501 Places

It is easy to see how entire armies perished on the road to Khiva. By land the city is reached after an 8 hour journey from Bukhara, along one of the most desolate and inhospitable highways in the world. Temperatures frequently top 45C in the shade, and even stepping out of our vehicle for a [...]

Many of us will have been there. We get a bout of food poisoning on a trip and don’t want to venture more than 100m from the bathroom (or hole in the ground, depending on your accommodation). We are working overtime at both ends, so to speak, and feel increasingly weak and dizzy. It’s all [...]

Whichever way you look at it, the superlatives that describe size come rolling off the tongue when you visit Sequoia. From the drive up from California’s central valley, passing from 2,000 to 7,000 feet in a matter of minutes, to the impressive vistas that open up when standing on Morro Rock, to the trees themselves, [...]

When his family had been deported from their homes in eastern Poland in 1940, my dad was only 9 years old. He saw his father for the last time in his home village of Niechniewicze (now in Belarus) when he had been taken into custody by Soviet forces and transported to Siberia. Only recently my [...]

This is a subject of much debate, and indeed an excellent piece this morning posted on Matador Abroad highlights some of the physical dangers, as well as the emotional toll, of being a racial outsider in certain societies. Having travelled as much as possible with my wife, who is Indian, for the 20 years, I [...]