder to look away from. When we spend enough time in the world, not just passing through it, we see the same pattern everywhere. The countries that draw the most tourists often contain staggering poverty and crumbling infrastructure. Clean water is not a given; according to the WHO, one in four people worldwide still lack access to safely managed drinking water. Tourist waste has overwhelmed places like Bali and is destroying the beautiful environment that the island sells. Education is fragile, underfunded, and sometimes nearly absent. And when education disappears, so do options. When options disappear, people find other ways to survive, ways the world tends to judge, without understanding what it withheld. So while the tourism economy generates billions, how sustainable is it, really? And how much of that revenue actually reaches the people who live in the places tourists come to love?

When the founder of Holding Hands Africa described what they were building in Watamu — schools, daily meals, clean water, a library, a model rooted in the community itself rather than imported from the outside — I became excited. This was not charity tourism. This was the real thing: a Kenyan-led, community-immersed organization working not to rescue anyone, but to remove barriers and walk alongside families as they build their own futures. So I said yes. I want to be part of that.

I am now the travel advisor for Holding Hands Africa, and together we are building something that combines tourism with genuine giving. In February 2027, we are offering a Yoga Immersion Experience based in Watamu, with daily yoga practice, the option to contribute time and money to a school service project, a village visit, and time with wildlife in the Mara. This is not a mission trip in the old-fashioned sense. It is an invitation to travel differently. To show up, stay a while, and give something back. To experience Kenya not only as a destination, but as a place where real and extraordinary lives are being lived.

Only fourteen spots are available, and the deposit deadline is June 29th. If this resonates with you, reach out. As I believe, the world is not an attraction. It is a community, and communities require participation, not just observation.

Learn more and register at hhafrica.org →

There are seasons where life expands outward — through travel, long dinners, ideas, conversations, movement, plans for the future. And then there are seasons where everything narrows. A series of major events occurs within a short period of time, and the radius of daily life contracts into simply trying to hold too many things together at once.

This winter and spring felt like compacted time.

We should have been returning from a long-awaited journey through the Middle East. Instead, the trip was canceled months ago, long before the region descended into war. Due to illness, I had to step away from travel entirely for six months. Life would’ve been full with just my illness, but then a cascade of challenging events kept falling. Consequently, writing drifted quietly to the side, along with much of what normally shapes my sense of self: curiosity, movement, cultural exploration, even the luxury of uninterrupted thought. What replaced it was appointments, logistics, vendor supervision, and a particular kind of exhaustion that sits differently from ordinary tiredness — the kind that comes from managing difficulty rather than from living fully. When life becomes compacted, intellectual and creative spaces disappear first.

And yet, something unexpected happened during this period of chaos: the world kept arriving anyway. Our friends and now business/volunteer partners that we met in Kenya dined with us in Los Angeles. We were fortunate to host a family of four from Vietnam for a weekend. We are hoping to host our friend from Zambia next month. We have spent evenings with people whose lives and stories are so different from ours—as my stepson said after one dinner, “that was a cultural evening”—yet their human experience is so similar. In some sense, we were able to experience the joys of traveling—curiosity fulfillment, cultural exploration, and shared humanity—all from our own table.

Perhaps that is part of what a compacted season teaches: that if you can carve out a little time to receive, curiosity does not require motion. The world is generous enough to arrive on your doorstep when you cannot go to it. And by receiving others and sharing your home, you find that you haven’t lost yourself; you’re just experiencing the joys of traveling a bit differently.

This summer might be a different season as well. For the first time in quite a while, there are no major itineraries spread across the calendar. No carefully researched routes. No long-haul flights waiting on the horizon. We are, it seems, about to embark on a quieter season. But quieter seasons have their own specialty — and perhaps their greatest gift is simply this: time to reflect and write again.

And most of the time, it really is wonderful. But there is another side to travel that people don’t talk about as often—the unpredictability of it all.

Ironically, the reason I haven’t written here in almost a month is because of travel itself. After returning from my most recent trips, I came down with a virus and complications that knocked me out for over a month, and I’m still on the mend.

When you move quickly between different countries, climates, and environments, your body is suddenly exposed to viruses, bacteria, and parasites it may not have encountered before. Your immune system simply hasn’t had time to build up antibodies. At the same time, travel asks your body to adapt to jet lag, unfamiliar water systems, different foods, and long stretches of disrupted sleep. Taken together, these changes place additional strain on the immune system, making travelers more susceptible to illness or causing the illnesses they do pick up to hit harder than they might at home.

Most of the time, I am very thoughtful about protecting my health while traveling. I prioritize sleep whenever possible, hydrate constantly on flights, and try to support my immune system with vitamins and supplements. I carefully pace my schedule, avoid overbooking myself, and try to allow for days of rest along the way. These habits usually help me stay healthy even on very long trips. But even when you take precautions, sometimes your body simply says it’s time to slow down.

Illness is one of the quieter realities of travel—something experienced travelers know well but that rarely shows up in photos or travel stories.

Another reality is uncertainty. Travel, by its nature, places you in unfamiliar environments where you don’t control very much. Flights can be delayed or cancelled, borders can change policies overnight, and unexpected events can quickly alter plans.

Over the past month alone, we’ve seen travelers stranded in different parts of the world—from Mexico to the Middle East—because of airline disruptions, sudden border closures, and even acts of war. Events like these can escalate quickly, and when you are far from home, the uncertainty can feel deeply unsettling. Being stranded without clear answers about when—or even if—you will be able to leave can be frightening, especially when personal safety becomes part of the equation.

These moments remind us that travel strips away the illusion of control. Even the most carefully planned itinerary can be disrupted by forces beyond our control. Weather shifts, governments make decisions, airlines cancel routes, and sometimes the world becomes unpredictable. It’s the side of travel that rarely appears in glossy Instagram photos or carefully curated itineraries.

And yet, despite all of these things, I still love to travel.

There is something deeply energizing about stepping into a place that feels completely different from home. Travel allows us to see the world through new perspectives, to understand cultures and histories that shape how people live today. It creates opportunities to learn, to listen, and to meet people whose lives and experiences are very different from our own. It stretches us. It challenges our assumptions and reminds us how vast and interconnected the world really is.

Travel also asks something deeper of us: adaptability and resilience. When you move through unfamiliar places and unexpected challenges, you learn to adjust quickly, think creatively, and rely on your instincts. In many ways, those experiences can strengthen you. Just as the body builds resilience after exposure to new environments, the mind becomes more capable of navigating uncertainty. But it is also important to acknowledge that not every experience is simply “character building.” Events like acts of war are serious and can be deeply frightening, and situations like these can leave a lasting emotional impact.

So yes, there are risks. There are disruptions. There are scary moments. Sometimes there are even weeks when your body forces you to pause and recover. Yet the inconveniences and unexpected difficulties become part of the story—experiences that, in hindsight, often teach us the most. And the rewards—the perspectives and the people you meet along the way—are still worth it to me.

Even after weeks of being sick and grounded at home, I already find myself thinking about the next journey. I was on a call today with a man from Kenya, and it was so fun to hear his accent, listen to Swahili phrases, and feel the genuine warmth that Kenyan people seem to carry so naturally. I couldn’t help but think about wanting to go back—after all, I never did see the elephant herds. Unfortunately, my doctor has grounded me for several months, but for now, I will keep living vicariously through others.

Once you’ve experienced the richness that travel can bring into your life, it’s very difficult to imagine giving it up. Those moments of discovery are what keep pulling many of us back onto airplanes again and again.

The world is simply too interesting not to explore.

In South Africa’s Eastern Cape, we spent a day watching a dominant male hippo and his younger son guard a waterhole with absolute authority. Warthogs approached slowly, cautiously, testing the boundary—hoping they might drink from a far corner if the hippo didn’t notice… or didn’t care. Rhinos hovered at the water’s edge, visibly hesitant, weighing thirst against the risk of getting too close. Then, the dominant male opened his mouth wide. Teeth exposed. An unmistakable warning. The rhinos retreated immediately.

Not long after, under the weight of brutal heat, a herd of buffalo came charging into the water, seemingly unaware the hippos were already there. The response was instant. The hippos surged forward again with mouths gaping, like sharp boulders suddenly in motion. The buffalo bolted out as fast as they’d entered. Territory defended. Message delivered.

On the Zambezi River in Zambia, floating quietly, we saw the same instinct play out again and again. Pods of hippos erupted into sound and motion if our boat drifted too close. Even crocodiles—as ancient and armored as they are—were not exempt. Just in front of our lodge, a crocodile and a hippo engaged in a brief but decisive battle for space. The crocodile eventually retreated into his former territory—defeated.

Lions in Kenya’s Maasai Mara live by a similar code, though their sense of territory carries its own gravity. Prides occupy defined landscapes—river bends, open plains, rocky outcrops—that are fiercely defended. When new dominant males arrive, they don’t inherit this space; they violently take it. Boundaries are redrawn, cubs from previous males are eliminated, and the land is claimed by the new power. Control of territory dictates access to food, mates, and survival itself.

What struck me was not how different this felt from human behavior—but how familiar.

Humans, throughout history, have been just as territorial. Perhaps more so, because we layer territory with ideology, religion, language, and legacy. In Istanbul—where we had a stopover on this last trip—walking through Topkapı Palace, you stand at the epicenter of the former Ottoman Empire, a civilization shaped by expansion. For centuries, the Ottomans pushed outward, absorbing land, people, and resources, driven by the same fundamental logic: control more territory, secure more power.

From Africa to Europe to Asia, empires rose and fell on this same principle. Rome expanded until it fractured under its own weight. The British Empire stretched across continents, held together by trade routes and military force, then gradually receded as colonies gained independence and power shifted. In Asia, the Qing Dynasty extended its reach across vast and diverse territories, unifying land through conquest and administration, only to strain under the pressure of size and internal unrest. Borders expanded. Borders collapsed. Maps were redrawn again and again.

And always, beneath the strategy and rhetoric, lingered the same questions: how much land can be claimed? How long can it truly be held? And is it ever enough?

Animals defend or invade territory because they must. It is survival. They will not eat or drink without it. Humans, however, often continue expanding long after survival is secured—chasing influence, dominance, and permanence, frequently under the guise of protection, progress, and security. Empires stretch until they fracture. Nations expand until the cost outweighs the gain. History shows the cycle repeating itself.

And yet, when you strip away palaces and flags, the instinct is the same as that of the hippo in the river: this is mine, and I will defend it. Perhaps the difference is that animals know when and why the boundary has been drawn. Humans keep pushing, often forgetting why the boundary existed in the first place.

In watching Africa’s wildlife, walking through the legacy of an empire, and then living within our own moment in history, I keep coming back to the idea that territory is one of the oldest forces shaping life on this planet. Among animals, boundaries are clear and consequences immediate. When a line is crossed, there is no negotiation—only response. Space is defended or abandoned, and often an animal is injured or killed in the process. There is loss, even when survival is the goal. Observing this, it’s hard not to recognize how deeply these patterns are written into life itself, and yet, humans, for as intelligent as we are, often forget that crossing boundaries, natural or imposed, carries consequences just as real.

Frequently, when we go to remote places, Jake turns to me and asks, “What am I going to do here?”

When we landed on a small, isolated island in Fiji with no television or internet in our bure, he looked around and said, “Am I just supposed to watch geckos for ten days?” And, in a way, yes, that is precisely what you are supposed to do. After a day or two, you unplug from your city life, and you begin watching the geckos in your bungalow or the warthogs wandering past your safari tent.

You settle into a quiet space, one shaped by the sun rising and falling, by the patterns of rain and wind, and by the occasional animal drama being the highlight of the day. Meals simplify. You eat what was caught that morning or delivered fresh that afternoon. Sleep even changes. You stop setting alarms and begin waking to the natural rhythm of the place you’re in: the sun rising, the birds chirping, the roosters crowing, or the monkeys playing on the roof.

On our last trip, we experienced something different, though.

We emerged from the bush into Johannesburg’s vast metropolis, and the shift was overwhelming. Suddenly, there were cars and honking, layers of smells, and people moving in every direction. The serenity of the previous days evaporated almost instantly. We traded open space for a concrete jungle, stillness for crowds and noise, and simplicity for endless choices.

We needed to eat, but the options felt paralyzing. We wanted to explore the city, to experience it fully, but the stimulation was more than we could bear. Instead, we retreated to the quiet of our hotel room, overwhelmed in a way we hadn’t expected.

Even television felt foreign. What we wanted wasn’t entertainment or distraction—it was stillness. The kind that had quietly rewired us without our noticing.

That’s bush shock.

It’s not culture shock from arriving somewhere new; it’s disorientation of returning to a world that suddenly feels too loud, too fast, too full. In the wilderness, your senses recalibrate. You learn how little you need, how slowly a day can unfold, how attention sharpens when nothing competes for it.

And then you return.

Bush shock shows up in small ways—decision fatigue, a low tolerance for noise, an almost physical craving for silence. It’s the realization that you adjusted to a different rhythm, and the modern world doesn’t offer a calm way to ease back in.

Eventually, it fades. Schedules return. Notifications resume. Maybe we even desire television again.

But the memory of the bush lingers. A quieter internal baseline. A deeper awareness of your surroundings. A subtle resistance to urgency masquerading as importance. The bush rearranges you. Now, you see everything a little more clearly and calmly than you did before.

The road to the hotel felt narrow and unpredictable—people darting into traffic, cars swerving to avoid motorcycles, buses passing with barely enough space, unpaved stretches punctured by potholes the size of the Meteor Crater. It was ten at night. We had just finished a three-and-a-half-hour flight from Johannesburg to Zanzibar, already delayed by an hour, and were now beginning a chaotic two-hour drive across the island in the dark. At some point, Jake and I looked at each other and silently agreed that wearing our seat belts was not optional. It genuinely felt as though the driver might hit a pedestrian or a motorcycle—and flip the car—at any moment.

Needless to say, by the time we arrived at our hotel, our nerves were more than a little fried, and our bodies had been jarred by the “African massage.”

Then, out of the darkness, two men wrapped in red cloth stepped forward, took our luggage from the car, and carried it to our room. As we walked, another man—also wrapped in red cloth—stopped us, smiled warmly, and said, “Jambo” (Hello, in Swahili). We asked casually, “Who are you?” He replied simply, “Security,” lifting his garment to reveal a machete.

Ah. Okay then.

The next morning, as we walked to breakfast, we were greeted again by another man in similar attire. “Jambo, jambo. Hakuna matata” (Hello, hello. No worries). We smiled and returned the greeting, and I leaned over to Jake and said quietly, “I don’t think that’s a uniform. I think they’re actually Maasai.” And indeed, as we later learned, they were.

The entire security team at the hotel was Maasai, most coming from the region around Mount Kilimanjaro. Every morning, they greeted us as we left our villa. They stood watch while it was being cleaned. They noted when we came and went. If anyone entered our room—room service, housekeeping, or an excursion guide—they entered too, positioning themselves nearby, observant but unobtrusive. If we needed anything, we simply called, and they didn’t just arrive quickly—they ran, focused and deliberate, with the intensity of people trained to protect (think Tom Cruise running in Mission: Impossible).

Their presence is unmistakable. Not loud. Not aggressive. Just steady.

What struck me most was the absence of fear in their posture. There was no bravado, no flexing of power, no attempt to intimidate. Instead, there was a calm authority that felt almost philosophical, like a Jedi warrior in a galaxy far away, trained not to dominate, but to maintain balance. Their strength was internal. Their restraint was intentional. Safety was conveyed not through force, but through certainty.

Across much of East Africa, particularly in Tanzania, Maasai men are commonly employed as security, often referred to as askari (guards). Hotels, safari lodges, private homes, even construction sites rely on them—not because they are heavily armed in a modern sense, but because of something far more enduring: reputation. For generations, the Maasai have been pastoralists and protectors, guardians of cattle, land, and family. Vigilance was never a profession; it was a way of life. Awareness, discipline, and readiness were essential to survival, and that cultural memory still carries weight today.

At night, when the air cools and the sounds of boats and people fade, the guards remain awake, often for twelve-hour shifts. Sometimes longer. In rural settings, they walk the perimeter quietly. In places like Zanzibar, they stand watch near entrances, small fires occasionally burning nearby, eyes scanning—not anxiously, but attentively. This kind of security feels different. It doesn’t rely on cameras or floodlights. It relies on human presence and on understanding the rhythms of a place—who belongs, who doesn’t, and when something feels off.

Guests feel it almost immediately, even if they can’t articulate why they feel safe.

What’s rarely discussed is how deeply this system depends on trust. The Maasai guards we encountered were proud of their work—not because it was glamorous, but because it was respected. Communities trust them. Employers trust them. Travelers, often without realizing it, trust them, too. That trust is a form of cultural capital, built over generations rather than contracts.

Of course, this role exists within tension. Many Maasai men balance traditional expectations—herding, family responsibilities, ceremonial life—with the realities of wage labor in towns and cities. Wearing traditional dress while guarding modern hotels feels symbolic of that in-between space: one foot rooted in ancestral identity, the other navigating contemporary economies. And yet, there is continuity here. Protection has always been central to Maasai life. The context has changed. The meaning has not.

As travelers, we often move through places without noticing the systems quietly holding everything together. Maasai security is one of those systems—subtle, steady, essential. They provide the calm amid Zanzibar’s chaos. Quiet guardians, standing watch so that others can rest.

Travel far enough that the world will transform you.

Thirteen hours can do that.

It’s a long stretch of time–long enough to lose track of your routine and your sense of urgency. Long enough to stop checking the clock. Long enough to measure time in chapters, movies, and small airplane rituals: a meal, a cup of tea, a walk down the aisle, or a quiet moment gazing out the window.

Five hours will take you somewhere else. Thirteen hours will take you somewhere new.

A short flight can change scenery. A long one changes perspective. When you travel far enough that languages shift, architecture carries centuries of foreign memories, and daily life moves to a different rhythm, something subtle happens: you start paying attention again. To how people greet one another. To how meals unfold. To what actually matters when everything familiar is stripped away.

In thirteen hours, you cross more than distance. You cross assumptions. You loosen habits. You trade certainty for curiosity. The cramped seat and restless half-sleep become part of the initiation—the price of entry into a place that asks something different of you.

Because if you’re willing to sit with that discomfort, the reward is transformation.

In 2026, thirteen hours can land you in a world that doesn’t mirror your own—one that challenges and transforms how you see time, beauty, history, and success.