On This Day Last Year...

I was 12 months into an 18 month trip around the world. So far, I had bowed before shrines in Nikko, Japan, drunk vodka with Russian "little bosses" on a ship to Vladivostok, ridden the Trans-Siberian train across Russia, seen the 83-year-dead body of Lenin, walked inside the Rhone Glacier, swam in Como Lake and the Adriatic, oggled at Jose Plecnik's architecture in Ljubljana, hitch-hiked across the Albanian border, walked around the Acropolis, sipped coffee inside the walls of Dubrovnik, visited the Aphrodite temples on Cyprus, and driven a donkey cart through the Siwa oasis in Egypt.

On this day last year, I was counting animals in Tanzania.