For decades, the 100-kilometre coastline south of Vlorë was off-limits to foreigners — a string of concrete bunker outposts guarding an ideological border with no one. Today it is open, mostly uncrowded, and astonishingly beautiful. White pebble beaches, turquoise water that looks like a screen-saver, and Ottoman-era hill towns you can wander through without hearing ... Read more
Read the field notes →Almaty is the southern capital that Kazakhstan never officially replaced but never really gave up. Skirts of the Tian Shan mountains rise directly behind the city, with the Medeu ice rink (1,691 m) and Shymbulak ski resort (3,200 m) accessible by cable car. The region around the city — apple orchards (Almaty means 'place of ... Read more
Read the field notes →The Azores are nine volcanic islands in the middle of the Atlantic, two hours by air from Lisbon. São Miguel is the largest and most visited; the others are quieter. Sete Cidades — a twin lake on São Miguel's western edge, one blue and one green — is the postcard image. Whale-watching is best off ... Read more
Read the field notes →Barichara sits on a ridge 1,334 m above sea level in Santander department, an area of green rolling hills, whitewashed Spanish-colonial towns, and a relatively dry, mild climate that suits older travellers and remote workers. The town itself is a heritage zone — cobblestones, white walls, terracotta roofs, a 17th-century cathedral, and views over the ... Read more
Read the field notes →Two days' walk into the Andes from the town of Cachora lies Choquequirao — a 15th-century Inca complex roughly the size of Machu Picchu but built on three plateaus of a mountain ridge. Excavated terraces, ritual baths, and llama-shaped stone carvings sprawl across a kilometre of mountainside; only a fraction of the site has been ... Read more
Read the field notes →Halfway between Norway and Iceland, the Faroe Islands are an 18-island archipelago of about 55,000 people. There are no proper beaches; the islands are basalt cliffs rising from the North Atlantic, with turf-roofed houses clinging to green valleys and millions of seabirds — puffins, gannets, kittiwakes — nesting on the ledges between May and August. ... Read more
Read the field notes →Guyana is South America's least visited country and one of its wildest. English-speaking, with a coast that feels Caribbean and an interior that is 80% pristine rainforest — including the Iwokrama Forest, a 3,710-square-kilometre reserve managed jointly by the government and indigenous communities. Kaieteur Falls is the world's largest single-drop waterfall by volume, set in ... Read more
Read the field notes →For a thousand years, Gyeongju was the capital of the Silla dynasty — the kingdom that unified the Korean peninsula. Today it's a museum town where you walk between grass-covered royal tombs in the morning and visit a 7th-century Buddhist temple complex in the afternoon, then finish at the Gyeongju National Museum to see a ... Read more
Read the field notes →An hour and a half by road from Phnom Penh, Kep used to be Cambodia's answer to the French Riviera — King Sisowath built a palace here, and in the 1960s it filled with vacation villas. The Khmer Rouge wiped most of that out, and for decades Kep was a ghost town. Today it's quietly ... Read more
Read the field notes →Langkawi is sold to package tourists as a duty-free beach break, but the real island lives up at the mangrove fringes and across the water on the smaller islands. The Kilim Karst Geopark is a UNESCO site where eagles hunt from limestone cliffs and fishermen still guide visitors through narrow tidal channels in long wooden ... Read more
Read the field notes →Matera is one of the oldest continuously inhabited cities in the world. People lived in caves carved into the tufa limestone of the Murgia plateau for at least 9,000 years; the Sassi (cave dwellings) were inhabited into the 1950s, when the Italian government evacuated the residents due to appalling living conditions. Today many Sassi have ... Read more
Read the field notes →Nosy Be ('big island' in Malagasy) is Madagascar's premier beach destination, a small volcanic island off the northwest coast with white sand beaches, warm turquoise water, and a string of smaller islands a short boat ride away. The interior of Madagascar is where the lemurs live; Nosy Be itself has limited wildlife, but day trips ... Read more
Read the field notes →Puerto Escondido is a small Pacific town in Oaxaca state split into distinct personalities: Zicatela, the long sandy beach famous for Mexican Pipeline surf; La Punta, the calmer southern stretch where digital nomads and yogis gather; and the Centro, where local Oaxacan families run shops and markets. Inland, the Oaxacan food tradition — mezcal, mole, ... Read more
Read the field notes →São Tomé is a small Portuguese-speaking island nation in the Gulf of Guinea, two hours' flight from Gabon. Volcanic, equatorial, with rainforests spilling down to black sand beaches, a working cocoa industry, and a handful of boutique eco-lodges that are some of the most idiosyncratic in Africa. Why go: This is ecotourism for the curious ... Read more
Read the field notes →The Simien Mountains in northern Ethiopia are a UNESCO World Heritage Site and the home of three mammals found nowhere else: the gelada baboon (a grass-eating primate that lives in troops of several hundred), the Walia ibex, and the Ethiopian wolf. Trekking routes range from a single-day hike to a 9-day traverse that includes Ras ... Read more
Read the field notes →Slovenia is small enough that you can drive from the Adriatic coast to alpine valleys in two hours, and the Soča valley is the most dramatic of those transitions. The Soča river is so impossibly emerald that it feels filtered — a colour it gets from carbonate deposits, not Instagram. The valley runs from the ... Read more
Read the field notes →The Solomon Islands are an archipelago of nearly 1,000 islands in the southwestern Pacific, east of Papua New Guinea. The country is part of the Coral Triangle — the most biodiverse marine ecosystem on Earth — and was a major theatre of the Second World War. Wrecks of American and Japanese warships, planes, and submarines ... Read more
Read the field notes →Tucked between 4,000-metre peaks and the Black Sea coast, Svaneti is the kind of place that resets your sense of scale. Medieval stone defensive towers still stand in dozens of villages, used today for storing grain and sheltering livestock. Most travellers pass through Mestia, the regional capital with a small museum and a newish cable ... Read more
Read the field notes →High in the mountains of South Sulawesi, the Torajan people have been burying their dead in cliff faces and erecting wooden effigies of the deceased for at least a thousand years. In a culture where death is not an ending but a process, funerals (Rambu Solo) can last up to twelve days and involve the ... Read more
Read the field notes →Vanuatu is an archipelago of 83 islands in the South Pacific, northeast of New Caledonia. It is the kind of place where you can climb an active volcano (Mount Yasur on Tanna), swim in a jungle blue hole that drops 30 metres, watch the original land-diving ritual (Naghol) on Pentecost Island, and finish the day ... Read more
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