Yesterday’s premier destination is next year’s overcrowded flop. The best meal from today may spoil tomorrow. Roads deteriorate, as do hotels, clothes, and electronics. Everything is temporary, even life itself. That’s why my favorite place on Earth is not one specific location. It is a state of mind. It is a feeling. My favorite place on…
The Banaue Rice Terraces in Ifugao, Philippines, preserve a lifestyle over 2000 years old. Here, millennia ago, the local people carved terraces into the Philippine Cordilleras mountains, effectively creating paddies to grow rice in land that was otherwise too steep for farming. The terraces not only created flatland garden beds, they also held back and…
Is there a destination that completely changed your life? That’s what the Dominican Republic did for me. But it’s only after I’d made my second trip to this island nation, that the authenticity of its culture and the pride of its people truly revealed themselves to me. I first visited the Dominican Republic (DR) in…
I roll over in bed and turn off the beeping alarm. 4:45. The room around me is pitch-black and I carefully reach out under my mosquito net to grab my head torch. With the torch lit on the lowest level, I sneak out from the pod, leaving my sleeping roommates behind. Once outside, I stop…
One day I decided I had enough; I had enough of not having anyone to support me or of having friends who didn’t understand the importance of opening up to the world and getting out of their comfort zone. So I decided to do it by myself, trying with all possible means to find opportunities…
Hope for the best, plan for the worst. If you’ve travelled before you’ll have heard this phrase but I didn’t really understand why it would be so important. What could possibly go wrong with a simple train journey between Nuwara Eliya and Ella, two towns in the south of Sri Lanka? Used to the frequency…
I have always kept scrapbooks of my holidays. The first one I created was when I was five years old, when I cycled with my family from Passau to Vienna. Of course, being only five this book is made up completely of pictures cut from tourist leaflets I collected on the journey. On the last…
I wake to the sound of rain. Palm fronds brush against my window pane as the sweet, dewey dawn breeze breathes new life into my still slumbering room. I slowly come to my senses: savoring first the scents of the jungle. Citronella, trod and moistened by precipitation; hibiscus, blooming into sugary perfume; earth, fertile and…
If the Pacific Ocean is the haystack, then the island of Niutao has to be a good contender for the needle. Measuring a single mile across, with a population of only a few hundred, Niutao is one of the nine islands which make up the Pacific nation of Tuvalu – the world’s fourth smallest country,…
It was a sunny morning of November 2003.Weather was chilly, despites Spring was pretty advanced. Nonetheless, the Navel of the World was founded at 3.399 meters high above the sea level. The ambient at San Pedro Train Station was vibrant, filled with the rumor of people walking, chatting and laughing. I was so excited about…