All that was once published about me somewhere.
Calls wake us in the first light of day. Off Banda Neira, two longboats surge alongside the Le Soleal, each carrying around two dozen rowers while a stroke drums the beat.
In the Tuli Block in eastern Botswana, six cattle farms are turning back into wilderness. Four days with trackers, sable antelope, an archaeologist and a Berlin couple bringing back what had vanished – and needing a fence to do it.
By small propeller plane from island to island in Vanuatu: a cave you leave by swimming, rock art on Lelepa, a festival without phones and the Yasur volcano, which never stops rumbling and spitting lava – visiting a people who take only their happiness seriously.
Eleven nights aboard Le Soléal across the Banda Sea to Raja Ampat – rowers who come out to meet the ship, the islands where nutmeg once grew and nowhere else, reefs home to three quarters of the world’s coral species and a yellow coconut leaf that closes a reef.
On 65 inhabited islands in the South Pacific, people often live without electricity and on very little money – and still top the Happy Planet Index. A journey to the Ni-Vanuatu, their caves, volcanoes and a sense of community that needs no rules.
“Australia is a continent pretending to be a country.” Duncan Fraser of the Adelaide tourism office says it almost in passing over lunch. I note the line down – it sounds like a joke but reads to me like a riddle. And it will not let go of Annette and me for eight days.
Alberta is famous for its vastness – but the best of it lies just beneath the surface: white buffalo at Métis Crossing, a forest starting over after the fire, a mountain that has forgotten nothing in 7,000 years. Westward, in British Columbia, the way leads up – by helicopter onto ridges and glaciers.
Adelaide is green, friendly and manageable – and then the other Australia begins. On Kangaroo Island an egg-laying mammal waddles through the leaves, and above the outback a Cessna reveals two salt lakes of a scale nobody thinks possible.
Rust-red dirt roads, termite mounds, boab trees – and somewhere deep in the outback, a breakdown that turns everything upside down. A Jeep journey along the infamous Gibb River Road. A blend of adventure and the millennia-old Dreamtime culture of the Miriwoong Aboriginal people.
Zwischen den Wellenbergen der Drake-Passage und den Pinguin-Stätten der Antarktischen Halbinsel liegt eine Welt im Wandel. Eine Schiffsreise zu einem Kontinent, der so verletzlich ist wie nie zuvor.
I experience Switzerland as a winter wonderland – with ice in all its fascinating facets: ice canyoning, ice climbing, cross-country skiing – and finally, my adventure buddy Markus Blum and I take an ice bath in Europe’s first public ice bath facility, the “Eisbadi” in Arosa.
A capital city full of magnificent temples, surrounded by lush jungle. Deep gorges with rushing rivers and breathtaking views over tea plantations and seas of clouds. Dark forests with centuries-old giant trees – Taiwan is all this and much more.