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Rita Orahuo, вУлица Оноре де Бальзака 65/1, Kyiv (2026)

02/08/2022

An icy mystery deep in Arctic Canada

Known as the "Crystal Eye" to the Inuit, Pingualuit Crater was once the destination for diamond-seeking prospectors. But the real treasure is the stories its deep waters can tell.

The plane banked to the right, hard. As we took a first sweep at the runway – or, rather, the short stretch of bumpy land in the Arctic tundra that would serve as one – an alarm sounded, the lights above the emergency exits flashed red and the sound of the aircraft's engines roaring back into action filled the main cabin. My stomach lurched.

It was an exhilarating introduction to the far north of Quebec, in a region known as Nunavik. Comprising the top third of Canadian province (larger than the US state of California and twice the size of Great Britain) fringed by frayed edges of a peninsula known as Ungava, most people don't even know it exists. But that wasn't always the case.

Back in 1950, this area was splashed across newspapers globally and pegged as the eighth wonder of the world. Not because of the wilderness, and not due to any manmade structure, but because of the distinct land feature I was now flying over enroute to take another shot at the runway: Pingualuit Crater.

31/07/2022

The ultimate stargazing road trip

Home to Portugal's "mountain of stars" and some of Europe's least light-polluted skies, the Alentejo region is best seen at night.

A long twisting road leads up Portugal's highest mountain, and here, unlike many other European summits, visitors can drive right to the top. The peak rises 1,993m above sea level, and although its actual name is Torre (tower), most people just call it by the same designation as the range it lofts over: Serra da Estrela or "mountain of the stars".

By day, the drive offers wonderful views across the undulant landscape of this narrow country – from the red hills of Spain in the east to the blue Atlantic Ocean in the west. However, the real spectacle comes as the sun starts to drop. Not only is this mountain a popular spot to watch golden sunsets, but for those who stay later, it offers a glimmering night-time fresco that covers the heavens, made up of millions of white pinpricks scattered in glorious imperfection.

Over the past decade, Portugal has gained recognition for being one of the top places in the world for travellers to observe the night sky, thanks to the creation of the 3,000 sq km Dark Sky Alqueva reserve, in Portugal's central Alentejo region. In 2011, the reserve was certified as the world's first Starlight Tourism Destination by the Starlight Foundation, a Unesco-supported international organisation that promotes science and tourism. This status celebrates the region's ideal viewing conditions (low levels of light pollution and an average of 286 cloudless nights per year, which result in some of Portugal's darkest skies), but also the wider tourism infrastructure it has inspired, which is set up to cater specifically to stargazers.

Dark Sky Alqueva is also the starting point for a stunning three-hour road trip that takes you through some of the least light-polluted parts of Europe, winding along the area's Dark Sky Route (a curated collection of activities and accommodations), and rising all the way to Portugal's highest peak, fittingly called the Serra da Estrela, or "mountain of stars".

29/07/2022

The world's most agile countries

With international travel opening up again, travellers may find more security visiting countries with a strong track record of adjusting their policies appropriately and swiftly.

An ongoing pandemic, global conflict and general uncertainty have put a spotlight on every country's need to be more agile and adaptable in recent years. By being able to implement flexible policies and solutions based on new information, governments can more effectively serve citizens and travellers in a rapidly changing world.

To capture this ability to adapt and respond to obstacles, US News & World Report introduced the new Agility index this year as part of their annual best countries rankings, creating a list of the top nations ranked by their ability to be adaptable, dynamic, modern, progressive or responsive.

These factors are more important than ever to travellers, many who are starting to travel internationally again for the first time in two years. As seen by the stream of new Covid-19 variants, conditions on the ground can shift rapidly and travellers may find more security visiting those countries with a strong track record of adjusting their policies appropriately and swiftly.

We spoke to residents and policy experts in some of the most highly ranked countries to find out what makes for an agile country and what travellers should expect when touching down.

27/07/2022

New Zealand's town that needs a passport

Every other January, visitors flock to the quirky Republic of Whangamōmona to celebrate a place that "refused to be swallowed up".

Sometimes geographical features are named aptly, and New Zealand's Forgotten World Highway is definitely one of those.

Driving from the town of Taumarunui to Whangamōmona in Taranaki in the western part of New Zealand's North Island, makes you feel like you're winding through a part of the world that time forgot. It's a place where moas (now-extinct 8ft flightless birds) crashed clumsily through the forest and thick green vines and ferns twisted their way around ancient kauri and totara trees, the lush darkness punctuated only by magical shafts of green light stabbing through the forest canopy. The 87km road is twisted and unforgiving, but the pristine bush and scenic saddles make it worth it, as you drive towards the Republic of Whangamōmona, or "the Republic", as locals sometimes like to call it.

This tiny, remote town is well known in New Zealand as the place that refused to be swallowed up by new zoning regulations in the late '80s and consequently declared itself independent. It even has its own "passport". In fact, if you happen to turn up on Republic Day, held biennially in January, you can't actually enter the town without a one. It's obviously all a bit tongue and cheek, but it does stem back to a time when it was somewhat less of a joke – to 1989, when alterations were proposed to regional borders that would move Whangamōmona from Taranaki Province to Manawatu/Wanganui.

Gaylene Coplestone remembers it well. "David Walter was the mayor of Stratford District Council [the nearest big town] at the time. He was a good friend of ours and obviously very involved in local politics. He wasn't too pleased when they announced the borders were going to move."

25/07/2022

South America's unknown ancient path

Connecting the Pacific and Atlantic Ocean, a 4,000km trail created by indigenous people over millennia is now beginning to reveal its mysteries to the world.

Overripe star fruits and guavas stuck to the soles of my boots in a sweet, fermenting mess as I strolled out of the sleepy town of Peabiru. I had travelled to Brazil's Paraná state, not too far from the Paraguay border, in search of the remains of the Caminho de Peabiru – a 4,000km network of pathways connecting the Atlantic and the Pacific Oceans, made over millennia by South America's indigenous people.

The Caminho de Peabiru was a spiritual path for native Guarani people in search of a mythological paradise. It also became a route to riches for European colonisers looking to access the interior of the continent. However, most of the original paths have disappeared, consumed by nature or transformed over the centuries into highways. It's only in the past few years that this intriguing route has begun to reveal its mysteries to a wider public, thanks to a growing network of new tourist trails.

It's easy to understand why the cross-continental trail is so quick to capture people's imaginations, and that's due to the story of the first European known to have walked its length: Portuguese sailor Aleixo Garcia. Shipwrecked in 1516 on the shores of southern Brazil after a failed Spanish mission to navigate the River Plate, Garcia and half a dozen other sailors were taken in by the amenable Guaranis. Eight years later, after hearing Guarani tales of a path that led all the way to an empire in the mountains rich in gold and silver, Garcia travelled with 2,000 Guarani warriors all the way to the Andes, nearly 3,000km away. According to Brazilian researcher Rosana Bond in her e-book The Saga of Aleixo Garcia, he became the first European known to have visited the Incan empire, in 1524, nearly a decade before the Spanish conquistador Francisco Pizarro who is widely believed to have made that "discovery".

23/07/2022

The abandoned Soviet mining town in Norway's Arctic

With Stalinist architecture, a prominent bust of Lenin and posters extolling the motherland, the desolate mining town of Pyramiden is one of the last Soviet outposts in the Arctic.

The journey to Pyramiden, on the Norwegian archipelago of Svalbard, felt a little like a journey to the ends of the Earth. First I flew to the north of Norway, to the outermost reaches of the European continent. Next, I boarded another plane north to Longyearbyen, Svalbard's capital, on the island of Spitsbergen, an island closer to the North Pole than it is to Oslo. Then, just when I imagined that I had already reached the world's furthest north – in a place where the sun doesn't rise for four months of every year and doesn't set for another four, a place where Arctic fox and Svalbard reindeer roam the streets – I went a little further.

The final leg to the all-but-abandoned coal-mining town left behind the known world, or, rather, the world as most of us know it. I sailed on the small, thrice-weekly tour boat from Longyearbyen, chugging out through churning Arctic waters while scanning the horizon for polar bears. By the time we rounded the first headland and turned for the far north, all was silence.

Looking like cartoon caricatures of Arctic birds, puffins flew alongside the boat, a prelude to the great seabird colonies on the cliffs. Clouds swirled around snow-bound summits and high valleys where the snows turned charcoal grey in mid-summer snow flurries, then blinding white in sudden sunshine rays. Great, grey, scalloped outcrops rose from fjord beaches, stony and deserted. I was in awe.

21/07/2022

Europe's island that swaps nationalities

Pheasant Island, located between France and Spain, bizarrely changes countries twice a year. But why?

From the sublime viewpoints above San Sebastián in the Basque Country, a hiker can see one of the world's oldest, most romantic, most biblical of paths. The Camino de Santiago pilgrimage passes this way, and the Homerian traverse to Saint James' tomb in the far western corner of northern Spain is well-trodden, proselytising many and capturing minds for centuries.

Each year, long-distance hikers and pilgrims come here in their hundreds of thousands, but I was not one of them. Instead of the cracked valleys winding towards churches, my destination was somewhere else entirely. A strange, uninhabited place called Pheasant Island.

Looking to understand Spain's Basque Country better, I accidentally stumbled upon the two-acre sliver of land while browsing through illustrated maps of the Western Pyrenees. Sheltered in the borderlands between Hendaye, France, and Irun, Spain, on the Bidasoa river flowing to the Bay of Biscay, the perplexing island is presided over by each nation for six months in turn and is a historical record of the rivalry between the countries.

Border irregularities are found throughout Europe – and the world – but a 200m-long island that swaps countries biannually is unfathomably odd. And few, curiously, know much about Pheasant Island at all.

19/07/2022

The city changing the way we fly

Few visitors touching down at Albany International Airport realise they're on hallowed ground for aviation history – and innovation.

In 1910, Glenn Curtiss, a motorcycle daredevil-turned-pilot, completed America's first long-distance intercity flight, between Albany and New York City, to great fanfare, while at the helm of his Albany Flyer biplane.

"It was one of the first planes ever built. Glenn Curtiss developed it right after the Wright brothers flew in 1903," said Kevin Millington, head of education and outreach at Empire State Aerosciences Museum (ESAM).

We were standing in the museum, underneath a biplane made of wood and canvas; it was big enough to dwarf us but seemed small and fragile in comparison to the planes that take off daily from Albany International Airport, about 24km away. As he pointed excitedly at the aircraft above us, Millington explained that it is an original 1910 Curtiss Pusher model, an identical twin to the Albany Flyer (which is now at the Glenn H. Curtiss Museum in New York's Finger Lakes region). It is ESAM's pièce de résistance.

12/07/2022

Matanzas: The rebirth of Cuba's abandoned cultural hub

Once known for its music, art and architecture, Matanzas had succumbed to neglect and disrepair. Decades later, however, it's being returned to its former glory.
"It used to be a garage," Adrián Socorro told me as he opened the large doors of El Garabato, his art studio on Calle Narváez beside the San Juan River. "Then, around the time that Matanzas was preparing for its 325th anniversary in 2018, the city historian finally approved my project and I moved in."

Inside was a warehouse-like room littered with the paraphernalia of an active workshop: plastic bottles and clusters of brushes, a multi-coloured palette, a half-finished sculpture of a cow-like animal hanging upside-down from the ceiling. Paintings were everywhere: hung on walls; propped on easels; stacked on tables. I spied dogs, chickens, flowers and nudes, all of them creatively drawn in a style that seemed to mix impressionism with the avant-garde.

"I paint from my own life and experience," Socorro explained. "I don't paint those pictures of old ladies smoking ci**rs that the tourists want to see."

Socorro is from Matanzas, a port city wrapped around a deep, sheltered bay 90km east of Havana, Cuba. When I revisited in December 2021 after a three-year gap, small but innovative restaurants offered homemade pasta and snack-sized tacos. The riverside walkway of Calle Narváez was a glorious artistic esplanade embellished with astonishing sculptures: an emaciated pig standing atop a red balloon; a depiction of Cuban national hero, José Martí, with a sword in his mouth; pink stepladders and life-sized giraffes. Within the space of 300m, I wandered from Socorro's studio-gallery past a music school, an art college and half a dozen imaginative bars and cafes.

It felt like a completely different city than the one I first travelled to in the late 1990s – then a scarred, dilapidated and semi-abandoned place, left to rot during the country's economically challenging "Special Period", a decade of austerity after the dissolution of the Soviet Union, whose subsidies had made up around 30% of the Cuban GNP. Back then, foreign visitors were whisked from the airport to swanky new resorts in the nearby town of Varadero, where Cuban guests were barred from entering resorts. Calle Narváez was a neglected warehouse district. The Parque Libertad, beautifully Botoxed by 2021, was dingy and unloved. Restaurants were practically non-existent. To me, the city resembled a sunken ship, a stricken Titanic whose damaged riches were hidden by decades of neglect.

21/06/2022

What makes the perfect escapist retreat?

How do ultra-escapist getaways around the world offer sanctuary from frantic, everyday life? With a sense of wonder, fantasy or history – or with a complete immersion in simplicity and nature, writes Dominic Lutyens.
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Burying our heads in a book and our toes in a beach offers escape from frantic working lives for many of us. Yet, when it comes to some of the world's most beautiful escapist getaways, from hotels and private villas to entire resorts, a complex, multisensory raft of factors come into play.

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Storytelling is the buzzword in interiors for creating spaces that imaginatively reference a venue's location and history, giving it a unique atmosphere. For guests, such decors draw attention to the venue's interesting past, overtly or subliminally, and make their stay more memorable.

06/06/2022

Inside the homes of the 'new naturalists'
This fascination with natural history has its historical precedents, she points out: "There's a long history of collecting from nature. In the 16th Century, a craze for shells saw wealthy European landowners charter ships to the New World to bring back items of curiosity." An early example of the phenomenon in the UK is the 17th-Century, shell-lined underground grotto at Woburn Abbey, Bedfordshire. "Collecting isn't just driven by science or a desire to catalogue. It's also about an appreciation of beautiful forms," adds Bingham.

03/06/2022

Can indigenous knowledge save the reef?
"Only a few hundred people have seen this place," said our Aboriginal guide, Balngarrawarra man Vince Harrigan, as we gazed at a sandstone rock shelter plastered with plump barramundi, cross-hatched crocodiles and eerie spirit figures painted by his ancestors long ago.

The ancient rock art galleries we'd hiked to is one of hundreds – perhaps even thousands – of Aboriginal cultural sites hidden in the wild, tropical savannah of Normanby Station, a sprawling cattle farm near Cooktown on Queensland's Cape York Peninsula, Australia's closest mainland port to the Great Barrier Reef.

By sharing this one with tourists as a guide with Culture Connect, Harrigan doesn't only provide his family with a sustainable income stream. With half of the full-day Rock Art & Ranger Tour dedicated to visiting Balngarrawarra ranger projects, it's also an opportunity to showcase how traditional knowledge is being used to prevent sediment runoff from being flushed down the Normanby River and onto the World Heritage-listed reef – where it's thought to create the ideal environment for coral-eating crown-of-thorns starfish to thrive.

Rita Orahuo

02/08/2022

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