Wanderlust July/August 2016 Sampler

Wanderlust Issue 168 (July/August 2016) Lake Titicaca, Peru/Bolivia ♦ 25 Most Remote Outposts ♦ Svalbard ♦ Cape York, Australia ♦ Tibet ♦ Guinea-Bissau ♦ Pocket guides: Ubud (Bali), Ohrid (Macedonia) & Rome

Svalbard

Huskies, glaciers and polar bears – life in Norway’s Arctic city

T R AV E L M AG A Z I N E www.wanderlust.co.uk July/August 2016

PERU

Tibet

Journey to Lhasa on the highest train in the world

W i n!

A trip for tw o to Austria See page 4

A high plains adventure in Peru and Bolivia on Lake Titicaca

Galápagos • Easter Island Alaska • Antarctica • Japan Costa Rica • Greenland Burma & more...

The world’s most remote outposts and why you HAVE to visit

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Guinea-Bissau ♦ Bali ♦ Australia ♦ Macedonia & more...

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CONTENTS

Issue 168 July/August 2016

360˚ – NEED TO KNOW

nder 6Viewfi to know this month...

12GoNeed 14 Eatnow this...

165 minutes with… Nigel Marven 18 Know your…

20Festival tripsCalgary Stampede 22 Fluorescent flamingos, holy bathing in the Ganges and conical peaks...

The Olympics: perfect time to visit a place?

New flights mean you’re closer to Tehran’s mix of mosques and mountains Discover why Azerbaijan’s cuisine is the party food of Central Asia

The wildlife daredevil talks snakes & sharks Earn your spurs in Canada’s Wild West Get your groove on for some of the planet’s best carnival jaunts

▲ Cover story

72The masterclass 75Instant expert: orangutans 78Take better travel photos Travel clinic 80Traveller’s 83treatment guide to… water

Wanderlust editor Phoebe Smith takes a walk on the wild side and tells you how to go camping off-piste Why these endangered primates are still under threat and need your help more than ever Cloudy day? Don’t let that put you off! Peter Watson explains how to capture the silver lining Is pollution a threat to globetrotters? Why you can’t breathe easy Avoid stomach bugs (and worse) with these six road-tested devices

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26 Peru

Take a journey through Peru and Bolivia’s wild altiplano, home to the Aymara people, to discover ruin-dotted islands and ancient traditions amid the pellucid waters of Lake Titicaca

TRAVEL MASTERCLASS

137 “Gentle waves washed over the rock pools and glossed the dark shore, yet something stirred in the shadows.” Nick Boulos

“Its babbling gorges and Tegallalang rice terraces still beguile, just as they did centuries ago.”

Melissa Burfitt

Calgary, p20

WIN! “Glimpses of an ancient world can be found across Rome. Even today, digs are still unearthing treasures.”

141

A two-night stay in Austria, p70

Peru, p26

TALKING HEADS Nigel Marven, p18 “We were in the water for too long and the specialist got a bit of fish oil on him; a bull shark took 26 inches out of his leg in one bite”

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Wanderlust July/August 2016

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KING OF THE SWINGERS...

Orangutans, p75 FEATURES

FROM THE ROAD

Dreamstime; Michael Hutchinson

56Svalbard 86Cape York

Head to the isle of Spitsbergen to see how this frozen mining region has become a hot Arctic escape Explore Queensland’s remote northern-eastern tip and beyond, road-tripping along some of the toughest terrain in Australia before island-hopping in the Pacific Tibet Take a continent-stretching train trip from Beijing to Tibet, bridging cultures and 3,750km of railroad Guinea-Bissau Incredible wildlife, local royalty and deep-rooted ancient traditions collide amid the islands and villages of this oft-forgotten West African gem

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POCKET GUIDES

112Your story

24 hours: 137First Ubud, Bali

Reader Dom Tulett finds adventure and solitude in lofty Lucerne while Nandini Chakraborty hunts for a tourist-free escape in busy Pompeii Your pictures Brazil, Peru, Australia, Cuba, Burma, Grenada and even North Korea – you’re a well travelled bunch aren’t you? We love seeing our readers’ pix, especially the ones that make us jealous!

Your letters In our mailbag: book-inspired travelling; invasive tourists interrupting a peaceful send-off in Venice; discovering your trip in Wanderlust; and enjoying a slice of paradise on a Vietnamese beach

Tear yourself away from Bali’s overrun coast and head inland for culture, cuisine and curiosities among Ubud’s villages and lush rice terraces

114

break: Ohrid, 139Short Macedonia

Exploring Europe’s oldest waters and best-kept secret amid monasteries and mountains

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141 Travel icon: Rome, Italy

With two of its star attractions newly refurbished and Vatican City now opening up areas previously off-limits to the public, now is the time to take a fresh look at the Eternal City

100

“The walls sparkled in the beam of my headtorch, the ice reflecting the light in tiny fragments like a disco ball.”

Phoebe Smith

“It wasn’t long ago that the Potala Palace and Old Town were all there was to Lhasa.

Now it was fast-growing and changing, but with a core of something pure and enchanted.”

Tom Rhys

Ohrid, p139 Rome, p141

Tibet, p100 Tehran, p14

86 Bali, p137

“Warmed by the Southern Pacific Ocean, it remains ruggedly inaccessible: swathed in forest and fringed by mangroves and virgin beaches.” Mark Stratton

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Cape York, p86

Special feature

38 World’s Best Outposts

They may be harder to get to, but these outposts are well worth the effort. Our list of remote wonders has volcanoes, wildlife, tundra and more...

Wanderlust July/August 2016

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Think pink Nakuru Lake, Kenya

Photographer: Anna Omelchenko/Shutterstock.com The Great Rift Valley cuts a rich swathe through the highlands of Kenya, attracting wildlife-lovers who are keen to spot the scores of species that call the area home.

Among the more remarkable are the flamingos of Nakuru Lake (1,754m), captured here against the dying of the light. The birds’ candyfloss feathers, stained from a diet of mineral-rich algae, form a sea of pink that’s best seen during the January-February dry-hot season. Yet the flamingos’ environment is changing, with rising water and pollution levels preventing the birds from feeding. Hopefully, remarkable sights like this won’t become a thing of the past.

This image is taken from Ultimate Wildlife Destinations by Samantha Wilson (New Holland Publishers; £15) is out now

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Pole position

A local Aymara propels his reed tortora boat across the calm waters of Lake Titicaca

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Peru & Bolivia

Highplains drifting

From fashionable La Paz to the ruin-scattered islands of Lake Titicaca – explore the spiritual home of the Aymara on a trip across Bolivia and Peru’s wild altiplano Words & photographs Chris Moss

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25

must-visit outposts

The middle of nowhere can be the most exhilarating destination of all and well worth the effort needed to get there.

Explore pirate islands, volcano villages, incredible wildlife and Arctic tundra in the furthest reaches of the world‌

Get higher

Angel Falls is the highest waterfall on Earth – and one of the trickiest to get to

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Outposts 7

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6 20 13

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22 14

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Arctic Norway

The town at the top of the world

As coal production slows at the most northerly town on earth, travellers have never been so important to its future. We venture to Longyearbyen to discover glaciers, wildlife and hardy locals...

Words Phoebe Smith Photographs Neil S Price

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Arctic Norway

“Y

ou never know when one might turn up, so you always have to be on your guard,” Thor Ove Bendiksen warned as he sipped his coffee slowly and deliberately, a smile creeping up on his rounded face while his white whiskers quivered. “You can be sitting down to eat dinner and… bam!” he hammered on the table to punctuate his point, “one walks into your house without warning.”

Sat in the corner of Fruene, a wood-panelled coffee shop in the centre of Longyearbyen, the regional capital of Svalbard, you’d be forgiven for thinking that Thor’s cautionary speech was about polar bears. It’s here, after all, on Spitsbergen – the largest of the islands that make up the Arctic archipelago – that Ursus maritimus outnumber human residents by over 1,000. But this 60-something retired miner was not talking bears; he was in fact regaling me with stories about one of the more regular uninvited visitors to his home: the tourist.

Ever since the profits from coal mining – the industry on which this town was built back in 1906 – began to fall, both the Government and locals have been looking for a viable alternative

economy. As coal prices slumped from US$160 per tonne in 2008 to just US$45 today, a good reason was needed to keep a permanent settlement in this the most northerly town in the world.

Scientific research is one, evidenced by the ever-expanding university that sits in the centre of town and whose students account for a large proportion of the population. The other is tourism. Boasting arctic wildlife, polar night, northern lights and midnight sun, it’s no wonder that the numbers of visitors has continually increased since the first curious arrivals – aristocratic hunters – found there way here in the early 1800s. In 2015 alone, 130,000 people reportedly visited (that’s 12,000 more than the year before). This goes someway to explain the flow of visitors to Thor’s house who, according to him, wander in regularly to test the theory that all residents must leave their doors unlocked in case a polar bear unwittingly heads into the community.

It’s not that human guests are unwanted – in fact they are fast becoming vital. I arrived to the island in April, just one week after the biggest working mine closed in Svea, 44km south of Longyearbyen, which employed about 400 people. They were – according to locals – to keep on just 25 employees, relocating them to Mine 7 on the outskirts of town, where the last working mine on the island exists solely to produce the coal needed to power the settlement. For locals, the closure was a hot topic of conversation. ⊲

‘For the next couple of hours I became a polar expeditioner, pulling an array of equipment up Lars Glacier at the southern edge of town’

Wanderlust July/August 2016

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Wanderlust Issue 165 (April 2016) xxxxxx ♦ xxxxxxxxx ♦ xxxxxxxxxxxxx ♦ xxxxxx ♦ xxxxxxxxx ♦ xxxxxxxxxxxxx ♦ xxxxxxxxx ♦ xxxxxxxxxxxxx ♦ xxxxxx ♦ xxxxxxxxx ♦ xxxxxxxxxxxxx

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Patagonia

Your guide to wild Argentina and Chile

T R AV E L M AG A Z I N E www.wanderlust.co.uk April 2016

South-East

ASIA

17 WORLD HERITAGE WONDERS FEATURING:

Cambodia ∙ Thailand ∙ Indonesia Laos ∙ Malaysia ∙ Borneo ∙ Vietnam Burma & Singapore...

Bulgaria

Trekking through over 2,500 years of history

Best country in the world?

The results of our reader travel awards – revealed!

Win!

A trip for two to Cambodia people worth over £2,000!

See page 4

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♦ New Zealand ♦ Lake District ♦ Hungary ♦ Sulawesi

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Guinea-Bissau Hope floats

Mooring up at a traditional village in the little-known Bijagรณs Archipelago

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THE LOST WORLD

Guinea-Bissau is easily overlooked – discover hippos, kings and ancient traditions in the islands and villages of West Africa’s forgotten country words & photographs Nick boulos

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