Bogotá never stood a chance. With all the Colombian marvels that had preceded it over the previous two months, the city that not a single person had anything positive to say about was always going to struggle to live up to the rest of the country’s experiences. Infamous for its terrible weather, horrendous traffic, and …
And breathe… Wow, that was intense. As desperate as I always am to arrive at each new destination with zero expectations and a blank canvas onto which to paint my new adventures, sometimes it simply isn’t possible. When backpacker gossip and itinerary discussions with proud locals repeatedly combine to highlight one specific locality, the hype …
“Bothrops atrox, or Talla X in Spanish: a highly venomous snake with a bite that will kill a man within two hours if no antivenom is available. We found it and killed it just outside the camp last night.“ In other words, a mere fifteen metres from the bed in which I was peacefully dreaming …
I have a very peculiar code of appreciation for the places that I visit. It is of course highly pretentious, to the surprise of absolutely no one reading this. I engage emotionally and intensely with everywhere that I go, often very quickly and always in the most judgemental manner possible. I do not want to …
Dubai was open for business, to all intents and purposes. Malls, restaurants, bars and museums were all operating fully, though with reduced capacity, and the metro was uncomfortably crowded at all times. São Paulo felt like a city that knew harsher restrictions were coming (they just have) and decided to double down in a last …
1,326 days is a very long time, so painfully long that I actually winced as I calculated it. Until I arrived in Panama yesterday, I had not visited a new country since setting foot on Senegalese soil on 10th June 2017. After three weeks in the UAE and Brazil, I can finally nudge my country …
STREET ART – ARCHITECTURE – CRAFT BEER – PEOPLE In no order of importance, these are the four criteria by which I evaluate the urban exploration ranking of any given city that invites me to visit. It is no surprise that New York, Melbourne, Cape Town, and Tokyo are my all time favourite urban playgrounds, …
It is all about the timing. It always has been, with me. As my fingers hovered above the mousepad button in my hotel room in Dubai, I could almost sense that moment of scientific discovery in a faraway laboratory. That exact moment when the researcher pulled his head back from the microscope, petri dish awash …
So far, so very good. Given the somewhat hurried nature of my departure to a destination more or less imposed on me, my first fortnight on what has now imaginatively been christened The Big Trip has been a nothing short of a resounding success. And this despite needing to extend my stay by an additional …
The running joke of the Dubai street art underground scene is that you need to be able to spray paint equally well with both hands to make it as a successful artist. Not so that those hard-to-reach metro underpass corners can be evenly coated from multiple angles, but rather so that the artist has another …