I selected Italy for the 2013 tour because it is a travel photography gold mine. Almost every village and train station has some photogenic quality about it. Not only will you walk away with great image, but I’ll also be working with you one-on-one to help improve your technique.

Sales pitch over. Enjoy the photos!

Street food is great and should not be feared

If the fears were just concerns which kept people on their toes while on the road it wouldn’t be so bad. However, most people let their fears prevent them from traveling and exploring the world.

The list of fears which people have about traveling is almost endless. They include:

• Fear of getting sick from drinking the water.
• Fear of getting sick from eating street food.
• Fear of getting robbed.
• Fear of getting ripped off.
• Fear of getting murdered.
• Fear of getting bed bugs.
• Fear of not knowing the language.
• Fear of getting sunburned.
• Fear of shark attacks.
• Fear of getting in a car accident.
• Fear of getting raped.
• Fear of getting arrested.
• Fear of carrying their camera or computer.
• Fear of losing their passport.

I could keep going and I’m sure that many of you have fears that you could add to the list.

Most of the fears are nothing more than manifestations of being in an unfamiliar environment, coupled with the media only delivering bad news about the rest of the world. The end result is an unwarranted fear of the unknown which causes many people to stay at home and avoid traveling.

Bad things can happen when you travel. I’d be lying if I said otherwise. However, the odds of something bad happening are not necessarily any greater traveling than they are at home. The only difference is that you know and are comfortable with the risks you face in your own neighborhood. Risks somewhere else are unknowns, so we have a tendency to exaggerate them.

In the six years I’ve been traveling I have been to over 100 countries and territories and I haven’t been robbed or mugged once. I haven’t been arrested or stranded anywhere. I have never been so paralyzed by a foreign language that I couldn’t eat or sleep. I have had no major accidents. I have gotten bed bugs once and I’ve had food poisoning once. My rate food poisoning is probably on a par with what I suffered before I started to travel.

Perhaps I’ve been lucky. Perhaps I’ve just been smart about what I do and where I go. Either way, hundreds of millions of people who travel internationally each year manage to do so without any of the deleterious effects that most people worry about.

One of the greatest benefits of traveling is getting over your fears. Learning how to become comfortable in foreign places will teach you how to overcome fears in your everyday life. It is one of the primary reasons why people who travel extensively are often so successful in other areas of life.

One of my biggest missions is to get people to over their fears and to get them to experience the world.

Don’t focus on the random bad thing which happens to make the news. Instead focus on the hundreds of millions of people who travel without incident each year.

The world is too amazing to let your fears prevent you from exploring it.

Starting line of the Yukon Quest

Traveling from Central America to northern Canada in the Winter and back has to be the most jarring change in climate that I’ve experienced in all my travels. Nonetheless, I managed to handle the transition pretty well. I picked up cold weather gear in Texas that had been sitting at my manager Amy’s house since I got back from Antarctica. That plus the gear I was able to borrow in Whitehorse made the experience very doable.

I visited the Yukon back in the summer of 2011 and it was a very memorable experience. Returning in the winter was no less so, but totally different. I was there as part of a media trip to photograph the Yukon Quest sled dog race, but we managed to fit in many other things as well.

One of the things was actually going dog sledding and running my own dog team. We went to the Sky High Wilderness Ranch outside of Whitehorse where they keep a kennel of 150 dogs. Each member of our group had a team of 4 dogs and went out for a 16 mile run.

It was one of the best experiences I’ve had during my last 6 years of traveling. The dogs are extremely anxious to run. There is no way to make them go faster, nor is it necessary. There is only a brake to slow them down. If you fall off your sled the dogs will not not stop for you. They will just keep running.

I also got to travel back up to Dawson City, which is 175 miles below the Arctic Circle. It is an interesting place in the summer and it is even more so in the winter. The people who choose to live in Dawson City during the winter are an interesting lot and what makes it such a great place to visit.

My trip to the Yukon was also a bonanza for photography. I’m very pleased with the images I captured and you will be seeing them in the upcoming weeks. I plan on editing most of them while I am in Central America.

As for my time in Central America, I am on my first trip of the year with G Adventures. It is the Mayan Ruins & Culture tour which goes to three countries (El Salvador, Honduras and Guatemala) and 5 UNESCO World Heritage Sites. It will give me a chance to visit a part of the world that I haven’t really explored before and will also serve as a great bookend to the trip I took to the Mayan Rivera back in September, 2012.

Sponsor Updates

Spots are filling up for my 2013 Travel Photography Tour to Italy with G Adventures. The list of places we’ll be visiting will provide you with dozens of fantastic images from around the world.

• Venice
• Florence
• Pisa
• Cinque Terre
• Rome
• Napels
• Amlafi Coast

Not only will you get to see some of the greatest sights in Italy, but you will also get a chance to improve your photography by working directly with me during the trip.

Reserve your space on the tour today!

Links

• As KFC Goes to Africa it Lacks Only One Thing: Chickens WSJ
• The Great Norway Diaper Racket Is the Best Arbitrage Ever The Atlantic
• The Yanomami Ax Fight: Science, Violence, Empirical Data, and the Facts Living Anthropologically
• The Inconvenient Truth About Polar Bears NPR
• Body found under parking lot is King Richard III CNN
• Asia is comedy’s next frontier CNN
• Zimbabwean government bank balance ‘down to $217′ Guardian
• For 40 Years, This Russian Family Was Cut Off From All Human Contact
  Smithsonian
• Tourist stranded at Santiago Airport for two months AOL Travel
• Apparently, We’ve Been Using Chinese Takeout Boxes All Wrong FoodBeast
• Can travelling make you healthier? BBC

UNESCO World Heritage Site #192: Talamanca Range-La Amistad Reserves / La Amistad National Park

From the World Heritage inscription:

The park lies in the foothills and mountains of Cordillera de Talamanca between the mountain ranges of Las Vueltas, Cartago and Echandi on the Panamanian/Costa Rican border.

The Cordillera de Talamanca is the highest and wildest non-volcanic mountain range in Central America. It was formed by the folding of the Earth’s crust and uplifting activity that created the land dividing the Pacific from the Caribbean. A long period of marine deposition in the shallow surrounding seas up until the Middle Miocene was followed by a period of marine volcanism, which included the uplifting of the whole area to some 4,000 m above sea level. Subsequent erosion due to heavy rainfall has created a rugged topography. During the Quaternary period, glaciers carved cirque lakes and steep valleys on the slopes of Chirripo National Park, the only area in Central America to show signs of glaciation.

Tropical rainforests have covered most of the area since at least the last glaciations, about 25,000 years ago. The park includes lowland tropical rainforest and cloudforest, as well as four communities not found elsewhere in Central America: subalpine paramo forests, pure oak stands, lakes of glacial origin and high-altitude bogs. The area also contains all five altitudinal zones found in the tropics. Most of the main crest lies within montane rainforest, characterized by mixed oak forest. Below 2,500 m lower montane rainforest occurs and the forest is generally more mixed. The Talamanca Mountains contain the largest tracts of virgin forest in Costa Rica. On high points along the ridge, at elevations above 2,900-3,100 m, frequent stands of paramo, swamps, cold marshes occur. The paramo located on Mount Kamuk contains the richest and most varied vegetation (after Chirripo) in the entire Talamanca Range and is the only one in Costa Rica that shows no signs of human intervention. Species diversity is perhaps unequalled in any other reserve of equivalent size in the world, due to the convergence of the floras of North and South America and varied climatic and edaphic (soil-related) factors.

This World Heritage Site comprises an enormous part of Costa Rica and comprises many separate national parks, preserves and forests:

• La Amistad International Peace Park
• Tapantí-Macizo de la Muerte National Park
• Chirripó National Park
• Barbilla National Park
• Hitoy-Cerere Wildlife Refuge
• Las Tablas Conservation Area
• Río Macho Forest Preserve

Despite its size, finding a way to visit one of the parks was far more difficult than I thought it would be. The Amistad Park is all wilderness and the only way in is to backpack several days. The other parks are also not really designed for large scale tourism.

I found easiest way to visit the site was via Tapanti National Park in the Orosi Valley, which is only an hour outside of San Jose. From there you can easily arrange day trips into the park or dive there if you have a car. While the park is accessible, there are only a small number of hiking trails available.

UNESCO World Heritage Site #191: Area de Conservación Guanacaste

Guanacaste is located in north-western Costa Rica. It stretches 105 km from the Pacific, across the Pacific coastal lowlands, over three tall volcanoes and down into the Atlantic coastal lowlands. It includes the Guanacaste Cordillera and surrounding flatlands and coastal areas. The most notable volcano is Rincon de la Vieja, which has three craters and one lagoon. Its last eruption was observed in the 1970s, but some fumarole activity still occurs in one of the craters. At the base of the volcano are several minor craters.

At least 32 rivers and 16 intermittent streams originate in the vicinity of the volcano, and flow into the Tempisque, a river of enormous importance for irrigation of agricultural land in the Guanacaste Province. The marine area includes various near shore islands and islets (mostly uninhabited), open ocean marine zones, beaches, rocky coasts, and approximately 20 km of sea turtle nesting beaches and a high diversity of wetland ecosystems (37 wetlands). The wetland forests are considered to be among the most pristine in Central America and worldwide.

The Guanacaste Conservation Area comprises three national parks in the Northwest of Costa Rica:

• Rincón de la Vieja Volcano NP
• Guanacaste NP
• Santa Rosa-Bolaños Island NP

There are also other, smaller protected areas as well which are included in the World Heritage Site.

My visit was to Rincón de la Vieja Volcano National Park, which is the most popular of the group and the easiest to visit. The major city in the region is Liberia and there are daily tours to the park which can be arranged at most hotels/hostels.

The park does take some dirt road driving to get to and you can easily spend a full day there walking the trails. In addition to volcanic hot spots, there are waterfalls and ample wildlife. During my day I saw wild monkeys, tropical birds, snakes and a tapir.

View my complete list of UNESCO World Heritage Sites.