This week's piece is by , a Swedish travel writer with a passion for exploring overlooked destinations and telling stories about the people behind them, who publishes on Substack. This is the fourth piece from our open submissions call. All words and photographs are hers.

The air is thick with pollution. The sweet smell of apple-flavored shisha and jasmine is sickening and intoxicating in equal measure. Like so many times before, Cairo greets me with honking car horns, unbearable heat, and a couple of men trying their luck with catcalls. The call to prayer echoes across the city and drowns out even my own thoughts. It’s absolute chaos.

I know more than a handful of people who swear that, despite being deeply impressed by Egypt’s cultural heritage, they will never set foot in the Egyptian capital again. The City of a Thousand Minarets doesn’t try to be a good girl.

The soul of Cairo is its people, and a day trip to the pyramids, capped by dinner at a mediocre restaurant, rarely leaves time to meet them.

It’s 11 a.m., and the sun is already merciless when I pull up to Al-Azhar Mosque. I’m in the medieval district known as Islamic Cairo, home to landmarks such as Al-Muizz Street, Khan el-Khalili Bazaar, and countless mosques. This predominantly working-class neighborhood is crowded, run-down, and wonderfully friendly.

Inside the mosque, I’m immediately stopped by a young man with a big smile.

“Welcome to Al-Azhar, isn’t it beautiful here?”

His name is Ali. He is a student at Al-Azhar University, one of the world’s oldest continuously operating centers of learning in Sunni Islam.

He likes to practice his English, he says. Ali wants to know if I’m religious, and before I get a chance to reply, he tells me what it’s like to dedicate his life to religious studies. He hopes to become a good man, stay close to God, and make a special girl happy. “It won’t be you, sorry, woman,” he says.

Walking through Islamic Cairo toward downtown, I come across a group of women and girls of different ages outside a juice bar. This alone is refreshing; usually it’s men who occupy spaces like this. The women notice me within seconds and start chatting and giggling. They push the girl with the best English skills to the front. They want to know if my red hair is real or dyed. “Dyed,” I admit. “It’s to cover up my grays.”

“You need to put color for the rest of your life, then,” says the girl.

Then she tells me they’re celebrating their friend’s birthday.

“We’re going to do fatla and have our hair done at the salon,” says another girl. “No boys allowed. Alhamdulillah.”

“It’s mango season, ya habibi!” yells one of the men at the juice bar. I order a fresh mango juice from one of the juice masters. It’s apparently his sister’s birthday, so I get a whole mango for free.

The area between Islamic Cairo and downtown is intense. Traffic goes from bad to worse. Street vendors shout at the top of their lungs, trying to drown out the shops’ prerecorded sales pitches for cheap T-shirts and toys.

Then the city changes, almost without my noticing.

Walking along Talaat Harb Street is a bit like stepping into another era. Beautiful European-style façades line the boulevards. It’s easy to see why Cairo was once dubbed the Paris of the Middle East. Today, though, these buildings are in desperate need of restoration. What used to be whitewashed is now coated in a permanent layer of Cairo’s dust. On Kasr el-Nile Street, lawyers and bank employees emerge from office buildings, lining up alongside police officers to buy strong coffee in paper cups.

Still, downtown is changing. I walk past chic concept stores, bookstores with international titles, and boutique hotels. None of these were here a few years ago. Outside a small gallery, a group of art students ask me where I’m from, then invite me to an exhibition opening the following evening.

Reaching Tahrir Square, Cairo’s pulse and the epicenter of the 2011 revolution, I sit down outside the Mogamma, the old government building. I share the bench with three middle-aged men who pass their time smoking cigarettes and teasing each other.

All three camped out in the square during the revolution. The most talkative of them, sporting the classic Cairene look of aviator sunglasses and a black leather jacket, drives a taxi for a living.

“Life is only a little better than when Mubarak was in power,” he says with a shrug.

Then he smiles. “But at least we have fun.”

I cross the Nile into the affluent neighborhood of Zamalek. This is where the rich and famous live, along with a few homeless people who sleep under the 26th of July Corridor, which runs across the island. It’s home to the good restaurants, the cool coffee shops, the advertising agencies, and the embassies.

I finally sit down for coffee at my favorite café, where I decide to step out of my comfort zone and try a few Arabic phrases. I realize too late that I’ve ordered dog instead of cake. The guys behind the counter double over with laughter. So does the cool girl in the line behind me.

“Would you like it cooked or fried?” the cashier shoots back.

An elderly couple starts giggling too.

I end up sitting next to the cool girl. Like me, she’s a freelance graphic designer who works from home and pops down to the café for some fresh air and company.

“Zamalek is the best area,” she says. “In many ways, it’s like Europe, but with an Egyptian vibe to it. Plus, you can apparently get fried dog for lunch.”

The most fascinating thing about Cairo is that conversations often follow the same rhythm regardless of social background. The Egyptian capital is a city of staggering inequalities, yet the people I meet on my walk seem to share the same attitude to life: a quick wit, an ability to laugh about life’s hardships, and a willingness to engage with strangers. Worlds apart in circumstances, but connected by the same humor, curiosity and way of navigating life. That is why I come back to Cairo again and again.

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Los Angeles, 4:00 p.m.

I landed at three, but since this is LA, you take a shuttle to basically Inglewood to get a car, so I am first greeted by the attendant an hour later. He welcomes me back, comments on my status, and tells me to pick any car I want from the lot. Every car on the lot is an SUV roughly five times the size of any car I have seen outside of the United States.

I go back to the attendant.

“But I reserved a compact. Do you have any compacts?”

He looks at me. Behind us, people are fanning out across the lot, running to vehicles as if they have just been told everything is free. He waves a few more of them through without breaking eye contact with me.

“It’s an upgrade, man. Just pick whatever.”

“How is it an upgrade if it probably gets fifteen miles a gallon?”

“Look, man, think about it. When you’re driving around town, who do you want people to think you are?”

Before I can answer, a Volvo sedan with Oregon plates pulls out of the washing area.

“I’ll take that one,” I say, already walking toward it before anyone else can. Behind me, I hear him exhale slowly through his teeth.

Malta, 6:30 p.m.

I booked the car for pickup at six as my flight was due in at 5:30. Landing about thirty minutes late, I stop at Burger King as I exit the terminal and carry the meal to the rental car counter, where I stand picking fries out of the bag while the man looks at my license and passport.

“You know, it’s fifty euros for after-hours pickup,” he says without looking up.

I stop chewing. “What? It’s 6:30, and my flight was delayed.”

“Well, this desk closed at six.”

“Sorry to have kept you, but I can’t imagine I’m the last person arriving tonight.”

“Oh, you’re not. I’m here until 8. There are more flights coming in,” he assures me. “So, did you want the insurance too, or can I charge for a five-thousand-euro deductible? Wait, sorry, 5,050. Gotta include that after-hours fee.”

We walk out into the garage to inspect the car, which is a small white Hyundai, just as I booked online. He opens the door and says aloud, “Only 723 kilometers, full tank. You’re good to go.” I get in and look around. The car is new, with two no-smoking stickers on the dashboard but no screen or USB plug. It does have hand-crank windows and a push-in cigarette lighter, though.

Bucharest, Romania, 2:15 a.m.

I exit the terminal and message the rental car company. A young man wearing a hoodie in a black van flags me down and drives me to a facility near the airport, which, at two in the morning, looks like somewhere you are taken specifically to not be found. He sits down at the desk and takes my passport, license, and credit card. He completes the paperwork and sticks the card in the credit card reader before pulling it out quickly and looking at it.

“Wait, you don’t have a credit card with raised numbers.”

“What do you mean, raised numbers?”

He runs his finger over the card. “It should be like buda buda boom. Look at the rental agreement; it’s in our terms.”

“You just put it in the chip reader.”

“We also need raised numbers.”

“I don’t think I’ve had a card with raised numbers since 2015.”

“Then you couldn’t have rented with us since 2015. Anyway, I can override it if you purchase our insurance.”

“And how much is that?”

“A hundred and fifty euros a day.”

I booked with this company for one reason: they are the only one that will let me drive to Moldova. So instead of driving to Moldova after Bucharest, I fly to Moldova for less than one day’s insurance, and then I fly back. Now needing a car for the rest of the trip, I go to another company. The man there completes the paperwork and inserts the chip card into the reader. He tells me the machine won’t take it, but I get no email or text about a declined transaction. I call my bank. My bank says no charge was attempted, and I relay this to the man.

“I definitely tried,” he says. “You saw me.”

“My bank says you didn’t.”

“I tried. I cannot rent you the car unless you cover it with our insurance.”

“And how much is that?”

“Two hundred euros a day.”

It’s raining as I walk out to see if the one next door has a car. The office is dark, and the door is locked, so I call the phone number on the door.

“Do you have a reservation?”

I recognize his voice, and I look back at the other rental car company and see him standing up inside on his cell phone. I take an Uber across town and rent from someone else.

Izmir, Turkey, 8:40 a.m.

The phone rings five times before someone answers.

“Hello, I landed, and the reservation says to call this number. I’m standing outside door C. Where are you?”

“OK, I will be right there.”

Fifteen minutes pass, and my phone rings again.

“What are you wearing?” he asks.

“A white hat. I’m right outside door C.”

“I don’t see you. I’m at door four.”

“There is no door four. It goes A, B, C.”

“There is no door C. It goes one, two, three, four!”

We go back and forth like this for a while. I hand my phone to a Turkish man standing nearby and ask him if he can help me. He listens for about thirty seconds, nods a few times, says something in Turkish, and hands the phone back to me.

“You might need to book a new car,” he says. “That man is in Antalya.”

Antalya is five hundred kilometers southeast; the rental car company logged the booking at the wrong location. I hire another car in the terminal and set off.

Lisbon, 8:00 a.m., Good Friday

We wake up before three in the morning in Copenhagen to catch the flight. Four hours later, we land in Lisbon and walk out to the curb, where we are told a van will be circling. Sure enough, the van is there. The man asks for the last name.

“Monaco.”

He flips through a stack of printed sheets, finds the name, crosses it off, and looks up.

“By the way, there are no cars.”

“What do you mean, there are no cars?”

“There’s a glitch with the computer. There have been no cars since the day before yesterday.”

“Couldn’t you have let us know?”

“Well,” he says, “now you know.”

I go back into the terminal to try the other companies. Every rental car counter at the airport has a line full of families and is completely out. It is Easter weekend in Portugal, after all. We take an Uber an hour and a half north to the hotel. When we check out a few days later, we Uber all the way back to the airport and rent from someone else for the remainder of the trip.

Sapporo, Japan, 12:45 p.m.

The staff at the rental office are so organized that the entire process takes about ten minutes. They hand me the keys, a little binder of paperwork, and a black-and-white photocopied map of the surrounding blocks with three gas stations circled on it. There are also cartoon bears drawn on the map. I am told to refuel at one of these three stations before returning the car and to keep the receipt. I am so enamored with the check-in process that I forget to take a single photo or video of the car.

The car looks like a block of tofu and drives like one too. The screen does not work with my phone, so before leaving Sapporo, I stop at a Daiso to buy a phone clamp for 300 yen. A few days later, pulling into another Daiso parking lot, I feel the little block of tofu jiggle. I get out and find a scuff on the underside of the front bumper. I have no idea whether it was there when I picked it up or if I just did it. I spend the rest of the trip convinced I am going to inconvenience these impossibly gracious people with additional paperwork.

On the return, a woman greets me with a deep bow and a smiling face. She walks around the car once. She does not mention the scuff. The only disappointment is that she does not even ask for my fuel receipt.

Skopje, North Macedonia, 11:15 a.m.

Somewhere in Bulgaria, I first notice the tire pressure light on the dashboard. It never actually loses pressure, but when I look at the tire, I cannot tell if it’s a nail or a metal tire plug. I am heading back through North Macedonia anyway, so I bring the car in.

The man in the parking lot could not be more helpful. He looks at the tire, shrugs, and tells me to go inside. No problem, he says. They will just swap the car.

Inside is a different experience. The young man at the desk does not get up.

“It’s a nail. A hundred and fifty euros.”

“You haven’t seen it. Can you come look at it? It looks like a repair plug. It might have been there before I got the car.”

He does not move. “A hundred and fifty euros.”

“Can I at least get a damage report for my insurance?”

“If you want a new car, I’m charging your card right now.”

I think of my plans in Kosovo, so I relent. “Fine, but I need documentation for the charge.”

“You’ll get it.”

He charges my card. I take the new car and leave. The report never arrives. When I return the second car at the end of the trip, the man at the desk looks confused. He cannot find the charge in the system. Over the next six weeks, I email and call somewhere between six and ten times. What eventually comes back is a refund. They ultimately decide it is easier to give me my money back than to create a document for me to get my money from someone else.

Kigali, Rwanda, morning

When I lived in Kigali, my own vehicle was not built for longer trips like self-drive safaris. When I needed one that was, I sent a WhatsApp message to a man I knew. He came to my house in the morning with the car. I gave him a wad of cash, and he gave me the keys before hopping on the back of a motorcycle taxi. There was no counter, paperwork, or insurance questions. When I got back, I would message him, and he would pick it up without asking many questions.

The journey is not over. If you enjoyed this piece, you can join me on the flight, at the breakfast buffet, or while booking a cheap flight:

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I found myself clapping along with the film. When I realized what I was doing, I looked over at the only other person seated in the darkened room. His hands were folded neatly in his lap, and he was staring at the screen. A man in uniform had led us in, given a full introduction to the park in Japanese, and bowed. He then looked at me and said in English, “Please no photos or video,” and clicked play.

It was a bear safety video, required viewing for anyone hiking in Shiretoko National Park. Through live-action scenarios, I was taught how to clap, and as the video continued, I warmed up my vocal cords for the instructed calls. The video warned me that I could have nothing to eat or drink except water or tea while hiking, so I was thankful to have finished my lingonberry soft-serve ice cream cone before paying for my entry card. Bears could hardly be interested in the coins left over from both purchases, I thought.

After the video finished, the ranger continued our briefing with PowerPoint slides showing the most recent bear sightings on the trail, including several in the past week. Guides are mandatory until July 31^st on this hike for the safety of bears and guests. I initially thought I was being smart skipping that cost by sitting here on August 2^nd, but now, looking at what a scrawny meal the only other man on the trail would make, I wasn’t so sure. I wanted to ask the ranger how the bears knew it is now August, but he seemed to read my mind, turning to me in English and saying, “On August 1^st our vegetation protection period started, so now officially our concern is the plants.”

The name Shiretoko is said to come from the Ainu word Sir-etok, meaning the end of the earth. The peninsula sits at the far northeastern tip of Hokkaido, and it has been a UNESCO World Heritage Site since 2005. What makes it unique is the diversity of its habitat on both land and sea, with cliffs rising more than 100 meters out of the Sea of Okhotsk. Shiretoko is a long way from the Japan most visitors see, and it also has one of the highest recorded densities of brown bears in the world. A few days earlier, when I could still have walked this trail with a guide, I had chosen to see the bears from a boat.

Most people base themselves in Utoro, a small fishing town on the peninsula’s western side, closest to the park itself. There are only a handful of hotels, most of them traditional onsen style, and the harbor, which is currently expanding, is full of fishing vessels. The cruises leave from there. Some go all the way past the lighthouse at the tip of the peninsula, and others, like the Rusha Bay cruise we took, go up the coast and turn around. Orcas and humpbacks are sometimes seen along the way.

Our boat was small, and there were about 30 of us onboard. We had been given a specific boarding number at the boat office, lined up like schoolchildren, and then guided in that same single-file line through the streets of Utoro and onto the boat. As we walked, bear bells attached to other guests’ backpacks jingled. Once aboard, we glided through still waters while a young staff member narrated in Japanese. To our right, the cliffs loomed over us as we dipped in and out of the coves, looking for bears at the water’s edge. Just before turning around and heading back, the crew finally saw one, pulling a fresh kill of a sika deer among the boulders. Through the binoculars, it was unmistakably a bear, and without them it was unmistakably a rock. A photo zoomed 10x on my iPhone captured the moment as a little blur on the lower half of the image. It is a photo that would be pointless to show anyone, but one that confirms I did, in fact, see a bear. That was the plan all along. See the bears from a boat where my wife could also enjoy it while the guides were still required, and then head out hiking on my own once they weren’t.

As we left the briefing room, the ranger checked our entry cards one last time. In the daylight, the other man now looked even leaner and fitter than during the movie. He bowed to the ranger, and his bear bell jangled. The Five Lakes loop takes about two hours, on a narrow dirt path through primeval forest of Sakhalin fir, oak, and birch. The understory was so thick there was no room to step aside, and the ranger got me as concerned about the plants underfoot as about the bears. For the first two hundred meters, my mind was all over the place. Should I let him go first as a shield, or should I suggest we walk together? Thus began a dance of politeness, which ended when the man insisted that I indeed should go ahead on my own and then photographed lichen with his Fujifilm camera long enough for me to disappear around the bend.

Absent the jingle of the bells, it was quiet but not silent; birds I couldn’t name called to each other over my head, and the forest enveloped me with the damp smell of fir. As I made my way along the trail, the gap between how dangerous I had been told it could be and how peaceful it was played with my mind. The trail itself did something similar, compressing through stands of trees before opening onto lakeside platforms where the mountains hung upside down in the reflection. The forest almost seemed to do everything it could to try to put my mind at ease, down to smelling like the hand wash at a restaurant I couldn’t afford.

As I continued onward, my attention shifted again from the birdsong to a jingle. I was happy that the other man had caught up to me, but as soon as I turned around, it stopped. Confused, I looked down. My hand was in my pocket, fiddling with the coins.

I continued onward, now clapping as instructed when coming around blind corners, following the trail. Somewhere between the third and fourth lakes, I heard a ringing that I knew was not my own. I had caught up to an older Swiss couple. I said hello, and the man replied, “Ah, American.” We chatted briefly, and I wished them well and left them and their bells behind.

That made four of us on the entire ground trail, which is hardly the kind of crowd that Japan as a whole has been experiencing. Shiretoko is hard to get to. Even once you’ve reached Hokkaido, it takes a long time to get here. For a stretch after I left them, the understory got denser until the only sounds were my own footsteps and my breath.

I had stopped clapping at the blind corners when I saw him. He was right in the middle of the trail, watching me. I began to run through the lecture in my head but found nothing on foxes. They had prepared me for bears. We stood there for a while, he and I, looking into each other’s eyes. It’s difficult to say who broke eye contact first, but when we did, he turned and walked down the path ahead of me, stopping after 20 meters to look back like he had something interesting to show me. We continued like this, walking together until the edge of the forest, my hands no longer clutching the coins in my pocket. At the end of the ground trail, as I ascended the steps to the elevated boardwalk that finishes the circuit, he held back and watched me go before diving into the bamboo grass. I stood and watched the bamboo grass sway as he continued forward.

When I returned to the car, I put my camera on the backseat and emptied the coins from my pocket into the cup holder. As the sun dipped low in the sky, I drove out through the park with the windows down, breathing in as much of this place as I could. No other cars were on the road. About 500 meters ahead of me, a brown bear slunk out of the forest, glanced my way, and crossed into the trees on the other side.

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This week's piece is by , a former language teacher who now works in communications. His work has appeared in The Lowestoft Chronicle, Gargoyle Magazine Online, LA Family Travel, and TravelBinger. (@treycerwin) This is the third piece from our open submissions call. All words are his.

I save fifty dollars by not taking the private bus from the San José airport, which all the tourists who can’t speak Spanish think is their only option. Instead, I catch an intercity bus to La Fortuna, where I’m headed for the rainforest.

I take a seat. The upholstery is unstained, the legroom ample, and there’s even air conditioning. The bus is not half full when we pull away. All are locals except for me and maybe one or two other travelers who know what they’re doing. No bloggers or honeymooners in sight. I can’t hide a smug grin thinking about those gullible saps getting ripped off back at international arrivals.

Raindrops patter on the window. The steady rhythm reminds me of waves breaking on the Pacific shores of Nicaragua, where I’ve just spent two weeks. I retreated to a quiet beach town unlisted in the guidebook, avoiding the predictable crowd of unwashed gap years battling for the hostel beer pong title. I place my backpack on the shelf above me, pop in my earbuds, and close my eyes.

Something like an hour has passed when I wake. Every seat is now taken, including the one next to me. People are even standing in the aisle. We must have made stops along the way.

I go for my backpack, but can’t seem to reach it. Grumbling, I unbuckle and stand up. There are a few duffels and frayed packs on the shelf, but mine isn’t among them. I beg the pardon of the standing passengers as I squeeze by, searching. Maybe it slid down on these mountain switchbacks. I reach the last row, but still no sign of it. I pace the aisle again.

No, this can’t be happening, I argue with myself. I’m a seasoned traveler. I’ve walked through slums in Rio and sipped tea with armed communists in the Himalayas. I once talked my way out of a citation in Germany, of all places! And anyway, doesn’t Costa Rica have a reputation for being safer than its neighbors?

Other passengers begin to take notice. I ask if they’ve seen a gray Totto backpack. They haven’t. Someone inquires about the contents—wallet, cash, cards, passport, a pair of shoes, and a watch my brother gave me. Everyone winces when I mention the passport, but it’s losing the watch that guts me most.

The driver pulls over for a smoke break. His hair is slicked back, the edge of his collar yellowed. I step out and give an account. He likes my Spanish. He can tell I’ve spent time in this part of the world. “So, you put your bag out of sight and dozed off?” It’s more of an accusation than a question. I ask about the security camera. “It doesn’t work,” he says and takes a long drag from his cigarette. He offers me one, and I almost accept.

Back on board, the woman sitting next to me can’t resist offering some belated advice, saying I should have held my bag in my lap. I tell her that a Colombian taught me an expression for this sort of thing: No das papaya. It has nothing to do with the fruit —more like, don’t make it easy for them. She likes the saying and asks if I’ve spent much time in Latin America. I have.

“You’ve traveled a lot,” she says.

Why, yes. I am quite seasoned.

The bus pulls into the station at La Fortuna. A guy from Florida hands me a folded twenty-dollar bill and wishes me luck. I don’t know what annoys me more —that I am now a charity case or that another gringo beat me at my own game.

I find the police station and file a report. I know I’ll never see my bag again, but it feels like the right thing to do. When the officer learns I was napping while my bag sat unattended, she gives me a punitive stare. “Why didn’t you take the private bus —the one with no stops?” she asks. “That’s what all the tourists do.” Ah, but you see, I’m not a tourist. I’m a seasoned traveler.

She allows me a turn on one of the station’s computers. I cancel my bank cards and send an email to my mother requesting a wire so I can return to San José, replace my passport, and catch the first flight out. The transfer will take at least a day, and tomorrow is Sunday.

“Do you have a place to stay?” asks the officer.

“I have a reservation.” It hasn’t been paid yet.

She offers me a ride. It’s not far, but I accept because it’s still raining. We pass a small church on the way. The design is modern, unlike most in the central plazas of the old Spanish Empire. I feel like entering and begging Saint Anthony of Padua for a miracle. Behind the church, green mountains rise, with their tops hidden in thick cloud cover. I imagine the cascades and thermal springs, the howler monkeys and poison dart frogs.

We pull up to a cottage with a wooden sign above the door that reads Guest House. A middle-aged woman with blonde highlights opens the door. I search her eyes for traces of goodwill. Her mercy is the only thing between me and the streets tonight. Her expression is hard to read.

She invites me to the kitchen table. I explain that my bag was snatched on the bus, that I’ve no means to pay at the moment, but promise to arrange a wire transfer. This time, I leave out the bits about stowing the bag out of sight and the nap.

I’m a seasoned traveler, after all.

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South Africa, known as the Rainbow Nation, is a country you can travel through comfortably and still miss almost entirely. The cliché that “the people make a place” is actually very apt here — I’ve been greeted with enormous warmth throughout my travels in the country and struck by the kindness of strangers. The hallmark sites are hallmarks for a reason. Kruger National Park, Table Mountain, a Rovos Rail journey, and the Cape vineyards: these are all genuinely must-do things. The country’s history, though, is something most outsiders assume they already know, myself included, because it’s been covered internationally and taught in history and geography classes. What became clear to me after my first visit, and after going back almost annually since, is how much more there is to learn and understand about this place.

So when I’m not there, and sometimes when I am, I read. On one of my first trips to Cape Town, I was naive enough to think I had a general grasp of what had gone on here, and what was happening in the country’s past, present and future. Then two things happened. I visited the District Six Museum and learned a range of stories I hadn’t yet read anywhere. And I found Clarke’s Bookshop, a must-visit for anyone in Cape Town, which holds an incredible wealth of books on Africa and on South Africa in particular. That’s what turned me on to the more recent history of the country.

Thankfully, a great deal has been written about this place, from one of the most remarkable humans of the last century to the South African novelists and reporters working now. The Rainbow Nation is a beautiful country, and I wholeheartedly recommend taking the time to visit. But South Africa is far from most places, and my intent with this list, as with all the lists I’ve done, is to give you a sense of the history and the people from wherever you are. And I always love when readers leave their own recommendations in the comments.

Non-Fiction

Long Walk to Freedom – Nelson Mandela Mandela began secretly writing this while imprisoned on Robben Island in 1974. Other prisoners shrunk his six hundred pages into shorthand and smuggled it off the island in a study file, while the copy he buried in the prison yard was later found by guards. He finished it after his release in 1990.

Always Another Country – A memoir of growing up in exile as the daughter of an ANC fighter and what it was like to return to a country that didn’t match what she imagined.

Gangster State – Pieter-Louis Myburgh A definitive account of how patronage networks hollowed out the ANC. It reads like a thriller and explains a lot about contemporary South African politics. It was so powerful that ANC Youth League supporters stormed the launch at Exclusive Books in Sandton and tore up copies.

A Man of Good Hope – A Somali refugee’s route from Mogadishu to Cape Town, reconstructed over years of interviews. This one was tough for me not to finish in a sitting.

Somewhere Over the Rainbow: Travels in South Africa – Gavin Bell Bell crossed the country in the years right after the transition. It might be a little dated now, but like good travel writing, it’s a record of the time and the optimism of the moment.

Fiction

The Promise – Damon Galgut The story follows four funerals across four decades and a single promise made to a Black servant. It is a short but technically thrilling novel.

Ways of Dying – Zakes Mda A professional mourner works the funerals of a nameless township during the violence of the early nineties. Mda writes with a kind of comic surrealism which makes Ways unique.

Coconut – Kopano Matlwa The story follows two young Black women in post-apartheid Johannesburg, one in the northern suburbs and one working a weekend shift in a restaurant there. Matlwa wrote it while she was still in medical school.

Zoo City – A noir set in Johannesburg where the guilty are magically bound to an animal, which sounds ridiculous, but it works very well. It won the Arthur C. Clarke Award in 2011.

A Year in the Wild – James Hendry Two brothers take rookie ranger jobs in a game reserve and narrate the season in alternating emails home to family. It’s clever in its construction and a great behind-the-scenes look at the safari industry. There are two sequels.

Bonus (Ten was not enough, so consider these three as well):

Disgrace by J.M. Coetzee

Country of My Skull by Antjie Krog

Enemy of the People by Adriaan Basson and Pieter du Toit

Also, if you're reading this on Substack and want to read more South African writers, I stumbled on this excellent list by . For the bookstores worth building a trip around, see Books & Bookstores.

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I spent part of July and August in Hokkaido, Japan’s northernmost and second-largest island. It was a place that I had been looking forward to visiting for a long time, and after experiencing some of the overtourism everyone reads about in Honshu on a few of my most recent trips there, I bypassed the mainland entirely. Between a handful of recommendations from contacts I had previously met from Hokkaido’s tourism board and reading ’s atmospheric pieces on the island, I had enough of a direction to just rent a car and go.

Upon reaching the northeasternmost part of the island, we checked into The SUNSET Shiretoko, a no-frills hotel above Utoro where you shower downstairs in the shared onsen and most rooms are shared occupancy. The lack of a shower in the room initially concerned my wife; however, once there, the peacefulness of the place and the views from the rooms and the onsen were incredible. You could see down to the harbor, and a herd of sika deer came by each night to graze in the last of the light, completely unbothered. It was one of the many great places we stayed on the trip, near accessible hiking in the national park, and I cannot think of a single reason not to tell you about it.

The New York Times ran a piece on gatekeeping while I was there, titled “In Travel Hot Spots, Gatekeepers Are Hiding Their Favorite Places.” The piece centered around Copenhagen, Mexico City, and Milan and garnered four hundred-plus comments, with most arguing that their neighborhoods have also recently been ruined by tourism. I can see their points. Although I don’t live directly in Copenhagen (I am about 20 minutes away), places like a seafood restaurant and bar called La Banchina that I took some photos of two summers ago are now in the Times’ new Copenhagen guide and appeared in my feed in two different Substack Notes yesterday. It’s a nice spot, sure, but with so many waterside bars and swimming spots, does everyone need to go there?

A Dane commenting on the piece defended his countrymen, saying that Danes don’t gatekeep but rather “want the tourists to fan out off the beaten path.” More people should share in this mentality. In the past, people used to just travel, experience a place, and come back with their memories and stories to share. Those usually came with recommendations, and if those family or friends made the trip themselves, it was likely that those business owners who provided the great experience the first time would benefit.

Now, with the rise of gatekeeping, there is a contingent of people who visit a place, post about it to collect the engagement, and then withhold the locations or booking information, citing that “they don't want this place to change.” How is that not pulling the ladder up behind you? I understand why people would want to keep something ecologically sensitive, like a beach for turtle hatching, quiet, or respect a community that has asked visitors not to come, and I support doing so for things that might damage the environment or a way of life, especially if there are not already mechanisms in place to restrict it. However, if you genuinely want to keep a place or an experience to yourself, then keep it to yourself. But once you have made the choice to share, you should follow through if someone asks. Choosing not to, just to curate your own brand, is nonsensical, especially when the business that hosted you would probably like the next guest too.

The travel industry does not grow exactly how you think it does. The normal way that growth happens (and overtourism happens) is really due to transport, specifically flights. Just a few weeks ago, United Airlines announced “its largest international expansion in history with ten new destinations in Europe.” Eight of the ten destinations on this new list currently have no non-stop service from the US at all. When those places go from requiring a connection to being a direct booking 4x or 5x a week, that is when the wave of overtourism hits. Look out, Ljubljana. Normally, the corridors precede most of the articles and the influencers. Any writers or influencers who cover these places before the flights arrive are the ones toiling away with hard pitches to publications and minimal views on their blogs to help the destinations become part of a corridor. Meanwhile, places that are easy to reach have crowds coming whether you tag them or not. So United’s new Denver to Paris non-stop is really just adding to it.

So, what does withholding the details of your trip accomplish besides costing the owners and operators there a booking? Eighty percent of international travelers visit ten percent of the world’s destinations, and this is largely due to these corridors, limited vacation time, and the urge to see and do the same things as everyone else.

The whole gatekeeping debate is almost entirely about that ten percent, and I get it. The other 90% of the world is out there, though, with many places already having the capacity to welcome more people than are currently showing up, especially in the shoulder and off seasons. People are going to travel regardless, and the more they hear about these places, the fewer end up in the places that are already under pressure. If you have been somewhere that traditional travel publications are not covering and it is worth going, you should post about it and write about it.

I don’t believe the risk is that, by doing so, too many people will follow and spoil the place. I think the risk is that by not doing so, people never learn about the alternatives — and there are so many.

Speaking of not gatekeeping! A restack or forwarding this story is the single best thing you can do to spread the word, even if you do so in disagreement.

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This week's piece is by , a geologist, historical researcher, and lifelong traveler whose nonfiction writings have appeared on Medium and Substack. This is the second piece from our open submissions call. All words and lead photograph are his.

Strolling around the circular exterior of the meditation hall, we interrupt a quiet family moment. A teenage boy, dressed in orange robes and sporting a freshly shaven head, leans against the structure as though relying on it to keep him from collapsing. At his side is someone I assume is his mother, her face sad in that enduring way that parents display when sharing a child’s grief. She holds out a cell phone to his ear. At his feet sits an older girl I take to be a sister, touching his leg and looking despondent.

Over the phone, I hear a quavering, old voice. A grandmother, perhaps? The boy’s face is turned away so the wall can hide it, his shoulders sagging. It is one day before the Buddhist New Year, a time when many boys in Sri Lanka are being initiated into the monastic ranks and separated from their families for the first time.

Kandy is a city camouflaged.

It remains hidden until you are already in the middle of it. One moment, you are swerving through deep canyons and verdant cliffs, at your side, the brown river carrying mountains to the distant sea, bit by bit. Concrete buildings with rebar protruding from the top floor decorate the roadside. Signs in loopy, artistic Sinhala script announce food, hardware, and wedding dresses.

Then, suddenly, the urban heart is all around, thick with buses and rickshaws and people. Nowhere on the subcontinent can you just enter a city and stroll peaceably down the street. Pressing crowds, noise, and color smack you in the face the moment you step off the bus and shout, Wake up!

I pose a question to someone standing at a bus stop. He is quick to smile, nodding his head in that characteristic South Asian way as he talks. Almost as though I said something funny.

Kandy is a city that resisted while others fell.

Long after the Portuguese had seized the coastlines of Sri Lanka, the Kandyan kings remained in power from this well-defended, mountainous capital. The Dutch, better suited for land warfare and with the same urge to place the entire island under their domination, also bogged down in the surrounding hills and valleys, succumbing to disease and harried by Kandyan snipers.

It took the stiff upper lip of the British army to finally take Kandy (after two attempts) and officially bring all of Sri Lanka under the colonial regime in 1815. Over 2,500 years of indigenous rule were signed away by representatives of the royal family, while the last king was carted away to exile in southern India.

We are in an open rooftop restaurant. The city, with its footprint contorted by the army of hills that press in from all sides, lies below. This scenic venue is apparently popular for young Sri Lankans, who dress in smart-casual attire to impress their romantic partners and work buddies with rounds of beer and lively, sometimes flirtatious conversation. The feeling of celebration and relaxation is strong. The Buddhist New Year falls on a Wednesday, and I’ve been told that many people have taken the whole week off.

The server approaches the table with our meal. A raven, perched on the patio guardrail, croaks in anticipation. The server wags his finger at the bird and turns to us.

“He knows he can’t go on the tables, and that if he is patient, I will feed him later. We’ve had a talk.”

There is a dance program at the community center on the afternoon we arrive. Each performance is a reenactment of a ritual or historical event. The women are resplendent in deep blues, greens, and purples for the Peacock Dance; the cutting and sifting of grain is simulated in the Kulu natuma, or ‘Harvest Dance’; and the Raban natuma showcases acrobats spinning multiple plates balanced on sticks.

It is difficult, perhaps impossible, not to pause for a moment at the edge of Kandy Lake, known in Sinhala as Kiri Muhada or the ‘Sea of Milk’. This water body frames part of downtown, and the city’s famous Buddhist temples dot its northern side. It is not a natural feature but was constructed by the last king of Kandy in 1807, and seems perfectly suited to complement the valley’s aesthetics. We take refuge here from a rainstorm, sheltering in the covered patio of the now shuttered Ulpen Geya, or old royal bathhouse.

Kandy is a magnet for Buddhist pilgrims.

There is a traveler’s joy in not knowing exactly what to expect from a place. I knew there was a relic of Buddha here, but I was unaware of how important it was.

The Sri Dalada Maligawa, on the north side of Lake Kandy, is the home of the Sacred Tooth Relic. This tooth was recovered from the body of Gautama Buddha after his physical death, and moved several times to avoid capture during wars in India, finally making its way to Sri Lanka. It was said that the governing body that possessed the tooth would rule the entire island, a prophecy that has largely held true since.

We enter the temple after sundown, when the cleansing rituals are being held. It is the New Year, a deeply auspicious time, and families with newborn babies are here to make offerings and seek blessings for their offspring. We line up with them and other tourists to enter the inner sanctums and circumambulate the regal container holding various relics, including the tooth. There is hushed reverence and no photography or dallying allowed. Then on to a table laden with flowers, candles, and other items, with thick crowds of worshippers and immobile, seated monks.

But it is downstairs where I capture the most human moment. Three men are in charge of drumming, maintaining a constant, slow beat throughout this long ritual. The man I take to be the leader, half hidden behind a pillar, is trying his hardest to break the serious composure of the other two. He makes rude faces and silently mouths words at them. I watch them struggle mightily to maintain the rhythm without laughing. Perhaps he torments them like this every night.

Temples dot the hills around the city. We visit Sri Maha Bodhi Viharaya, a relatively recent construction with the largest Buddha statue in town. From here, the whole valley can be viewed. The air has a freshness to it, a cool mountain atmosphere absent from the humid, low-lying plains and coastal regions.

At Asgiri Maha Vihara Pirivena, where the freshly minted adolescent monk is saying goodbye to his family, the interior of the meditation hall is awash with imagery and color, with its dark wooden wall panels and detailed ceiling art.

Another floor houses a step-by-step user’s guide to the stages of human life, in decade increments. Each is labeled. I decide that I don’t like the look of my own decade, tipping into the ‘aged’ phase, which shows a person slightly stooped over and weak. I prefer the ‘knowledge’ phase from 40–50 years, displaying a person with a strong, upright stance and holding a book. Surely that’ll be me forever.

Just as depressing is the painting on the adjoining wall, which shows the ten stages of a body’s decomposition. Each is labeled with a grisly description. Buddhism never fails to remind us of how temporary and unnoteworthy we are. When I was young and saw such images in religious artwork, I felt safely distant from contemplating my own mortality. Now, there is a vague tug of melancholy. Not because I will fail to secure any real estate in Nirvana. I hope I’ve done enough to mean something to somebody.

We stop to eat a street-food meal that looks like lasagna but tastes like curry —bought more to escape a sudden downpour than because we are hungry. The name of the dish is written on the window in Sinhala, so I never learn what it is called. I wash mine down with a spicy chai, the flavor that unerringly places me in this specific part of the world.

I don’t gush about many cities. Nearly everywhere has a tedious or ugly side. Modern urban development is invariably bursting at the seams, choosing the utilitarian management of an ever-increasing population over aesthetics.

Somehow, little Kandy, nestled in its green valley fortress, has escaped that. Not just parts of it, but the whole thing. Not in the mold of a picture-perfect Swiss village, but in the brash, overstimulating South Asian way, where bursts of noise and color count for everything.

For more cultural experiences worth building a trip around, see Cultural Immersion.

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My mother died of breast cancer when I was fifteen. For the entirety of my childhood, she shot rolls of film and had them developed the way everyone did then. For the first few years, she put them into albums sorted by year, but then life kept happening, faster yet with the birth of my sister, so the envelopes stacked up quicker than she could sort them. When she started chemotherapy, she began bringing a duffle bag of them to her appointments. At first, she was still trying to build the albums. Later, as she lost the feeling and dexterity in her fingers, she wrote only the places and dates on the outside of the envelopes, so that somebody would know what was inside them.

About ten years later, before I moved overseas for work, I decided to scan everything. It took a long time, but I got them all done, and when I finished my family’s, I did my grandparents’ which also included anything that predated them, and then an aunt and uncle’s. I have never once regretted the hours spent hunched over a scanner archiving something like 40,000 photos. I can look at photographs of my mother whenever I want to. But it was a different time back then, and what I was scanning was the entire photographic output of several lifetimes.

A few weeks ago, I was in Hong Kong, and having a coffee in my hotel room while deciding whether to bring my camera out. Somewhere in the indecision, the question itself struck me as an interesting thing to ask other people, so I put it on Notes, closed my phone, and went out.

A lot of people replied.

I was surprised by how many said this is already how they travel, that they have done it for years and do not find it difficult. I trust people with their own answers, particularly because I have traveled with family and friends who might take at most a handful of photographs across an entire week and do not appear to have missed anything by it. However, this is not really a representative sample. These were people who chose to answer a question on a platform built on reading, which is close to the opposite of other platforms that fill your feed with vacation photographs. I also suspect that some people viewed this as a question with a right and a wrong answer. I don’t.

Around 1.95 trillion photographs will be taken this year, which comes out to about 5.3 billion a day.1 At the peak of film photography, the world managed an estimated 75 billion in a year. Borrowing from the language of climate overshoot, we pass the entire annual output of the peak of the film era now around the fourteenth of January, and that date arrives earlier every year. Who are these all for?

“Why if you are not going to post could you not take pictures or videos for your memories? I don’t have social media except this so I never post holidays. I still want to commemorate the trip. That said, not being able to would not change anything. I would still go.”

—

In my haste I had typed a question that was really two, and B. Scott Chapman is right; they are not the same thing at all.

A study by Diehl, Zauberman, and Barasch2 found that photographing an experience makes people enjoy it more, because hunting for the shot makes you look harder at what is in front of you. They also found that it has a limit. When the thing in front of you is already holding your attention, the benefit goes away (think concert pictures and videos).

The results get even worse once you add a future audience. Shooting with a plan to share raises self-presentational concern, and people photographing to ultimately share it somewhere else had a worse time than people photographing for themselves.3

I had ultimately decided to take the camera and walked the route I have walked many times before to the Foreign Correspondents’ Club, where I had work to do. On the way, I photographed some women cleaning produce in an alley and a few buildings I have more than likely shot before. There was nothing there I had not already seen.

I ate surrounded by framed photographs and articles, most of them somebody’s assignment from a decade or two ago. My camera was in the bag next to me. I opened the Substack app while waiting for the check, and the replies had come in faster than I expected.

I found myself nodding along and replying in agreement because every answer that came in sounded right to me.

“Some of the most blissful moments traveling were marveling at the beauty and wonder before me without interrupting or spoiling the moment to take a picture. I keep those moments in my memory bank years later.”

—

As many more like these came through, I thought of the handful of trips I took without a camera and how much I still can remember about them. Brad Yonaka had also done both but emphasized the impact of time.

“I would say it is both good and bad. Good in that I was more focused and free to enjoy what I was doing, and kept a better journal. Bad in that there is no visual left for me to refer to. Not a big deal at first, but as the years pass, those visual references get fuzzier.”

—

Which made me wonder what it is he wants back, and what I would want back after that amount of time had passed. Karl Plesz had already started doubting the pictures themselves.

“I’m at the point now where I look at past photos of vacations and think, “How is this any different from the thousands of other pictures someone took of this exact spot?”

—

I have taken plenty of those. put it more bluntly, asking whether the question meant going to Paris and not taking twenty photos of the Eiffel Tower that I would never look at again. I think where photographs have been useful to me is when they bring back a person I met somewhere or something specific that happened, which is what I imagine Brad would like to hold on to. I have never gone back to a picture of the Eiffel Tower, but I have gone back to a picture taken on a family trip outside of a TGI Fridays in New Jersey.

When my mother took that picture, she had no idea if it would actually mean something in the future. But it clearly meant something to her in the moment.

In 1825, the United States Post Office opened a dead letter office, which started as a room in Washington for mail that could not be delivered and could not be returned. By the end of the century, more than twenty thousand pieces passed through it every day. Every piece that ended up there had been meant for someone.

In my mother’s lifetime, film made every photograph a decision — whether today was worth bringing a camera along, and if it was, which moment was worth the shot. She did not know which of them would end up mattering or if any would be any good. But it was a physical thing, and she had every reason to assume it would outlast her.

In October 2005, Facebook became the first major platform to offer unlimited photo storage. Every photo site before then still put a limit on how much you could upload, one of the last things keeping any of the old selectivity in place. After that, there was far less reason to choose or sort.

In college, I would bring a point-and-shoot to a party and probably upload the photos to an album the next day. My mother used to order double prints on special occasions and hand a set to my grandparents or mail a few of them to a friend. On Facebook, the equivalent was a tag –the photograph appeared in someone else’s profile. After a while I deleted my account and with it all the photos from the web. A friend joked with me afterward that ninety percent of his ‘photos of him’ disappeared overnight, which was also a pretty accurate description of what had happened.

Then the iPhone arrived in 2007, and you no longer had to decide whether to bring a camera anywhere again. I kept taking photographs after that, including on my phone, but I stopped doing much of anything with them. Soon thereafter, Instagram replaced the album with a feed, meaning photographs were now something you put out to stay visible. Then in 2011, Snapchat let them disappear, and once a photograph could vanish after being opened, it changed from documentation to conversation. In less than a decade, a photograph went from one thing to several things at once and without much in the way of barriers, which is why the question I asked is so laced with connotations.

Some of the replies traced that progression in a single answer.

“I used to take lots of photos. Then realized I never looked at them. I don’t care about posting them to impress others and I don’t care about looking at them again most of the time. Now I take a few of family and that’s about it unless it’s something really impressive.”

—

But not everything about that progression is a loss.

“Never post it, sure. No photos or videos at all, no. As someone with aphantasia4, the only reliable way to remember what it was like in the place I visited is by looking at what I captured.”

—

What kept surfacing, without any additional prompt, was family as the thing that changed the answer entirely and was likely the driving force behind my mother’s work.

“Before becoming a mom, absolutely! After... I really treasure having photos and videos of my little one as they discover the world.”

—

Then Dr. Amber Hull went somewhere I hadn’t.

“One of the most luxurious recent experiences I had was at a silent, phone-free spa in Whistler called Scandinave. Phone free parties and social gatherings are also becoming more popular. As are silent meditation retreats. I see this as a new luxury market.”

—

She is not wrong, and the fact that she can identify it as a market tells you how much everything has changed. Not needing to document your life has become, somehow, evidence that you've made it. As many of the commenters pointed out, that used to be more or less how everyone lived.

The question and the replies that followed have been banging around since I returned from my trip. I thought I was asking something simple, but I realize it was about something else entirely.

A few years ago, I was best man in a wedding. My wife was there, although she was not standing up herself. Professional photographers worked the entire event, and everyone around us had phones out for most of it. After going through the shared iCloud album and the professional photos, we realized that not a single photograph of the two of us together existed. I can still see the dress she was wearing and the way she did her hair, which is what the people who said they carry only their memories would call enough. It probably is. But it is a strange thing to realize that somebody who takes photographs as part of their job did not end up with one of himself and his date.

Of all the photographs from that day, the only one that seemed to be missing was ours.

My mother could not have known that the envelopes she was labeling would end up with me, or what any of it would come to mean to the rest of the family and me. She wrote the dates and places on the outside so that somebody would know what was inside. But she did it as her health declined because she clearly felt it was worth it. She had somebody.

I do not know why I keep shooting. Without children, I do not know where my photographs will ultimately go. The only thing I can do is put them somewhere while I am here to do it; maybe that is all I can do. There is no dead letter office for any of this.

Another 5.3 billion were taken today.

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This week's piece is by Julia Hammond, a UK-based travel writer whose work has appeared in The iPaper, the New Zealand Herald, Wanderlust, and Daily Passport (@juliamhammond). She's been to more than 130 countries. This is the first piece from our open submissions call. All words and photographs are hers.

Sometimes it pays to have a guide. Without one, I’d have walked right past what looked to be an unremarkable —if quite large— bromeliad. The tips of its leaves were brown and curling; it wasn’t in great shape. Yet concealed within its folds was a tiny yellow frog. Endemic to Kaieteur National Park, the Golden Rocket Frog was barely the size of a fingernail. Even with the guide’s help, picking out the two black eyes of the creature that had tucked herself into the shadowy gap between two leaves was no easy task.

I was reminded that travel is as much about those unexpected, unscheduled moments as it is about the famous landmarks we make such long journeys to see. This remote corner of Guyana is home to Kaieteur Falls. The Guyanese claim it is the world’s largest single-drop waterfall by volume, and it was certainly an impressive sight. We stood and watched as the Potaro River poured over a sandstone cliff, tumbling 226 meters down into the plunge pool below. The guide reeled off the statistics —more than 136,200 liters of water cascaded over the falls every second— but this epic moment wasn’t about the numbers.1

To reach this remote spot, most travelers take a flight. A handwritten tally on the National Park office whiteboard recorded the year’s totals: by October, 8,159 visitors had arrived by air compared to a paltry 38 overlanders. Day-trippers were flown up in light aircraft, the kind of planes where you need to disclose your weight and sit where they tell you, to make sure the balance is right and the plane won’t crash. Noisy, uncomfortable and cramped, they’re a far cry from the wide-bodied jets that swoop from continent to continent and make such trips possible within busy lives.

In such a tiny cabin, flying felt raw and stripped back, the preserve of the adventurous —and those well-heeled enough to afford the privilege. Georgetown’s colorful rooftops were soon replaced by trees subdivided into a grid by dead straight dirt roads. Fires burned where sections were being cleared for agriculture. But nature soon took over, as far below us silt-laden rivers carved up tracts of dense rainforest. Aside from a handful of mining concerns that created colorful scars on this pristine landscape, there was little evidence from this height of any human activity. The undulating carpet of trees appeared impenetrable.

Like the trees, the clouds thickened and fat raindrops began to pound the windshield. Distant lightning lit up the sky. Our knuckles paled as they tightened around the seams of our seats. We exchanged nervous smiles in an attempt to convince each other that we hadn’t made the worst mistake of our lives.

And then, out of nowhere, there it was. A river of liquid chocolate that seemed almost motionless. A faulted escarpment, its gnarly face partially shrouded by cloud. A narrow column of water cascading over the edge, the wind catching at its edges. Beneath, an irregularly shaped pond surrounded by sepia-hued boulders.

We touched down on an unkempt airstrip that was barely keeping the grass at bay and set off behind our guide down a sandy trail that wound through clumps of red sundews; these endemic flypaper plants trap their prey with the sticky hairs that coat their leaves. A sign read Boy Scout’s View; it led to an overlook that gave us our first glimpse of the waterfall from the ground. The cascade itself was in shadow, though sunlight intensified the yellow leaves of the shrubs and trees that clustered at the trail’s edge. As far as the eye could see, it was just trees and rock, save for this single, magnificent spear of white water and spray that pounded and puddled to form a tannin-rich plunge pool. Even from this distance, the thunderous roar of the water drowned out our conversations, demanding attention.

We moved on, to Rainbow View. Closer than the first overlook, the sound intensified, and the impact of the water on the rock strata was more apparent. What had appeared a homogenous shade of brown from a distance became striated blocks of caramel, coffee and cream. The layered sedimentary rock became a series of unevenly spaced steps under the relentless assault of the flow of water. Yet above the falls, the river was calm, flowing around low hummocks of grass right up to the rock lip. But once it tumbled over the edge, gravity gifted the waterfall its extraordinary power.

There were no barriers here, save for those erected by our own common sense. Those with a head for heights could sit on the edge of the gorge, their feet dangling; others held back, scared of what could happen with a single slip or trip. Regardless, everyone’s gaze flicked between the falls and the canyon; each successive spur was a subtly different shade as the color morphed from emerald green to a washed-out slate blue. Bromeliads, palms and countless species of endemic trees formed a lush, riparian forest.

Despite the impressive nature of the waterfall, it was dry season and the water level was low. Huge boulders had piled up on the riverbed, carried there when the Potaro was in spate and dumped when they became too much to transport. They’d remain there until the river chipped away at them, or floodwater moved them downstream.

Our final stop brought us in line with the edge of the falls’ rocky overhang. Here, the trees parted; erosion from the water as it splashed back on itself had scooped out the rock behind the falls to create a marked undercut. Over time, this faulted cliff would become more precarious and eventually collapse, allowing the falls to retreat upstream. It had been this way for millions of years, a humbling thought that put our own short lifespans into sharp focus.

As we walked back to the airstrip, the guide paused one last time. In this biodiverse space, one bird stands out among more than three hundred species: the Guianan Cock-of-the-Rock. And I mean that literally —the striking orange plumage of the male and its Mohican-like crown make it easy to spot among the trees, and we were privileged to witness a pair. We watched them until it was time to go.

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Copenhagen

You are riding a rented bike through the city, though you ran into a parked car twenty minutes ago, but if you’re being honest, that fifteen-dollar cardamom bun you were eating with one hand was not helping your steering. At ten at night, it is still light out, and you have missed your dinner reservation by two hours because no one mentioned how late the sun sets. Ultimately you’re fine with this though since you are not sure whether you had to forage for the lichen yourself or not.

Sicily

Dua Lipa got married here earlier this summer, and the island didn’t seem to mind, so your friend is getting married here too. The twelve-page itinerary she provided is on the passenger seat of the Fiat you rented, and the welcome bag includes limoncello and a hand-drawn map of the old town. A man on a Vespa speeds past you on a blind curve carrying a child and two grocery bags. Two hours later, the hand-drawn map has not worked for you, and now you are being honked at on a one-way street and are considering opening the limoncello rather than trying to reverse.

Albania

You are discovering it this year, along with twelve million other people who saw the same TikTok and two others who “discovered it from a friend’s yacht." Your drone is charged, and your caption “why is nobody talking about thisss” is already written, but now you are debating if the content is the beaches or the island. The beaches themselves are stunning, as are the concrete bunkers on every hillside, which you will describe to friends back home as “random.” You ordered the homemade raki because it looked like white Gatorade, and now you know that it is not.

Barcelona

You are here for the architecture, by which you mean the Sagrada Familia, which was finally topped off after one hundred and forty-four years in time for the cool Pope. You also wanted to hit the beach, and the only free space was wedged between two families who appear to be hosting separate birthday parties. Afraid to not remember where your towel is, you don’t even swim. That night you head to a tapas bar where you are the only one eating patatas bravas at seven p.m. because dinner does not start here until ten. On the walk home, a local empties a water gun into your face.

Budapest

Hungary got a new hot prime minister, which happened to be the same week you booked your flights. It is a hundred degrees out, and yet you are sitting in a thermal bath next to a man playing chess in a Speedo that predates the European Union. Last night you went to a ruin bar with a dentist’s chair for a barstool and a chandelier made of bicycle wheels.

London

London isn’t in Europe. It left, remember?

Montenegro

You are ahead of the curve, and you know this because you have told everyone. Montenegro is the new Croatia, which was the new Greece, which was the new Italy, which is still Italy but now charges admission to the Trevi fountain. You have a beach mostly to yourself and have found a restaurant other tourists haven’t, according to you, although it has four thousand reviews and a laminated English menu. If you have some time later, you will try to find a local who can actually tell you how to get to Casino Royale.

Ibiza

You’re yelling at the person next to you that you saw DJ Grëtzl at a warehouse in Berlin, but that this is next level. A bottle of water costs thirty euros, so you have instead bought two pills called BamBams for fifty euros that look like Flintstones vitamins from a man in the bathroom who accepted Venmo. You are shirtless and so is every other man here, and you are all built the same way, which is either very well or not at all. Tomorrow you will do a sound bath on a cliff and post something about wellness.

Sardinia

You are eating pecorino in a mountain village where you stopped hiking after a man who is a hundred and four walked past you carrying firewood. You’re here for the longevity, so you’re drinking cannonau straight from the bottle. It’s the antioxidants, you tell yourself, though it’s also because you offended the waiter by saying you couldn’t eat the pane carasau due to a gluten allergy. You asked an old man his secret, and he told you to mind your own business, which may in fact be it. You are going to live forever, or at least long enough for next summer. 👙

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I was waiting to board a train at Shanghai Hongqiao Railway Station in August 2014 when I received a call from my friend who used to live in Hong Kong. I picked up, since there was no logical reason he would be calling me at half past seven in the morning unless it was something urgent. Upon answering, he asked me if I was sitting down. I told him I was just about to go to the bathroom and was trying to decide between the squatting toilet or the western one, so that was yet to be decided. He went on to tell me that Cathay Pacific was releasing a promotion at eight o’clock to celebrate winning Skytrax’s World’s Best Airline award for the fourth time. The drop, he said, was 2,014 round-trip business class or premium economy tickets at $100 HKD or about twelve dollars each, and he would text me the link.

My train to Hefei for a business meeting was departing just after the sale opened, so I knew if I was to have any chance, I would have to enter the site right away. I milled by the gates waiting to board, and as the clock ticked down, I tried pulling up the link. Sure enough, there were flights to Sydney, New York, and London in premium economy for $100 HKD and to cities like Osaka and Bangkok for the same in business class. At 8 am, as I descended an escalator to board the high-speed rail that would ferry me across the flatlands east of Shanghai, the sale went live, and after clicking to purchase was greeted with a message that the page was not available. This, however, was a common occurrence behind China’s great firewall and in an era of 3G and 4G signals. Not knowing what it was, I turned on my VPN, which was set to the United States, and got the same message. As I sat in my window seat on the train, dejected, I had one final thought and changed my VPN to Hong Kong. The page opened.

As the train that would ferry me at close to three hundred kilometers an hour pulled out of the station, I feverishly typed in information knowing full well the signal would soon break between towers or within tunnels. I found the one I had been targeting: Sydney, for dates in November when I happened to know my uncle and cousin would be traveling there. As the sprawl of Shanghai sped past, the page reloaded to display a confirmation message. In November, I would fly to Sydney on the best airline in the world, and it had only cost me twelve dollars.

I then spent the rest of the train ride to Hefei figuring out how to explain to my employer that I would need an additional week off in November

Cathay Pacific never won the top spot again. After 2014, the award rotated among the usual names: Qatar, Emirates, and Singapore Airlines. A few years later I moved from Shanghai, and Cathay Pacific had become just the airline I told my story about rather than something I flew. In 2019, amid the upheaval that consumed Hong Kong that summer, Cathay lost its CEO. Months later, COVID arrived, and the airline cut a quarter of its workforce and shut down Cathay Dragon, its regional subsidiary that was often my carrier from Shanghai to Hong Kong, after 35 years. To my surprise last year, Cathay had climbed back to third in Skytrax.

Last week, I flew Cathay again.

The problems began before we departed for the airport. Upon check-in 48 hours before departure, despite being new Cathay members, we were unable to check-in early, pick our seats, or assign our membership to our booking as we were told by the online agent it was impossible to use our membership on the booking until they have verified that I was, in fact, a human. Frustrated, I told my wife it was ok: check-in opened 24 hours prior for everyone, even us androids. My attempt the next day got me slightly further until I was greeted by errors and bold red fonts that indicated that I was trying to do something they absolutely would not allow. I once again got on the chat feature with an online agent and politely explained that we are flexible people, stressing the fact that we were indeed people and that if they could just confirm an aisle/middle anywhere on the aircraft we’d handle the rest at the airport. Naturally, the agent explained to me they had a better solution, and that was to divide the guests in the booking up and seat us randomly around the plane.

At Heathrow, after boarding but before take off, I asked the man who was sitting in the aisle next to my wife if he minded switching; I had ultimately gotten into a nice aisle myself, so the trade was fair and was eagerly made. The plane pushed back 25 minutes late, taxied to the runway, and then stopped. The pilot came on and announced we had a technical fault and would be brought back to the gate. Once we had returned, he came back on to add in his same measured tone that Heathrow had a curfew of 11:30 pm, and so if the plane was not fixed by 11:10 pm we would not fly. It was not resolved, and we deplaned into an empty terminal, taken back through immigration, collected our bags, and put onto buses and driven to a nearby hotel. Which I did while simultaneously trying to coordinate with the hotel to allow our other family who was inbound on another flight to still check in under my name. At 3 am our heads finally hit a pillow.

Calling what followed a slow drip of information would be too complimentary. Having heard that breakfast would be at 9, we roused ourselves to eat and returned to the room. In the app, it showed our flight had been rescheduled for the same time at 7 pm. Then, a half hour later, we were rebooked completely on a route that would make a 12-hour nonstop now 20 hours via Kuala Lumpur, departing at 9:30 pm, and cost us two days. I called Cathay, and the lady assured me that not only was there nothing else possibly available to get to Hong Kong even outside of their alliance, but she could also give us the most random seats possible on Malaysia Airlines.

It was around this time my wife began referring to them as Cathay Horrific.

Given the later departure, I called the front desk and asked how late check-out could be extended to and was told not only that check-out was in 10 minutes, but lunch had started, and so if we wanted to eat we should go down. In fact, there would be a representative for Cathay Pacific there who would update us all. We never saw or heard from another representative from Cathay Pacific again. When the buses did arrive, they had been instructed by Cathay to take us not to the airport but to another hotel, which took an additional thirty minutes to sort out. After languishing at the airport for six and a half hours, we boarded our flight to Kuala Lumpur.

This first leg was now 14 hours, but I had at least secured seats together from the gate agent. Seated next to us in our row of three was a lady with two lap infants. We wedged ourselves in as I speculated wildly as to how this was going to work. Eventually, her husband came and collected the younger child and left to go to another part of the plane. They had been split up too. I offered to swap our middle but they had the bassinet in the other seat so could not give it up. The staff or others in that row found inconveniencing themselves unnecessary. The child who remained could not have been more than a month from turning two, which is the limit for a lap infant. The child was so big that the flight staff checked her passport again before take off. I had been only slightly dejected to now be flying during the World Cup final rather than watching it over dim sum, but the child next to us kicked my wife, me, and the seat in front of her like she was playing in it.

We landed at Kuala Lumpur and sat on the tarmac for another hour waiting for a gate to clear while she got in a few more. By 3 am, two days later than we were due to arrive, our heads finally hit a pillow in Hong Kong.

In 2014 I bought a twelve-dollar ticket to Sydney with 3G and a VPN and considered myself to be at the top of my travel game. Writing this, I realize how little of that story was actually about me. Cathay was just a great airline with great systems. I know far more about travel now than I did then, but none of it matters if the airline on the other end is a shell of what it was. 🛬

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My guide was standing beside the Aswan High Dam, talking about the Soviets. Behind him, the Lotus Flower rose seventy meters into the sky, five concrete petals built by Soviet architects to commemorate their role in the dam’s construction. When the West refused to fund the project in the 1950s, the Soviet Union stepped in with more than a billion dollars in loans and sent its own engineers and heavy equipment to get it built. My guide was proud of the engineering and its control over the Nile. He assured me that if I wanted to swim in the north I could, but that crocodiles, they had no way to pass.

Aswan itself was easy to like. The corniche ran along the east bank, offering views across to Elephantine Island. The souk behind it was busy with a local hum, narrow streets selling much more than spices, prayer mats, and Mo Salah football shirts. Fueled by street koshari a mash of rice, macaroni, lentils, and chickpeas mixed together I spent two days walking and taking photographs before hiring a driver to go south.

Abu Simbel is 280 kilometers into the desert, near the Sudanese border. Since 1997, when militants killed sixty-two people at the Temple of Hatshepsut in Luxor, tourist vehicles traveling the road have had to register with the Tourism Police and pass through checkpoints along the highway. The road closes to tourist traffic after five in the evening. You leave early, and you need to be accompanied by a driver and guide.

The drive is long, flat, and empty, three and a half hours of open desert where you can see the road ahead for miles without another car on it. The checkpoints were orderly, with only a few words exchanged between the driver and the officer, while our documents were all checked before being waved through.

Ramesses II had the temples carved into the cliff face in the thirteenth century BC, four colossal statues of himself flanking the entrance, each about twenty meters high and visible from across the water in an era when the Nile still ran this far south. In the 1960s, when the Aswan High Dam threatened to submerge them, UNESCO cut the entire complex into blocks and reassembled it sixty-five meters higher on the cliff. The engineering of the rescue is as impressive as the original construction, and these two achievements tend to compete for attention.

After the temple, we went looking for lunch and found it down a side street in the town, a small place with a few tables out front. The man who ran it served us and then sat down across from my guide to talk. I ate fried fish with tahini — sesame paste thinned with lemon juice and garlic — rice, and a salad while a small boy ran between the tables. From my seat I could see trucks on the road carrying Sudanese men in the back. The border was twenty kilometers away, and Wadi Halfa, the first town on the other side, was sixty-five.

The next morning I hired a different driver to take me north to Luxor, a journey of about 245 kilometers that most tourists do on a Nile cruise, watching the same landscape pass from the deck of a boat with a drink in hand. I was doing it by car, which is a different experience.

We set off while it was still dark. The first stop was Kom Ombo, about an hour north of Aswan, a double temple built during the Ptolemaic period and dedicated on one side to Sobek, the crocodile god, and on the other to Horus. The Nile cruise ships were docked along the bank with passengers eating breakfast on deck, but I had the temple to myself before they disembarked. The museum next door has mummified crocodiles from an era when they still swam this stretch of the river.

As we left Kom Ombo and started north, the driver glanced at my camera on the seat beside me. For this next stretch, he said, it was probably best not to take any photos. I told him I understood.

The road snaked through agricultural country along the Nile. Children darted out of sugarcane fields and banana groves that lined the right side of the road; everything was green after two days of desert between Aswan and Abu Simbel. We shared the road with tuk-tuks, pickup trucks, and donkey carts stacked with produce. Speed bumps appeared every hundred meters or so through the villages.

I noticed graffiti on some of the street signs — a four-fingered hand, spray-painted in black. I asked the driver about it. It was a symbol of the Muslim Brotherhood, he said. That was part of why he had asked me to keep the camera away. He had no idea if any of them were still around, but in his mind, it was better not to find out.

On the back of a tuk-tuk pickup cab, I saw a large stencil of Saddam Hussein’s face. I asked the driver about that too. Oh yes, he said, Saddam is quite admired here. He stood up for the Arabs. He said it as it was obvious, and reached for the stereo and moved on to the next song.

Driving through these small towns, slowed to cycling pace by the speed bumps, brought me closer to life along the Nile’s banks than anything else on the trip had. This was a different Egypt than the cities I had visited, and further still from that depicted in the temples.

At Edfu, we crossed the Nile and turned west, leaving the river road behind for a newer highway that cuts inland through the desert toward Luxor. The government has been upgrading this road as part of a national infrastructure push, and it was wider and faster than even the road down to Abu Simbel.

While the checkpoints along the Abu Simbel road had been formal and part of a system with a history and a reason behind it, the checkpoints on the Luxor-Aswan highway were something else — police officers standing beside cones in the road, stopping cars, collecting money, and waving them on. Fifty Egyptian pounds at each stop, the driver told me, and there were enough stops between here and Luxor that it added up to a meaningful share of his fare.

He reached into the center console and pulled out a high-visibility vest, neon yellow with Chinese characters printed on the back. It had the logo of China Energy Engineering Corporation, one of the state-owned companies building solar installations across Upper Egypt, including a 500-megawatt plant at Kom Ombo and a massive energy storage facility near Aswan, both adjacent to the highway we were driving on. I asked him about his new fashion. He explained that these informal checkpoints had sprouted up along the road, and by wearing the vest, he could tell the officers he was just a driver taking a worker to a site, and not have to pay the “toll”. I asked if it worked. So far, he said, he had had pretty good luck with it.

I was wearing a button-down and sunglasses, and it occurred to me that I could pass easily enough for someone being driven to a construction site. At the first checkpoint he pulled over, had a brief conversation with the officer, who leaned down and looked at me in the back seat. I raised my hand in a small wave and nodded. He waved us through.

This happened several more times over the next hour and worked every time. We stopped at a gas station along the highway, and the driver got out, still wearing the vest, and stood smoking a cigarette while I had a drink. I asked him what he was actually saying to them when they stopped us. He smiled. Just that you are an engineer who is running late, he said.

As we approached Luxor the desert gave way to the city gradually, the road filling with traffic until we were fully enclosed by the hum of entrepreneurship in the city center. He dropped me at my hotel, shook my hand, and told me to let him know if I ever needed a ride again. I told him I would, and thought about thanking him in Mandarin for good measure. 🦺

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Hi,

It’s been a little over two weeks since you last heard from me, which is the longest gap since this newsletter began. There’s a reason for it, and today I finally get to show you.

For the past few months, I have been building something, and it can be summarized in one statistic: 80% of travelers visit the same 10% of destinations around the world. None of this will surprise you, but the extent of it is unbelievable. The famous places grow more crowded every year while the rest of the world goes largely unvisited, even as much of it becomes easier to reach, safer, and more interesting than it has ever been. A traveler willing to look past the usual list has more of the world available to them right now than at any point in history.

This is what Scott Monaco is for: covering these places well, and making them feel as reachable as they actually are. The writing stays here, as it always has — nothing about this newsletter changes (although there was a refresh here, too). What is new is scottmonaco.travel, which went live this week and the things that come with it. Have a look around when you have a minute.

That said, the tent is now getting bigger. A larger platform means more stories from more corners of the map, more opportunities for the destinations that deserve attention, and more opportunities for you.

The Open Call

Scott Monaco is now a publication, and it carries more bylines than mine. You’ve already seen the first guest work appear here and here in recent months. Today, that becomes formal: from now through July 31, submissions are open to everyone.

Essay — 1,000 to 3,000 words of personal narrative or reported feature grounded in firsthand experience. Pays $200.

Photo Essay — 6 to 15 documentary images with 700 to 1,500 words of prose, telling a single story. Pays $200.

Humor — 500 to 1,000 words, travel-related. Pays $50.

Every submission is read blind. Your name, bio, and links are collected by the form and set aside until after the decision is made, which means the work is judged on the work. Decisions go out on a rolling basis, and accepted contributors are paid within a week of publication and featured on the main site with a bio and links to their own platforms. Work you've self-published on your own newsletter or blog is welcome.

Full guidelines, eligibility, and formatting details are on the submission page.

Who Should Submit

You do not need to think of yourself as a travel writer. If you write about travel, culture, food, art, history, or daily life in the Global South or the less-traveled world, this call includes you. That is true whether you're writing about the country you live in or one you traveled to. What matters is firsthand experience and a real story. If you're unsure whether your story fits, spend a few minutes on scottmonaco.travel to understand the mission and the types of experiences we cover.

I read constantly, and some of the best writing about these places is being published by people doing it entirely on their own. This call is a way to pay for that work and put it in front of readers who come here looking for exactly it.

Where This Comes From

There’s precedent for this. When and launched Strange Pilgrims, they described it as “attempting something rare” — a reader-supported, ad-free literary magazine that charges no submission fees and pays its writers. By all accounts, it has worked, and watching them build it has been genuinely inspiring to me.

When I look at travel writing, at destinations that need coverage and rarely get it commissioned, at the talent already writing about these places on their own, I believe the same mechanics can work here. I hope that reading this, you believe it too, whether that means submitting your work or becoming a paid subscriber who helps fund it.

And in a happy piece of timing, ’ summer reading window is open right now. If you have literary work (fiction, essays, flash) I recommend you send it to them.

How This Gets Paid For

Contributor payments come from paid subscriptions. When you upgrade, your subscription goes toward paying the writers and photographers whose work you’ll read here, along with the time it takes to read and evaluate every submission properly.

Paid subscribers also get year-round submission access. When this open call closes on July 31, paid subscribers can keep submitting in every category, at the same rates, through the paid subscriber’s link on the guidelines page.

Subscribe now

What's Next

New work from me resumes next week, and I’m sitting on stories from a recent trip that I’m very excited to share with you soon. Guest pieces from this call will publish as they’re ready.

The goal now is to put this call in front of as many people as possible who might want to submit. If you know a writer or photographer whose work belongs here, please share this with them. Together, let’s tell the stories from the other 90%.

— Scott

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Wimbledon is one of the few major sporting events in the world where you can show up the day of and buy a ticket at face value. All tickets sold through The Queue, including Centre Court, No. 1 Court, and Grounds Passes, are at face value with no dynamic pricing or service fees. A Grounds Pass during the opening week costs only £33. The cheapest Centre Court seat on opening day is £80. If you can get to southwest London and you are willing to wait, you can get in.

I have done this and have gotten Centre Court tickets. I have also been turned away, or more accurately, I turned myself away after a steward told me my queue number was unlikely to get me through the gates before mid-afternoon. Both experiences were well worth the trip, and both taught me something about how The Queue works and why it remains one of the most interesting ticketing systems in professional sports.

In 2023, one of my good friends was in London visiting family, and we made the plan to meet up and arrive at The Queue between 5 and 6 am. We took the District Line to Southfields and walked the five minutes to Wimbledon Park, where the stewards issued us our Queue Cards numbered somewhere in the five thousands. Clouds were overhead, and the weather was cool, which I would later understand was one of the reasons we got as lucky as we did.

The Queue is well-run in a way that is specifically British. There are food vendors and coffee vans, water refill stations, portable toilets, left luggage lockers, and stewards around the clock. It is polite and orderly. The Queue operates according to a formal code of conduct that governs tent sizes, noise levels, and how long you can leave to use the bathroom (30 minutes). If you have ever wondered what it would look like if the national love of a good queue were given its fullest institutional expression, this is it. We talked to the couple in front of us from the Netherlands who had been doing The Queue for 23 straight years, which turned out to be common: people who just loved this and came back every summer. We had coffee from one of the vans, caught up on our lives, and talked about the matches and the chance of rain with everyone around us.

Only around 9:30 did the line start to move as people at the front were directed to the ticket counters ahead of the grounds opening at 10 am. Even then, it moved slowly. By 11, we were still inching toward the only visible gate, unsure if we would get through or when. Past that first gate, the line continued to snake through what is called the Queue Village, a stretch of sponsor stands with free samples and games that you pass through on the way to the ticket booths. Then finally we were at the sellers, and the one with no line waved us over. “So, Centre Court, yeah?” he said. I was so tired I just said “What?” and he repeated it: they had Centre Court tickets if we wanted them, and mentioned the section. I was already looking back at my friend in disbelief and said OK, two, and we had our tickets.

We started by walking the surprisingly compact grounds. The matches happening on the outside courts have simple rafters and the intimacy of a high school match on some of the smaller courts. As someone who played competitive tennis until college, watching Ben Shelton’s serve from 30 feet away like it was a high school match felt surreal. We walked the Hill with its big screen, the Tea Lawn, and the Centenary Garden. Huddles of ball boys and girls formed and dispersed on their way to and from the courts.

Then the rain that had been threatening all morning arrived, and the teams moved fast to tarp the uncovered courts and pause the matches. Players whose matches were paused just walked through the crowd carrying their own racket bags. We made our way to the American Express lounge behind No. 3 Court (which is free for any Amex cardmember), but it was full. So we decided to head to Centre Court early, since the first match was not until 1:30.

By the time we found our seats the retractable roof was closed and the rain was steady outside. The Princess of Wales entered the Royal Box, and the crowd rose. Then at 1:15, the screens lit up with a highlight reel of Roger Federer’s eight Wimbledon titles. Federer himself walked in wearing a cream suit and sat down between his wife Mirka and the Princess. The ovation lasted around ninety seconds. He stood there tapping his chest and mouthing “thank you” while the arena made it clear they were not ready for him to have retired the previous year.

Then Elena Rybakina of Kazakhstan took the court to defend her title and the tennis started, and I was watching it from a seat I had purchased seven hours earlier from a tent at the edge of Wimbledon Park. After Rybakina, Aryna Sabalenka played her opening match, and the day ended with Andy Murray. Outside, the rain ultimately canceled the remaining matches that were not on the covered show courts. We were extremely fortunate. Others in line around us who did not get that specific ticket window were likely rained out with their Grounds Passes a few hours after entering. That said, even if that had happened to me, a few hours inside for the price of a Grounds Pass would still have been worth the morning.

At the end of the day, my friend and I exited through the gates and said our goodbyes.

Last year I went back. Again I arrived around 6 am but this time my queue card number was 8,726. I specifically steered clear of July 4, which fell on a Friday and would draw the usual spike of American visitors on holiday in London. I picked a Thursday instead. It was hot and clear and the queue was long before I got there.

I spent the morning reading, talking with people in line, and watching the queue fill up the park. My friend was not in town, so I had come alone. You don’t need others to enjoy the queue. At around 11, without seeing much movement ahead of me, I asked a steward what my number realistically meant. The answer was straightforward based on what he had been hearing from the front: I was unlikely to get in before 3 or 4 pm for Grounds. So I left. I walked back through the park past people still arriving and was on the District Line before noon. Was I disappointed? Sure. Were others in the line bothered by how long it was taking? I am not so sure. People were picnicking, and enjoying company, and taking part in what is arguably a more British tradition than Wimbledon itself: queuing.

Why The Queue Still Exists

The Queue dates back to the open era when the All England Club began holding back a portion of tickets for same-day sale to the general public. The reasoning was (and still is) that the tournament should be accessible to people who could not or did not plan months ahead. Every other major event in professional sports has moved to advance-only sales, dynamic pricing, and secondary markets. I am writing this as FIFA is charging people thousands of dollars to get into a stadium. Wimbledon instead is the outlier. They still hold back around 1,500 show court tickets and several thousand Grounds Passes for same-day sale through The Queue every day of the two-week tournament, at face value to whoever lines up. Over the decades, the AELTC formalized the whole operation with numbered Queue Cards, a code of conduct, 24-hour stewards, and overnight camping rules. They treat The Queue as a feature of the tournament rather than a problem to be solved, and the people who come back year after year seem to agree.

How The Queue Works in 2026

The Championships run from Monday, June 29 through Sunday, July 12. The Queue opens at 2 pm on Sunday, June 28, the day before play begins.

Joining. The Queue forms in Wimbledon Park, a five-minute walk from Southfields station on the District Line. You proceed to the end of the line, receive a numbered and dated Queue Card from the stewards, and that card determines your place until you buy your ticket. Queue Cards are non-transferable and stewards will not issue extras for people who are not physically in line, so arrive with your full group. You need a myWIMBLEDON account set up through the Wimbledon app to scan at the ticket booth, so it’s recommended to do this before you arrive, although you will have a few hours to do it in the queue if you forget.

Overnight vs. morning arrival. A lot of coverage about The Queue focuses on camping overnight, and if you want Centre Court or No. 1 Court tickets on a busy day, overnight is the safe bet. But many people have no desire to sleep in a tent in Wimbledon Park, and for those people the morning is still viable. Arriving before 6 am on a weekday gives you a reasonable shot at show court tickets and a very good shot at a Grounds Pass. The later you arrive and the more popular the day, the less likely you are to get a show court wristband, but Grounds Passes remain available well into the morning on most days.

If you do stay overnight, only two-person tents are permitted. No gazebos, barbecues, or camping stoves. Smoking and vaping are banned. One person must stay with the tent at all times. Stewards wake everyone between 5:30 and 6 am to pack up, and bags go to left luggage (£5 for overnight equipment, £1 for other items, cashless only). Wristbands for show court tickets are distributed starting at 7:30 am, front of the line first.

Know your number. Wimbledon allocates approximately 500 tickets each for Centre Court, No. 1 Court, and No. 2 Court (roughly 1,500 show court tickets) daily through The Queue. If your Queue Card is below 500, you have a very strong chance at Centre Court. Cards in the 500–1,000 range are likely No. 1 Court territory, and 1,000–1,500 puts you in line for No. 2 Court. After 1,500, you are looking at a Grounds Pass. There is some flex in these numbers since people ahead of you may choose a different court depending on the day’s draw, but after about 1,500 show courts are gone. Since 2024, stewards have distributed colored wristbands at 7:30 am that match the exact number of available show court tickets, so by that point you know where you stand.

Buying tickets. The grounds open at 10 am. You keep your Queue Card until you reach the Ticket Sales area, where you buy your ticket with a credit or debit card (no cash). Entry continues until capacity is reached (approximately 42,000), at which point further entry is only possible as people leave. Bags entering the grounds are restricted to 40cm × 30cm × 30cm; anything larger goes to left luggage. For photographers, Wimbledon allows DSLRs and mirrorless cameras with lenses up to 300mm(!), which is very generous for a major sporting event. Between the tennis, the outfits, and the grounds themselves, it is one of the most photogenic days out in sports.

What I Would Tell Someone Going for the First Time

Go on a weekday. This is the single biggest variable. Weekends and holidays draw significantly larger crowds, and your queue number for the same arrival time will be much higher. My Centre Court experience was on a Tuesday, and the line was manageable. My contrasting attempt in this piece was on a weekday too, but with perfect weather, and I was number 8,726. Also worth knowing: July 4 falls during the first week most years, and the US holiday brings a noticeable wave of American visitors to London adding to queue demand around that date.

Understand the week one vs. week two tradeoff. Week one is when every court is in play and the outside courts are packed with main draw singles matches, including seeded players you can watch from a few meters away with a Grounds Pass. But week one also draws the biggest queues for exactly that reason.

Week two has fewer main draw matches on the outside courts as the singles and doubles fields narrow to the show courts, which means the queue is usually shorter and getting in is easier. The outside courts are not empty though, as the wheelchair championships, junior tournaments, and invitation doubles all run during the second week across those same courts, and the wheelchair matches in particular draw real crowds.

Use weather to your advantage, but understand the risk. Overcast skies and rain forecasts thin the queue considerably, because most people (tourists) imagine Wimbledon as a sun-and-strawberries affair and stay home when the forecast looks gray. Fewer people in line means a lower queue number. But there is that risk. The day I got Centre Court, it started to pour a few hours into play, and every match on the uncovered courts was canceled. Anyone with a Grounds Pass had very little tennis to watch. Centre Court and No. 1 Court have retractable roofs and kept playing, which meant I was fine, but it was a reminder that weather works both ways; it helps you get in and it can ruin what you came for.

You do not have to go in the morning. By mid to late afternoon, the main matches are underway or finished, and there is little chance of a show court ticket through The Queue. But if you simply want to experience Wimbledon and catch the tail end of play, joining the queue after 5 pm for late entry is a real option. Grounds Passes may still be available, the queue moves fast because morning visitors are already leaving, and once inside you can try the Ticket Resale virtual queue for returned show court seats at £15. Given that both Centre Court and No. 1 Court have roofs, evening matches can run late, so a £15 resale ticket bought at 5 pm could get you hours of tennis.

Check the queue status before you travel. The Wimbledon app is the primary official source. It is required for ticket purchase anyway and provides live queue updates during the tournament, including your position once you have checked in. The official @Wimbledon accounts on X and Instagram post queue capacity warnings when the grounds are full. Beyond the official channels, the r/wimbledon subreddit runs discussion threads during the tournament where people share queue numbers, wait times, and day-by-day experiences.

The Amex lounge is worth knowing about. If you have any American Express card (not just Platinum or up, but any card), the Cardmember Lounge behind No. 3 Court is free to enter with up to two guests and is a good place to sit down and recharge between matches when the grounds are crowded. The Amex Pavilion on the Hill is open to all ticketed attendees on the ground floor, with the top floor reserved for cardmembers.

Amex cardholders can also buy last-minute Centre Court tickets. A small number of Centre Court tickets are released through the Wimbledon app during the tournament. Tickets are released across three sales windows between June 27 and July 9, and the drop times are posted on the Amex UK Instagram, but they will go very fast.

A Grounds Pass is a good day out. The outside courts at Wimbledon are where you get closest to the players, and in the early rounds, you can watch seeded players from a few feet away on Courts 12 and 18. And the Ticket Resale system from 3 pm gives you a shot at a discounted Centre Court seat (£15), which is the cheapest legitimate way to enjoy a show court at any Grand Slam.

Bring the right stuff. If staying overnight: a two-person tent, sleeping bag, phone charger, snacks, something to read. The park has food vendors and water refill stations, so you do not need to overpack. If arriving in the morning: bring a book, a layer to sit on, or maybe a small blanket, and a portable charger. Some people bring cards or small lawn games that fit in backpacks. Remember the bag restriction for entering the grounds is 40cm × 30cm × 30cm.

I will be back in the queue this year, and if you’re a subscriber who is now interested in going, don’t hesitate to reach out. 🎾

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Draft 1. Saved 5/4/26, 1:48 p.m.

Thank you for your email. I will be out of the office from July 1 through July 7 with limited access to email. I will respond to all messages upon my return. For urgent matters, please direct inquiries to Simone Harris, who leads our accounts team.

Best, Gary

Draft 2. Saved 5/27/26, 3:41 p.m.

Thank you for your email. I will be out of the office from July 1 through July 7 for our annual beach week with my family. This will be our seventh year at the same rental, and my daughter has been marking the days on the kitchen calendar since April. I cannot overstate how much I am looking forward to this week. I will have limited access to email and will respond to all messages upon my return. For urgent matters, please contact Simone Harris.

I hope you can take some time for yourself this summer as well!

Best, Gary

Draft 3. Saved 6/12/26, 8:19 p.m.

Thank you for your email. I will be out of the office from July 1 through July 7 for our annual week at the beach.

We have rented the same house, the Sandpiper, for seven summers now, and my daughter has taken to calling it “our house,” which neither my wife nor I have corrected. There is a frog that lives under the front porch. She named it last summer and expects it to be there this July. I have not told her how long frogs live because I do not actually know, and I am afraid to look it up. I need this week. I will have limited access to email. For urgent matters, please contact Simone Harris.

Best, Gary

Draft 4. Saved 6/24/26, 10:52 p.m.

Thank you for your email. I will be out of the office from July 1 through July 7. Given the price of gas right now, we have decided to skip the boat rental this year, so I will actually be available in the afternoons throughout the week. For anything related to the Hartman account, please call my cell directly. For all other matters, please contact Simone Harris.

Gary

Draft 5. Saved 6/26/26, 9:33 p.m.

Thank you for your email. I will be out of the office from July 1 through July 7, but will be checking email throughout the day and am available for calls. I understand that the Copilot rollout is being expanded while I am away, and I would appreciate being kept in the loop on any changes to my accounts. I have been doing this for eleven years. I know which clients want a phone call and which ones want to be left alone. A chatbot does not know these things. My cell is in the signature.

Gary

Draft 6. Saved 6/29/26, 11:47 p.m.

I WILL BE “OUT OF THE OFFICE” FROM JULY 1 THROUGH JULY 7 IN THE SENSE THAT I WILL BE SITTING IN A RENTAL HOUSE THAT COSTS ELEVEN HUNDRED DOLLARS MORE THAN IT DID LAST YEAR WHILE PAYING FIVE DOLLARS AND FIFTY CENTS A GALLON TO DRIVE NINE HOURS WITH A DOG THAT NEEDS TO GO TO THE BATHROOM EVERY HOUR. I WILL HAVE ACCESS TO EMAIL BECAUSE IT IS 2026 AND THERE IS NO SUCH THING AS LIMITED ACCESS TO EMAIL. YOU CAN REACH ME ANYTIME. I AM ALWAYS REACHABLE. I HAVE BEEN REACHABLE EVERY SINGLE DAY FOR ELEVEN YEARS. THE ALGORITHM CANNOT DO WHAT I DO.

GARY

Draft 7. Saved 6/30/26, 12:04 a.m.

OOO 7/1–7/7.

G

Draft 8. Saved 7/1/26, 6:12 a.m.

Thank you for your email. I will be in the office this week and available at my desk. I am here.

Gary

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On April 29th, a statue appeared overnight in central London. Banksy had installed a man in a suit on a plinth in Waterloo Place, holding a flag that blows back and covers his face so completely that he cannot see where he is going, which is off the edge of his own pedestal.

On the same day, the Swedish parliament voted to change who gets to become Swedish. The new rules raise the wait for citizenship from five years to eight and add language tests, a civics exam, and a minimum income. More than 100,000 people had already applied under the old rules, some of them two or three years ago, and rather than let their applications be judged by the rules in force when they filed, the government will decide them under standards written afterward. Its own expert inquiry and senior judges both recommended protecting those people. The government refused and won the deciding motion by a single vote, 147 to 146, a vote it obtained by cheating.

Here is how. In the Swedish parliament, the parties agree in advance on who will sit out a vote, so that absences cancel each other and no one can swing a result by who happens to show up. The Sweden Democrats, the far-right party that now keeps the coalition government in power, had been shut out of the arrangement for a decade because no one trusted them with it. They needed only half that long, once let in, to prove everyone right: on this vote, two of their MPs were marked absent, then walked in and cast the two deciding ballots that killed the protections. The Swedish press called it a coup, and the party did not bother to deny it. But it only worked because the mainstream parties let it. Three coalition members wanted to vote for the protections and were pressured to stay home instead.

The new law took effect on June 6th, Sweden’s National Day. Of all the days available, the new rules came into force on the one day each year when, by law, every municipality in the country holds a ceremony to welcome its newest citizens with speeches, choirs, coffee, and cake.

I am one of those 100,000 people, or I would have been. I am a foreigner who moved to Sweden five years ago for my wife’s work with a major Swedish company. I started a business here. Every one of my clients is outside Sweden, which means every krona of income tax I have paid, at one of the highest rates in the world, is money the Swedish government would not have otherwise seen. On April 25th, I became eligible to apply for citizenship under the rules I had followed from the day I arrived. Four days later, the rules changed. I could have filed in the weeks before June 6th, and it would have made no difference. The Migration Agency was never going to decide my case before the cutoff, and every application left undecided as of June 6th will now be rejected, and the application fees kept. Countries set their own citizenship standards, and Sweden’s old requirements were among the more lenient in Europe. The rules themselves are not the betrayal, but retroactive application of new rules without transition is a deliberate choice to break faith with people who built their lives around the system as it existed.

The government justified it on security grounds, saying the police needed more time to screen the people in the queue. Everyone in Sweden knows what it is actually about: the refugees who arrived in 2015, most of them from Syria, Afghanistan, and Iraq, and the families they have built since. Sweden let them in and then never really let them in. The failure to integrate a generation of newcomers was the country's own, and the new law punishes them and everyone else for it. The Swedish way is not to say that out loud.

An expat and an immigrant move to the same country for the same reasons. They want to build a life, contribute to a place, and raise a family somewhere that appears to want them there. The only difference between the two words is where you come from and what you look like. I am an immigrant. So are the 100,000 people in that queue.

People tend to invoke Sweden as proof that high taxes, generous systems, and shared prosperity work. I can confirm that the systems work. I have a pension, public healthcare, and a tax bill to prove it. But if a country can move the goalposts once, retroactively, it can move them again. Every skilled worker in the world considering Sweden should now be asking themselves why they would bet a decade of their life on a country where the rules are written in pencil.

Sweden recorded its fewest births in more than two decades last year. The fertility rate has fallen to 1.43 children per woman, an all-time low, and the government was concerned enough to commission a formal inquiry into why Swedes have stopped having children. Sweden’s own Migration Agency has identified dozens of occupations including healthcare workers and IT professionals, where employers cannot find enough workers domestically. The country’s population growth now depends almost entirely on immigration, which is the one thing its politics has decided to make as painful as possible. The government is simultaneously offering repatriation grants of up to 350,000 kronor (roughly $32,000) to asylum-based residents willing to leave the country. Sweden stepped off the edge of that plinth some time ago. It is now in free fall and has not yet looked down.

I have built a life here and I do not want to leave. But Sweden has shown every foreigner inside its borders that the welcome can be withdrawn, and it is doing it while running out of the very people it is turning away. Where exactly do you think the future comes from?

Thanks to The Local Sweden for its coverage and campaigning on this.

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We left the car in La Línea de la Concepción and walked across the border into Gibraltar. The checkpoint was brief — a few people ahead of us, a quick look at the passports — and then we were through and standing at the edge of an active runway.

Gibraltar’s airport runway cuts directly across the only road into the territory, a strip of tarmac that functions as both landing zone and pedestrian crossing depending on when you arrive. An EasyJet flight was on approach, and the barriers had come down, so we stood with a handful of other people and a few idling cars and watched a commercial aircraft land from a few hundred feet away. When it cleared, the barriers lifted, and everyone walked across the runway and into town.

For decades, crossing into Gibraltar involved more than a runway and a passport check. La Verja, the fence, was the hard border between Spain and the British Overseas Territory, a 1.2-kilometer chain-link barrier that Franco sealed shut in 1969 and that wasn’t fully reopened until 1985. Even after that, it remained a bottleneck, with queues that could stretch for hours, since even when the UK was in the EU, Gibraltar was never part of the Schengen area. A new treaty between the UK and the EU, provisionally effective this July, dismantles it entirely. The land border check we had just walked through will soon cease to exist at all.

The Rock rises over 400 meters above the town, a mass of Jurassic limestone visible from nearly every street, and the tunnels bored into it during the Great Siege and both World Wars extend for over 50 kilometers inside the stone. I walked Main Street and the alleys that branch off it, through Casemates Square, where people sat eating in the sun, and continued on toward the cable car at the base. You can hike the upper ridge, take the cable car, or pay one of the taxi drivers who were working the queue with real enthusiasm. I joined the line for the cable car, which turned out to be a very British queue — orderly, patient, and after thirty minutes showed no signs of becoming anything else. It was a beautiful day, and everyone on the peninsula had the same idea. I figured I would come back and went to explore the lower levels on foot instead.

In the Alameda Gardens, I strolled under dragon trees older than the gardens themselves and past beds of cacti and South African aloes before coming upon a red telephone box. The phone box may or may not have been functional, but it was doing its job regardless, which was to remind you that this sliver of Mediterranean coastline belongs to the British Crown. Gibraltar has voted twice, overwhelmingly, to remain a British Overseas Territory, and the evidence is everywhere — pubs advertising fish and chips and full English breakfasts, street names that belong in Kent, and Union Jacks whipping in the wind.

Walking back toward the border later that day, I realized the Britishness of the place had been more striking than I had expected, and that I was more drawn to it for exactly that reason. We crossed back into Spain the way we had come, on foot and across the runway, and drove south. An hour along the coast, at the point where mainland Europe runs out of road, something entirely different was waiting.

I saw the kites before I saw the town.

They appeared above the waterline as I came around a bend on the coastal road, bright shapes pulling tight against the wind, too many to count. By the time we reached Tarifa and parked, there were seemingly hundreds of them strung across the strait, riders cutting back and forth through the chop while their sails carved arcs overhead. I dropped my bag in the room and went straight to the beach.

Tarifa is the southernmost point in mainland Spain, and people have been crossing the strait from here for over a thousand years. In 710 AD, a Berber commander named Tarif ibn Malik sailed from North Africa with four hundred soldiers and made landfall on this coast. The town still carries his name, and the castle he would have recognized still stands by the port. Two winds, the Levante from the east and the Poniente from the west, funnel through the strait and have turned the beaches into one of the best kitesurfing destinations in the world. On the sand, a man was trying to come in from the water, which I learned requires someone onshore to help harness the sail. I was useless at first, standing there with my camera, until I watched a few others do it and got the idea.

The town is small enough to cover on foot in an afternoon, with narrow streets and small plazas where people eat well and without hurry. We found a place for dinner and arrived at what we considered a reasonable hour for bed, which in Spain meant the restaurant was not yet open. I loitered outside with enough transparency that the waiter eventually took pity on us, patted me on the back, and ushered us to a table before the kitchen was officially running. The seafood tapas that followed were excellent, unfussy, and light enough to offset the full English if you visited both places in a day.

From most points along the coast, you can see the Rif Mountains of Morocco rising from the opposite shore. Africa is right there, sitting across a channel of water narrow enough to make you reconsider what you thought you knew about the distance between continents.

Fourteen kilometers, at the narrowest point.

The next morning, we boarded the ferry. Spanish immigration processed us at the terminal in Tarifa before departure. Moroccan immigration started as soon as we were onboard. The officer had set up in a small curtained cubby on the upper deck with a portable computer that looked like a suitcase from a Bond film — the kind of setup you’d expect to see someone use to decrypt something, not verify the validity of a document. He was efficient and friendly, considerably more so than any arrival I have experienced at other Moroccan entry points, and by the time the boat docked in Tangier we were already cleared to enter. We walked off the gangway and onto the African continent without stopping. The crossing took exactly one hour.

Tangier has been absorbing people who arrive unsettled by the speed of that transition for a very long time. Paul Bowles came in 1931 and returned so many times he eventually stopped leaving, spending the last 52 years of his life in the city. William Burroughs wrote Naked Lunch in a room in the medina. Allen Ginsberg passed through and kept passing through. They were drawn to a place that sat at the entrance to the Mediterranean and operated under its own logic —a city that had been an international zone governed by eight foreign powers simultaneously and then an independent one that still carries the residue of all that overlap. The writers came because Tangier didn’t require them to be one thing, and because the crossing from Europe was short enough to be easy and long enough to feel like an escape.

The medina was far more pleasant than Marrakech. We wandered for a long time without a plan, which is the only way to move through streets that are narrow and layer on top of each other, which rewards a slower stride. We found a rooftop, ordered lunch, and sat in the sun looking out over the medina.

The ferry back was the same crossing in reverse, an hour over the same water, except this time a kid in the row behind us was playing one of those rhythm games on his phone, the kind where you tap along to the music, and he was stuck on “Dance Monkey” by Tones and I. He kept failing and restarting, which meant we heard the same thirty seconds of that song on a loop for roughly twenty minutes, which is not something I would wish on my worst enemy. By about the fortieth repetition, it occurred to me that this was the most difficult part of the entire trip.

We had left our car in Tarifa, so before the drive back, I ducked into the lobby of the place we had stayed the night before to use the bathroom. Two Swedish tourists were at the front desk, and they had questions. A lot of them. How easy is it to get to Tangier? Where do you park? Can you do it in a day? Is the ferry reliable? How does immigration work? What if they drove to Gibraltar instead, how easy was that? They were very talkative Swedes. They were still going when I came out.

I thought about saying something. That we had just done exactly what they were asking about, and that it could not have been easier. That you can stand in three countries on two continents in as little as two days and enjoy them all, and the crossings are the simplest part. That the fences are coming down, the ferries run on time, and this rewarding cultural triangle is only 14 kilometers on its shortest side.

I picked up my bag and walked out to the car. They would figure it out. The continents drift, slowly and always, but right now they are close. 🧭

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This week’s piece is by Mandy Sham, a journalist and photographer whose work has appeared in Suitcase, GQ, National Geographic, and Travel + Leisure (@peach.punk). I gave her free rein to write about whatever she wanted for you all, and she chose the thing that tells you the most about a place — where and how its people eat. It also makes me incredibly hungry. All words and photographs are hers.

This taco is a symphony, even before it arrives.

A resounding “Pásele, pásele!” cuts through the urgency of foot traffic; through the crack and spit of hot oil. I’m at the counter—thinking of the recipes, like culinary sheet music, that travelled through a chain of people I’ll never meet. Then comes the taquero’s movement, where that legacy is not only expressed but embodied. Wielding his knife, he slices meat from the trompo and catches it in one swift arc—followed by a near-instantaneous flourish of onion and cilantro.

Chef’s kiss? Yes indeed—the most fiery, passionate kind. Even without a single bite taken, the tightly choreographed rhythms of this stall are enough to know this will be a memorable meal. The plastic-wrapped plate moves from the taquero’s hands to mine. All of it took ten seconds. But the ten seconds took a lifetime.

Mexico City, a city of twenty-two million people, is sustained every day by this roadside moment. Street food, in its countless iterations, feeds workers in construction and cubicles alike. It’s the engine that keeps North America’s largest metropolitan area running. There’s a circadian rhythm to it, too—tethering the city’s inhabitants to the ebb and flow of any given day. The hearty morning’s chilaquiles-stuffed tortas and tamales transition, by nightfall, to the fire and staccato of tacos de suadero and al pastor.

When I last visited CDMX in March, I was hit by the near-ubiquitous aroma of corn tortillas on the comal—warm, toasty, earthy—a scent that instantly transported me back to my very first trip in 2018. Studies in neuroscience have shown smells evoke more emotionally intense memories than any other sensory cue. The Proust effect, as it’s called, gets triggered for me every time I return.

But this exact smell of maíz is also a sensory time machine—the thing that unites modern Mexico to its pre-Hispanic ancestry. It’s arguable that this olfactory legacy is one of the things that hasn’t changed since the days of Tenochtitlán, the historic capital of the Aztec Empire.

Mexican street food culture begins there, too. For millennia, tianguis (derived from the Nahuatl tianquiztli) were itinerant open-air markets, organized into different types of commodities. They perfectly distilled the social and economic heart of Mesoamerica into a transient gathering space: part-business hub, part-town square, part-communal kitchen. A prepared foods section would feature earlier versions of mole, flavored with chilies and honey, and tortillas. Markets like Tlatelolco were the way both goods and news travelled. Word of mouth, as they say—except these mouths salivated a lot.

While Spanish colonization attempted to do away with these spaces or regulate them, the sprawling weekly markets continued to evolve. A modern-day puesto, or street stall, might look like something added to an existing sidewalk—a metallic micro-kitchen built to conform to Mexico City’s social rhythms and density. But it’s conceptually been around for far longer, and the cultural weight of them is undeniable.

Puestos shape the physical identities of streets just like signs and lampposts do; one might even argue that they change the makeup of them entirely. While they certainly don’t have walls as sit-down restaurants do, they effectively transform sidewalk corners into rooms: a kind of sanctuary to stop, eat, and talk in the midst of a busy transit corridor. The ticket to entry is a few pesos, elbows tucked in, and the delicate choreography ensuring none of the salsa or meat juices drip out.

Among all the places I’ve travelled to, Mexico is still one of the most sensory-charged places to eat—because taking part in that everyday ritual involves digging in, in every sense. Puesto culture is quick and economical for a relentless working force, but it also offers a temporary truce with Mexico City’s unrelenting thrum. It isn’t just a physical third space; it’s psychological, too. For fifteen minutes, your time is yours. And whether consciously or not, it’s a bridge connecting you right to the people who sustain you.

Somewhere under the shade of a hot pink tarpaulin, lined up in single file with a gordita de bistec in both hands, I found the key to uncovering the pulse of a neighborhood’s beating heart. Perhaps it’s more accurate to say it found me—because the places most representative of its people’s tastes will reveal that in the crowds milling next to it. It was lunch hour at a busy intersection, and I lined up with my full wallet and empty stomach. When I asked an older man waiting in front of me to recommend something, he was ecstatic, giving me a rundown of his favorites and a short history of the owners working behind the plancha.

That’s when I realized: scoop up enough nopales and pickled red onions, and you’re bound to scoop up a few stories along the way. Vendors know their repeat customers and vice versa. Sometimes the orders go unspoken. It’s a slow simmer of a relationship, built with familiarity and loyalty to the business. These dishes may be plated with little ceremony, but they are handed to you with the utmost care.

Food as a driver of connection, of course, isn’t isolated to the sidewalk. It feels like the connective tissue of a city where community and sustenance are in fact indistinguishable. The fondas, small eateries known for their pocketbook-friendly lunches, hold up this social contract in one simple exchange: “Provecho”, said even to strangers as diners pay up and leave. This is evidenced as well in the mercados. In the deepest corners of vast, almost labyrinthine markets, you’ll find stalls bursting with the hum of their regulars. Over the years, I’ve made no small number of friends and acquaintances over a spontaneous plate of quesadillas. All it took was limited counter space and a shared hunger.

When night falls, street food isn’t so much of an intermission from the day; it increasingly feels like a destination in itself. The scent of rendered fat and seared meat spikes the air with a renewed aliveness. To me, this sharper, more chaotic energy feels more intimate. I think of the time my friends and I drifted out of a bar, several fancy cocktails deep, and found ourselves face-to-face with a birria stand: the fluorescent lights unabating, the wafting aromas too good to refuse.

The three of us stood there, huddled over our orders of quesabirria and cups of rich consomé—liquid velvet to cut through the late-night haze, and punctuate conversations that felt both generous and easy. I still think of the sanctity of that moment. Suddenly, the scale of millions of people didn’t feel daunting. Instead, it felt familiar: a city held together by that primordial need to be fed and seen.

Any time I’m asked if I want everything with my taco—cilantro, onion, and a dash of the base salsa—I know my answer. I want the toppings, the ritual, the history, and the connection. I want it all: “Sí, con todo.” 🌮

For more places worth traveling for the food, see Food & Cuisine.

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There is a saying that if you are not the expert, find the expert, and I think the best version of that is when you find someone who is not only good but willing to share how they do it.

Hong Kong is one of the best cities in the world for photography. I have been there many times over the years, and I never run out of things to shoot, which is partly because the city is so dense that the visual material just stacks up in front of you — people, trams, signage, laundry, all compressed into the same frame with residential towers rising behind them. The light in Hong Kong matters more than it does in most places because the same street can look completely different depending on the hour, and some of the best conditions come when you would not expect them. Mong Kok in the rain, for instance, is better than Mong Kok on a clear night. Every neighborhood has its own feel, and because the MTR and the tram network connect everything, you can cover an enormous amount of ground in a day on foot.

Manson is a Hong Kong-based photographer I have been following for a while, and he is that expert. I asked him to pick eight of his favorite locations and tell you how to photograph them, and he came back with the kind of detail you only get from someone who has spent years shooting the same streets. You could hit all eight in a long weekend, if you wanted. And even if you are not carrying a camera (or a professional one), these are just great vantage points of the city.

Daytime

Aberdeen Street Steps – Central

Best Time to Visit: Afternoon on a sunny day, around 12–2:00 PM. During this window, the sun is high enough to spill into the narrow alley, creating dramatic highlights on the stone steps and the people walking down, while keeping the old shop stalls in moody shadow.

How to Photograph the Spot: Position yourself at the bottom of the steps looking up. This angle emphasizes the steepness of the street and allows you to frame your subjects against the vertical backdrop of the city’s dense architecture.

Technique: Use a wide-to-medium aperture, around f/4 or f/5.6, to maintain sharp detail throughout the scene. Wait for a lone subject to enter the shaft of light on the stairs to create a strong focal point and a sense of story.

Fa Yuen Street Market – Mong Kok

Best Time to Visit: Mid-afternoon, around 3:00–5:00 PM, is ideal for capturing the peak energy of the market. Overcast or rainy days are actually better for creating a moody and cinematic look.

How to Photograph the Spot: Head to the Mong Kok Road Footbridge that crosses over Fa Yuen Street. Shoot from the center of the bridge to get a perfectly symmetrical view of the market stalls stretching into the distance.

Technique: Use a medium telephoto lens, like an 85mm, to compress the perspective. This makes the tall buildings feel like they are leaning in, emphasizing the urban canyon effect.

Southern Building – North Point

Best Time to Visit: Afternoon, when the low sun hits the yellow and red facade of the Southern Building, making the colors pop while casting long, cinematic shadows across the tram tracks.

How to Photograph the Spot: Shoot from the pedestrian footbridge overlooking King’s Road. This elevated position gives you a clear, unobstructed view of the oncoming trams and the sheer scale of the residential blocks behind them.

Technique: Use a zoom lens, around 50–100mm, to compress the scene, making the building appear even more massive over the traffic. Wait for a white or brightly colored tram to enter the patch of sunlight for a high-contrast focal point.

Hill Road Flyover – Shek Tong Tsui

Best Time to Visit: Anytime in the afternoon, or at night when the streetlights create a moody, cinematic feel.

How to Photograph the Spot: To get the full snake-like effect of the flyover curving above you, use an ultra-wide-angle lens, below 18mm, and shoot from a low vantage point looking up.

Technique: Use a ‘leading lines composition’ by aligning the curves of the flyover with the road below to create a sense of depth. If shooting at night, a shutter speed between 5 and 20 seconds can capture light trails from passing cars.

Golden Hour

Lion Rock – Shek Kip Mei

Best Time to Visit: Late afternoon on a sunny day, approximately one hour before sunset. The golden hour light hits the face of the mountain, highlighting its rugged texture and making the lion stand out.

How to Photograph the Spot: Shoot from the pedestrian footbridge on Nam Cheong Street. This vantage point allows you to use the long, straight road as a leading line that draws the eye directly toward the mountain peak.

Technique: Use a telephoto lens, 85mm or longer, to create a compression effect. This makes the mountain appear much larger and closer to the foreground buildings and traffic, emphasizing the proximity of Hong Kong’s urban life to its nature.

Blue Hour and Night

Garden Hill – Sham Shui Po

Best Time to Visit: Arrive around 6:00 PM to catch the sunset, but the blue hour — the period just after sunset — is the real window here, as the city lights begin to come on against the fading sky. This is a popular spot for local photographers, so try to go mid-week to avoid the weekend rush.

How to Photograph the Spot: Use a telephoto lens, like a 70–200mm, to compress the scene and emphasize the stacked look of the buildings.

Technique: Use a tripod for long-exposure shots to capture sharp details of the buildings and light trails from the traffic below. HDR photography helps balance the bright city lights with the darker areas of the hillside.

Jardine’s Lookout – Night View

Best Time to Visit: The blue hour, roughly 20–30 minutes after sunset, is the sweet spot for this location. It provides the perfect balance where the sky retains a deep blue hue while the city lights are fully illuminated.

How to Photograph the Spot: A tripod is critical here for the long exposures needed to capture the city lights clearly. Use a telephoto lens, 70–200mm, to isolate specific buildings like the IFC, or a mid-range lens, 24–105mm, to capture the entire skyline.

Technique: Keep your ISO low, between 100 and 200, to minimize grain. Use a mid-range aperture around f/8 to f/11 to ensure the entire cityscape is sharp from front to back.

Portland Street Neon – Mong Kok

Best Time to Visit: Visit on a rainy night. The wet asphalt creates a mirror-like surface that reflects the neon signs, doubling the color and light in your frame.

How to Photograph the Spot: Shoot from a low angle — getting your camera close to the ground will maximize those reflections on the wet pavement. Use the iconic red taxis as a focal point to add a sense of motion and local character.

Technique: Use a fast prime lens, like a 35mm or 50mm f/1.8, to handle the low light without a tripod. To capture the falling rain, use a faster shutter speed around 1/250s or higher and push your ISO slightly. 📷

You can find more of Manson’s work on Instagram at @mansonyms.

All photographs © Mansonyms. Used with permission.

For more places worth traveling to photograph, see Photography.

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When I first moved to Sweden, I only had a vague sense of what Eurovision was. I knew it was some kind of European talent show that had been going on for a long time, and that it was almost certainly not for me. As a new resident trying to learn as much as I could about Swedish culture, I gave it a shot. Sweden has won Eurovision seven times, tied with Ireland for the most in the contest’s history, and Swedes take the contest very seriously. I was hooked within twenty minutes.1

Here is what I did not understand about Eurovision from the outside: it is the single largest live music event in the world. Close to forty countries each send one act to perform a single song —three minutes, no longer— on one stage, and nearly two hundred million people watch it live. Every televised singing competition Americans have ever cared about —American Idol, The Voice, X Factor— descends from this thing. But none of them come close to its scale or its stakes, because none of them are asking entire nations to compete against each other. ABBA came out of Eurovision, and Celine Dion won it representing Switzerland. In more recent years, acts like t.A.T.u, Loreen, Duncan Laurence, and Måneskin have all been notable after the competition. It is campy and overproduced and emotionally manipulative, and I mean all of that as a compliment. The whole thing is built on the idea that pop music can bring forty countries together, and the insane part is that it works.

The EBU has always maintained that Eurovision is non-political. The rules explicitly say so: No political content in songs, no political messaging on stage, and no political gestures from performers are allowed. This has never been entirely true. The voting blocs alone make that clear — Cyprus has awarded Greece twelve points in twenty-six out of thirty-one possible years.2 Ukraine’s Jamala won in 2016 with “1944,” a song about the Soviet deportation of Crimean Tatars that the EBU approved by classifying it as historical rather than political, a distinction that requires a certain flexibility of mind.

Then, in February 2022, Russia invaded Ukraine. The EBU initially said both countries could still compete, citing the contest's non-political nature. However, within forty-eight hours, after multiple broadcasters threatened to pull out, Russia was banned. The statement said their inclusion would bring the competition into disrepute. Ukraine went on to win that year in Turin, carried by the highest televote in Eurovision history. The viewing public across the continent voted in what felt less like a song contest and more like a referendum on solidarity. That said, the song was excellent, the deserved winner by any measure, even if its music video — filmed in Bucha, Irpin, Borodyanka, and Hostomel, cities near Kyiv destroyed during the Russian occupation — was itself not exactly apolitical.

I watched from my couch in Malmö and thought: well, that settles that. Politics had arrived at Eurovision, but it had arrived in a way that felt clean and possibly even righteous. Russia has remained banned ever since.3 Nobody objected.

The way Eurovision works, the winning country hosts the following year. Ukraine won in 2022 but could not host as the country was still at war, so the United Kingdom stepped in as the runners-up and held the 2023 contest in Liverpool. Sweden’s Loreen won in Liverpool, which meant the 2024 contest was coming to Sweden.

In July 2023, Sweden announced that their host city would be Malmö, which is my city. From everything I had experienced watching from the couch, it was going to be absolutely joyous — the costumes, the visitors flooding in from dozens of countries, the entire city given over to it. I did not even need to travel. I was elated.

Then everything changed. On October 7, 2023, Hamas launched its attack on Israel. Israel’s military response in Gaza followed, and by the time the 2024 Eurovision Song Contest arrived in Malmö, the death toll in Gaza had passed thirty-five thousand. Malmö is one of the most diverse cities in Sweden. Roughly a third of its residents were born outside the country, and a significant share of them are from the Middle East, including a large Palestinian community. These were people whose families were under bombardment. I watched my barber, who is Palestinian, seemingly age years between monthly haircuts, worrying about relatives who had nothing to do with any of it. Protests became regular. The city I loved for its openness was now hosting the most contentious Eurovision in the contest’s history, and the tension was everywhere.

Calls to ban Israel from the contest began almost immediately. Nine countries signed a declaration demanding exclusion. The EBU refused, invoking the same non-political stance it had abandoned for Russia two years earlier. Israel’s original entry, “October Rain,” was rejected by the EBU for appearing to reference the October 7 attacks. A revised version, “Hurricane,” was cleared to compete.

I had tickets to the jury show, the Friday evening dress rehearsal, where professional juries for each country cast their votes. It is essentially the full production, identical staging and performances, before a packed arena. We had been told in advance that Palestinian flags would be confiscated at the door. This did not prevent the sentiment from getting in.

The booing began before Israel’s entry took the stage and swelled as Eden Golan appeared. It was loud and sustained and accompanied by chants of “free Palestine” that rolled across the arena. There were cheers too, and people around us trying to tell the ones yelling that it was not her fault — though whether a twenty-year-old singer sent to represent a country conducting a military campaign in Gaza is a performer or propaganda is not a question with a comfortable answer. Two dads in front of me with their young child tried to get security to remove the Dutch fans behind us, who were screaming obscenities about the contest, about Israel, about all of it. Security never left their post.

The contest was also unraveling for reasons beyond Israel's participation. That morning, the Netherlands' entrant, Joost Klein, one of the front-runners, had been pulled from rehearsals after being accused of having an altercation with a camera operator. His fate was still unknown. When his slot came later in the running order, his song played through the speakers, and his staging lit up the screens, but the stage was empty. The Dutch fans behind us, already not in a forgiving mood, only got louder.

The next night, we had friends over to watch the live final on television. Eden Golan performed again, and the audio felt completely different from what we had heard in the arena. The boos sounded almost non-existent, replaced with cheers and applause. The EBU denied any manipulation, saying the Swedish host broadcaster SVT had simply adjusted levels to even things out for TV viewers. An audio analysis published by The Intercept a year later confirmed what everyone in the arena already knew: the booing had been suppressed in the broadcast.

But there was one moment they could not suppress. Late in the show, the broadcast cut live to Martin Österdahl, the EBU’s executive supervisor, for a tradition he had performed since taking the role in 2020: appearing on camera from inside the arena to certify that the votes had been verified and deliver his catchphrase, “you’re good to go.” It was the one live, un-isolated microphone of the entire broadcast. When Österdahl appeared, the arena erupted. The boos were deafening, directed at him, at the organization he represented, and at its refusal to act. He was booed again minutes later when he delivered the Dutch jury votes himself, after the Dutch spokesperson withdrew following Joost Klein’s disqualification earlier that day. Swedish prosecutors would later find no case to answer.

Then came the voting results, and with them a different kind of problem. To understand why, you need to understand how Eurovision voting works. Viewers across Europe and beyond can vote by phone, text, or online — but you cannot vote for your own country. In 2024, each viewer was allowed up to twenty votes. Half the final result comes from this public televote; the other half comes from professional juries in each country.

Israel’s “Hurricane” received 323 televote points, the second-highest of the night, and finished fifth overall. Israel’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs later confirmed it had coordinated an international campaign to boost the public vote, reaching out to pro-Israel communities in countries across Europe and beyond. A billboard went up in Times Square promoting Eden Golan. At the time, nothing in the rules prohibited a government from running an organized cross-border voting campaign on behalf of its entry. The EBU took no action, because technically no rule had been broken. The spirit of the contest — nations competing through music, audiences voting on songs — was a different matter.

In 2025, it happened again, at a scale that made the previous year look like a trial run. The contest moved to Basel, and Israel’s entry was Yuval Raphael, a survivor of the Nova music festival attack on October 7. The Israeli Government Advertising Agency ran targeted YouTube ads across thirty-five countries, instructing viewers to cast all twenty of their allowed votes for Israel. Israeli diplomatic missions were instructed to mobilize support. The campaign received over sixty-eight million impressions, a figure the EBU’s own fact-checking outlet later confirmed. Raphael won the televote and finished second overall behind Austria’s JJ.

And in Basel, the EBU made sure the Malmö mic problem would not repeat itself. Österdahl’s live on-camera role was eliminated. The presenters delivered his “good to go” line themselves. A graphic appeared on screen confirming the votes were verified, and Österdahl gave a silent thumbs-up. It was changed because a microphone in a room full of angry people had transmitted something the EBU did not want two hundred million viewers to hear. Not everyone cooperated with the silence, however. Spain’s public broadcaster RTVE aired a message during the Basel broadcast: “When human rights are at stake, silence is not an option. Peace and Justice for Palestine.”

Multiple broadcasters demanded audits of the 2025 vote. Spain, Belgium, Finland, the Netherlands, Ireland, Iceland, Norway, and Slovenia all called for full transparency on the voting data. Twelve Members of the European Parliament wrote to the EBU demanding an independent audit. Spain’s Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez said publicly that Israel should be excluded and that the contest could not apply double standards. Three weeks after Basel, Österdahl resigned. The man who had made “United by Music” the contest’s permanent slogan, who had been its public face for five years, was gone.

The EBU’s response arrived in November 2025: a voting overhaul that halved the maximum votes per viewer, restored professional juries to the semi-finals, and added new rules discouraging “disproportionate promotion campaigns” by governments. The reforms did not mention Israel by name. Eurovision director Martin Green insisted the 2025 results were “valid and robust,” changing the rules while simultaneously declaring that nothing had been wrong with the results that prompted the changes.

At the General Assembly in Geneva, the organization framed its vote carefully. Members were asked whether the new rules were sufficient —not whether Israel should be allowed to participate. Eight countries requested a separate ballot on Israel’s participation. The EBU presidency denied it. Israel was cleared to compete in 2026.

Five countries decided that was enough.

Ireland withdrew first, calling Israel’s participation “unconscionable given the appalling loss of lives in Gaza.” The Netherlands followed, with broadcaster AVROTROS saying the decision would stand even if a ceasefire were reached. Spain, one of the contest’s founding Big Five4, pulled out next — RTVE’s chair said the genocide in Gaza made it impossible to look the other way. Slovenia and Iceland followed, with Slovenia instead airing a Palestinian documentary and film series called Voices of Palestine in its place this week.

It is the largest boycott since 1970. Thirty-five countries will compete in Vienna, the fewest since 2003, before the semi-final format existed. Nemo, the Swiss artist who won the 2024 contest in Malmö, returned their trophy in protest. Seventy-two former contestants have signed an open letter calling for Israel’s exclusion. Over a thousand artists, among them Massive Attack, Sigur Rós, Brian Eno, Kneecap, and Macklemore, signed a separate boycott letter. Germany, meanwhile, threatened to withdraw if Israel were banned, a reminder that the pressure runs in both directions. Since the 2024 contest in Malmö, Israel has continued its military operations in Gaza, launched strikes on Iran, and expanded its offensive into Lebanon. The death toll in Gaza has surpassed seventy thousand.

In years past, we would start getting excited about it here in Sweden months in advance, watching the music videos as they were released, rewatching Will Ferrell’s Eurovision movie for the tenth time. This year, we haven’t.

Tomorrow (May 12), the first semi-final of the 2026 Eurovision Song Contest opens in Vienna at the Wiener Stadthalle. It is the EBU’s seventieth anniversary edition, and it arrives in the worst institutional crisis the organization has faced.

The question is not whether politics belong at Eurovision. It is whether the EBU can keep pretending they don’t. The apolitical framing worked for decades. It does not work now, and insisting on it has cost the contest five countries, its executive supervisor, and the trust of its own membership.

I still love Eurovision. I listen to past songs from Ukraine, Czechia, Germany, Croatia, and many others in rotation, and I will watch it again. The tagline has not changed. The contest has. 🎤

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