The Alaska Highway: Driving the Last Frontier Road
The ALCAN is not the loneliest road in North America anymore, but the 1,387 miles from Dawson Creek, British Columbia to Delta Junction, Alaska can still feel like one. Drive it right.
The ALCAN is not the loneliest road in North America anymore, but the 1,387 miles from Dawson Creek, British Columbia to Delta Junction, Alaska can still feel like one. Drive it right.
The Americas stack sea-level jungles against 4,000-metre cities, sometimes a ninety-minute flight apart. Your body notices even when your itinerary doesn’t. A practical guide to altitude illness, acclimatisation, and the climate whiplash of travelling vertically.
Every long-trip plan eventually becomes a spreadsheet, and every spreadsheet eventually meets a country that laughs at it. Realistic monthly budgets for twelve destinations across the Americas — backpacker and mid-range — with the traps that break them.
The fine print of a travel policy is forty pages long, and the three clauses that will decide your claim are buried on page thirty. A guide to what long-trip insurance really pays for — and the exclusions that catch trekkers, motorcyclists and the optimistically uninsured.
The good news: a US passport opens almost the entire western hemisphere without a visa. The useful news: the exceptions changed recently, the fees hide in odd places, and the rules everyone remembers are a few years out of date.
The cup you had this morning travelled further than most people do in a year. Visiting the farms where coffee actually grows is the rare food pilgrimage that’s cheap, beautiful and easy to arrange — if you time the harvest and know what kind of visit you’re booking.
The standard advice — never eat anything from a street cart — costs you the best meals of the trip and doesn’t even keep you safe. Here’s the system experienced travellers actually use, and what to do when it fails anyway.
From Texas brisket to a Patagonian lamb splayed on an iron cross, the Americas run on slow meat and older rituals. A continent-spanning guide to who cooks what over which fire — and how to get yourself invited to the good ones.
A desert coast, a mountain range, a rainforest, and five centuries of immigration walk into a kitchen. The result is the most decorated restaurant city on Earth — and, more importantly, a food culture you can eat your way through for a few dollars a plate.
Three centuries of empire are written into the streets of Cartagena, Quito, Havana, Salvador and a dozen other cities — in gold leaf and slave-built stone, in balconies and fortifications. Learn a handful of visual grammar rules and every plaza becomes a document.