Made a typically eleventh-hour decision to climb Mount Fuji last week. It was actually my second choice for a July getaway (hopefully I’ll have reason to post about my first choice in a couple of months), but finances and social obligations rendered it the better option. Luckily, it didn’t disappoint! I first visited Japan ten […]
GETTING IN As mentioned here, after receiving a spiritual battering courtesy of Nicaragua’s chicken buses and El Salvador’s pervasive noise pollution, I booked myself onto an expensive shuttle to go directly from La Unión to Antigua, Guatemala. By this point, I’d deemed my reserves of time and patience more precious than my ever-dwindling budget – and I
GETTING IN Despite my best efforts, I was unable to convince staff at the Monteverde bus terminal to conjure a direct connection to Nicaragua. Instead, I was told to wake up at 3:30am and take a bus to a highway junction – that’s right, not a town but an actual roadside – where I’d need to flag
BACKGROUND Mexico and Central America have long formed the most glaring ‘gap’ in my map of visited countries. There are other blind spots of course, but they’re either less prominent as travel destinations (much of the Arab world, West Africa) or things I’m saving for if I ever make it to old age (Scandinavia, the
I’ve been fortunate enough to have suffered a whole array of near-death experiences at this stage in life. And of all those, summiting Kilimanjaro is the one that featured the most prolonged physical agony – but it’s also the one that I cherish most, and perhaps the only one that I look back upon with
New Zealand may well be the most important trip I’ve ever taken. Rewind back to late 2023. After spending most of the 2010s indulging in maximal wanderlust, I swaggered into 2020 planning to maintain business as usual only to then watch my world spectacularly implode. As I dealt with the remnants of that personal bloodbath,
It had taken over three decades of existence, but by early 2019 I’d gotten myself to a stage where I’d stepped foot on every inhabited continent bar one: South America. Aka the one that was most logistically difficult and financially taxing in relation to my home location of Shanghai. But I was scheduled to begin