Margaret Backenheimer is a Northwest writer who lives close to the Pacific Ocean, from where she has worked as a regular travel columnist for the Chicago Tribune for nearly three decades. Her columns cover events and festivals worldwide, as do her travels, which stretch from Hawaii (where she once taught) to Seattle (where she once studied), from Mexico (her favorite getaway in Loreto, on the Sea of Cortez) to the Far East—to Hong Kong, China and Japan especially. More recently she has discovered Africa, which has fed her passions for wildlife preservation and for cats of all sizes.
For Margaret, travel is a way of gaining deeper insights into life by opening the gates to new, previously mysterious worlds. The realms of native animals are often her touchstone on these journeys. She has come eye-to-eye with reindeer at Sweden’s Ice Hotel, gooney birds (albatross) by the thousands on Midway Island, long-lived tortoises in the Galapagos Islands, rescued elephants in Thailand and Kenya, pods of orca whales in Puget Sound and pink dolphins in Hong Kong Harbour. A monthly column on cruising for Global Traveler Magazine now transports her to other memorable shores as well, from the Columbia River to Croatia’s Dalmatian Coast.
Favorite travel number: 5—for Africa’s Big Five (elephants, rhino, buffalo, leopards and lions), plus cheetahs and other cats in the wild.
What keeps Margaret awake at night plotting trips: the hope of seeing an entire family of cheetahs roaming the savanna while on safari.
Favorite travel memories: walking through the night zoo in Singapore; feeding time at the Sheldrick Elephant Orphanage in Nairobi; riding the rails back and forth across the whole of Japan while learning to read the timetables; touching a whale in the waters of the Baja; riding the Norway in a Nutshell line from fjord to mountain peak; bicycling through a forest of unyielding gooney birds on Midway Island; observing a lone cheetah surveying the terrain in the wind-swept grasses of Kenya’s Masai Mara.
