The ladies from Singapore were perturbed. The revelation that we were leaving Antarctica a day earlier than planned sent them into a huddle to discuss options, as if they had any. I caught snippets of their conversation and the tone seemed to lie between conspiratorial and mutinous. Finally, one raised..
All posts by Jamie Lafferty
A cold, bloodless dawn breaks above the Andes, the yolk of a white sun spilling out across the Atacama Desert ahead. I’m standing next to the ruins of a shepherd’s hut, 13,800ft above sea level. This altitude — over three times that of Ben Nevis — plus the fact I’ve been..
“Where did you get this from?” Asks Ragnar as he approaches my rental car uninvited. In a long list of nations that aren’t the Faroe Islands, this sort of behaviour might make me nervous. Yet up here, half way between Scotland and Iceland, everything has the feel of a village,..
I was somewhere north of Sparta when the Monster began to let go of my jaw. As the awful infusion of caffeine and chemicals faded, it was replaced by an enormous fatigue, so as soon as possible I pulled over in the rental car and slept at the dusty roadside...
The boat was bouncing in a schizophrenic way that made sleep impossible. Just as any kind of soporific rhythm was established, we’d catch a little air and the belly of the hull would slam into the ocean, compressing our spines and snapping us awake. There were 10 of us on..
South from here there’s nothing but the vastness of the Pacific, nothing until you hit Antarctica’s Ross Ice Shelf where, for now, the ocean still freezes. Due west you’ll find more of the same – only the mighty sea, all the way to the island of Biak, just north of..
It feels like a place summoned from the scorched pages of a Cormac McCarthy novel. Out on Bartolomé all humidity is gone, all moisture burnt away. The very air feels as though it has been drained like the victim of a vampire. Here, in the rain shadow of Santa Cruz, the..
Over the next year or two, if travel writing still exists, it’s going to have yet another Covid problem, specifically whether or not keep acknowledging the compound squalors of the pandemic and their effects on the industry. Eventually people – I mean editors – are just going to want writers..
I’ll start this story in La Paz in March 2011, though in truth that city has little to do with it. My then fiancée and I were on the tenth month of 13 on the road, backpackers who by that stage had grown feral without really knowing it. We had seen..
Like many young boys, the most upsetting thing I could hear as a child wasn’t that my mother was angry with me, but that she was “disappointed”. Thankfully, it’s been a while since I felt that particular kind of upset. Or I should say it was a while – despite..
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Thanks for writing this. I'm going to echo the people above. Write a book! If you do, I'd definitely buy it <3
I'd still recommend going. Just don't eat whale when you're there – it's on plenty of menus.
Hi Trev, nah I doubt it – it's just a bit too remote and the infrastructure isn't there.