The Worldwide Quest Blog

Coffee is serious business in Ethiopia and they do it right - none of your ‘tall non-fat latte with caramel drizzle’ nonsense. There’s a wonderful ritual to coffee drinking that invites you to slow down and savour the aroma and the flavour. The coffee ceremony begins with the hostess (and it is almost always a woman) cleaning a handful of green beans by shaking the beans in a wok...

An interview with Ken Greenberg, Ken is an urban designer, teacher, writer, former Director of Urban Design and Architecture for the City of Toronto and Principal of Greenberg Consultants. Join Ken and his wife Eti on a Most Liveable Cities trip to Helsinki in August 2020. Each year, various organizations issue a list of the best cities in the world to live in. What do you look for when determini...

If all you know about the city of Medellín, Colombia is its troubled past, you’re in for a surprise. The city, once considered the most dangerous city in the world, is now celebrated as an international benchmark for urban transformation, social innovation and, most of all, inspiration and hope.The Medellín miracle goes way beyond the more modest experiments with participatory plan...

Curators, seniors, entrepreneurs… as I look over the photos of my trip to Uzbekistan in 2015, I’m struck by the remarkable women I met.  The Ferociously Dedicated Curator At the “Museum of Forbidden Art” in Nukus, (more properly known as the Savitsky Collection of the Karakalpakstan State Museum of Art ) we met a curator devoted to preserving over 90,000 items includi...

Quest traveller Shelia S. reminisces about a prize sighting on our Tanzania Classic Safari in February 2019.I first visited Tanzania in 1992. It was July, in the dry season. A haze of smoke often spread over the golden sea of buffalo grass and millet in the fields. Large animals were moving north for food and water as the country dried up. Our guides, though fluent in more than two languages, knew...

Although it seemed like spring would never arrive in Canada and through much of the USA, it finally did by June and with it came the arrival of Monarch butterflies. Last winter in Mexico the overwintering colonies increased by an astounding 144% over the previous year, covering an area of more than 6 hectares. That was the greatest number of monarchs seen since the winter of 2006/2007 and by far ...