“How do you know when it's ready to harvest?” I think aloud, staring at what is, now, just a dusty bunch of grapes.Third-generation winemaker Bacho Burjanadze holds the fruit up for us, a group of sixteen travelers who just met this morning. “You see this mist?” he says, rubbing a film of natural yeast off the grape’s skin to reveal shiny sea-green flesh below the brown nebula of sugar. Last season’s late hail ruined much of the harvest, but this year has been warm and dry. Burjanadze is optimis...

I awake at dawn. Sivas begins with apartment blocks and minarets lancing a peach sky shaded with haze. The city’s station, like every stop, is an opportunity for the smokers to file out but they have to hurry. Before the city wakes, we are off again, plunging deeper into Anatolia.From here to Erzurum was the most complicated track to build. A hundred and thirty eight tunnels were needed to traverse the Eastern Anatolian High Plateau that had once made these communities famously remote. The Turki...

Ercolano station whips by, a blur of terracotta and graffitied concrete. We are supposed to be out there negotiating a bus ticket up Vesuvius, the only active volcano on the European mainland. Napoli’s low swagger demands local knowledge, which includes its public transport system of overlapping modes and companies. It’s a dialect we don’t speak, so we remain crammed among the armpits and steadying hands of tourists, squawking school children and their underpaid teachers.Vesuvius, the only activ...

Bali has many reputations. Kuta, once the centre of the tourist universe, is in decline having never recovered its pre-COVID glory when hordes of Bintang-singleted Aussies staggered through the Hard Rock Cafe foyer loaded with pirated DVDs. In the last few years, attention has shifted west to Canggu, into influencer territory, where every cafe, restaurant and bar is styled to be the perfect backdrop – the visually stunning but bland dragonfruit featuring frequently. At a beach club after a frie

Historical places are often anticlimactic to visit. Expecting they will maintain their resonance indefinitely, you arrive to find the concrete and flaking paint strangely mute. This is why most have museums – to do the talking. Yet some places wear their history indelibly. One such place is Long Tieng. Known within the CIA as “the most secret place on Earth”, a slew of swashbuckling declassified Cold War tales emerged from when the site became Lima Site 20A. From this runway the US conducted its

How long you’ve been in Laos will decide how you react to Viengxay’s landscape. To new arrivals, bungalows nestled between towering misty limestone peaks will constitute an achingly beautiful sight but to the acclimatised, this is just more Northern Laos. And that’s the point. Viengxay was a secret underground city used by the Lao Communist Party (Pathet Lao) between 1964-73, to provide shelter from Yankee bombs, allowing the upper echelons here to conduct a revolution and win a civil war. At it

Throughout my twenties I binged: working, saving hard while living in a dingy share house then cashing out for a big trip. From a career perspective it was reckless. While often I would be accepted back to the same job when I returned, I was too risky to promote. In my thirties I needed a more sustainable model. Once upon a time these were mythical creatures who had escaped the gravitational force of conventional employment: they lived a purely remote lifestyle, logging in from hotel rooms, c

Singapore to Luang Prabang by train became possible only in December 2021 as the world was peeking out from lockdown. Part of China's Belt and Road Initiative, the Laos to China railway, one of three planned branches, the others through Myanmar and Vietnam, will one day converge on Bangkok. For passengers this closes a chain that more-or-less connects Singapore along four thousand kilometres of metre gauge track to the Chinese network. More-or-less because the purist will take exception to the