WLT Travel Library

More irreverent folks might call her the “bearded lady,” but those who follow politics, ancient as well as modern, know that the reign of Hatshepsut, ca. 1479-1458 B.C., is an amazing story. Featured on the cover of the April 2009 issue of National Geographic magazine, Hatshepsut, according to surviving mural depictions, indeed sported a beard, as well as the royal head cloth of a pharaoh, to bolster her stature as the ruler of the Egyptians in the New Kingdom.

A complicated succession story preceded Hatshepsut’s rise to the throne of Egypt, one involving not only the importation into the royal lineage of a formidable general (Hatshepsut’s father, whose responsibility it was to produce a male heir), and incest—Hatshepsut married that male heir, her half-brother. A minor wife of her husband produced the male next-in-line, something Hatshepsut failed to do, and when that young boy, Tutmose III, inherited the throne at the death of his father, Hatshepsut, as was the custom, took on the role of queen regent while her stepson matured.

Eventually, however, Hatshepsut started to perform the functions more commonly associated with Egyptian kings, and shunting her stepson aside, she assumed control over the kingdom, a control did not relinquish for twenty-one years. She went on a building spree unique in Egyptian history, commissioning new temples and renovating existing shrines from the Sinai to Nubia. At Karnak she erected four magnificent obelisks, and she left innumerable accounts of her history, lineage, titles, hopes, and fears in statuary and on stone walls.

We may never discover what induced the shift in Hatshepsut’s behavior. Nevertheless, the bravura with which she assumed male traits and attire and undertook grandiose building projects to bolster her stature, while extraordinary, was more than likely offensive to many. When Tutmose III did assume the throne, nearly every image of Hatshepsut as king—on temples, monuments, and obelisks—was eradicated. Today, Hatshepsut’s mummy, discovered in the spring of 2007 after centuries of repose in Egypt’s Valley of the Kings, lies on display in Cairo’s Egyptian Museum.



According to the November-December 2009 issue of Audubon magazine, Israel is one of the great bird-watching destinations in the world. This New Jersey–sized country is at the heart of a heavily traveled migratory flyway, along which some 500 million birds cruise between Europe, Asia, and Africa. Among the 540 species recorded in Israel to date are pelicans, storks, ibises, cranes, and the Levant sparrow hawk, a small bird of prey whose entire world population, according to Audubon, “passes over Israel is as little as 10 days.”

More than 150,000 people travel to the Hula Valley, which is visible from the Golan Heights, to watch the tens of thousands of common cranes that migrate between Europe and Africa. This area is fast becoming the nucleus of Israel’s nascent wildlife tourism industry. In a more urban setting is the Jerusalem Bird Observatory, located adjacent to Israel’s parliament, the Knesset. This small one-acre plot houses a bird blind and banding area that attracts thousands of visitors, from schoolchildren to politicians, in search of science and/or solitude. And in the foothills of the Jerusalem Plains near Tel Aviv, Israel’s modern economic hub, is a pond covered with white-headed ducks, one of the rarest bird species in the world. “This is an area of extreme importance for white-headed ducks,” the Audubon article quotes Jonathan Meyrav, a former Israeli soldier who now works for the Society for the Protection of Nature in Israel and leads birding trips around the country. “Maybe 8,000 are left in the world, and up to one-third of them winter here in Israel.” In a country that is 60 percent desert, a pond is an oasis for migrating birds.



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*Did you know? Wallace’s Line is a zoogeographical boundary that separates regions of Asia from Wallacea, which is a transitional zone between Asia and Australia. West of the line, organisms relate to Asiatic species; east of the line, they relate to a mixture of Asian and Australian species.

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“Knowing such a place doesn’t exist anywhere else in the world, I couldn’t help but shed a few tears as I left the Galápagos. I had had so many special experiences on Explore the Galapagos Islands, a 7-day cruise aboard the Isabela II, that I knew I would have precious memories and fun stories for the rest of my life. One of my favorite was unplanned. One afternoon, we stopped at a secluded stretch of crescent white sand beach to spend some time stretching our legs.

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