Azul y Tranquilidad, Part I: Getting to Providencia, a little island in the middle of the blue.

Posted on 01/19/2026 by Lesli W.

19 Jan 2026: I am channelling blue. Or, more precisely, the 7 (+/- 3) shades of blue that surround a little island I didn’t know existed 8 weeks ago.

A panoramic view of a turquoise ocean under a clear blue sky with scattered clouds, seen from a rocky shore with greenery in the foreground.

Rewind to the beginning of December: I needed a break from my computer. My inner mermaid was screaming to return to her home planet. My bones were cold. I needed to tune out work and the real world and the endless blather from every form of media. I needed a return to the blue.

A plan is hatched.

A conversation with an old friend put me in touch with a dive instructor on a little-known island called Providencia; part of Colombia, but geographically closer to Nicaragua. Its history is that of pirate island, and an English, then Spanish, territory before Colombia’s independence in the 1800s. Privateering was Providencia’s chief business for a while, and rumours abound of treasure still hidden on the tiny island to this day. In 2007 UNESCO incorporated the archipelago of San Andrés, Providencia and Santa Catalina into their network of Caribbean biosphere reserves, calling it Seaflower.

Before the dot-com boom and bust and well before online travel blogs were really a thing, I spent a lot of my vacation time diving in Belize and Honduras. This was also before the hordes of tourists and the warming of the waters and the multi-story luxury resorts built on the edge of atolls that really can’t support the growth. The pristine reefs in that part of the Caribbean have grayed and crumbled over the years; apparently capitalism is an exemption in environmental protection.

So when I read about Providencia, it resonated like a glimmer of hopeful azul in a long, cold, gray December. It was small enough to be overlooked by the masses, cherished just so by its denizens, and hard enough to get to that most of the cringey tourists wouldn’t bother. Also, aside from beaching and diving and snorkeling and climbing The Peak, there wasn’t a heck of a lot to do there. I booked flights as soon as I saw photos.

Rusty Spanish and a small glitch.

To get to Providencia, you need to go through San Andrés. Luckily Avianca flies direct to Bogotá from Boston; and while it feels like a world away, Colombia is in the same time zone as the Eastern US. So the flight from Bogotá to San Andrés was also relatively straightforward. The small oopsie: In the chaos of work-holiday-family-new year before the trip, I had completely forgotten to apply for my Check-MIG (tourist visa). So as the BOS-BOG flight taxied to the gate in Bogotá, I furiously entered my info into the web form then held my breath. Exhale: The acceptance email arrived as I was walking to the immigration line. This level of stress is not highly recommended. The other thing that nobody tells you unless you dig for the info (which I didn’t), is that you need a tourist card to enter the reserve area, so with rusty Spanish I navigated to the kiosk to get mine just in time to board the flight to San Andrés.

I stayed in an eco-hostel on San Andrés for a night, a quirky little hotel built into an ancient coral reef, before waking to take the final hop to Providencia (The Rock House: I highly recommend!). Even though I only spent one short night there, I felt welcomed and safe from the moment I arrived. As solo female travellers know, this is such a relief…one less thing to stress over, giving back some emotional energy to focus on that last leg.

View out of a propellor plane window of an island with a bridge surrounded by bright blue water.

Note to travellers: always check and re-check flight times… the flight was changed to leave 20 minutes early! But I made the flight, understood enough of the in-flight announcements (100% en Español), found a taxi, and made it to my little hotel in South West Bay in time to unpack, find the dive shop, and take a small nap in my hammock before sunset.

A small regional airplane parked on an airport tarmac with a green mountain in the background and a clear blue sky.

I hadn’t intended on writing a whole post on just the getting there process, pero aqui estamos (but here we are). Thanks for coming along on the beginning of this journey with me.

In Part II we’ll dive into Providencia. Literally.

2026 Calendars are here!

Posted on 11/15/2025 by Lesli W.

This year, I’ve decided to dedicate a portion of the proceeds of my annual calendar to the amazing research and conservation work Bring The Elephant Home is doing on elephant behaviour, habitat, and wellbeing in South Africa and Thailand (and soon other parts of Africa, like Zimbabwe, Uganda, and more!).

The calendars are available in my photography shop. Just select the SHOP button, go to Specialty Products, and scroll down to the calendars.

Currently, I’m only able to ship within the US, but send me a note if you’re out of the US and want a calendar…we’ll figure something out.

While you’re in my photography shop, browse around… you may find something fun as a holiday gift. The photo lab I use does amazing prints, and we can ship pretty quickly for holiday gifts.

Thanks, and have a great day!

I visited Dachau and Oktoberfest in the same day. I sort of recommend it.

Posted on 10/05/2025 by Lesli W.

Dachau is the first concentration camp that I’ve seen, and even though I’ve learned about the depths of depravity we humans are capable of by reading about the horrors and visiting the Rwanda Genocide Museum, by visiting the old slave market in Stone Town, by walking through Berlin and learning about the Holocaust in school and in Germany in an unapologetic way, it felt important to see this place, to walk through the ghosts of things that should not have happened.

Ditto, Oktoberfest. I mean, it felt important to go. I’ve been in Munich a few times (even when the Wiesn was in full swing). I love Germany. Aachen feels like my 2^nd home. Yet for some reason, Oktoberfest has never been on my list… But this time there was time in the itinerary, so why not.

That these two juxtaposed realities can exist in the same plane of existence is both appalling and yet somehow not entirely unexpected.

The words arbeit macht frei (work makes you free) are wrought into the iron in the entry gate at Dachau. It was a work camp more than a death camp, though the calculated deliberateness of the atrocities and the hypocrisy of the arbeit makes it very clear why chiefs from this camp went on to do even more evils at Auschwitz and others.

Walking the grounds and exhibits, in their brutal honesty, makes you realise that as horrible as the recounting was, it was sanitized for the sake of the viewer. Sanitized, for fucks sake. What actually happened there was far worse.

It was a gray, semi-rainy late-September morning. By the time we left, I was cold. My feet hurt. I was hungry. I needed a shower. Absurd first-world problems by any measure. Unfathomable, by today’s.

A cold, almost metallic, shiver stayed with me throughout the gray morning, and I couldn’t get the word hypocrisy out of my mind as I tried to align the thoughts this should not have happened with how close are we now to the timeline then?

It was a quiet bus-then-train ride back to the hotel, where a shower felt a little more decadent than the day before and a snack of some day-old bread was a luxury in a real world that felt so surreal and undeserved after the morning.

Rhetorical question: How can we simultaneously release ourselves from the past while living with empathy and integrity and inclusiveness so that history doesn’t get the chance to repeat itself?

Genuss lässt dich vergessen (indulgence/enjoyment makes you forget) is written nowhere that I’m aware of, yet the visions of the morning dissipated as we meandered the streets of Munich and wended our way to the Theresienwiese, the Oktoberfest fairgrounds. Along the way we saw lederhosen-clad revellers on electric scooters, dirndl-dressed Fräulein, and oodles of others dressed in traditional garb and less-so.

We had been with German friends for the past week and a half, all of whom joked and rolled their eyes that we wanted to go to Oktoberfest; all of whom suggested visiting the more authentic Oide Wiesn.

So we entered the fairgrounds via the Oide Wiesn, the historic Oktoberfest, in hopes of avoiding some of the chaos outside these gates. It felt like a state fair, only 11,000 times bigger, replete with enormous beer tents and oompah bands and Bavarian folk dancing. As one does, we indulged a bit: drinking steins of local beer, eating Bavarian pretzels and Fischbrötchen, riding the Willenborg Ferris wheel, and maybe the best part, peoplewatching, because the outfits and the mayhem truly make the day.

Traditional Bavarian folk dance in a beer tent at Oktoberfest

The Oide Wiesn felt like the safe place, as venturing into the wilds of the main Oktoberfest madness felt like a frat party on steroids. We ducked in and out of beer halls and played “spot the American tourists” (inebriated 20-somethings in rented lederhosen with stuffed chickens on their heads…I am not kidding) and “dodge the detritus” (unfortunate results of said inebriation) enough to call it quits for the day and head to the exit with one final auf Wiedersehen to the experience.

It doesn’t make a lot of sense to visit the polar extremes on the humanity spectrum in the same day…But maybe it does. Maybe they both teach us lessons on balance and compassion and bramacharya, restraint.

Be kind.
Don’t let apathy win.
Indulge…but not to excess.
Practice equity and empathy and compassion.
Laugh…at yourself before others.
Live modestly.
Love generously.
Learn rabidly.

Bringing down fences: one year on.

Posted on 06/11/2025 by Lesli W.

I started writing this post on a dark plane flying North over the African continent, visions of elephants and African wildlife swimming in my head. Now I’m home, back from another trip to Kariega with the BTEH team to do additional observations and work on an exciting elephant ID project that blossomed from that first trip.

How it started: I went down to South Africa last March sort of blindly. I had signed up for a volunteer program with an NGO called Bring The Elephant Home to help the researchers do behavioural studies on elephants at Kariega Game Reserve in the Eastern Cape. We spent 10 days there, in the field and in the classroom, learning about and studying these amazing creatures. Just a few months before that trip, they had removed the interior fences in the reserve, so one of the key questions we tried to answer was “what happens with the eles when you remove fences?” I wrote about that amazing experience here.

Fast-forward a year and a few months, and these elephants have been living in their expanded habitat for some time now.

5 observations after another 10 days in the field:

The herds seem to be thriving. There are new-ish calves and lots of mud wallowing. The eles really seemed jovial and happy.

All the herds seem to be spending a lot of time in the Harvestvale section of the reserve. There are still 3 matriarchs with GPS collars (Half Moon, Beauty, and Bukela), and the BTEH team has tracked them over the past year in a sort of migration pattern with the seasons. Last year, Bukela’s herd was very cautious about crossing over into their new territory, so it could be that the Kariega West herd has benefitted most with the new habitat.

They’ve made new friends and acquaintances. One of the most beautiful things to observe was that all the herds seem to be affiliating, if not intermingling. Time will tell whether this leads to new mini-herds or one giant one.

The bulls are roaming about in bands of 2s and 3s, and even these guys have crossed clans. We observed Matchstick hanging around with Holy Moly, and Sean (one delegate from each of the herds). Maybe Matchstick (from Harvestvale) is playing mentor – or host – to the other two (from KW).

Kambaku was in musth. He’s from the Kariega West side. It seemed probable that he mated with Mavis (from Harvestvale), so the bulls are probably enjoying the fact that they have more ladies to choose from.

Exciting news.

Last year, I left feeling like there had to be an easier way to ID individual elephants. So I organised a Hackathon team to work on an AI model that would help speed up and automate the identification process. While we didn’t fully solve the problem for Hackathon, we came close… and that led to a partnership of sorts between our Hackathon team, Bring The Elephant Home, Microsoft’s AI for Good Lab, and WildMe, the internationally-known NGO that works to identify and track endangered species worldwide. To date, WildMe’s WildBook population monitoring doesn’t have elephants in their re-ID model because they didn’t have a large enough data set to train the AI. So through this collaboration we are going to first train their re-ID model to include elephants, and then work on a mobile app that can be used in the field.

To say that we are very excited is an understatement!

More exciting news.

All research points to the fact that habitat expansion leads to thriving herds, lower environmental impact, less human/elephant conflict, less human intervention needed for elephant population control, and a healthier ecosystem for many of the interdependent species in the area. Together with the Elephant Reintegration Trust, BTEH is working on creating the world’s first elephant rewilding reserve. BTEH also supports initiatives to create an “elephant corridor” in the Eastern Cape that aims to pull down more fences between private reserves and build a network of connected wild spaces up to Addo National Park.

This year’s program felt like both a summation of research as well as a lens into the future. Many thanks to Antoinette and Brooke at Bring The Elephant Home for creating these exciting programs to promote elephant wellbeing and more successful human-elephant coexistence.

More to follow, with photos and stories, from an amazing 10 days with the elephants and the BTEH volunteer team.

Costa Rica parte tres: The ocean redeems itself.

Posted on 04/04/2025 by Lesli W.

They say the ideal holiday length is 10 days. You need 4 days to decompress from the real world, a few days to deep dive into the present, and a day or so to get ready to go back to reality. By dia cuatro, I felt a shift, whether it was the whales, a surrender to the humidity, or the fauna, I felt like I was on a proper escape from the real world.

My last day of diving was a Friday. The currents were shifting with the moon, bringing higher tides and more surge, which could mean lower visibility. But as we were getting ready for our first dive, a manta ray swam directly under the boat, chasing plankton on top of the reef at the el Diablo dive site.

I’ve dived in Thailand, Burma, Zanzibar…but I’ve never seen a manta underwater. These creatures are as graceful as they are massive (giant manta ray wingspans can be nearly 9 metres or almost 30ft!), yet they eat the tiny stuff: krill and plankton. This was going to be an interesting dive!

The ocean did not disappoint: we were graced by 3 giant mantas in total, an aloof pair travelling together and a solo one who seemed to really enjoy swimming over our bubbles. The sheer size of these animals is breathtaking; absolutely enormous, yet they fly overhead like chubby kites.

This day made up for every other thus far!

And I had 2 days left for wandering, birdwatching, critter-finding, and hammock lolling before needing to wrap up and get back to reality.

The Bahìa Drake trail is a path that follows the line where the sea meets the jungle, and runs many kilometres from Drake Bay down the coast towards Corcovado National Park. It was brutally hot out, so I walked about 30 minutes, landing on a beach inhabited by a fleet of college spring breakers. I quickly retreated to another little beach, completely quiet save a few thousand hermit crabs skittering around the sand.

I spent my remaining time in Drake Bay trying to slow down time. I knew that when I got back, the pressures of an impending product launch would be all-consuming. So I sat and watched while a small company of scarlet macaws amassed in a mango tree to gorge on the unripe fruit. I watched as giant iguanas appeared out of nowhere to slowly yet lithely scamper up trees. I stalked hummingbirds and a handful of different kinds of tanagers.

And like that, the week was up. The trip back was without issue, though I felt more nervous travelling back into the US than I did leaving it. My passport has a somewhat chequered history, and the current news cycle didn’t make me feel any more comfortable. This too shall pass.

Awesome souvenirs.

I got a text message from one of the French guys on the dive boat a couple of days after I got home. “Awesome souvenirs,” he texted. I had sent some of the manta photos and videos to the group. And it made me smile. I think we have it all wrong here…the word souvenirs in French means memories.

And a picture is worth a thousand words.

This Girl's Meanderings

Thoughts and photos from adventures far and near

Azul y Tranquilidad, Part I: Getting to Providencia, a little island in the middle of the blue.

Like this:

2026 Calendars are here!

Like this:

I visited Dachau and Oktoberfest in the same day. I sort of recommend it.

Like this:

Bringing down fences: one year on.

Exciting news.

More exciting news.

Like this:

Costa Rica parte tres: The ocean redeems itself.

Like this:

Share this:

Like this:

Share this:

Like this:

Share this:

Like this:

Exciting news.

More exciting news.

Share this:

Like this:

Share this:

Like this: