Fifty years ago – August 1971 – I was able to climb the Great Pyramid of Cheops all the way to the top. 450 feet high, 4,000 years old, the only one of the original Seven Wonders of the World to still exist, it was my first time in Egypt and I had to give it a go.

Of course, this is illegal. So I waited near sunset and all the tourists had gone, walked around to the northwest corner hidden from most views where there was one lonely guard. I gave him 20 Egyptian pounds which made him very happy, and up I went. Each block at the bottom is about five feet tall and gets smaller as you climb, with over 200 stone layers or “courses” base to apex. The top is flat, about 10-foot square – the limestone casing reaching a point gone long ago.

I was a philosophy doctoral student back then, so I sat down, took out from my daypack Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics, and read my idol’s wisdom in the light of the setting sun. It was a sunset I’ll never forget, too mesmerized by the moment to take a picture. The photo is of me taken recently where I began my climb of decades ago. (Glimpses of Our Breathtaking World #126 Photo ©Jack Wheeler)

Bangaram Atoll, Laccadive Islands, India.  The “Lacquered” islands or Laccadives are legendary for the glossiness of the Indian Ocean surrounding them.  There are three dozen of these coral atolls over 150 miles off the coast of southwest India – but moorkh Indian bureaucrats insist on calling them “Lakshadweep,” Sanskrit for “100,000.  Go figure.

Paintings of the French Impressionists of the 19^th century merged dreams and reality.  Here that is for real.  The beauty in the Laccadives can be so astonishing that it seems surreal – like when the ocean and sky merge into one in a palette of pastels straight from the brush of Monet.  Come to Bangaram and you’ll find yourself living inside a painting. (Glimpses of Our Breathtaking World #172 photo ©Jack Wheeler)

Santo Antão island, Cape Verde. The world’s best moonshine, which the islanders call grogue, is made here.  There are ten islands comprising the country of Cape Verde, some 400 miles off the West African coast of Senegal in the Atlantic Ocean.  For hundreds of years, Cape Verdeans have been making grogue but the folks like the fellow here on Santo Antão have perfected it.

You’ll find their stills out in the sugar cane fields, where they put the cane in to a press called a trapiche, then cook down the molasses in an old oil drum into a clear distilled rum that’s up to 140 proof or more. This fellow is pouring me a sample to taste in a coconut shell.  You have to be really careful because it’s so smooth and silky it goes down like water – making it very easy to get quickly wasted.

If you like it – which of course you will – he’ll pour fresh grogue into an empty plastic liter water bottle and sell it to you for six bucks.  People are always partying in Cape Verde, and why not with all this grogue.  They don’t mix it with anything except some lime juice and an ice cube.  Really fantastic.  Come to Cape Verde and have great time yourself! (Glimpses of Our Breathtaking World #171 photo ©Jack Wheeler)

Dar al-Hajar, the Rock Palace, was built by Yemen’s ruler, Imam Yahya Muhammad Hamiddin (1869-1948), atop a rock pinnacle as his summer residence. It lies in a valley about 10 miles outside Yemen’s capital of Sana’a. While an iconic example of Yemeni architecture, it’s impossible to visit now with civil war raging in the country. Someday we’ll be able to safely return to Yemen again. (Glimpses of Our Breathtaking World #143 Photo ©Jack Wheeler)

Toledo, Spain.   As you drive up the hill upon which this ancient city sits, at the city’s entrance you are greeted by this statue.  It is of King Alfonso VI of León and Castile (1040-1109) holding his sword as the Christian cross symbolizing his liberating Toledo from Moslem rule.

The sword has been the symbol of Toledo for over two millennia.  In 193 BC, Romans founded the city as Toletum, where their  blacksmiths developed a process of making swords of layered steel with different carbon contents, known to history as “Toledo steel,” the finest in the world for millennia until the hi-tech methods of today.

With Fall of Rome, Christian Visigoths ruled Spain from their capital here at Toledo – known as “Holy Toledo,” the center of a flourishing Christian civilization for 300 years until it was overrun by Moslems spreading Islam from Africa in the early 700s.

It was Alfonso VI who liberated Toledo from the Moslems in 1085.  It was his great-grandson, Alfonso VIII (1155-1214) who led 30,000 knights in a surprise attack on 200,000 Moslems at the Plains of Tolosa in 1212 to destroy Moslem rule in Spain.

Today, Toledo is a small town of some 50,000, charming, historic, and peaceful.  It’s one of the special places we’ll visit exploring Holy Spain this coming March. Hope you’ll be with us. (Glimpses of Our Breathtaking World #170 photo ©Jack Wheeler)