Whenever I hear about 9/11, I will hear, from the background of my memory, the sound of monkeys. Ericka and I had arrived a day earlier on a little, twin-prop airplane that had carried a dozen of us north from Guatemala City over the verdant canopy of Central American jungle to Tikal in Guatemala's northern province, and back in time five centuries to a Mezoamerica the jungle swallowed whole. We entered the ruins at daybreak under the silhouettes of monkeys in the treetops above us, climbed temples to look out over the jungle canopy, wondered quietly about the lifestyle of a people whose world ended before ours began and whether that world made any more sense or was in any way more satisfying than this one...

I took this picture of Lake Balaton, "the Hungarian Sea" on an afternoon when passing showers stippled the water's surface with doubt, and ivory-sailed sloops raced before the storm winds. It's hard not to look at a map of Hungary without finding your eye drawn naturally to this immense body of water in the western half. The blue of the map fails to do justice to the temperament of the water, however: we watched the lake flow from greys and silvers through turquoise and every potential shade of dark blue we've known...

Budapest rises from the hillsides on either side of the Danube in a tangle of spires, every bit as much the old warrior's helmet as the pinnacle of a cathedral. It is breathtaking. From our vantage point in the sturdy old Soviet hydrofoil, it indeed seemed to earn its self-proclaimed moniker, the "Pearl of the Danube, usurping the crown from even Vienna, which wins economically but loses when measured in charm. And it's hard not to like a capital city you can enter via a watercourse, rather than a airport chafing under its own security measures.

We left Vienna in the bright sun of early morning on a hydrofoil, bound 300 miles down the Danube to Budapest, gateway to the East. Of the several boats moored quayside at the Shiffahrtzentrum, I was surprised to discover ours was not one of the several multidecked, glassy vessels bobbing in the river current, but rather the squat, sealed vessel that looked to me like a half-submerged bus or a big blue cigar. It was either Russian- or Bulgarian-built, judging by the Cyrillic on the steel bulkheads, but it would take us all the way to Budapest in quiet comfort.

The Danube was broad and vaguely industrial around Vienna, and grey and wind-tossed by the time we reached Bratislava. Twice we labored through locks that lowered us over a hundred feet vertically: massive steel and concrete things as silent as the grave.

The year was 1890-something, the place an inauspicious village in the Bakony hills of northwestern Hungary. There, a young man by the name of Ferenc was tiring of the agricultural life of his village, Ajkarendek, where his family and a couple dozen others tilled fields of wheat and vegetables. But the New World was calling.

In May 2009 we visited Ajkarendek, Hungary, ancestral home of my own family, and found it very much a place to come home to.

Its name betrayed the simplicity of the place, but not its elegance: Český Krumlov, the "Czech bend in the river." There in the 13th century the local village erected a husky tower from which the garrison could survey the watercourse and hillsides below. From roadside where our bus from Prague delivered us, the tower - cylindrical, drawn to a flag-bearing point over a porticoed walkway apt for crossbow-bearing archers - dominated the horizon. But the tower's prominence receded immediately as we approached the village and the river drew into view.

Deep in the highlands of Praslin Island in the Seychelles lies the Vallée de Mai, origin and sole source of the legendary Coco de Mer nut (Lodoicea maldivica). At nearly 40 pounds it is the world's largest seed, and the subject of centuries of rumors, superstitions, and mysteries due solely to its evocative shape, that of a woman's midsection, front and back.