I was later assured by two Botswanan game wardens that I was safer with 15 Cape buffalo staring at me than just one. They explained that since a Cape will almost always charge when it feels threatened, there’s less likelihood of one member of a grazing herd charging, because they each feel secure when chowing down with their buddies.

• “From their misunderstanding, I learned valuable lessons that helped me through years of foreign travel: If you speak a different language than the other, make sure—unmistakably sure—you and the other person are in agreement. Be sensitive when you’re in a position of power, as a hotel guest is with an employee. Never assume that a member of a foreign culture will readily undertake an act that is proscribed in her society. And avoid presuming that just because a person is poor or working class, they’ll do anything you want—even if you’re the head of the IMF.”
• “In the undeveloped world I wear pants or shorts with at least six pockets and try to distribute my valuable portable assets among them so no single picked pocket is a disaster.”
• “Toilet paper is also the key to the system I use for comfort-ranking countries around the world. Unlike the rather esoteric econometric model utilized by the World Bank or the incomprehensible computer program employed by the International Monetary Fund, my Podell Potty Paper Rating (PPPR) System is simple, reliable, and easy to apply. It’s based on the quality of toilet paper in that country’s public restrooms and uses the following scale:
  COUNTRY’S WORLD COMFORT RANKING BASED ON TYPE TOILET TISSUE IN PUBLIC RESTROOMS
  1 Soft white
  2 Hard white
  3 Rough brown, green, or purple
  4 Pieces of newspaper
  5 Bucket of water (mostly in Asia)
  6   No paper, no water. And no toilet seat.
  7 No public toilets at all”
• “After 90 million years of separate evolution, Madagascar had become home to some of the most unusual—and now most endangered—wildlife and vegetation on our pale blue dot, including 70 varieties of lemurs, the planet’s largest and smallest chameleons, and 120 bird species that breed nowhere else—200,000 species in all, 80 percent of which have no other home on earth. The island had become a top concern of conservationists, but extensive damage has already been done, with the animals surviving only in national parks and reserves, while the locals continued to hunt, chop, charcoal, slash, and burn.”
• “Knowing Steve as well as I did, I was sure this inveterate traveler and macho adventurer, then 84, would prefer to have died with his boots on rather than be painfully poked and probed by oncologists and subjected to all the debilitating side effects of chemotherapy in a likely losing battle.”
• “The third reason was the most pertinent, but the hardest for me to accept: I was getting older, well past the age when people traveled the way I did. At most of the abodes where I stayed, on most of the trains and buses I rode, in most of the countries I visited, I was decades older than the other voyagers. Independent travel in the underdeveloped world was a young guy’s game, requiring sturdy legs, strong arms, sharp eyes, loads of energy, a reliable memory, a high tolerance for problems and delays, and a phlegmatic demeanor, all of which I was losing.”
• “Kiribati could be a paradise if it cleaned up its act physically and fiscally. It has miles of potentially exquisite beaches unspoiled by any high-rise developments, a splendid abundance of collectible seashells, safe swimming, excellent reef and big-game fishing, no harmful snakes or animals, almost no mosquitoes, a constant, refreshing breeze that dissipated the heat, no beggars, nobody going hungry, no serious crime, and some of the world’s most gentle, kindly, hospitable inhabitants. You could buy a house for less than your annual rent in the States. And no matter how poor your sense of direction, only one road, and water on each side of it, you’d always find your way home. It was an ideal place to lose track of time and get away from it all. The four-page weekly newspaper featured only sports stories and an occasional political scandal. The TV—despite the huge dish antenna outside my room—carried only one channel, and it was slavishly devoted to rugby, following the sport with the sun, almost 24/7, across the British Commonwealth, from Fiji to New Zealand, across Australia, to South Africa, to England.”
• “When ChildFund gave me a tour of its schools, I began to understand the cause of the problem: The kids are not taught to think; memorization and recitation fill most of the day. They learn factoids and definitions, math formulas and the periodic table of the elements, but they are not taught to solve problems, to be creative, to look ahead, to think things through.”