Porto is a small city in Portugal, where the river remembers, and the wine makes sure you do too... I had just finished an absolutely fantastic, terribly cold trip in the surreally beautiful and wild Greenland. After that, I needed warmth. Not the Instagram sort. The real kind. The kind that seeps back into bones that have...
Greenland is a place where beauty has teeth... Greenland didn’t try to impress me.It didn’t perform... Nor did it soften the edges. It simply existed — vast, aloof, devastatingly beautiful. A place so remote and so unforgiving that it rewired my idea of beauty itself. This wasn’t beauty meant to be consumed or Instagram-med. This was beauty that...
Azores Islands is a place Where the Earth Still Has a Pulse. Some places whisper. Some places shout. The Azores do neither. They breathe. You hear it in the hiss of steam escaping the ground. In the slow, deliberate sigh of the Atlantic pounding black lava shores. In the way the land feels… Warm. Alive. Slightly restless. As...
Borneo. Heard of it? Of course you have. Considered going? Probably not. And that, is precisely its charm.
I had heard of it too. Everyone has. It floats around in our collective imagination like a half-remembered bedtime story — dark rainforests, head-hunting tribes, orangutans swinging through mist, maps with more ‘green’ than roads. But travel there? Honestly, it...
Mount Kinabalu does not need marketing. It does not try to seduce you with adjectives. It simply stands there — granite-heavy, cloud-wrapped, unconcerned. At 4,095 meters, Mount Kinabalu is the highest peak in Southeast Asia. But height, as I discovered, is the least interesting thing about it. Mount Kinabalu sits inside Kinabalu National Park, Malaysia’s first UNESCO...
Sepilok Orangutan Rehabilitation Centre is about learning how to leave things alone. There is a moment at Sepilok when you realize this isn’t about you. No sweeping music. No dramatic announcements. Just a wooden platform, forest all around, and the faint rustle of movement somewhere above. Then they appear. Orangutans do not make entrances. They arrive. The Sepilok Orangutan...
Sandakan does not overwhelm you at first glance. It doesn’t announce itself with drama. It looks almost… ordinary. And then you begin paying attention. Sandakan sits on the east coast of Sabah, edging one of the most biologically dense regions left on Earth. The forests here belong to the great Bornean lowland rainforest system — ancient, layered,...
Gomantong Cave does not ease you in gently. You smell it before you see it. This vast limestone cave system near Sandakan is one of the largest and most biologically intense caves in Southeast Asia. It is home to millions of bats and swiftlets, and to centuries of human labor that still continues today. This is not...
"Tribes of Sabah" evokes images of of Head-Hunters, Blowguns, and the Long Life of a Misunderstood Past. In fact, every time Borneo is mentioned in casual conversation, it doesn’t take long for the phrase “head-hunters” to surface. It is usually delivered with a half-smile. A shiver of theatrical danger. A colonial hangover masquerading as curiosity. And like...
Mulu Hills is where the Earth seems like it is showing off... If Borneo’s rainforests feel ancient, Mulu feels prehistoric. Gunung Mulu National Park, in Sarawak, is less a destination than a geological statement. It is a place where water, limestone, and time collaborated for millions of years — and did not bother checking whether humans would...