I write on Substack at csandw.substack.com. I’m a travel writer, photographer and lifetime traveler. I’ve visited 120 countries and territories. My most recent book is a collection of thirty essays from 3QuarksDaily called Out There, published in April 2021. I’ve also written books about travel to the Arctic, to Chernobyl and a collection of stories from around the world. My wife and I live in Georgia and spend most summers in a cabin on Lake Saimaa in Finland. I write at CommonSenseAndWhiskey.com and curate 20,000-plus photos from around the world at EarthPhotos.com. Email BillMurrayWriter [at] gmail.com.
Website: http://csandw.substack.com
by Bill Murray Godfrey points the Land Rover toward Ngorongoro Crater. The road is fine to lull the unwary, but before you know it there is one lane, then no tarmac, then mud and potholes and empty hills. Close cropped with a natty little mustache, Godfrey is kempt, forties, paunch-softened, with an easy smile. A…
by Bill Murray Americans stood as implacable enemies of National Socialism. As an American myself, on the anniversary of the Berlin Wall’s fall, I want to tell you about my dear friend the Nazi soldier. “I don’t like Polish people,” he says, and raises an eyebrow suggesting “How could anybody, really?” Among other things, it’s…
by Bill Murray Late morning heat rises in waves over tall grass. It’s an hour and a half drive, sand flies buzzing, to Luwi bush camp, a seasonal camp with just four huts of thatch and grass on a still lagoon, far out into Zambia’s South Luangwa National Park, about 300 miles north of Lusaka.…
by Bill Murray The first part of this century West Africa was no place to be. Liberia was led by Charles Taylor, now serving a fifty year sentence for “aiding and abetting as well as planning some of the most heinous and brutal crimes in recorded human history.” In Sierra Leone’s civil war, entire families were gunned down in…
by Bill Murray Thirty years ago this week two million people joined hands forming a human chain across 676 kilometers of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania. Known as the Baltic Way, the visually arresting stunt was a cinematic cri de coeur for freedom. In time freedom was theirs. The Russian military fled, sometimes trashing their barracks and looting along…
by Bill Murray What you pay attention to depends on where you are. “In an old city, a tourist hears the rumble of wheels over cobblestones that the native does not and notices sound bouncing differently between walls more tightly constructed than in spacious American cities.” – Alexandra Horowitz She’s right. With the clatter of…
by Bill Murray A few months ago, Mikhail Saakashvili, ousted leader of the former Soviet Republic of Georgia and the Ukrainian town of Odessa, predicted that Russia would next attack either Sweden or Finland. A few days ago I visited the Finnish and Russian border towns of Lappeenranta and Выборг (Vyborg), and if war preparations in…
by Bill Murray OUTBOUND We’re off to meet a small live-aboard motorboat about three hours drive south of Ho Chi Minh City to cruise the Mekong Delta for a few days. The older gentleman driving has a deep, rich voice we don’t understand, speaks no English and we no Vietnamese besides pleasantries, the names of…
by Bill Murray My wife and I live in the southern Appalachian mountains across a narrow valley from Georgia’s highest mountain. Most of our farm borders the United States Forest Service, pretty far up in the woods. If we don’t go out, we might not see anyone for a week. It’s so far up in…
by Bill Murray Two dozen strangers meet by the fjord at the edge of town. We are utterly out of our element, tourists through and through. Today we shall pound across the tundra on snowmobiles, a means of conveyance most of us have never been aboard. We’re all curious about our tour company-issued Arctic wear.…
by Bill Murray Just about everyone who visits the famous South Luangwa wildlife park drives through Mfuwe, Zambia. A mere wide spot in the road, a trifle to tourists, Mfuwe holds a fearsome, searing memory. It will forever be known for the Man-Eater of Mfuwe, a lion that killed six people over two months in…
by Bill Murray 47-year old Teburoro Tito stood at the head of his delegation on an island way out in the Pacific Ocean. At the stroke of midnight on January 1st, 2000 the President of Kiribati handed a torch to a young man, ceremonially passing the future to a new generation. Nobody lived there. Nobody…
by Bill Murray John Allen Chau, the missionary killed in the Andaman Islands in November, reopened the ‘uncontacted people’ debate. An advocacy group called Survival believes “Uncontacted peoples make a judgment that they are better off remaining uncontacted and independent, fending for themselves.” Most everybody else wants in, missionaries on their missions, doctors preventing disease,…
by Bill Murray In the middle of the night of March 24, 1992, a pressure seal failed in the number three unit of the Leningradskaya Nuclear Power Plant at Sosnoviy Bor, Russia, releasing radioactive gases. With a friend, I had train tickets from Tallinn, in newly independent Estonia, to St. Petersburg the next day. That…
by Bill Murray The crocodiles know. They form pincers on either side of the crossing point. Richard says they feel the vibration of all those hooves along the riverbank above them. Waves of animals surge toward the river then fall away. If they all go we’ll witness a frightful, deadly crush of beasts in motion,…
by Bill Murray Hyvä asiakkaamme, Ethän käytä huoneiston takkaa. Se on tällä hetkellä epäkunnossa Ja savuttaa sisään. Dear customer, Please don’t use the fireplace. It is for the moment out of order and the smoke comes into the apartment. Now wait a minute. We might need that fireplace in Lapland in December. Just now it’s…
by Bill Murray It all started with zebras. Hard to believe, but sustained, hands-on field work in east Africa only has a sixty year history. Today Hans Klingel is an emeritus professor at the Braunschweig Zoological Institute, but when he arrived in Africa in 1962 Herr Klingel was one of only three scientists in the…
by Bill Murray Polynesia could swallow up the entire north Atlantic Ocean. It’s that big. Only half of one per cent of Polynesia is land, and 92 per cent of that is New Zealand. Then there’s Tonga and Samoa, the Cook and Hawaiian islands, the French possessions, and back in its own lonely corner, Rapa…