Travel stories often begin with a destination. This one begins with a return. My latest feature for the South China Morning Post explores Sal, the best-known island in Cabo Verde. While most visitors come for its beaches, warm Atlantic waters and year-round sunshine, I found a more compelling story unfolding just beneath the surface. Across…
My travel essay on the island of Sal, in Cape Verde, has just been published by Nueva Tribuna, making it my second travel piece to appear in a national Spanish publication. The story has an interesting backstory. I wrote it after visiting Sal, an island shaped by salt, arrivals, departures, and centuries of movement across…
A salt lake inside the crater of an extinct volcano is not where most people expect to find a lesson in history, identity, and cultural resilience. Yet on the island of Sal, Cabo Verde, floating in mineral-rich brine while voices echoed from the crater walls, it became impossible to ignore how landscapes absorb human stories…
Vultures circling above a dusty football pitch. A traditional wrestling festival in rural Gambia. A man who seemed to drift through the edges of the crowd unnoticed — until he stepped into the circle and became something else entirely. My latest travel feature, published in Spanish by Nueva Tribuna, explores transformation, belonging and the strange…
It began, quite simply, with reading Joseph Roth. But as I kept reading, and watching the news here in Spain fill with talk of “national priority,” something shifted. The distance between then and now began to feel thinner than it should. The phrase has been circulating in recent months, attached to new political agreements in…
Every Holy Week, Spain performs one of its most intricate cultural balancing acts. The processions move through ancient streets with choreographed solemnity. Drums echo against stone walls. Candles burn. Brotherhoods trace routes that predate the modern state itself. For many, it is heritage. For others, devotion. For nearly everyone in Spain, it is—at the very…
How do you understand a country that seems to contain at least two entirely different worlds? In my latest Camino a Ítaca column in the Spanish newspaper HOY, I explore a paradox I witnessed while thinking about modern Iran. In Tehran, a one-hour drive can feel like a journey across centuries — from affluent northern…
Sometimes a city isn’t a skyline or a list of monuments. Sometimes it’s a story that refuses to stay still, slipping through tidy definitions and glossy brochures. I was recently invited—somehow, improbably—to write for the Ateneo de Cáceres, as part of their reflections on what culture means in the context of Cáceres’ bid for European…
My travel-essay, “Everywhere and Nowhere: Following Ibn Battuta Across Marbella”, has been selected as a finalist by Intrepid Times in their “A Book Led Me There” competition. Intrepid Times In this piece I venture beyond Marbella’s glittering façade of sun-saturated luxury—Ferraris, gold chains, shopping sprees—and into the old town’s labyrinth of alleys where the echoes…
A Secret Key: Returning to Jasper National Park When I began “On Borrowed Roads: Rediscovering Jasper,” I thought I was writing about distance — about what it means to return to Jasper National Park after so long away. I imagined readers who didn’t know the Canadian Rockies or the sound of the Athabasca River breaking…