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San Antonio Week—It’s Fiesta Time

In 1891, the city of San Antonio held a single parade to honor Davy Crockett, Jim Bowie, and the other heroes of the Alamo and the battle of San Jacinto. Fiesta has since grown to an 11-day event in late April that features live music, art fairs, and a slew of parades including The Texas Cavaliers River Parade, which I’m headed to tonight. As soon as my flight landed yesterday in San Antonio, I took a taxi to Market Square, the largest mercado north of Mexico to take in the festivities with the crowds. There were bands playing, churros and funnel cakes cooking, and a frenzied crowd dancing and drinking margaritas and cervezas under the hot sun. I made my way to Mi Tierra, a beloved Mexican restaurant on the square since 1941. The line was an hour long, but since I was traveling solo, the woman at the desk told me to try and get a seat at the back counter. I found the last seat next to the mariachi band on break and ordered enchiladas with a sweet and spicy mole sauce. One bite and I was happy to be back in town. 

 
I’ll be blogging, tweeting, YouTubing, and Facebooking all week from San Antonio, introducing readers to everything happening in the city. So stick around and we’ll have a fiesta together! 
 

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Biking Isle-aux-Coudres

To reach Isle-aux-Coudres, you take a free 15-minute ferry from the mainland. Once there, it feels as if all the woes of modernity are washed away, replaced by the salty air of the St. Lawrence and a serene island from yesteryear. If you were looking for a good workout, you could speed around the 23-km circumference of Isle-aux-Coudres in little over an hour. But then you would miss the stone houses and their carefully manicured potted plants in the windows, the rocky shoreline that creeps into the vast river at low tide, and the ski trails of Le Massif that slice down the mountainside on the opposite shores. If you don’t take your time, you won’t stop to snap photos of the small chapels not much larger than doll houses, tour a working windmill and watermill from the 1820s, and sample the hard apple cider and tasty apple and pear mistelle from Verger Pedneault. Most importantly, if you don’t slow down and appreciate the island on two wheels, you won’t meet the wonderful people, like Patricia Deslauriers, owner of Motel L’Islet, a professional jazz bassist who now owns a lodging on a peninsula that juts out of the southernmost part of the island. She wakes up every morning to a sunrise and goes to bed after a glorious sunset. She also brings world class musicians to the island every Sunday for concerts that often attract over 1,000 people. Then there’s the maitre’d at Hôtel Cap-aux-Pierres, who spends his winters at Langkawi, the cluster of islands off Malaysia in the Andaman Sea. Or the world champion kitesurfer who now teaches her sport to others at her kitesurfing and yoga studio on the island. Isle-aux-Coudres is a magical island, one where you foolishly spend one day and soon realize you should have spent a week.
 
I’m off to Quebec City for a little more biking on my last day. I’ll be back on Monday to talk about the lodging and food on my trip. I want to thank Cynthia Lacasse at Tourisme Quebec for helping to design a perfect week of multisport adventure in Lac-Saint-Jean, Saguenay, and Charlevoix. Next time, you come to Quebec City, make sure you extend your trip by at least 3 days to see this spectacular region of the province. Have a great weekend and keep active! 
 
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Nairobi’s Giraffe Manor Expands

Yes, the chance to kiss a giraffe as he sticks his head through the window of the estate should not be overlooked. Take it from someone who has done this personally, a giraffe’s tongue is almost as long as his neck. No, the reason we like to book Giraffe Manor in Nairobi for our clients before or after a safari is its great location in the city, close to Karen Blixen’s former home and near the David Sheldrick Elephant Orphanage. Unfortunately, the 10-room boutique property is often sold out. Thankfully, they just added two superior double rooms. Called Edd and Selma, they’re named after two of the Manor’s beloved giraffes. Go have a look and a lick! 

 
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When to Go on Safari in East Africa

June through September has always been prime time for going on safari in Tanzania, especially if you want to catch the wildebeest migration across the Mara River. I’ve caught the migration from the Kenya side of the river one September as the wildebeests were making their way back south to the Serengeti. Yes, it was exciting seeing hundreds of wildebeests trampling across the river, but it wasn’t as nearly as exciting as seeing that one leopard bringing his kill up a tree. You have to realize that June, July, and August are by far the most crowded months to be on safari in Tanzania and Kenya. Crowds and land rovers lessen once September hits. Indeed, September and October are a special time of year to be on safari in the Mara, Serengeti, or Grumeti. Though I have to admit that I enjoyed being in Tanzania these past two weeks of March. The big rains of March and April were nowhere to be seen and we had the often congested roads of Ngorongoro Crater practically to ourselves. Travel to the Kusini Camp in the southern Serengeti in December, January, and February, and not only will you see an incredible amount of game, but North Americans and Europeans can escape the cold of winter and hit Zanzibar and the other coastal islands for a beach vacation. That sounds like the right move for this Boston boy. 

 
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Conservation Efforts in the Masai Mara

Mara is Swahili for “dotted hillside,” aptly named for the wealth of wildlife roaming the valley, especially during the fall when vast hordes of wildebeests are making their annual migration from the Masai Mara to the Serengeti. Yet, it wasn’t so long ago that this same wilderness area was rife with poachers aiming to bag their rhino, Maasai warriors spearing male lions as their gateway to manhood, villagers killing ostriches and impala for their meat, and mass tourism unchecked as 20 to 30 land rovers could often be found viewing that same lone leopard. Haji Ogle, who spent the bulk of his life working for the Kenya Wildlife Service battling poachers in the bush, still has his concerns.  He worries about mass tourism and would like the number of visitors to the park each day to be limited by a national government agency, not the local county council that runs the reserve now. Yet he insists that the Masai Mara be open to everyone, keeping the admission price at a reasonable 500 Kenya Schillings or $6.25 US for adult residents of the country.  Ogle is also uneasy about the growth of large wheat farms that are encroaching on the land from the east, yet he can’t help but remain optimistic. “Coming from where I was and where I am today, this is one of the enterprises that has been a success,” say Ogle.  “Kenyan conservation is now widespread.”
 

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Following in Tom Thomson’s Footsteps at Algonquin Provincial Park

On our first day at Bartlett Lodge, we signed up for a Tom Thomson tour with our guide, Malcolm. Tom Thomson was arguably Canada’s first iconic painter, sketching lone birches and pines swaying in the wind on the shores of Algonquin’s many lakes. While not technically a member of Canada’s Group of Seven artists, he was good friends with many in the group and would have certainly been a member if he had not died under mysterious circumstances at Algonquin in 1917. Thomson would spend a good 5-year span at Algonquin before his untimely death and Malcolm did a thorough job showing us the many sites where his paintings were created. We started at Tea Lake Dam, where Thomson first camped in the area along a babbling brook. Thomson was also known as an accomplished angler and paddler and you can easily see him living happily on the water’s edge here. It helped that Malcolm brought along a laptop to show us the sketches that were created in this exact spot and many other locales we would visit that day. 

The bulk of our time was spent on Canoe Lake, the busiest part of Algonquin, and where they serve a Tom Thomson burger at the Visitor Center. We took “Winnie the Tinnie,” a motorized canoe around the entirety of the lake, passing celebrated Canadian overnight summer camps, like Camp Ahmek, where Prime Minister Justin Trudeau was both a camper and counselor. At Hayhurst Point, we docked and walked up a small hillside to see a plaque that Group of Seven artist, J.E.H. MacDonald, created in memory of his friend. No one is certain how Thomson died, but his canoe arrived back to the shores first, and soon his body was found in the waters. It was ruled an accident, but there were some unruly characters living in the park in those early years, and many still believe he was murdered. Malcolm showed us the sight where his body was found and the small cemetery where he is now buried (another controversy since some people think his body was taken), before we headed back under heavy rains. The heavyu drops splashed off the water of the lake, creating a pointillist canvas that Thomson would have appreciated. 
 
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Toronto, The Culinary Capital of Canada

We’re headed to Niagara-on-the-Lake this morning to start our bike trip. Yesterday, I was fortunate to spend Victoria Day in one of my favorite cities to dine, Toronto. No need to travel the world to find varying culture when you can simply walk around Toronto’s ethnically diverse neighborhoods. Start with dim sum in Chinatown, where we dined at Rol San on Spadina (worth the wait). Or grab a traditional walnut cake in Koreatown, head to Greektown for helpings of saganaki and lamb souvlaki, order a cappuccino at one of the outdoor cafés in Little Italy, find chicken tikka masala at the Indian Bazaar in Little India, and dine on your fair share of pierogies and borscht in Little Poland, or “Ronceys,” as the locals call it. If you’re looking for more innovative multicultural fare, sample the sublime Duck Egg dish at Café Boulud, Daniel Boulud’s French restaurant at the new Four Seasons Toronto. Or venture to the Parkdale neighborhood to try the tasty smoke trout at Keriwa Café, the Native Canadian restaurant that I recently wrote about for The Washington Post. 
 

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