I had always wanted to visit Saudi Arabia — either one day on Hajj or Umrah, or simply as a traveler with time to roam. For years, it felt like one of those places I meant  to get to, but never quite did. Getting there was difficult unless you were on pilgrimage or had a work permit. Tourism was prohibited. That changed in 2019, when the Kingdom launched its first real tourist visa program. Suddenly, people from dozens of countries could apply online for an e-visa — or even

Getting ready to soar down the longest zipline in the world, launching off the highest mountain in the United Arab Emirates I had been to Dubai several times before finally venturing beyond the glass towers and beach clubs to properly visit the rest of the United Arab Emirates. This time, I flew into DXB, cleared immigration, picked up a rental car—and didn’t even glance at the skyline. Instead, I pointed the car north and drove toward Ras Al Khaimah. Visiting the UAE and onl

Andorra is one of those places that sounds almost fictional — a tiny principality tucked high in the eastern Pyrenees, ruled by co-princes, draped in snow, and built almost entirely on steep mountainsides. I had driven through once in 2012 during a family loop around the Iberian Peninsula, but I hadn’t fully appreciated how dramatic the terrain really was. The peaks may not reach Alpine altitudes — nothing here touches 4,000 meters — but they rise sharply and relentlessly, ri

It all started, as many good ski stories do, in an airport at an unreasonable hour. During a short stopover in Munich, I finally caught up with Brett Ploss , a financial advisor from Indiana and prolific writer for SnowBrains . Months earlier, we’d met in Santiago, Chile, bonded over stories of skiing and long-haul flights, and made plans to go skiing in Georgia. We boarded our flight to Tbilisi around 2 a.m. and landed just before sunset, stepping into a country perched betw

Standing on the Edge of the Earth Mount Nyiragongo looks very much like a volcano in the storybook sense. It rises dramatically from the Virunga Mountains, just north of Goma, close enough to Rwanda that you can feel how little separates one country from the next. But beneath that calm exterior is something far more unsettling. Nyiragongo holds the largest open lava lake on the planet—a churning, molten cauldron that has risen and fallen by hundreds of meters over time, carvi

On this—my tenth visit to Qatar—I found myself thinking about how easy it is to misunderstand a place if you only skim its surface. Many visitors fly in, stay in Doha, and leave believing they’ve “done” the country. It’s a bit like visiting Paris for a long weekend and claiming to know France. Doha is  remarkable—bold architecture, cultural ambition, an ever-shifting calendar of events—but Qatar is far more than its capital. You need to be willing to drive a little, linger a

I left Chamonix on 12 September 2018 with an ambitious goal: to walk the Haute Route to Zermatt, alone, on foot, carrying everything I needed to sleep outside. I’d been to Zermatt many times before—weekend ski trips from Geneva, familiar restaurants, familiar streets, familiar views. What I wanted this time wasn’t familiarity. It was an expanded and earned perspective. By the time I reached Zermatt eighteen days later, I’d logged 480,805 steps and 292.8 km, crossed 11 high mo

As an avid scuba diver and occasional beach bum, I’d long dreamed of visiting the Maldives. What stopped me was twofold. First, its sheer isolation—this isn’t a place you casually pass through on the way to somewhere else. You go to the Maldives, or you don’t go at all. Second, and more importantly, I had zero interest in the classic Maldives experience: an all-inclusive resort on a private island with nothing else anywhere nearby. Until fairly recently, that was essentially

Day 1: Durian Dreams and a Narrow Escape I arrived in Colombo in early October 2025 on a flight from the Maldives, finally fulfilling a dream I’d been carrying for more than half a century. Some destinations creep into your imagination slowly, sedimented over years of reading, listening, and wondering. Sri Lanka was one of those—long imagined, long deferred, suddenly real. While waiting in line at immigration, my attention was drawn not to the officials stamping passports, bu

How a Joint UN initiative is planting the seeds for success in local communities By Adam Rogers, original essay appeared on Medium in November 2022. After arriving in Nukus, a bustling desert town in the far west of Uzbekistan –the capital of the autonomous republic of Karakalpakstan — I reached out to UNDP programme manager Alisher Utemisov to learn more about what he and his teams were doing in the region. Alisher assigned three team leaders to accompany me to Muynak, a on

It was 1985, and I had just crossed into Zimbabwe from Zambia, arriving in time for the fifth anniversary of Zimbabwe’s independence. I carry two deeply etched memories from that country, both involving close encounters with the Grim Reaper. Having travelled across Zambia from Malawi, I headed straight for Victoria Falls. On the Zambezi River, the falls plunge 108 metres into the narrow Batoka Gorge, and standing at the edge is an almost physical experience. The sound hits yo

In late November 1983, I crossed into Syria from Turkey on foot. I was 19 years old, in the first year of what would become a five-year backpacking journey around the planet. The two countries had been fighting on and off for years, and by then had pushed their border posts several kilometres back from the actual frontier, leaving a stretch of no-man’s land between them. When I showed up on the Turkish side with a group of truck drivers I’d hitched a ride with, the exit offic

My first trip to Chile was in 2006, during that beautiful phase of life when parenthood was new but my wanderlust remained undiminished. My wife Gillian and I had always been spontaneous travelers, ready to explore distant corners of the world at a moment's notice. The arrival of our son Sage, then just three years old, hadn't dampened our adventurous spirit—it merely added a new dimension to our travels. Without iPads (still four years from invention) to entertain a toddler

Under the glimmering Cambodian sky, I found myself working in a country poised delicately between recovery and renewal. It was 1997, barely two decades after the devastation of the Khmer Rouge, and only a few years after the UN-brokered peace accords. Siem Reap was still a quiet provincial town—dusty roads, wooden houses, and a rhythm of life shaped more by rice cycles than visitor itineraries. Tourism, as the world now knows it, had not yet arrived. Angkor Wat loomed nearby

In the early hours of April 26, 1986, Reactor No. 4 at the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant exploded during a badly designed safety test, compounded by human error. The blast blew the reactor apart, ignited a graphite fire, and sent a plume of radioactive material high into the atmosphere. In the chaotic hours that followed, authorities made a desperate early attempt to douse the burning core with water. It failed. The water instantly evaporated, and radioactive steam was carrie

It was a crisp, cold morning in Khartoum as I awoke before dawn.  I crawled out of my sleeping bag in the courtyard of the students' dormitory at the University of Sudan and woke up my Sudanese friends to bid them farewell.   No matter how used to travelling one becomes, it's always difficult to say goodbye to friends with whom one has spent time . In the summer of 1984, I stayed in Khartoum for five months, teaching English to Ethiopian refugees to earn enough money to conti

Antonio Inoki is a well-known Japanese professional wrestler and martial artist who, during his heyday, beat most of the world’s wrestlers and professional fighters, from Pakistan’s Akram Pahalwan to America’s Mohammed Ali.  As a politician Inoki was twice elected to the House of Councillors, the equivalent of the United States Senate.  He was also actively involved in trying to build bridges of communication and understanding between North Korea and Japan – not an easy task

Pulling water from a remote well in the middle of the Sahara Desert.   March 1983 – Two large trucks rumbled north along the Route de Tanezrouft, their engines roaring like distant thunder as they ventured toward the border with Algeria, leaving contrails of dust in their wake. In the local Tuareg language, the name of this unforgiving land means “Land of Thirst,” and I could see why. The area stretched before us, notoriously flat, featureless, and without any sign of water –

Nearly four decades after my last visit, I return to the serene grounds of Wat Suan Mokk in Southern Thailand for a ten-day silent meditation retreat. This article is available on Dreams Abroad. Please read it there by clicking on their logo, below: