Skip the Place du Tertre crush for the Montmartre two streets away — Coeur Coffee on rue Ravignan, La Maison Rose, LE 975, and how to do Sacré-Cœur properly. We know a place. Everyone climbs to Place du Tertre and stops there. Keep walking. There are two Montmartres, running side by side, and most people only ever meet one. The first is the one on the postcards: the painters' square, the portrait easels, the crêpe stands, the coach groups shuffling between them. The second st

There is a certain kind of wine bar that doesn't want to be found. No sign, or a sign for a business that closed in 1987. A door you'd walk past a hundred times. Inside: forty seats, a chalkboard, someone's uncle deciding what you're drinking tonight. These are the ones worth building a day around: LISBON Sol e Pesca, on Rua Nova do Carvalho, is a former fishing-tackle shop that now pours Portuguese wine alongside the best tinned fish of your life — conservas on bread, done

The city rewards stamina, not itineraries. Every first-timer makes the same mistake in New York: they build an itinerary. Times Square, Empire State, a musical, a checklist. New York is not a checklist city. It is a walking city, maybe the walking city, and the whole point is what happens between the landmarks. So: pick a neighbourhood per day, not a list of sights. One day downtown — start with a bacon-egg-and-cheese from any deli that looks busy, walk the West Village while

One hour of driving, two entirely different ideas of Hawaii. Everyone has an opinion about Waikiki, and most of them are wrong. Yes, it's built up. Yes, there's a Cheesecake Factory. But at 6am, before the towels come out, Waikiki is one of the great city beaches of the world — longboarders on glassy rollers, Diamond Head going pink, old men swimming their morning laps. Rent a board from a beach boy stand and take the slowest, friendliest wave of your life. Eat a plate lunch.

Three days in the loudest beautiful city on earth. Then an island with no cars at all. RIO is the only megacity on earth where the geography upstages the skyline. Granite mountains straight out of the sea, forest running through the middle of town, and beaches that function as the city's living room. Do the icons — Christ early morning, Sugarloaf for sunset (that order matters) — then live like a carioca. Start the day at Ipanema around Posto 9, drink coconut water straight f

A 3,976-metre volcano, a group of friends, porters who put us all to shame — and a front-row seat to an eruption. I'll be honest about Acatenango: it's fun and games until it very suddenly isn't, and then it becomes one of the best things you'll ever do. I did it in January 2024 — dry season, the right call — a group of friends plus a few strangers who joined our trek and weren't strangers by the top. It starts innocently: a van out of Antigua, a farmhouse breakfast, walking