The journey from Manali in Himachal Pradesh to Spiti Valley - the cold desert mountain near Tibetan border is one of the most beautiful road trips in India. Let's take this amazing journey.
The journey from Manali in Himachal Pradesh to Spiti Valley - the cold desert mountain near Tibetan border is one of the most beautiful road trips in India. Let's take this amazing journey.
I’d already seen this beach before I ever set foot on it. A jetty reaching out into a bay, recognisable enough from 30,000 feet that I named it in a caption weeks before I could confirm it, on the flight from Melbourne into Cairns. Palm Cove, on the descent into Cairns. Turns out I was right, and the only way to actually check was to go. The jetty, from 30,000...
Twenty-eight nights, every flight and every day I actually spent, across a country I’d tell anyone to give real time to. I’ve been to forty-three countries, and this trip is still one I’d point to first if someone asked which one to copy. Australia is a genuine island, a long way from almost everywhere, and that isolation is exactly why it rewards a...
If someone had blindfolded me on my first evening in Cairns and left me on a street corner with every sign covered, I don’t think I could have told them I was in Australia. That’s not a complaint. It’s the single most interesting thing about the place, and it took me until my second day here to actually admit it to myself. I’d flown in from...
Cairns isn’t really the destination – it’s the gateway. I flew this route in January 2026 while making my way around Australia. Five days in Melbourne, then a straight shot north into the tropics: you leave laneways and coffee culture in the cool south and land in Far North Queensland’s heat and rainforest a few hours later. This is where you...
Ubud’s budget scene is unusually good for what it costs. Pools, free breakfast, and daily yoga are standard rather than a luxury add-on, and the difference between a big social hostel and a quiet family homestay is really a difference in what kind of trip you want, not in comfort or cleanliness. This guide covers both ends properly: proper social hostels with...
Ubud has thousands of places to stay, from ten-dollar homestays to resorts that open with a walk across a suspended bridge. Rather than one long undifferentiated list, these picks are sorted by what each hotel actually does best, so you can jump straight to the category that matches your trip. This guide focuses on the 32 strongest picks across every style and...
Where to stay in Ubud comes down to one real question: how much walking are you willing to trade for how much jungle? Ubud isn’t a single town so much as a scatter of villages that grew into each other. Central Ubud gets you Jalan Raya’s markets, temples and traffic all within a few minutes’ walk. Ten minutes further out, in either direction, the...
Cairns punches above its size for a city built around one purpose: getting you to the Great Barrier Reef. The Esplanade alone has three Crystalbrook-branded five-stars within a few blocks of each other, a Pullman on either side of the CBD, and a lagoon pool standing in for the beach the city itself doesn’t have. Up the coast, Palm Cove does the beach properly...
Cairns has an odd secret for a city built entirely around the Great Barrier Reef: the CBD itself has no beach. The Esplanade waterfront is a mudflat at low tide, crocodile warning signs and all, and everyone swims in the free saltwater lagoon instead. That single fact decides more about where you should stay here than anything else. Want to walk to your reef boat and...
The mosquitoes found me before the tree did. I was standing under a strangler fig that had been alive for something like 500 years, and all I could think about was my ankles. That was the first ten minutes of a full day on the Atherton Tablelands, the highland plateau that sits an hour or two inland from Cairns, cool where the coast is humid, green in a completely...