Oh, I’ve gotten to have all kinds of great experiences doing these books. I’ve made four trips to the Amazon. I swam in a tributary of the Amazon with pink dolphins, who came to know me every day. That was amazing. Amazing. I’ve also swum in the Black Water River tributary of the Amazon, in which you can’t see anything. It’s like you’re swimming in space. You can’t see anything around you. And one day I’d had some minor surgery on my foot, and I had a bandage on it, and someone came along and took that bandage right off. I have no idea who it was. Could’ve been an electric eel as long as a limousine, because I know there were a lot of electric eels there. We would see them. I know I washed my hair in a place that had a resident electric eel. My hair used to be straight. No, I’m just kidding. I’ve gotten to hike in the Alpine Mountains of the great Gobi in Mongolia. Pretty amazing. To research Quest for the Tree Kangaroo, I met with Nick Bishop and a scientist, Dr. Lisa Dabek, and our whole team to the cloud forest of Papua New Guinea. We were surely the only non-native people ever to set foot in that cloud forest at 10,000 feet.
That was amazing. And I’ve traveled in southeast Asia to all kinds of wondrous places. Sometimes you feel like you’re in some kind of a dream. I remember the first night I woke up in a tent in the Gobi. And I got up and I was wandering around under the stars, and in the distance I saw some horses that were grazing. And I thought, oh how lovely. Those are really big horses.
And then I thought, they’re really lumpy horses. They were camels! And they were just kind of sharing the desert with us. That was just great. So many wonders you get to see, and to see them, all you have to do is just go there. You know? And be ready. And the teachers will come out of the woodwork.
