Unpacked by Afar

Indigenous tourism is growing, but it’s not always easy to tell which tours are owned and led by the communities they showcase. In this episode, Afar senior editor Jen Choi sits down with Kate Nelson, the Tlingit writer behind “Traveling Turtle Island: 14 Epic Indigenous-Led Experiences Across North America,” from Afar’s Fall 2026 Epic Trips issue. The package includes trekking to a Maya city in C...

Welcome to the fourth and final episode of a four-part Unpacked series on Dubai travel, this time focused on Dubai culture. People love to say the city is all shopping malls and construction cranes, so guest host Nicola Chilton sets out to prove that wrong with two guests who are keeping its heritage alive in very different ways. First, Nicola talks with Dr. Azra Khamissa, a Canadian-South Af...

Welcome to episode three of a four-part Unpacked series on Dubai travel, this time focused on Dubai food: how a city long known for celebrity chefs and global concepts has grown a homegrown food scene with a flavor all its own. Guest host Nicola Chilton first sits down with Kathy Johnston, Chief Chocolate Officer of Mirzam, the Dubai-born, bean-to-bar chocolate company celebrating its 10th birthda...

In a new ongoing series, Afar is asking a deceptively simple question: What does a UNESCO World Heritage designation actually do? This episode starts in North Queensland, Australia, home to two UNESCO sites that sit side by side: the Great Barrier Reef and the Wet Tropics, which includes the Daintree Rainforest. First, host Aislyn Greene talks with Dr. Eric Fisher, a marine biologist and Biology M...

Welcome to episode two of a four-part Unpacked series on Dubai travel, this time focused on Dubai hospitality: how a city with more than 800 hotels and 150,000 rooms built a world-class hotel scene on one of the Arabian Peninsula’s oldest traditions: the welcome. Guest host Nicola Chilton starts in the desert with Philippe Zuber, CEO of Kerzner International, who oversees eight Dubai hotels, inclu...

Welcome to episode one of a four-part Unpacked series on Dubai travel: the history, the ambition, and the glamorous, multicultural city it's become today. In this episode, host Aislyn Greene and the Dubai-based travel writer Nicola Chilton set the stage: They walk through how a fishing village and pearling outpost became one of the fastest-changing cities on Earth—and what it's actually like on th...

Afar contributing writer Emma John road-trips the Great Victorian Bathing Trail, uncovering the best spa towns in Victoria, Australia—from thermal springs on the coast to century-old bathhouses inland. A traditional spa vacation was never Emma John's thing—she needs to be on the move to relax. So when she set out to explore Victoria Australia spas along the newly opened Great Victorian Bathing Tra...

Travel journalist Kathryn Romeyn shares how to find Thailand off the beaten path—from Nan Province night markets to Khao Sok's rainforest—plus the best time to visit Thailand if you want fewer crowds and lower prices. This week on Unpacked, host Aislyn Greene explores Thailand off the beaten path with journalist Kathryn Romeyn, who's covered Southeast Asia since 2014 and calls Bali, Indonesia home...

The spices in your cabinet are probably five to seven years old—and that's not an accident. On this episode of Unpacked, host Aislyn Greene sits down with Sana Javeri Kadri, founder of Diaspora Spice Co., who spent nine years dismantling a 500-year-old system and replacing it with something radically different: direct relationships with regenerative spice farming partners across India and Sri Lank...

An African safari doesn't have to mean a traffic jam. On this episode of Unpacked, host Aislyn Greene travels to Tanzania's southern circuit—visiting two parks most first-time safari-ers never consider—and discovers what happens when you trade the famous Great Migration crossing for a dry riverbed with not another human being in sight. To get there, she consulted Elizabeth Gordon, co-founder of Ex...

By the end of this century, half of the world's 7,000 languages could be gone. On this episode of Unpacked, host Aislyn Greene hands the mic to travel writer Lucy Kehoe for a conversation about saving language with journalist Sophia Smith Galer, author of the new book How to Kill a Language. For Sophia, saving language is personal: her Italian grandmother spoke Emilian, one of Italy's Indigenous t...

This kind of Japan travel doesn't show up in guidebooks. In January 2024, a major earthquake struck the Noto Peninsula, lifting the seabed 15 feet into the air and exposing an ocean floor that locals walked across—harvesting octopus and abalone—to get home. This week on Unpacked, Five Questions, host and Afar executive editor Katherine LaGrave is joined by Afar contributing writer Ryan Knighton, w...

For the past several decades, writer and editor Lavinia Spalding has championed women's travel writing. She's helmed seven editions of the Best Women's Travel Writing—the celebrated Traveler's Tales anthology—including the latest, released on June 9th. Over the years, she's read hundreds of submissions a year from women around the world and distilled them into one essential collection. So host Ais...

Buffalo, New York might be the greatest architecture city you've never heard of. In the fourth and final episode of our Unpacked by Afar series, we explore how this Rust Belt city became one of the richest showcases of American architecture anywhere in the country. Host Aislyn Greene tours Buffalo with Ed Howard, a docent and guide with Explore Buffalo. Ed shares that Buffalo was one of the wealth...

For 185 years, some of the most important chapters of American history have unfolded on a few blocks of Buffalo's East Side. In the third episode of our four-part Unpacked by Afar series, we walk the Michigan Street African American Heritage Corridor, the beating heart of Buffalo Black history, with the man who has made preserving it his life's work. Executive director Terry Alford grew up on thes...

This is the final stop on our five-part audio guide to Asheville, North Carolina, and we’re heading for the trees. In this episode of Unpacked by Afar, host Aislyn Greene laces up for Asheville hiking, and discovers why the oldest mountains on Earth are also some of the most beloved. On a tour with Hike Bike Kayak Asheville that takes Aislyn and guide David into the Pisgah National Forest, Aislyn...

This is the fourth stop on our five-part audio guide to Asheville, North Carolina, and it may be the tastiest one yet. In this episode of Unpacked by Afar, host Aislyn Greene digs into Asheville food, and the surprising reason this mountain city punches so far above its weight at the table. Aislyn joins a walking food tour with Sita of Eating Asheville, eating her way through a town where farm to...

This is the third stop on our five-part audio guide to Asheville, North Carolina, and it takes us just outside the city to the small mountain town of Black Mountain, North Carolina. In this episode of Unpacked by Afar, host Aislyn Greene goes looking for the creative soul of the region, and finds it everywhere: in the galleries, in the glass studios, and above all in the music scene. Aislyn starts...

This is the second stop on our five-part audio guide to Asheville, North Carolina, and it reaches back a lot further than you might expect. In this episode of Unpacked by Afar, host Aislyn Greene unpacks the long, strange story of Asheville wellness, and why doctors have been sending patients to these mountains for more than a century and a half. To understand where Asheville wellness began, Aisly...

Welcome to the first stop on our five-part audio guide to Asheville, North Carolina. And where better to start than at the beginning? In this episode of Unpacked by Afar, host Aislyn Greene sets out on foot to trace Asheville history from the ground up, and to answer a simple question: How did a remote, hard-to-reach valley in the Blue Ridge Mountains become one of the most creative small cities i...

Buffalo, New York has called itself the City of Good Neighbors since 1940, and in 2023 Reader's Digest even voted it the nicest city in America. But is it true? In this episode of Unpacked by Afar, host Aislyn Greene turns a Buffalo travel story into a bigger question: what does it actually take to turn a stranger into a neighbor? We begin 150 years ago, on the East Side patch that grew into the s...

Everybody knows Buffalo, New York, for the chicken wing. Fewer people know the real story behind the wing—or the full story of Buffalo's food scene, which is grounded in tradition and full of innovation. In the first episode of our four-part Unpacked by Afar series on Buffalo, we start where you should always start: at the table. Host Aislyn Greene digs into a food scene that has quietly become on...

Welcome to Unpacked Five Questions, a podcast that takes you behind the scenes of one great travel story. In this episode, executive editor Katherine LaGrave sits down with writer Latria Graham, Afar's Unpacked columnist. Latria spent seven weeks driving the nearly 5,000-mile Lewis and Clark National Historic Trail—alone—to report a story about the Corps of Discovery's most essential and least cre...

LGBTQ+ Americans are more than twice as likely as the general population to hold a valid passport. That stat sits at the heart of (Out )on the Road: The Radical Joy of Queer Travel, a new book from writer Lindsey Danis that's part memoir, part guide. Most conversations about queer travel start and end with safety. Lindsey wanted to write past that, toward joy, belonging, and power. In this episode...

Welcome to Travel to Listen, a new Unpacked series hosted by veteran music journalist Tim Chester. Over four episodes, Tim took us into the cities where music is more than entertainment—it's the shortcut to a place's soul. In this season finale, he heads to Detroit to explore the legendary Motown sound—and to find out what's next for the little house on West Grand Boulevard that started it all. Me...