Solo travel is one of life’s greatest joys—but what if you get so sick you can’t think?

Solo travel is all kinds of liberating—after all, you get to call the shots on every aspect of your trip. But what happens when you get so ill that your decision-making abilities become practically non-existent?

It has been one of those glorious travel days. The type that makes you think, ‘Oh yes, I could do this forever. I will do this forever!’

I’m in Singapore at the end of a six-week trip around Indonesia. This morning, I took a local bus to Changi museum for a sobering history lesson, before hopping onto another bus to the pier where I boarded an old-style ‘bumboat’ ferry for the short ride to Singapore’s car-free island of Pulau Ubin.

With few facilities, Singapore’s last ‘kampung’ (village) is an antidote to the shiny city just a few miles away. And a day to myself on Pulau Ubin—cycling along quiet paths, spotting kingfishers, enjoying the views and finishing with a beer and fried rice by the water—has been joyous. It’s been a perfect day. And then it begins.

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How a volcanic eruption saved a tiny Indonesian island (from itself)

A pristine Indonesian island and a grumpy old volcano teaches travel writer Marco Ferrarese that sometimes, nature will look after herself—whether anyone realizes it at the time or not.

Bent over a plank of wood, Papa Opi expertly smudges its raw surface into a smooth, polished piece. A proud creator, his hands shuttle up and down, firmly gripping his tool’s handle. It’s only when he takes a break from the wood that he lifts his head up, and we our gazes finally meet. 

The calm in Papa Opi’s eyes belies a tragic tale of survival. The same calm emanates from his voice when Papa Opi starts telling me about the 1983 eruption of Gunung Colo. Once a mighty conic volcano, today’s Colo lays dormant on the opposite side of Una-Una island. But it’s never quiet: It’s cracked caldera still hisses white sulphurous gases, as if the volcano never wanted to stop talking. 

That slice of hell on earth is not far from where we are both standing—a 30-minute motorbike ride (there are no cars on Una-Una) across the island’s rutted jungle tracks and a dry river bed leads visitors straight to the mouth of that fire mountain.

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Baghdad 2019: A new era for a much-troubled destination?

It’s not top of the list when it comes to city breaks, but Leon McCarron was surprised—and heartened—when he visited Baghdad, a city that once upon a time was the center of the world.

“We’re going to one of the most interesting places here,” says my guide Mustafa as he drives through the streets in his silver Mini-inspired car. “You’ll see what this city is really like when we get there.”

We park up outside an old mosque with fading blue turquoise tiling and an ornate stone doorway, then walk along a broad boulevard of busy stores, people spilling out onto the road. Behind a man selling sugarcane from a wooden cart is an arched entrance to a smaller, narrower street that’s fully pedestrianized—or perhaps so busy that no vehicles dare enter.

“Welcome to Al-Mutanabbi Street!” said Mustafa. We’ve arrived in the middle of the weekly book market—Mustafa promises this will say “more about the city today than any news report.”

Even
with an open mind, this was not the scene I had expected on my first visit to
Baghdad.

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Difficult, dry, and spectacularly different: This is Egypt by bike

Not content with heading to Egypt in search of the famous sights, Lola Akinmade Åkerström opted for a once-in-a-lifetime two-wheeled excursion instead. And, despite the blistering heat, she lived to tell the tale.  

It’s 2010 and our motley crew of cyclists has assembled in Egypt.

There’s Charlie, a professional
cyclist in his 40s; Jayme, an adventure writer in her 30s; Alpha, a triathlete
in her 70s; our local fixer Tamir; a handful of other adventure travelers who’d
collectively logged thousands of kilometers mountain-biking around the world—and
then there’s me.

On paper, our plan of riding
between 120-150 kilometers over eight days didn’t seem all that strenuous. But,
upon closer inspection of the facts (mainly, that we’d be biking through open
desert while enduring 100+ degree Fahrenheit heat, with zero reprieve from the
beating sun), it’s all beginning to seem a little
more strenuous.

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Into Alaska: The road trip without roads

Riding the railroad into Alaska’s interior takes Jon Holmes on a journey deep into America’s last frontier, a land of earthquakes, bears, pepper spray, and new railway companions.

Alaska. Out here, you’ll find 700,000 square miles of beauty to contend with. It’s the perfect destination, on paper, for a road trip of epic proportions; the kind you spent long nights—and even longer school days—dreaming about as a teenager. But there’s one teeny, tiny issue: In some parts, there are no roads.

You might think traveling through a country without tarmac could be regarded as problematic and Juneau, the capital, does little to quash those doubts. It has no roads in or out: You fly, get on a boat or wait until winter when vast rivers freeze solid and become impromptu motorways for snowmobiles.

But if you really want to see Alaska, you do as I’m doing, and you take the Alaska Railroad—the mighty metal artery around which the country was built, as it snakes from the south coast up into an immense interior of lakes, forests and blue-white glaciers shuffling their lumpy, creaking masses down to an icy sea.

Roads? Where we’re going, we don’t need roads.

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House music in Pakistan? Meet the innovators cranking up the volume

In the ‘90s, Pakistan’s music and nightlife scene was flourishing. Then came terrorism, and an end to all that. But now, spurred on by a desire to bring Pakistan back to the world, artists like house duo Fake Shamans are turning the volume up again.  

Nice evening in the Punjab, Pakistan. The sun’s going down behind the
spires of Badshahi Mosque, settling into a hazy purple twilight, and on the
roof of an ice cream parlour in downtown Lahore, two guys are installing a
turntable and complicated mixing gear. Down on the streets, the city’s red-light
district, Heera Mandi, is starting to flicker.

Back in the 1500s, this was the home of the tawaif courtesans, high priestesses of music and entertainment, basically the geishas of the Mughal empire. It’s a good backdrop for a new kind of spectacle: The open-air Pakistani house rave.

The two guys fiddling with cables are electronica DJs Omair Anjum and Mohammed ‘Mosh’ Shah, better known by their stage name, Fake Shamans.

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Forget Amazon: Mumbai’s 125-year-old food delivery system wins the day

Modern technology is no match for Mumbai’s 125-year-old lunchtime delivery service. Lottie Gross meets the city’s much-lauded dabbawalas.

Indian road traffic makes way for no-one. No one, that is, except the dabbawalas of Mumbai—the world-famous, much-lauded lunchbox delivery men who take to the city’s trains to transport hot meals from home to office daily.

They’ve been studied by Harvard professors and visited by royals from all over the world: Two of them even attended the wedding of the Prince of Wales and Camilla Parker Bowles in 2005. And they’ve been fascinating travelers for decades too. I first read about the dabbawalas (dabba meaning lunchbox and wala being the person/the one with) a decade ago, in an edition of the Rough Guide to India. I could scarcely believe the system still existed, what with the modern era bringing an end to so many manual jobs across the world.

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