On The Far Side of the Earth

The first thing to know about central Mongolia in late spring is that it is cold enough that you stop minding what is on fire. This week's issue: six days in a ger camp three hours west of Ulaanbaatar, with a stove fed on dried horse dung, six adults to a yurt, and the kind of quiet you only get when the nearest town is forty kilometres away in every direction. The trip orbits four scenes. The...

There is no adequate preparation for the Registan at dawn. You know it from photographs — the three madrasas arranged around the square, the blue and gold tilework — but photographs cannot tell you about the scale, or the silence, or the way the mosaics change colour as the sun moves. This week's issue: four days in Samarkand at the moment of its reopening. Uzbekistan opened to general visa-fr...

The restaurant had no chairs and no tables. There was a long room with cushions running the length of three walls, and when I sat down the waiter laid a clear plastic sheet on the carpet in front of me, and on the sheet he laid the food. I had no idea what to do with my legs. This week's issue is a walk through Al-Balad — the historic district of Jeddah, the port that processed pilgrims to Mec...

Bhutan calls itself Druk Yul, the Land of the Thunder Dragon. It's the only country on earth that's carbon-negative, the only one that measures Gross National Happiness, and the only place I've ever been where my guide asked me, with absolute sincerity, whether Chinese and Japanese food are the same thing. Five days through the western valleys with Sonam — guide, driver, occasional phi...

There are no roads to Mahale. The Mahale Mountains National Park sits on the eastern shore of Lake Tanganyika — the second-deepest freshwater lake on earth, and the longest, narrow as a country. To get there, you take a boat. Six to eight hours from Kigoma, sometimes longer if the wind comes from the south, which it does without warning. Issue 001 is a week at Mahale, watching chimpanzees that hav...