Real journeys. Real lessons

The Cambrian, Adelboden · Switzerland · Europe

Adelboden is a ski village in the Bernese Oberland, and on the slope above it stands the hotel we go back to: The Cambrian. Its outdoor pool is heated, it is o…

Blausee and Oeschinensee, Kander valley · Switzerland · Europe

Two lakes sit a few kilometres apart in the Kander valley of the Bernese Oberland, both on every visitor's list, both the same improbable blue-green, and they…

Einsiedeln to Ziegelbrücke, Alpine Panorama Trail · Switzerland · Europe

Switzerland has more marked trails than anyone can finish, so we keep a simple rule: if the forecast says the day will be good, we pick a hike and go. This tim…

Fürenwand via ferrata, Fürenalp above Engelberg · Switzerland · Europe

A via ferrata is a climbing route with the hard part bolted on: steel rungs, pegs, ladders and a cable you clip into with a harness, so that people who are not…

Oeschinensee, above Kandersteg · Switzerland · Europe

High above Kandersteg, in the Bernese Oberland, there is a lake that looks retouched in every photograph and is not. Oeschinensee sits at 1,578 metres in a bow…

Bunderchrinde, between Kandersteg and Adelboden · Switzerland · Europe

Several long-distance trails cross Switzerland, and the Via Alpina is the famous one: a chain of passes across the whole country, east to west. What we do, whe…

Matterhorn, Hörnli ridge · Switzerland · Europe

I had been to Zermatt several times, and the Matterhorn was always there, the lone pyramid over the village. Every visit I thought: it would be interesting to…

Rheinfall, Neuhausen am Rheinfall near Schaffhausen · Switzerland · Europe

Some of the best things in Switzerland take effort to reach: a summit, a glacier lake, a hut three hours up a path. The biggest waterfall in Europe is not one…

Säntis, Alpstein · Switzerland · Europe

Säntis is the mountain you see from everywhere in eastern Switzerland. At 2,502 metres it is the high point of the Alpstein, the limestone range above Appenzel…

Trient · Switzerland · Europe

We have a tradition, the three of us – my wife, a close friend and me – of going hiking around the first of August, the Swiss national holiday. The tradition h…

Bisse de Clavau, Sion · Switzerland · Europe

Most people come to the Valais for the peaks. The locals walk the bisses. A bisse is an irrigation channel, cut along the hillside to carry meltwater across th…

Zermatt ski area · Switzerland · Europe

Zermatt in the run-up to Christmas is normally one of the busiest places in the Alps. One December, we had it almost to ourselves, and we did not understand wh…

Hörnlihütte, Zermatt · Switzerland · Europe

Everyone who visits Zermatt sees the Matterhorn. Far fewer walk up to the foot of it and sleep there, and that is the part I would send anyone to do, climber o…

Lake Zürich, Mythenquai to Tiefenbrunnen · Switzerland · Europe

Once a summer, on a weekday afternoon, up to nine thousand people get into Lake Zürich at the Mythenquai lido and swim straight across it. It is called the Sta…

Cabane des Becs de Bosson · Switzerland · Europe

Dinner at 2,985 metres From Grimentz the trail does one thing: up. Past the top lift station the crowds stop, and they stay stopped. The path keeps climbing to…

Saas-Fee to Evolène · Switzerland · Europe

Six passes, four days We started in glacier country and finished in French. Four days on foot from Saas-Fee to Evolène, six stages of the Alpine Passes Trail l…

Meidpass · Switzerland · Europe

The day the language changes Everyone spoke German at breakfast. By lunch, everyone spoke French. The switch happens on the Meidpass at 2,789 metres, and it is…

Augstbordpass · Switzerland · Europe

The ledge and the high pass An hour out of Saas-Fee the path stops being a path. It narrows to a ledge with a wire rope bolted into the rock, and the Weissmies…

Seychelles · Africa

La Digue is the third of the main Seychelles islands, and the first thing you notice when you get off the ferry is what is missing: cars. There are barely any.…

7 Summits

The Seven Summits are the highest mountain on each continent. I have five. Here is where I stand. Done Aconcagua, 6,961 m, South America. I topped out twenty m…

7 Summits

The Seven Summits are the highest mountain on each of the seven continents. Climbing all of them is one of mountaineering's classic challenges. Here is the ful…

7 Summits

Climb the highest mountain on each continent and you have done the Seven Summits. Simple, until you ask which peaks count, because two continents are disputed.…

Jokulsarlon · Iceland · Europe

On Iceland's south coast there is a lagoon full of icebergs, and the strangest thing about it is how easy it is to reach. No tour, no guide, no boat required:…

Seljalandsfoss · Iceland · Europe

Iceland has so many waterfalls that you stop counting by day two. But one stands out, not because it is the biggest, but because of what you can do with it. At…

7 Summits

I have climbed five of the seven summits. Aconcagua, Denali, Kilimanjaro, Elbrus, Kosciuszko. Everest was meant to be the sixth, and the one I have wanted long…

7 Summits

To climb Everest you need a body that works where the air holds about a third of the oxygen it does at sea level. You cannot build that in a gym. So for the wi…

Kuwait Bay · Kuwait · Asia

By four in the afternoon I had finished every sight on my Kuwait City list, with a flight out only late that night. So I did what the map suggested: crossed th…

Kuwait City · Kuwait · Asia

Kuwait was a deliberate layover: I landed in the morning with a flight out late at night, and one day proved exactly enough. It nearly ended at the airport, th…

Mahé · Seychelles · Africa

For most of the trip my wife kept mentioning the same thing. She wanted, just once, to have dinner barefoot on the beach. Not in a restaurant near the beach. O…

La Digue · Seychelles · Africa

Fruit bat curry is a real Seychellois dish, an old Creole one, and somewhere on the trip it became the thing I most wanted to eat. Not because it sounded delic…

Curieuse Island · Seychelles · Africa

Curieuse is a small island off the coast of Praslin, a national park you can only reach by boat, and it is famous for one thing: giant tortoises. Not in a pen,…

Seychelles · Africa

Seven days, four islands. On paper it sounds like the kind of trip where you spend more time packing and queuing for ferries than actually being anywhere. It w…

La Digue · Seychelles · Africa

Anse Source d'Argent, on the little island of La Digue, is the beach you have already seen a hundred times without knowing its name: pink granite boulders the…

Seychelles · Africa

Seychelles has a reputation for being eye-wateringly expensive, and some of it is earned. But the cost is not quite where you expect it, and there is a way to…

Morcote, Lake Lugano, Ticino · Switzerland · Europe

Ask people to picture the prettiest village in Switzerland and they describe a wooden chalet with the Matterhorn behind it. The village that actually won a nat…

Alp Flix to Ausserferrera · Switzerland · Europe

Alp Flix is where this stretch of the Alpine Passes Trail lets you stop for the night. We did not stop. We laid out a Swiss picnic on the grass, bread, cheese,…

Ausserferrera · Switzerland · Europe

Three days of rain on the Alpine Passes Trail teaches you things no packing list mentions. Wet shorts plus long distances equals chafing, and by the time we li…

Splügen · Switzerland · Europe

After three big days on the Alpine Passes Trail, the walk from Ausserferrera to Splügen felt almost gentle: the shortest stage of our traverse, one green shoul…

Bioko · Equatorial Guinea · Africa

Equatorial Guinea is the African country almost nobody can place on a map, and the only one where Spanish is the working language. Landing on Bioko, its volcan…

Malabo · Equatorial Guinea · Africa

Every Olympics has one. In Sydney in 2000 it was Eric Moussambani of Equatorial Guinea, Eric the Eel, who had learned to swim only months before and found hims…

New Zealand · Oceania

We gave the South Island ten days and drove around 2500km, and the honest answer to how long you need is: more than you think, but ten is a sweet spot. Here is…

Otago Coast · New Zealand · Oceania

Some of the best wildlife moments do not photograph well, and this is one of them. On the Otago coast, as the last light finally drained away, we stood on a pl…

Christchurch · New Zealand · Oceania

We started and ended the trip in Christchurch, and it is not the city it was. On 22 February 2011 a magnitude 6.3 earthquake struck directly beneath it, killin…

Doubtful Sound · New Zealand · Oceania

Everyone goes to Milford Sound. Almost nobody goes to its bigger, wilder neighbour. Doubtful Sound is around three times longer and ten times larger than Milfo…

South Island · New Zealand · Oceania

The South Island looks compact on a map, and then you start planning and realise the good stuff is scattered across the whole thing: glaciers on the west coast…

Milford Sound · New Zealand · Oceania

Milford Sound is the picture that sells New Zealand: a fiord cut deep into the southwest corner of the South Island, sheer black cliffs rising straight out of…

Moeraki Boulders · New Zealand · Oceania

Scattered along a quiet beach on the Otago coast are dozens of almost perfectly round stone spheres, some of them taller than a person, half-buried in the sand…

Aoraki/Mount Cook · New Zealand · Oceania

At Aoraki/Mt Cook, New Zealand's highest mountain, we did two very different hikes in one day, and between them they cover almost everyone who comes here. One…

Nevis Canyon · New Zealand · Oceania

When I booked the Nevis there was a note on the page: can't decide between the bungy and the swing? Do both. So I did both, one morning, back to back, in a can…

Queenstown · New Zealand · Oceania

Queenstown is the adventure capital of New Zealand and the menu is genuinely overwhelming: bungy, swings, jet boats, luge, paragliding. You could spend a week…

Routeburn Track · New Zealand · Oceania

The Routeburn is one of New Zealand's Great Walks, a 32-kilometre alpine crossing most people take two or three days to complete, sleeping in huts along the wa…

Wanaka · New Zealand · Oceania

You have seen the photo even if you do not know the name: a lone figure on a narrow ridge high above Lake Wanaka, mountains stacked behind, the whole South Isl…

Lake Pukaki · New Zealand · Oceania

I had been trying to talk my wife into a skydive for years, and the answer was always no. What finally changed her mind was not me. It was a police officer we…

Te Anau · New Zealand · Oceania

After a full day on the water we had one more thing booked, and it turned out to be one of the strangest, loveliest hours of the trip. From the lakefront at Te…

Lake Tekapo · New Zealand · Oceania

Lake Tekapo sits in the middle of the largest dark sky reserve in the southern hemisphere, a whole region of the Mackenzie Basin that has fought to keep its ni…

West Coast, South Island · New Zealand · Oceania

The west coast of the South Island is the wild side: a thin strip of road pinned between the Tasman Sea and the Southern Alps, where rainforest runs almost to…

Jenatschhütte · Switzerland · Europe

St. Moritz is where the Alps go to be seen. Two valleys behind it stands a stone hut with no road, no showers and no phone signal, and the walk to it is the be…

St. Moritz to Splügen · Switzerland · Europe

Every year I plan one hike that is deliberately a bit too much, and I invite everyone I know. The numbers do the filtering: most people read the kilometres and…

Apia, Upolu · Samoa · Oceania

Samoa is one of the first countries on earth to reach the New Year. We loved the idea of ringing it in while friends back home were still sitting down to lunch…

Upolu · Samoa · Oceania

Driving in Samoa needs a local permit, a temporary licence you are meant to pick up once you land; your home licence on its own does not count. So we went to g…

Mulifanua & Salelologa · Samoa · Oceania

Two pieces of Samoa logistics are worth sorting before they sort you. Neither is hard once you know it is coming. First, driving. A foreign licence on its own…

Savaia, Upolu · Samoa · Oceania

Back on Upolu after a day trip across the water to Savai'i, I had a couple of hours to spare and spent them on the strangest, best snorkel of the trip. Along t…

Upolu & Savai'i · Samoa · Oceania

Most people heading to the South Pacific think Fiji or Tahiti. Samoa barely registers, and that is exactly its appeal. We arrived after a stop in Tuvalu, near…

Upolu · Samoa · Oceania

We came to Samoa expecting a calm island and not much action, and spent a day chasing waterfalls we could not believe were empty. Upolu, the main island, is st…

Daecheon Beach, Boryeong, South Korea · South Korea · Asia

The Boryeong Mud Festival had been on my list for years, one of those events that turns up on every list of the world's most ridiculous. I was living in Hong K…

Imjingak and the DMZ, Paju, South Korea · South Korea · Asia

Of all the day trips out of Seoul, the one I wanted was the DMZ, the strip of no-man's-land that has divided the peninsula since the war, and the closest an or…

Gyeongbokgung and Bukchon, Seoul, South Korea · South Korea · Asia

I came back from the DMZ in the middle of a Saturday afternoon and walked into Gwanghwamun Square, which after a day of old lanes and teahouses felt like arriv…

Seoul, South Korea · South Korea · Asia

Do not go to South Korea in summer. I mean it kindly. I went to Seoul at the end of July, on a long weekend from Hong Kong, a city that is no stranger to heat…

Myeongdong, Seoul, South Korea · South Korea · Asia

I will be honest: the first time I sat down to Korean barbecue in Seoul I had no idea what I was doing. I had spent the afternoon in a hanbok at Gyeongbokgung…

Bukchon Hanok Village, Seoul, South Korea · South Korea · Asia

By late afternoon on my first full day in Seoul I had walked the old city end to end and was standing in Bukchon, the hillside neighbourhood of tiled-roof hano…

Seoul, South Korea · South Korea · Asia

Seoul rewards a weekend better than almost any big city I know, because the good things sit close together and the metro does the rest. I had a long weekend fr…

Gotthard Pass and the Schöllenen Gorge, Uri / Ticino · Switzerland · Europe

Between Zürich and the Italian-speaking south of Switzerland sits the Gotthard, and there are two ways across it. Most people take the road tunnel. On a holida…

Lugano, Ticino · Switzerland · Europe

Every year family comes to visit us in Switzerland, and every year we take them somewhere they have not been. This time it was the Italian part. We enjoyed a m…

Monte San Salvatore, Lugano, Ticino · Switzerland · Europe

Lugano has two mountains standing over it, one on each side of the bay. Monte Brè, to the east, is the gentle one we climb for sunsets. Monte San Salvatore, to…

Conakry to Coyah, Guinea · Guinea · Africa

People will tell you to go to Madina, the big market in Conakry, and they are not wrong so much as thinking too small. Guinea's capital does not contain a mark…

Conakry, Guinea · Guinea · Africa

We had spent the day getting two Subarus out of a stranger's yard and into a mechanic's, and the evening in a restaurant watching Guinea play Gambia – a countr…

Guinea, Guinea-Bissau and Equatorial Guinea · Guinea · Africa

Three countries in Africa are called Guinea, and hardly anyone can tell you which is which. I have now been to all three, and I can report that the confusion i…

Fiji · Oceania

Kava is the drink at the centre of Fijian life, a muddy, earthy brew made from a pounded root, and sooner or later on a trip to Fiji you will be invited to sha…

Yasawas & Denarau · Fiji · Oceania

Planning a Fiji honeymoon, you face one real decision early: do you stay on the mainland, near the airport, or out on the small islands? We did both, and the d…

Sawa-i-lau · Fiji · Oceania

Up in the northern Yasawas, on a small limestone island called Sawa-i-lau, there is a sea cave you can swim into. It is one of the set-piece excursions in this…

Yasawa Islands · Fiji · Oceania

Most people do the South Pacific as a package: one resort, transfers included, decisions made for them. We did the opposite, and stitched a month across four c…

Taveuni · Fiji · Oceania

Fiji is called the soft coral capital of the world, and the single most famous dive in the country is a vertical wall off the island of Taveuni called the Grea…

Yasawa Islands · Fiji · Oceania

One morning on a Yasawa island in Fiji, I left my wife with her book and went diving with sharks. I had wanted to surprise her with it, the way I usually do, b…

Funafuti · Tuvalu · Oceania

Tuvalu's character is not in big sights, it has almost none, but in a handful of small customs that tell you exactly where you are. Take devotion time. For abo…

Funafuti · Tuvalu · Oceania

Tuvalu rewards the effort to get there, but it takes planning, because almost nothing about a visit works the way it does elsewhere. Start with the flights. Th…

Funafuti lagoon · Tuvalu · Oceania

Tuvalu: one of the least-visited countries on earth Tuvalu is one of the least-visited countries on earth, a thread of low coral atolls in the central Pacific…

Koundara to Conakry, Guinea · Guinea · Africa

There are two roads from Koundara down to the capital, and they both take twenty-one hours. That is not a figure of speech. We reached Koundara at one in the m…

The Koundara–Mali road, Guinea · Guinea · Africa

The Africa Rally is the stupid, wonderful thing a few of us do most years: buy old cars too cheap to cry over and drive them south from Europe through West Afr…

Bissau to the Kandika border, Guinea-Bissau · Guinea-Bissau · Africa

We were up hours before sunrise and driving out of the capital in the dark, because the day had a whole country in it. Bissau to the eastern border is not a lo…

Kandika border, Guinea-Bissau to Guinea · Guinea · Africa

The border between Guinea-Bissau and Guinea is a rope. Not a barrier, not a gate, not a booth with a window. A rope, strung across a red dirt road, at a point…

Koundara, Guinea · Guinea · Africa

We crossed into Guinea in the afternoon and the paperwork ate the rest of the day, so it was properly dark by the time twelve of us started looking for somewhe…

Bissau Velho, Bissau · Guinea-Bissau · Africa

Guinea-Bissau has one tourist attraction, and when we walked into it there was almost nobody there. Bissau Velho is what Portugal left behind, and it is going…

The border road to Bissau, Guinea-Bissau · Guinea-Bissau · Africa

The road from the Senegal border to Bissau is where you learn the rules, and the rules are mostly about equipment. We were stopped repeatedly on that stretch.…

Casamance (Ziguinchor) · Senegal · Africa

Casamance is the strip of Senegal south of Gambia, and it is the one part of the country the government advisories single out – decades of low-level separatist…

Mandina creeks, Lamin · Gambia · Africa

Twelve days into a rally that started in Gibraltar, we finally stopped driving. The rest day was always going to be spent on the water – The Gambia exists beca…

Banjul · Gambia · Africa

Capitals announce themselves. You feel the traffic thicken, the buildings climb, the noise arrive. Banjul does the opposite. We drove off the Barra ferry strai…

Barra–Banjul ferry, Gambia River · Gambia · Africa

The Gambia is a river with a country wrapped around it, and arriving from northern Senegal you meet the river before you meet the country: the ferry from Barra…

Bijilo Forest Park · Gambia · Africa

Bijilo Forest Park is a band of coastal woodland pressed against The Gambia's main resort mile – hotel pools on one side, wild monkey troops on the other. We w…

Tanji · Gambia · Africa

Tanji does not have a fish market the way a town has a market hall. Tanji has a beach, and at the end of the day the beach becomes the market – the whole of it…

Kachikally, Bakau · Gambia · Africa

Kachikally is a crocodile pool in Bakau, a few streets behind The Gambia's resort coast, and it is a shrine – people have come here for generations to pray, an…

Dakar · Senegal · Africa

Dakar was the first real city of the trip since Morocco – after a week of desert roads and small towns, suddenly traffic, noise, and things to queue for. We di…

Lac Rose (Lake Retba), north of Dakar · Senegal · Africa

Lac Rose sat on our route plan as one of the highlights of Senegal: the pink lake from the postcards, just north of Dakar, water the colour of strawberry milk.…

Diama border crossing, Senegal River · Senegal · Africa

There are two ways to drive from Mauritania into Senegal. Rosso, the main crossing, has a reputation bad enough that every overlander forum tells you to avoid…

Saint-Louis · Senegal · Africa

We rolled into Saint-Louis at the end of a long day: four hours arguing our way across the border at Diama, and before that, a week of Mauritania – desert road…

Dakhla · Western Sahara · Africa

Dakhla sits at the end of a long spit of land in the far south of Western Sahara, a full day's drive from anything else. The approach sets you up to expect a g…

Dakhla · Western Sahara · Africa

Outside Dakhla, where the desert meets the lagoon, there is a white dune that rises clean out of the water, and we drove out to it one evening with a snowboard…

Fouta Djallon, Guinea · Guinea · Africa

Most years a few of us drive cheap old cars across West Africa on what we call the Africa Rally, through villages that almost never see outsiders. Early on, we…

Nouakchott · Mauritania · Africa

“The best country in the world,” said the first local who spoke English. For about half a day, he was right. We crossed into Mauritania at Nouadhibou and drove…

The desert outside Nouakchott · Mauritania · Africa

While planning Mauritania I found an old map on the internet: checkpoint coordinates from some long-past rally that cut across a stretch of open desert just ou…

Zouérat–Choum line · Mauritania · Africa

In the Mauritanian desert runs one of the world's great train rides, and it was never meant for passengers. The iron-ore train is a freight line, up to three k…

Morocco–Mauritania border · Mauritania · Africa

Between the last Moroccan post in Western Sahara and the first Mauritanian one there is a strip of desert that belongs to nobody. Part asphalt, part gravel, no…

Port de Pêche, Nouakchott · Mauritania · Africa

I had heard stories about Nouakchott's fish market long before we got anywhere near Mauritania, and it sat on my list the whole way down. It is the capital's f…

Ouadane · Mauritania · Africa

We had learned by then that our Subarus would not survive the drive to the Eye of the Sahara - too much sand, too much rock. Finding a replacement was its own…

Richat Structure · Mauritania · Africa

The Eye of the Sahara, the Richat Structure on a map, is one of those places that looks unreal from above and almost unknown on the ground. It is a set of conc…

Terjit · Mauritania · Africa

By the time we turned off for Terjit it was past seven in the evening and I was doing fuel sums in my head - every station on the way out of Nouakchott had giv…

Western Sahara coast · Western Sahara · Africa

On the Africa Rally, a few of us drive cheap old cars from Europe through West Africa until they fall apart. Two days into the 2023 run, on the Western Sahara…

Western Sahara · Africa

Look at a map of West Africa and there is a stretch most itineraries pretend is not there: the long strip of Western Sahara between southern Morocco and the Ma…

Denali · 7 Summits

Denali is the highest mountain in North America, 6,194 metres, and the cold one. A small plane drops you on a glacier and from there you are on your own. No po…

Reykjanes Peninsula · Iceland · Europe

Plenty of people pass through Iceland on a layover and never leave the airport. On my way to climb Denali, with flights routing through Reykjavik, I did the op…

Iceland · Europe

Is Iceland expensive? Yes, genuinely, and it is worth knowing why before you go, so the prices do not blindside you. When I first went as a student, we travell…

Iceland Ring Road · Iceland · Europe

We rented a car in Iceland, drove the full loop around the island, and only learned afterwards that the country's roads come in two legal categories. Nobody at…

Iceland · Europe

How many days do you need in Iceland? For the full Ring Road around the island, the honest answer is at least seven, and I say that as someone who tried to do…

Iceland · Europe

Iceland's Ring Road is hard to get badly wrong, but there are a few mistakes that quietly cost you the best of it, and I made some of them. Here is what I woul…

Gspon · Switzerland · Europe

id 2022_simplon-pass-saas-fee slug simplon-pass-saas-fee title Simplon Pass to Saas Fee: no room at the inn in Gspon type inspire region Switzerland & the Alps…

The eastern Canary Islands · Canary Islands · Europe

I dismissed the Canary Islands for years as nothing special, just some islands, and everyone I knew kept flying to the same one, which did not help. When we fi…

The Canary Islands' south coasts · Canary Islands · Europe

Here is the cost equation nobody runs properly. Winter sun usually means the Caribbean or the Indian Ocean: long-haul flights, jet lag, serious money before yo…

Tenerife & Gran Canaria · Canary Islands · Europe

I drove both islands on the same trip, so this is a same-eyes comparison, not two vacations remembered differently. Tenerife is the big-ticket island. Teide is…

Teide National Park, Tenerife · Canary Islands · Europe

Teide is Spain's highest peak, and it does not sit in the Pyrenees, it rises out of an island in the Atlantic. The drive up is half the event: you climb throug…

Playa de Cofete, Fuerteventura · Canary Islands · Europe

Fuerteventura is the Canary island people buy for its beaches, and the strange truth is that its best one is the hardest to reach. I first saw Playa de Cofete…

Lanzarote · Canary Islands · Europe

All my friends went to Tenerife. Nobody told me about Lanzarote, and I cannot decide if I am grateful or offended, because Lanzarote is the closest Europe gets…

Barranco de las Vacas, Gran Canaria · Canary Islands · Europe

There is a slot canyon on Gran Canaria. Not a big one: roughly fifty metres of narrow, wave-curved rock in terracotta and pink, but the shapes could pass for a…

Barranco de Guayadeque, Gran Canaria · Canary Islands · Europe

There is a ravine on Gran Canaria where the island still lives in caves, and most visitors drive past its mouth without knowing. Barranco de Guayadeque cuts de…

Roque Nublo, Gran Canaria · Canary Islands · Europe

Gran Canaria's interior is crowned by a stone giant: Roque Nublo, a monolith standing on a high plateau at the very heart of the island, visible from half the…

All'Acqua, Val Bedretto, Ticino · Switzerland · Europe

We have been hiking one of Switzerland's long-distance trails in pieces: a weekend here, a weekend there, squeezing two stages into a day whenever the legs all…

Grimentz, Val d'Anniviers, Valais · Switzerland · Europe

We did not move to the mountains for months. A week was enough. My wife had holiday days left and I did not, so we made a deal: she would take the week off, I…

7132 Therme Vals, Vals, Graubünden · Switzerland · Europe

Some Swiss hotels are destinations in their own right, and the one we dreamed about was 7132, in the village of Vals, up a side valley in Graubünden. So when f…

A coffee plantation in the Central Valley · Costa Rica · North America

I spent a lot of Costa Rica feeling mildly fleeced. The coffee tour is the one I would pay for again without thinking about it. Part of that is the setting. Co…

Manuel Antonio, Pacific coast · Costa Rica · North America

Everywhere else in Costa Rica I had to work to see animals. At Manuel Antonio they turned up at the pool. That is not a figure of speech. Monkeys came through…

Tabacón and Arenal, La Fortuna · Costa Rica · North America

Most hot springs are a pool with a gate on it. Tabacón is a river. Water comes off Arenal already hot, and instead of being piped into a complex it is allowed…

Monteverde cloud forest · Costa Rica · North America

Monteverde is sold as one of the great experiences in Costa Rica. I walked the hanging bridges expecting to be moved, and what I got was a nice walk in a wet f…

The Pacuare river · Costa Rica · North America

The Pacuare turns up on every list of the world's best rafting rivers. I went, and it was a float. That is the honest version and I am aware it is not the popu…

Arenal and the Pacific coast · Costa Rica · North America

Costa Rica is expensive, and you should know that going in. Not expensive by the standards of its poorer Central American neighbours, but expensive in absolute…

The Bogarín trail, La Fortuna · Costa Rica · North America

A sloth is the one animal people fly to Costa Rica hoping to see and then walk straight past. They barely move, they sit high in the canopy, and their fur grow…

Punta Caracol, Bocas del Toro · Panama · North America

Bocas del Toro is the part of Panama that finally looks like the brochure. After the heat and grey of the Pacific side, you cross to a Caribbean archipelago of…

Puerto Viejo and Manuel Antonio · Costa Rica · North America

Costa Rica makes you choose. The Pacific and the Caribbean sit a few hours apart with a spine of volcanoes and cloud forest in between, and in a single week yo…

Irazú volcano, above Cartago · Costa Rica · North America

Costa Rica has a volcano you do not have to climb. You drive up Irazú, park near the top, walk a few minutes, and look down into the crater. What is in it is a…

Triftbrücke · Switzerland · Europe

Some hikes start with a plan so simple it sounds like a joke: park the car and walk uphill until you reach one of the most dramatic bridges in the Alps. The Tr…

Jacó, Pacific coast · Costa Rica · North America

I have spent New Year in places that sold tickets for it. This one had fires on a beach. Jacó is the closest surf town to the capital and it is not anybody's i…

The Peñas Blancas crossing, Nicaragua to Costa Rica · Nicaragua · North America

Nicaragua and Costa Rica share a border, a climate, and a coastline, and almost nothing else. I did them back to back on the same trip, crossing overland from…

Loma de Tiscapa and the lakefront, Managua · Nicaragua · North America

Managua was the one part of Nicaragua I did not warm to, and I would rather be useful about that than just negative, because almost everyone who comes to the c…

Cerro Negro, near León · Nicaragua · North America

Cerro Negro is one of the youngest volcanoes on earth, born in 1850, last erupted around twenty years before I got there, and still very much active. You climb…

Las Isletas, Lake Nicaragua, Granada · Nicaragua · North America

Granada is the prettiest city in Nicaragua and the easiest to fall for. A colonial grid of colourful low houses, churches, and courtyards, it runs on a warm, s…

Basilica of the Assumption, León · Nicaragua · North America

Leon is the colonial city most travellers skip on the way to somewhere else, and the reason to stop is on its roof. The cathedral that anchors the city, the la…

Santiago crater, Masaya Volcano · Nicaragua · North America

Most volcanoes make you work for the view. Masaya let us drive to the edge and look straight down. It is one of very few places on earth where you park a short…

Casco Viejo, Panama City · Panama · North America

Casco Viejo is where Panama City keeps its history, and walking it you feel the whole strange story of the place in one square kilometre. This is the old town:…

Coiba National Park, off Santa Catalina · Panama · North America

Coiba is sold as one of the Pacific's great dive sites: a former prison island turned national park, a biodiversity hotspot, the works. I went out with high ex…

Miraflores Locks, Panama Canal · Panama · North America

The Panama Canal is the first thing anyone mentions about Panama, and it is worth knowing what visiting it actually involves before you build a day around it.…

Panama City and Bocas del Toro · Panama · North America

Is Panama worth visiting? Honestly, it is the country that has sat lowest on my list of everywhere I have been. A lot of it underwhelmed me: the long, hot driv…

Verzasca Dam (Contra Dam), Ticino · Switzerland · Europe

When I moved to Switzerland I learned that it had one of the highest bungee jumps in the world, and from that day it was only a question of when. The where was…

Aconcagua · 7 Summits

Aconcagua is the highest mountain in South America, 6,961 metres, and the highest anywhere outside the Himalaya. It was my fourth of the seven summits, and the…

Moynaq · Uzbekistan · Asia

At Moynaq, in the far north of Uzbekistan, fishing boats sit rusting on dry sand. Not beached, not abandoned near the shore. Stranded in a desert, with no wate…

Tajikistan · Asia

We reached the border late at night, deliberately, on the theory that there would be fewer people. There were fewer people. There was, however, a group of Aust…

Iran · Asia

I arrived in Iran nervous. Years of headlines had done their work, and I expected suspicion, hostility, maybe worse. What I got, within an hour, was strangers…

Iran · Asia

Everything I thought I knew about Iran, I had learned from the news, and the news only ever shows you one Iran. There is another one, the one people actually l…

Kazakhstan · Asia

I wanted to see Iran and the Stans, and I found an adventure race that went exactly there. Then I looked at the dates. I had a full-time job, and disappearing…

Kazakhstan · Asia

Everyone warned us before we left. You will be robbed, they said. You will be shaken down at every checkpoint. What actually happened across the Stans was the…

Khiva · Uzbekistan · Asia

We rolled into Khiva, the walled desert town in western Uzbekistan, filthy and exhausted after days of driving, and found the place in the middle of a local fe…

Kyrgyz steppe · Kyrgyzstan · Asia

After the deserts, Kyrgyzstan arrived green and lush, with horses and cows on the plains and yurts scattered across them. Then we saw one close to the road wit…

Mashhad · Iran · Asia

There was one place on the whole trip that I was quietly dreading. In the country's holiest city stands one of the largest and most sacred shrines in the Islam…

Pamir Highway · Tajikistan · Asia

The Pamir Highway is one of the highest roads in the world and one of the great drives on earth, and the first thing it teaches you is patience. It took us 29…

Ashgabat · Turkmenistan · Asia

You come down out of the mountains and the city appears below you, white and gleaming, and it does not look real. Ashgabat is built almost entirely from white…

Darvaza · Turkmenistan · Asia

In the middle of the Karakum desert, a wide crater in the ground has been on fire for decades. They call it the Gates of Hell, and driving to it is most of the…

Samarkand to Khiva · Uzbekistan · Asia

Uzbekistan hands you the Silk Road in a straight line, and a week is enough to drive it properly. Three great desert cities, each entirely distinct, plus a det…

Zurich · Ironman

I had signed up for this a year earlier, in 2015, talked a couple of people into it, and then work stranded me in Abu Dhabi and I missed the start. So Ironman…

Reykjavik · Iceland · Europe

There is one thing you are more or less obliged to try in Iceland, and almost nobody enjoys it: hakarl, fermented shark. It is exactly what it sounds like. Gre…

Thorsmork · Iceland · Europe

The plan was to walk the Laugavegur, Iceland's most famous trek, over a few days. We did not finish it, but we got more than halfway. And it remains one of my…

Iceland · Europe

The thing no photograph prepared me for in Iceland was the light, or rather, the refusal of the dark. I went at the end of June, and for the whole trip the sun…

Ring Road · Iceland · Europe

Driving Iceland's Ring Road is the rare trip that lives up to every photograph, and then quietly outdoes them. Route 1 is a single road that loops the entire i…