I had already become acquainted with Smith’s cooking; my first taste of it was in September, 1997, the year before filming began, during a visit to the Island when my parents treated me to a birthday dinner at the inn. I came back a few years later with my wife, Linda, and our two sons, and again enjoyed a multi-course dinner that featured creativity, local ingredients and fresh flavours.

Smith moved on from the inn, opening a restaurant called Maple Bistro in Halifax, where Linda and I enjoyed another amazing dinner, and to star in more than a handful of other culinary shows as well as appearing as both a challenger and a judge in various cook-off contests. He came back to the Island in 2015, buying the Inn and turning its restaurant into a showcase for his devotion for sustainable food production and local ingredients.

When Linda and I were on the Island in 2017, having dinner at the Inn was high on our agenda. Imagine our disappointment when we were told the dining room no longer served dinner every night; that there was only a single Saturday night event called Fireworks Feast and it was sold out for the only Saturday we would be on the Island during our week-long stay. Disappointment turned to anticipation when our waiting-list status snagged us a booking, and we both agreed that our dinner that night was one of our best in a year that also saw us experience extraordinary meals in some of South Africa’s best restaurants.

When we knew in January that we were returning to Prince Edward Island this year after a seven-year absence, we also knew we wanted to experience the Fireworks Feast again. A sharp price increase to $255 per person did cause us to pause for a while but we threw fiscal caution to the wind and went for it.

Smith’s Fireworks Feast is a four-hour immersive culinary experience that begins at 4pm with a tour of the Inn’s ever-expanding organic farm led by enthusiastic and personable resident farmer Kevin Petrie. Shadowed by his old farm dog for whom he regularly provides water and treats, Petrie takes guests around the farm detailing how the restaurant makes use of every possible part of every plant depending on the season and its stage of growth. His enthusiasm is infectious.

Perhaps our favourite part of the experience comes next. For a full hour, a series of outdoor stations serve up a variety of hors d’oeuvre anchored by an all-you-can-eat oyster bar, this year serving up three varieties, including our new PEI oyster favourite fished right in the bay in front of the inn that gives it its name.

Also served up were roasted Island mussels and oysters, house-smoked salmon, four varieties of miniature tacos and more. The bar is open and well stocked with local beers and spirits. I love a creative bloody caesar, non-alcoholic of course, and the one on offer was spectacular, including a spicy-hot pickled bean that I have now replicated at home using a Carolina reaper and habañero hybrid for the heat.

Before heading in for dinner itself, Chef Smith gathers his guests on the front lawn of the Inn and demonstrates the art of sabering the cork from a bottle of sparkling wine before inviting a guest to try their hand at it. Guests then raise their glasses of bubbly in a toast to the farmers, fishers, foragers and others who have provided the ingredients for dinner. (The Island’s famous Anne of Green Gables raspberry cordial is on hand for the teetotallers in the crowd.)

While dinner was certainly what we expected by way of creativity, artful presentation and delicious seasonal flavours, we both had the memory that our first experience of it seven years ago was just a wee bit better. Bread, chowder, salad and meat courses all delight. The salad course was especially artistic. Dietary restrictions, on which we were quizzed both when we booked and when we arrived (we have none), are creatively tracked by an amusingly analog lego display on a pillar between the open kitchen and the dining room.

The evening winds down with homemade marshmallows roasted on an open fire. Our short drive back to our north shore cottage at the mouth of St. Peter’s Bay was delightfully punctuated by the appearance of a couple of iconic Red Island foxes, the province’s official animal, that popped up on the roadside and posed for us for a few minutes.

Wandering around the corner reveals a hundred or more mainly young people armed with trumpets and tubas and trombones and percussion instruments of all sorts being schooled passage by repetitive passage in a particular piece of music. As the temperature rises through the spring and early summer, their proficiency steadily improves, and their ranks swell with scores of marchers, twirlers and dancers.

They are all members of the local klopse, or troupe of minstrels, who, along with perhaps a dozen other troupes from around region, will take part in the annual Kaapse Klopse, or minstrel carnival, that fills the streets of Cape Town with their vibrant colours, raucous music, precision marching and an all around celebration of Cape coloured life and culture that dates back to the nineteenth century.

The carnival is traditionally held on and around Tweede Nuwe Jaar, or second New Year, the one day of the year that the Dutch colony’s slaves were given a day off and permitted to celebrate their culture. (Cape coloureds are a proudly distinctive multiracial grouping in South Africa whose ancestry is a mix of indigenous, immigrant, bantu and East Indian slaves.)

I spent a sun-filled several hours taking pictures at this year’s carnival, including many of “our” troupe, decked out in their white and neon green outfits. The kids, ranging from preschoolers to teenagers, were definitely the most fun to photograph.

Still, when a tiny 20-seat locavore gem less than a two-hour drive from Cape Town was unexpectedly catapulted into fame when it was named “restaurant of the year” by the inaugural (and short-lived) World Restaurant Awards in 2019, it immediately grabbed a spot high up on my list of places I must try. What with global pandemics and just the sheer challenge of snagging a booking at such a small place with such a big, new reputation, it was not until my sister and her two daughters were visiting last year that we finally made it to Wolfgat, where chef Kobus van der Merwe takes an intensely hands-on and foraging-obsessed approach to crafting the unique little plates that make up his multi-course seasonal tasting menu.

(Van der Merwe shares my skepticism of lists and rankings. “Can there ever be such a thing as the best restaurant in the world?” he asks in an article in which he also deservedly rips into the seemingly lazy and arbitrary judging of one of South Africa’s leading ranking efforts. “Of course not,” he answers himself. “Because judging any dining experience will always remain incredibly subjective.”)

Perched quite literally on the beach, with only 20 seats clustered in tables of two and four on the stoep of a little 103-year-old fisher’s cottage overlooking the busy strand in Paternoster, Wolfgat combines the sights, sounds and smells of the ocean with the taste of many wild seaside foodstuffs featured in the dishes themselves. Every dish featured something from the sea or something that grows close to the sea. While I have had meals I would rate higher on my personal best-of list, this was definitely one of the more creative dining adventures I have enjoyed, and certainly one that paid full tribute to what can be caught and gleaned from van der Merwe’s immediate environment.

The meal opened with sourdough bread and strandveld (Afrikaans for beach scrub) snacks. The butter for the bread was flavoured with bokkom, a type of salted and dried mullet popular along the west coast of South Africa. And the snacks included an oyster, the shell of which rested charmingly on a little forest of seaside plant.

An artful little arrangement of quince, fennel, dune celery and snoek roe followed. Dune celery is among a handful of coastal indigenous edible plants enjoying a revival in wild gardens and kitchen gardens around Cape Town. Snoek, meanwhile, is an immensely popular variety of snake mackerel widely enjoyed on South African braais and, in one of my favourite snacks, smoked and made into a paté.

A colourful arrangement of whites, greens and reds brought the delicate flavour of yellowtail together with the acidity of ox-heart tomato, the sweet-sour punch of pomegranate seeds, and the crispy, salty tang of soutslaai (literally salt salad), a succulent that is also enjoying renewed interest with local chefs.

A tiny bowl of kei-apple soup was home to a few Saldhana Bay mussels and lightly wilted dune lettuce, another crispy, salty indigenous edible succulent.

Pickled fish, or piekelvis in Afrikaans, enjoys almost sacramental reverence locally. With the sea bringing both the fish and the ship-borne spices used to pickle it, piekelvis is such a staple dish, especially around the holidays, that any report of Christmas-time poor fish catches makes headline news. Van der Merwe says his dish is a tribute to South African poet and food lover C. Louis Leipoldt for whom it was a signature dish. Van der Merwe’s version sees two morsels of fish that has been cooked and then marinated for at least three three days in a masala of spices, sharing an island of yogurt along with a dollop of chutney and a sambal of cabbage and apple, and topped with peach, raw cabbage and crispy baked kiesieblaar, or malva leaf.

If the bread course introduced my nieces to their very first oyster, the final dish before dessert was my first taste of abalone, a highly prized and widely poached delicacy here in South Africa that can also be legally harvested with a permit. It was served on a smear of heerenboon, an heirloom bean variety, with mushroom and a variety of seaweed.

Dessert was a poached fig atop of a hanepoot and sweetcorn biscuit. Hanepoot is a round green grape that is one of the earliest vines planted in the Cape.

We agreed the food was novel and adventuresome, even if it all added up to somewhat less than the hype and our expectations, and probably not the best meal for that kind of money that I have ever eaten. The location was utterly charming, and the service was excellent with chef Kobus himself serving up and explaining a couple of the dishes. It was worth the wait, and the two-hour drive.

We visited Todos Santos for three nights as part of our first — and so far, only — trip to Mexico that saw us also stay in La Paz on the eastern, or Gulf of California, side of the peninsula and in San José del Cabo, the less glitzy and less frantic neighbour of the ultra-chic Cabo San Lucas at the southern tip of the peninsula.

Just like in the song, though, Todos Santos is “up ahead in the distance” on a “(not so) dark desert highway” about 75 kilometres north of Cabo. It comes complete with a mission bell or, at least, the beautiful Nuestra Señora del Pilar de la Paz, or Our Lady of the Pillar of Peace church, successor building to a Catholic mission founded here by Spanish Jesuits in 1773.

We didn’t stay at the Hotel California but, rather, at Todos Santos Inn, an utterly charming and intimate eight-room hacienda originally built for a sugar magnate in the 1800s. Ours was one of only two rooms on the ground floor, giving out onto a beautiful courtyard where a long, round stone bench with comfortable cushions circled a little fountain. If the delicious tapas we enjoyed the one night it was offered in the inn’s lovely bar and the superb breakfasts with which we started each day were anything to go by, the fact that the restaurant was not fully open for the day’s other meals during our stay was definitely our loss.

Todos Santos has had a boom-and-bust history since its founding. The mission was attacked in 1734 by indigenous Guaycura bands opposed to, among other injustices, the Jesuits’ prohibition on polygamy, while wars and epidemics over the next 15 years depopulated the region. The forcible detention at the mission of Guaycura children in an effort to pacify the local population did nothing to stop decimation by measles and other diseases, and by 1825, when the original mission closed, the Guaycura had become culturally extinct. The last battle of the Mexican American War was the Skirmish of Todos Santos in 1848.

Sugarcane, rather than the forced conversion to Catholicism of the local indigenous people, became the main industry through the latter half of the 1800s and the first half of the 1900s. With an abundant water source, the region became Mexico’s sugarcane capital, and by the turn of the 20th century, boasted as many as eight mills to process the crop. The water dried up in 1950, the last mill shut down in 1965, and Todos Santos faced a bleak future until the water returned in 1980 and the government paved the highway between Cabo and the U.S. border, reviving a prosperous agricultural industry and bringing an influx of tourists and real estate developers.

That development was threatening to utterly change the character of Los Cerritos beach, just south of Todos Santos, when we visited, although a planned massive construction of villas and condos seems not to have gone ahead in the decade or so since we were there. I thoroughly enjoyed the rough and heavy, if chilly, surf at Los Cerritos. We nicknamed the beach “Lost Cerritos” because the sign to it that everybody said we could not possibly miss had fallen over, causing us to drive up and down the road about half a dozen times before we finally located the hidden road down to the beach.

Todos Santos has become a centre for artists, both local and international and from other areas of Mexico, with silversmiths, landscape painters and others filling the galleries in the restored colonial buildings along its streets. We bought a beautiful silver jug and a unique stick, stone and wire sculpture of a lizard.

Like the song says, we could and did “check out any time” we liked. Unlike the song, though, the only thing that “can never leave” is our memories of a beautiful little Mexican town.

We were on our first game drive at Lion Sands, one of a collection of private game reserves of varying degrees of opulence strung all along the west bank of the Sabi River that forms one boundary of South Africa’s massive Kruger National Park. Our tracker, perched on a seat high on the front of the oversize Land Rover game drive vehicle ubiquitous across the continent, knew she had to be in the vicinity because the meat from her recent hunt was hanging in a tree in front of us.

It took the sharp, young eyes of a Belgian lad in the truck to spot her, crouched within, and almost camouflaged by, tall, sand-coloured grasses. We waited, patiently, and, fortunately for my brand new digital camera and long, fast lens, she got up and paced about and, with the light very much golden-hour perfect, I captured two images of her that were easily the best shots I took over three nights and six game drives at Lion Sands.

The leopard is the most elusive of the so-called big five game animals — lion, leopard, rhino, buffalo and elephant — that big game hunters used to chase for trophies and that photographers like me now want to tick off their bucket list, and here we found a gorgeous specimen barely minutes into our first safari.

But that was Lion Sands in a nutshell — an astonishingly luxurious oasis of comfort, close personal attention and the very best safari experience imaginable that brought all the animals of the African veld so close we could almost touch them. I had a 70-200mm fast telephoto zoom and a 2x convertor that gave me 400mm when I wanted it and yet, for many of my best shots, my lens was not even at full extension.

Linda and I had ended up at Lion Sands through a wonderful confluence of coincidental events that started with a random telephone call to my PR agency Ottawa and ended with the man, and now friend, on the other end of that call snagging us a media rate for our stay at a place with one lodge that had been rated as the best hotel in the world a couple of years before our 2010 trip. At a rack rate of USD2,500 per person per night, there was never any way we could ever afford such a luxury; the glorious accidents that brought us there delivered an experience that will be hard to duplicate.

We spent our first night in Lion Sands’ River Lodge, which was impressive enough, but were upgraded for our remaining two nights to its Ivory Lodge, a string of eight luxury suites spread so far apart along the banks of the Sabi River that we could not see our neighbours on either side. The person who brought us to the room opened the big wooden door and then just stepped aside so that we could, as she said every new guest always did, walk in and simply halt, gobsmacked by the unhindered view across a private plunge pool to the river and to Kruger beyond, before turning and taking in the lounge and dining room to our right, and the bedroom to our left.

A king bed was almost impossible to leave when our butler — yes, our butler — brought us tea and rusks before the sun came up in the morning so we could head out on an early-morning game drive to witness the nocturnal veld going to sleep and the diurnal veld waking up, all before breakfast. (Staff, knowing we were in South Africa to celebrate our tenth wedding anniversary, made up a beautiful display of flower petals and tea-light candles that greeted us when we returned to our room the second night. It was very special.) We could soak in a massive tub, which we did, or luxuriate in an outdoor shower. Although all our meals were served in the dining room we could have seated a dinner party of eight around the the table in the other half of the suite. This was definitely a glimpse into how some people live.

As out-of-this-world as the accommodations were, though, the animals were the real stars of the Lion Sands. We saw all of the big five, plus giraffes, warthogs, zebras, more varieties of bok that we could keep track of, and a host of smaller critters and birds of all description. On our last game drive, we got permission to cross into a neighbouring game reserve — all the fences between the reserves and between them and Kruger were long ago torn down to make one of the largest wildlife preserves anywhere — to finally see lions that had evaded us up until then. Sadly, the pride were somnolent from recent gorging on a kill and were lolling sleepily in the road, humourously, but not terribly photogenically.

We have been on other safari experiences since returning to live in South Africa nine years ago but none has come close to our first mind-boggling time at Lions Sands, and there are no pictures in my vast collection that I love more than the two images of the majestic lady I shot on my very first drive.

Playful local interpretations of Japanese touches included chawanmushi, or savoury custard, made with ostrich egg; a chef’s knife roll of half a dozen locally forged steak knives from which we each chose our favourite; make-our-own hand-roll of locally caught chutoro and ikura; and even a little spekboom crafted in traditional bonsai style.

The flavour pairings of the ingredients in each dish were superb whether it was the deep smokey notes of burnt mushroom custard with a brittle brûlée crust matched with a warm hokkaido milk bun, the guinea fowl wonton in an intense tori paitan broth, or the explosion of tart sweetness from the cherry jelly accompanying springbok loin deftly cooked to a perfect medium rare.

From front-of-room greeting to knowledgeable explanation of each dish and of Linda’s wine pairings, the service was equally excellent.

There’s every good reason why Fyn has developed the reputation that has long had me wanting to eat here. This meal easily enters our top-10 all-time list.

The country itself has long fascinated me. It stands as perhaps the only country in Africa never to have been colonised, although Italy did occupy it for several years around the Second World War, leaving behind a fondness for pasta and a thriving coffee culture. Indeed, most scholars agree Ethiopia is where coffee was first cultivated, and Ethiopian Harar coffee, reputed to be the world’s original java, is one of my favourite.

Ethiopia is home to the second oldest Christian religion in the world, the Ethiopian Tewahedo Orthodox Church, which predates the spread of Christianity to most of Europe. The church maintains that it possesses the Ark of the Convenant, the vessel Moses is believed to have constructed to hold the two stone tablets of the ten commandments. While the church refuses to divulge where it is keeping the Ark, it is undisputed that it does own what is believed to be the oldest surviving illustrated Christian manuscripts depicting large swaths of the Christian bible. (Sadly, this bible and other priceless artifacts were either stolen, secreted away for safekeeping, or destroyed during the two-year civil conflict that raged from 2020 to 2022 between the federal army and rebels in the northern Tigray region.)

In the 12th century, Gebre Mesqel Lalibela, a priest-king of the church, returned from a pilgrimage to Jerusalem and, believing that the recent Muslim capture of that city would mean the destruction of its temples, he had a series of 11 temples carved out of solid rock. It was part of what he believed was divine instruction to recreate Jerusalem; even the Tekeze River is known as the River Jordan where it runs through the town.

Each of the 11 churches was hand-carved out of solid rock during the 12th and 13th century. They are still in use today, with Lalibela ranking as the holiest city in Ethiopia and the site of massive annual pilgrimages. All 11 are designated as world heritage sites.

With a five-night layover in Addis, I booked a three-night hop up to Lalibela, a quick 90-minute flight to the western highlands of the country where a shuttle took me on the 90-minute drive to Lalibela. This is hill country, and that’s the closest to the town that enough flat land could be found for an airport. This is also arid country and, with seasonal rains expected within a month or two, the landscape was pockmarked with countless deep pits that cultivators had dug to catch and store the precious rains.

With a local guide, I made two trips to the churches, which are collected into two parts, with a third, the youngest and best preserved of them, standing alone. It is this church, Bete Giyorgis, the Church of St. George, which appears most often in posters about Lalibela and for good reason — it is the only one not covered by a protective roof to guard against further deterioration, and its commanding presence, standing in a deep hole in the solid rock out of which it was hewn, makes it incredibly photogenic.

All the churches are still in active use. Priests can be found in any of them on any given day, and the accoutrements of worship, such as carpets, drums and staffs that worshippers lean on during what I am sure are drawn-out liturgies, are strewn about. Between Christmas, called Genna in the Tewahedo calendar, and the feast of the Epiphany, or Timkat, tens of thousands of robed pilgrims descend on Lalibela, many of them finding shelter in the small caves and grottoes that dot the walls surrounding the churches. (My digs at Sora Lodge were far more comfortable.)

The marks of the hand tools used to carve the churches are plainly visible on their walls, and the whole thing inspires a level of disbelief that can be extinguished only by seeing them firsthand. Indeed, the first European to see the churches, Portuguese explorer Francisco Álvares, wrote, “I weary of writing more about these buildings, because it seems to me that I shall not be believed if I write more … I swear by God, in Whose power I am, that all I have written is the truth.”