Rewards credit cards are a great way to earn valuable reward currency for expenses you already make on the regular. They also make travel more comfortable thanks to transferable points and miles.
11.03.2025 - 11:18 / cntraveler.com
“Okay, now do the blob,” whispered Mark Thornton, the founder of Mark Thornton Safaris and our guide in Tanzania's Serengeti National Park. His words, barely audible, were the first anyone had spoken in an hour, and they spurred our group of five into action. We linked arms and began moving slowly, rugby-scrum style, so as to appear a nonthreatening part of the landscape (a large bush or perhaps a boulder), toward a trio of spirited male warthogs whose long, foppish manes rippled in the breeze as if in an '80s hair-band video.
On driving safaris, warthogs are usually bit players to speed past when on the trail of some splashier main attraction. But we were on foot, so there was no speeding past anything. We had been walking since 7 a.m., and the September sun was high in the sky. Stealthily following these warthogs was the very reason we were in the Serengeti. We had earned this sighting. My husband, Alex, and I were at the end of a four-day walking and fly-camping safari with Thornton and his team: Toroye, who is from a small hunter-gatherer community outside the park and has been trekking with Thornton for two decades; Masanga, a ranger appointed by the park (required if you're not using a vehicle); and Kipon and Edward, who drove ahead in a pickup each day and set up camp—simple yet comfortable sleeping tents and solar bag showers—and handled meal prep while the rest of us hiked to the next destination.
Spying on grazing giraffes during a morning trek
After landing in the Serengeti's Seronera airstrip, we drove for a couple of hours until the dirt road ran out and then continued on through open grassland into the northeastern wilderness zone, one of the park's four restricted areas in which game drives, lodges, and semipermanent camps or structures of any kind are strictly forbidden, and where even a single, wavering bar of cell service is elusive. “The Serengeti is at a critical juncture right now, trying to balance preservation with development,” Thornton explained as we crossed a seemingly endless savanna punctuated by wind-sculpted acacias and the occasional rocky outcropping. “It's really easy to focus on the negative, the dozens of cars racing to see a single sleeping leopard or the traffic jams at the Mara River crossing. But I have to applaud the park for these wilderness zones. They don't have to have them—most parks don't.” Only a few dozen small groups a year enter these restricted, pristine places, while the remainder of the Serengeti sees upwards of 200,000 visitors annually.
These zones have enabled Thornton to lead the kind of safaris that tread lightly on the land. “You're walking, the crew goes by a small pickup truck, we're not creating roads, we're bringing all of our own water
Rewards credit cards are a great way to earn valuable reward currency for expenses you already make on the regular. They also make travel more comfortable thanks to transferable points and miles.
For the first time since 2020, the Avianca lounge at Miami International Airport (MIA) has reopened its doors. Except now, it's a joint venture with TAP Air Portugal — the first of its kind.
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I stepped off a train in Vienna three decades ago and have been finding my way back to it ever since. Some cities seem to encapsulate a feeling, a mood; Vienna has inspired countless artists, not least Billy Joel, who in the 1970s named a song after the city. “Slow down, you're doing fine,” goes the refrain. “You can afford to lose a day or two….” Vienna makes it easy to do those things. In the beloved indie romance Before Sunrise, Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy meet on a train, then alight in Vienna, where they shoot the breeze and meander the streets until dawn. Rarely crowded, the city offers space to think, the potential for chance encounters. And while some European cities clear out in summer, leaving the door open for visitors to shut behind them, Vienna is always itself.
Frank Lloyd Wright’s distinctive brand of American architecture is peppered throughout the country. With more than 532 designs, the greatest concentration is in his home state of Wisconsin, which has a trail through eight sites, including his first home and studio, Taliesin in Spring Green, as well as around Chicago, where he launched his career in 1887.
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