The Blog
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A Messy Trip Down the Tanana
By Gary Tomlin Tanana River, Alaska. July, 2025 –The Tanana is the second largest river in Alaska, and the largest tributary in the Yukon River watershed. It drains the north slope of the humongous Alaska Mountain Range, and eventually joins the Mighty Yukon about 100 miles northwest of Manley Hot Springs. Photo by Sid Parish…
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Amazon Travel part 6: Manatee Forever
By Gary Tomlin The Amazon Rescue Centre is a classy, focused investment in wildlife preservation by the Dallas World Aquarium, in Texas. It has been designed and equipped to provide adequate care and temporary housing to the distressed animals that the customs service and law-enforcement agents have recovered from smugglers and poachers. Injured animals from…
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Amazon Travel Part 5: Rainforest Bio Station
By Gary Tomlin The perfect life-sustaining temperatures, abundance of water, and mostly undisturbed habitat in Amazonia create an environment where plants, animals and insects thrive like nowhere else on the planet. Scientists have not come close to identifying all of the species present. Variations in climatic factors like altitude, wind patterns, soil properties, topography, water…
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Amazon Travel Part 4: Nauta
By Gary Tomlin NAUTA, PERU — The Ucayali and Marañon Rivers merge together here and become the Mighty Amazon. It’s the place where native Kukama dissidents chose to resettle in 1830, after fleeing from their home in Lagunas, following an uprising against their Jesuit overlords. The first Brazilian steam boat to navigate all the way…
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Amazonia – Travel Challenges Part 3
By Gary Tomlin Yurimanguas, Peru — This thriving river port city of 70,000 is at the end of the highway. It’s all boats and waterways from here. Large multi-decked, self-propelled, cargo barges and smaller, faster, people boats, called rapid boats, transport all that is necessary, from spaghetti to tractors, to sustain life for all of…
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Amazonia – Travel Challenges Part 2
by Gary Tomlin Northern Andes, Peru— Started today in the city of Jaén, in the shot-gun seat, of a shared taxi going to the historic city of Chachapoya. It’s a pretty drive to the southeast. Stopped at the junction in the interesting looking city of Bagua Grande to take on two passengers. There was a…
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Amazonia – Travel Challenges
by Gary Tomlin High Andes, Peru — For this adventure, I planned to enter the Amazon watershed at the city of Yurimanguas, Peru, where there’s a port on the Huallaga River. I went into it with only a sketchy idea of how I was going to get there. Part of type-two adventure is in figuring…
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The Gocta Falls
By Gary Tomlin Cocachimba, Peru — The few streets are unpaved in this little known, mountain-side village of simplistic and rough-hewn charm. There’s a horse stable and soccer field in the town center. There is one road south, down slope, to civilization. On the north side is the trailhead to the stunningly high Gocta Waterfall.…
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The Heart of a Child
By Gary Tomlin It’s Carnival weekend in Vilcabamba, Ecuador, where traditionally, the Lenten season is welcomed with a community water fight. To celebrate Christ’s ministry on earth, the good Catholics administer a public, mass baptism. So much so that the most popular items on the street vendors’ carts are plastic zip bags, that hang around…