BUFFALO PARK TRAIL curves in a figure-8 through a meadow below the San Francisco Peaks near Flagstaff, Arizona. In a wet May, spring peepers sing from a little ephemeral wetland. In a generous monsoon summer, Evening Primrose and Sego Lilies lie in the deep grass like fallen stars. In October, grasses have gone gold and silver; evening is the heart of a tourmaline.

Amanda Pressner is co-author of “The Lost Girls: Three Friends. Four Continents. One Unconventional Detour Around the World”, and executive editor of the woman’s travel website lostgirlsworld.com.Recently, she invited Matador to check out the contents of her backpack rolling duffel heading down to Puerto Rico for a reunion adventure with her fellow Lost Girls, Jen and Holly.

Jonathan Kalan heads to Zanzibar for East Africa’s largest music festival.A massive five-day music, culture, seafood, and booze-fueled party, Sauti Za Busara (“Voice of Wisdom,” in Swahili) draws thousands of tourists to Stone Town — the “old town” district of Zanzibar’s capital — and its 17th-century fort along the main strip.

The Gypsy wedding band was slightly the worse for booze, the perpetual pom-pom-pom of the davul drum rhythmical, insistent, throbbed like a fever pulse in the sizzling heat, while the zurna — a kind of trumpeted clarinet with stops instead of keys and the instrument of choice among Turkified Roma — emitted a kind of dirge-like, screechy, piercing Oriental whine in a 9/8 Gypsy rhythm (“My head is like a zurna,” is what the Turks use to express a hangover).

Screengrab from BombFlow TVCheck how the crew at BombFlow TV pioneers new waterfalls and highwater lines in BC.“FINDING MARYSVILLE FALLS was unreal: a clean roadside 60-footer in British Columbia, but it wasn’t all good. Right downstream of the waterfall was wan unrunnable canyon full of siphons and logs.

Have you ever heard of Slavutych?ALMOST EVERYONE HAS heard of Chernobyl. Even if you aren’t really sure what happened there, you know something terribly wrong went down. In April of 1986, an explosion occurred at the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant. It and the resulting fire released radioactive material which spread around Europe and western parts of the USSR.