Journey to the North Pole in a Hot Air Balloon

This is the forgotten story of a brave (and perhaps slightly mad) scientist and his two men, who made a perilous one way journey to the furthest ends of the earth. And if an expedition to the North Pole in itself wasn’t dangerous enough, they decided they would do it in a hydrogen balloon. Thirty-three…

PHANTOMS of PARIS: The Midnight Wanderers

We all have it; that itch for exploring, to discover what’s behind the closed doors of our cities, under our feet and overhead. Urban environments hide buried secrets of the past all around us and if curious enough, we can find them. For a while now, I’ve been following the online imprint of a small…

Want to Explore NYC’s Most Secret Spaces? Join the Club

I‘m wondering how many New Yorkers know about the greatest club in their city. Like many of your reading, I’m the kind of city kid that likes to look under the surface of my urban landscape, open doors I’m not supposed to and see inside spaces you need a special key for. The New York Adventure Club has…

She Lives at The Last Stop to The North Pole

For the adventurous of spirit, and those who yearn to pack a bag and disappear to somewhere as remote as possible, arguably nowhere quite captures the imagination as Svalbard. The far flung Norwegian archipelago in the Arctic Ice lies just six hundred and fifty miles from the North Pole. It may be a place where…

The Largest Cave in the World, Complete With Its Own River, Jungle, and Climate

People have been crawling around the cavernous mountains of Asia for centuries, but remarkably, the largest cave in the world remained hidden from discovery deep in the forests of Phong Nha Ke Bang National Park in Vietnam until 1991. As the story of the Sơn Đoòng Cave goes, “local farmer Ho Khanh was walking along a stretch of…

Alone with Her Bike, the First Females to Ride Around the World

Happy women’s history month. Which only gives me another reason to write about more incredible humans that also happen to be female. What fascinates me most about the stories of the women I’d like to share with you today, is not that they dared to figure out how to ride a motorbike or infiltrate a…

Journey to Zealandia, Earth’s Hidden 8th Continent

Beneath the crystalline waters of the South Pacific, 32 scientists from 12 countries emerged after a nine-week voyage to the depths. They’d been drilling for samples from a long-lost world, on a quest that sounds a whole lot like the premise of a Jules Verne novel: the expedition to Zealandia. Not that far beneath the…

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Don’t Be a Tourist in Scotland: The MessyNessy Road Trip Guide

Scotland is the place you choose when the idea of another summer spent doing the same damn thing as everyone else starts to lose its appeal. It’s the place that you choose when you realise Scotland has landscapes that look like they’re from another planet and that you quite like the idea of escaping to another, very beautiful…

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A Quick Tour of the Remotest Island in the World

Not a single ship visited Tristan da Cunha from 1909 until 1919, until the HMS Yarmouth finally stopped by to inform the islanders of the outcome of World War I. Accessible on by sea, Tristan da Cunha is in fact an archipelago, the remotest inhabited one in the world, although only the main island was settled by man, with…