Hotel @nyware

“We haul it all” could be a Chinook unit’s motto. And nobody ever forgets a ride in one of the US Army's lift-anything-go-anywhere helicopters. After  more than 18 years of U.S.-backed efforts to stabilize the country, American diplomats and other supporting personnel still rely on privately-operated helicopters just to safely get around Afghanistan’s capital Kabul.

Documenting these travels with pictures has the added advantage of it being true, and therefore you have to tolerate contradictions and see things from different perspectives. "You worked on a cruise ship and now you are working in a war zone,huh?" Yep, from cruise ship to cruise missiles. Same thing , "At your service. Yes Maam, Yes Sir"...I am STILL in The Hospitality Industry. Both are 24 hour work environments. The customer this contract is the US Army. I'm here because my LEFT brain got good at telling my RIGHT brain what to do! It is very important that  expedition history not be distilled to just those great man and woman like Magellan,  Edmund Hillary, Lewis  and Clark et al., but to the regular folk  who  go out to do their own exploring and circumnavigation of the Earth and then blog about it-literature in a hurry. No matter where I go there I am. I can still look up at the same moon, stars albeit different hemisphere. It innately belongs to...

I have a status meeting with myself every Friday. Today's topic is risk intelligence.Risk appetite governs how much risk you want to take, while risk intelligence involves being aware how much you are actually taking.   I  tolerate ambiguity. I play poker and deal with partial information developing  a high level of risk intelligence But this is not poker, this is war. It is the ability to estimate probabilities accurately, it’s about having the right amount of certainty to make educated guesses. come across occasional islands of high risk intelligence in odd places casinos and war zones. As John Maynard Keynes said:  “When the facts change, I change my mind. What do you do, sir?” . Before you can take your path you must live it in thought. It is one thing to study war and another to live the warrior life. My thought makes me travel and create archives of experience and expectation where I incinerate negativity and have a mindfulness of pu...

H2OMG "To live every day as if it had been stolen from death, that is how I would like to live. To feel the joy of life, as Eve felt the joy of life. To separate oneself from the burden, the angst, the anguish that we all encounter every day. To say I am alive, I am wonderful, I am. I am. That is something to aspire to." Garth Stein Another 2 days and dazed by the power and majesty of the hydropower of the great Zambezi Victoria Falls, a UNESCO World Heritage site, Victoria Falls, an Uber waterfall on the border of Zimbabwe and Zambia. Looking out  at The Zambezi Riverfrom TheRoyal Livingstone Hotel-towards The Smoke That Thunders-Victoria Falls Also known locally as “Mosi-oa-Tunya” – or the “The Smoke that Thunders” – this isn’t the highest or even the widest waterfall in the world. It is, nevertheless, the largest, based on its width of 5,604 ft and height of 354 ft, making it the world’s largest sheet of falling water. This is beautiful but oh s...

 "I won the lottery". because as Bruce  Springsteen says, "I was born in the USA". We Speak English Or People Die Underwrote my foreign travels with these blue-chip gigs Cnn Verses The Alphabet There are some similiarities between Afghanastan and Myanmar-Drugs, long civil wars and emerging economies... but I digress...actually reminisce, harking back to SE Asia and 3 days in Yangoon: Yangoon's  analog eyes don’t see our digital world. But does it matter. Internet or InterNOT? Traveling in places with out  electricity with TCN's, Third Country Nationals, are not voyages of discovery, but  rituals of reassurance- So with,curiosity, vulnerability and vocabulary, I will articulate t.e Myanmar sound bite. Warrior Ethos These ppl in Burma, aka Golden land, are so sweet, Yet they are the digital homeless, who couldn’t tell you the difference between google and facebook, a laptop or an ipad. The largest experimen...