Real journeys. Real lessons
Stories to spark your next trip
Journeys I've actually done
61 stories
Seychelles · Africa
La Digue by bike: the island with almost no cars
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
5 down, 2 to go: my Seven Summits so far
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 7 Summits, explained (and where I am)
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
Seven Summits or Nine Summits: which one really counts?
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
The glacier lagoon you can reach without a tour
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
One waterfall in Iceland you can walk behind
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
Everest, postponed - and why the dream isn't over
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
Training for Everest in a tent in my bedroom
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
Kuwait after dark: driving into the desert tent camps
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
Turning a Kuwait layover into a highlight
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
A barefoot beach dinner, the surprise that closed our Seychelles trip
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
Hunting down fruit bat curry in Seychelles
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 Island, where giant tortoises roam right past you
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
Four islands in seven days in Seychelles, without rushing
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
Sunrise on Anse Source d'Argent, the most photographed beach on earth
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
Is Seychelles worth the money?
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…
Bioko · Equatorial Guinea · Africa
Equatorial Guinea: the oil-rich island most travellers can't place
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
I swam Eric the Eel's Olympic time, in his Malabo pool
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
How many days do you need on the South Island?
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
Waiting for the blue penguins at dusk
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
Christchurch, the city that rebuilt itself
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
Doubtful Sound, where the captain cuts the engines
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 drive route that doesn't backtrack
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
Kayaking into Milford Sound
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
The Moeraki Boulders
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
Two Mount Cook hikes: the easy one and the hard one
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
The Nevis: bungy first, then the swing
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's adventure menu, ranked
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 Track in a single day
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
Roy's Peak: the view, and the queue for it
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
Talking my wife into a skydive over Mt Cook
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
The glowworm caves at Te Anau
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's church and the darkest sky in the country
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 wild west coast road past the glaciers
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…
Denali · 7 Summits
Denali: hauling 50kg to the highest point in North America
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
How to spend an Iceland layover on the Reykjanes peninsula
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? An honest breakdown
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
F-roads: the rental-car trap in Iceland
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?
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
The Iceland Ring Road mistakes (and myths) to know before you go
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
Simplon Pass to Saas Fee: no room at the inn in Gspon
Guideid 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…
Triftbrücke · Switzerland · Europe
Triftbrucke: Switzerland's scariest footbridge
GuideSome 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…
Aconcagua · 7 Summits
Aconcagua: 2 steps, 15 breaths near the top
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
The ship graveyard where the sea used to be
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
The Austrians who would not pay the border fee
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
Iran: the most hospitable country you're scared of
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
The Iran the news never showed me
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
We drove the Mongol Rally through Central 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
Overlanding the 'stans: what it's really like
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
My brother won a melon arm-wrestling in Khiva
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
We knocked on a yurt to buy the local drink
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
The shrine I feared, and the joy I found instead
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, at twenty kilometres an hour
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
Ashgabat: the white marble city with nobody in it
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
The Gates of Hell, at four in the morning
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
The Silk Road in a week: Samarkand to Khiva
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
Ironman, a year late
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
Trying hakarl, Iceland's fermented shark
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 Laugavegur trek we abandoned
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 night that never came: Iceland's midnight sun
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
What driving Iceland's Ring Road is actually like
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…
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