Richard Bangs

The dialectic is that water is divine and hellish, delicious and deadly. And the Rhone in Switzerland is the poster child, spilling from the roof of a continent. It is a powerful waterway that lights cities, and slakes the thirst of millions. And at the same time it is a...

Like many who live near the sea, I'm drawn to high places. And so it is as I gaze from the Ladera Resort on the island of St. Lucia, near the northern end of the Windward Islands. Beyond the open western wall of my room loom two nearly half-mile-high, perfectly...

Whether or not we name it, we all seek a balance between the moving parts of our lives. We strive for agreement between our physical and spiritual worlds. Yet, too often we find ourselves incapable of summoning this state of being. Why?

There is a place whose people have been...

This is the final installment of a five-part series. Read part one, part two, part three and part four.

At the craic of noon next day we make our way to an interruption in the road, a pause between thoughts,...

This is the fourth installment of a five-part series. Read part one, part two and part three.

Now Martin gives us a tour of Dan O'Hara's cottage. It's a brief tour as the place is hardly big enough to swing...

This is the third installment of a five-part series. Read part one and part two.

Beneath a morning sky that seems about to collapse under its own weight, we venture to the Rossaveal ferry terminal and board the Happy Hooker for a ride across...

This is the second installment of a five-part series. Read part one.

Up the stunning R478 coastal road, full of scoops and cuts, pleats and tucks, bights and coves, where the cold Atlantic is engaged in its never-ending battle with the rocky shore: By mid-afternoon, we...

This is the first installment of a five-part series.

It begins, as do all good Irish stories, in a pub. Sitting, Guinness in grip, with old friend Karen Coleman, a radio and television host in Dublin, she effluxes: "You've got to go to the west of Ireland. It's...

I owe my career in travel, which has been largely agreeable, with undeniable moments of high pleasure, to Pan Am.

When I started the adventure travel company, Sobek, in the '70s, I had aspirations of worldwide exploration, of opening up arenas of adventure to a global audience. I had maps,...

"I will make this beautiful land better known to men that it may become one of their haunts. It is impossible to describe its luxuriance." -David Livingstone, in Zambia, 1866

It begins a bit like an Agatha Christie novel. Six of us, each representing a...

"For every problem there is one solution which is simple, neat and wrong." -- H.L. Mencken

It's a singularly American rite of passage, reading Mark Twain's masterpiece, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. I was a junior at Walt Whitman High School in Bethesda, Maryland, and the story of Huck and...

"Let me journey down
On the great river...
'twixt gorges of the hills." -Yu-Pe-Ya's Lute

The Amazon and Nile are longer; the Congo carries more water. But somehow the Yangtze is the stream that has evoked more reverence among explorers, geologists, ethnologists, hydraulic engineers, and river runners. Rising...

We were on a river so remote it doesn't exist on most maps, the Blackfeather, a tributary of the Mountain River, deep in the Mackenzie Mountains of Canada's Northwest Territories about 100 miles south of the Arctic Circle. These...

"Pura Vida." It's a phrase I've heard ever since I first came to Costa Rica many years ago. At some point I realized I had heard it everywhere throughout the country, uttered by guides, park rangers, bus drivers and bureaucrats. But until recently, I never really considered what Pura Vida...

Chastity is an unknown virtue among these natives." ~ Bronislaw Malinowski, 1922

Named for Denis de Trobriand, first lieutenant in France's 1793 D'Entrecasteaux South Sea Expedition, the Trobriands were made famous by Polish anthropologist Bronislaw Malinowski, who studied them during World War I and wrote a classic monograph about the...

This is the final part of a three-part series. Read part two here.

I take a tour of the top of Pilatus Kulm, passing a pack of young Chinese boys skipping like young rams, then a...

This is part two of a three-part series. Read part one here.

Legends notwithstanding, the top of Mt. Pilatus is an empirical domain, and the feelings evoked are powerful, at least to me at this...

Perhaps no rail line in Switzerland is more sublime than the Pilatusbahn, more than a hundred years old and powered by steam until 1937, when electric cars were introduced.

After a few more bends in the river, another curious sight appears: a sign held high by a Pakistani in Western attire:...

This is the third installment in a four-part series. Read the second here.

By the 4th day the river is dropping 100 feet per mile (by comparison, the Colorado through the Grand Canyon drops 7 feet per mile)....