Safari and Wildlife

My husband, Allan, always looks for the best travel for our dollar, shopping via the Internet. For a Feb. 4-17, 2006, safari in Kenya and Tanzania, we used a small company based in Nairobi: Njewa Safaris (Box 2009-01000, Thika, Kenya; phone/fax +254-20-210531, mobile +254-722-752520 or visit www.njewasafaris.com). The land price for our tour was $2,700 per person.

Chris, an expert bird guide and owner of Chris Dahlberg’s Specialised River Tours (Daintree Village, Queensland 4873, Australia; phone 07 4098 7997 or visit www.daintreeriver tours.com.au), was one of the reasons we chose to visit Daintree on our trip to Australia.

For our trip to Normandy, France, in May-June ’04, we wanted to have one base for our 5-night/6-day stay plus a guide who would provide transportation and be familiar with the area. Martin Reeve’s Normandy Safaris (57 Raley Rd., Locks Heath, Southampton S031 6PB, England; phone 01489-576081 or visit www.normandysafaris.co.uk) provided a perfect match for our requirements.

Martin Reeve proved to be well informed and an excellent driver. He takes no more than six adults in a very comfortable minibus.

Fethiye, Turkey, has a wonderful small market with everything you might wish to buy — great jewelry, rugs, spices. . . . On a June-July ’04 tour with Treasures of Travel (Edmonds, WA; 800/572-0526), I found wonderful things there for my home and for my friends. — PEGGY LONG, Portland, OR

Since our retirement, my wife, Dorothy, and I follow a custom of celebrating Christmas away from home. We spent the 2005 holiday season on the tour “Best of Kenya and Tanzania,” Dec. 13-31, with Overseas Adventure Travel (One Broadway, Ste. 600, Cambridge, MA 02142; 800/493-6824, www.oattravel.com).

East Africa is an area of great natural beauty mixed with abject poverty — huge collections of animals alongside native peoples scratching out a living yet apparently cheerful.

In no specific order, following are the places I have visited that I consider to be the greatest of the natural wonders of our world. (The Grand Canyon in Arizona would be on this list, but I’m concentrating on sights covered by ITN, those outside of North America and the Caribbean.)

Several entries from my list of Lesser Known Natural Wonders, listed at the bottom, would be in this category if they were more widely known. I have been to 183 of the 194 countries on the ITN Official List of Nations.

In the chilly dawn of the Kalahari Desert, two dozen meerkats turn the dark fur of their bellies to the sun, warming up for the day’s hunt for food.

I was saddened to read in the “News Watch” section of the January ’06 issue about the shooting of the tourist on Nov. 8, 2005, in Murchison Falls National Park, Uganda. I had completely missed any mention of it in my local newspaper, The Washington Post, so I looked it up online.

It seems that the tourist, a Brit, was farther north than tourists usually go in the park. Nonetheless, it is frightening that, despite Uganda’s best efforts, the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA) is still operating within the park boundaries.

Trucks, lined with tourists sporting assorted hats like exotic crested birds, raced jeeps to the gatehouse in Ranthambore National Park in Rajasthan, India. After securing route assignments, the drivers fanned out like beaters on a tiger hunt over dirt roads pockmarked by monsoon rains. My daughter, Anna, and I were among the lucky few in a jeep.