Whenever I’m asked when the best time to go on safari is, my enthusiastic – if rather unhelpful – answer is “it’s always a good time to be on safari’. So, with a view to being slightly more helpful, I wanted to talk a little about Emerald Season. Conventional wisdom for years has been that […]
The Rabat-Tangier A-5 is a modern, four lane tollway traversing some of Morocco’s most fertile agricultural land, crossing several major rivers just before they finish their course in the nearby Atlantic, and passing beside the main coastal towns of what was once the Spanish protectorate of Morocco, namely Larache and the colourful artistic medina of […]
A few months ago, when there were still leaves on the trees and the temperatures hadn’t yet dipped below the freezing mark, my friend Susanne joined me on a research dig around the often overlooked country of Slovenia. Together we spent ten days roaming the land and trying to absorb as much as possible. While […]
To travel is to hold smelling salts to our senses, to go wide-eyed, to become hyper observant, run on sheer curiosity. I dive into a research trip scanning for the beauty, the stories, the connections between where I am now and other places I’ve been. I pick a local caffè to hear the morning gossip […]
I’ve just returned from an archipelago off the coast of Panama where a massive, privately-funded conservation endeavour is now being shared with the outside world via a top-tier hospitality project. And I can’t say enough good things about it. Genuine hospitality can be the perfect vehicle for the expression and transmission of culture. However, resort […]
With the advent of the digital era, many bemoaned the disappearance of books as physical objects and pointed to the dangers connected with such a possibility, for it might change the way we think. So, these days, when a book becomes a literary case, that’s already cause for celebration. If that book is an art […]
Olive oil, wine, and cork. Lots of cork. I know of few places whose story can be so thoroughly woven together by and distilled down to such spare components. Portugal’s Alentejo region is these things and more. But trying to describe this region beyond these finite products is for me a futile exercise. As with […]
I like to dig, search, and poke around, and to stir up different ways to connect with a place. How to look at a city or a region with a different set of eyes, or better yet, with a different approach, like the way a pilot gauges the wind direction to land correctly on […]
All languages are affected by the environment they are born from, they carry the landscape and temperature with them. Each particular language has variations, and through these variations a culture is expressed. We have all heard about instances of this, how there are multiple words for snow in northern climes, or how some places have […]
“How to Talk About Places You’ve Never Been” is a book I bought a few years ago when I began teaching in the travel department of the local college. Had my passport been stolen? Was this cheating? Was my professional integrity in tatters? No on all fronts. In fact, despite my initial sense of existential […]
Put it down to stereotype, but I have always been a planner. The desire to work as efficiently as possible runs deep in my Germanic veins; crossing things off my do list sparks joy. I have also always been attracted to the idea of “going places”. Well before joining the travel industry, I enjoyed mapping […]
This isn’t really a podcast, and it isn’t an interview, but it is a collection of clips recorded from two planners trying to capture the ephemeral feeling we have right when we get back from a research trip. When someone from Trufflepig goes off digging for a few weeks at a time, searching and researching, […]
“I don’t think this guy is coming.” My watch marks a quarter to eleven, as we stand atop a rocky plateau and a series of crumbling stairs that lead down to a crude wooden pier. Below us, the lagoon of Naila, and beyond it, a sea of pink sand dunes. And beyond that, the tumultuous […]
With some of them there’s not much you can do: they’re stubborn, they squirm and squeal at every attempt to implement some discipline; sometimes you manage to reestablish a form of order, sometimes you fail. Some are just born wild and you know from the very beginning that they’re gonna have a life of their […]
The world is forever moving towards complexity, leaving us to face down bigger and bigger questions with every trip around the sun. The world of travel is no exception, and the inter-connected complexities of over-tourism, climate change and now COVID make planning decisions more complicated than ever. Questions abound, and for the more philosophical among […]
You are called papa not ‘patata’, you were not born Castillian: you are dark like our skin, we are Americans, potato, we are Indians. – Pablo Neruda, Ode to the Potato Similar to other fuels on a grand scale, the quest to harness sources of consumable energy has been the cause of migrations, the root of […]