Lina Zeldovich

“Do-Re-Mi,” sings my guide Amelia Höring, who’s standing in the middle of Mirabell Gardens in Salzburg, Austria. Most guides don’t sing on city tours, but here it’s fitting—this year, Salzburg, where The Sound of Music was filmed, celebrates the 60th anniversary of the much-loved movie. Julie Andrews, who played Maria Rainer, the governess of the seven von Trapp children, trills the tune in the Mirabell Gardens while teaching them how to sing. “We can all try singing together,” Höring suggest...

After surviving colonisation, deforestation and enforced labour, Costa Rica’s Indigenous people are reviving traditions and ecosystems lost to the centuries – and visitors are welcome to join in

This centuries-old Korean subculture of free-diving women is almost gone.

Yun Yeun Oak, an 80-year-old Korean free diver, brings a tray of seafood to my table. She puts it down and names the contents of the little bowls, each holding a different type of today’s catch. “This is a sea cucumber, this is a sea pineapple, and this is sea urchin,” she says in Korean, as Michelle Hong, the tour guide from Intrepid Travel, translates. The food is so fresh, it still carries the ocean scent with it. I...

Ben Brandao remembers his first official introduction to comb jellies vividly. It was 2017 and he was running kayaking tours in Cape Canaveral, Florida, taking people to see bioluminescence—a phenomenon in which some creatures emit light. In late October that year, two buses full of geneticists pulled up at the shore to join his tour.

Nearly 200 years before slavery was abolished in the US, Black freedom-seekers journeyed south instead of north to a place that promised freedom.

In October 1687, a dugout canoe arrived at the shores of St Augustine, then a settlement in Spanish Florida and now the oldest continuously occupied city in the mainland US. The canoe carried eight men and two women, one of whom was holding a toddler in her arms...

French Courchevel and Swiss St Moritz may the most famous of the European ski resorts, but they’re also crowded and pricey. Smaller and less-visited Alpine villages offer more authentic regional experiences, more affordable lift tickets, shorter lines, uncrowded slopes and boundless trails that start or end at your hotel — and sometimes even at your room.

A playful black-and-white capuchin monkey jumps across the wooden walkway right in front of me. Her companions leisurely walk on the walkway banisters, not minding people holding their breaths while filming the show with their phones. It’s just another day in the Manuel Antonio National Park in Costa Rica, where some wild creatures are so used to humans that it see...

I’m sitting at La Flor de Lis, an artisanal restaurant in Zaragoza, the capital of Spain’s Aragon region, poking at my unconventional appetiser: rabbit meat with tomatoes, sprinkled with pine nuts vinaigrette and a dollop of thyme-infused ice-cream. The dish calls itself a salad, yet I never thought I’d see such ingredients together on the same plate. I work up enough courage, savour a mouthful—and find myself in awe. The melting ice-cream, whose sweetness is balanced by thyme and the vinaigr...

Marcel Ravin, a chef at the two-star Michelin restaurant Blue Bay in Monte Carlo, places his signature dessert in front of me. The elegant dish looks like a heap of spring blossoms in a bowl. “These aren’t flowers, but rather crispy chocolate florets,” he explains. Growing up on the Island of Martinique, Ravin used to pick fruit and vegetables with his grandmother...

Long flights, especially overnight flights, are the bane of travelers’ existence. The basic economy seats that barely recline and the ever-shrinking legroom add to the discomfort. No one enjoys being twisted into a pretzel for hours, but if you’re flying to Europe, Asia, or Africa, you’re in for, unfortunately, a long flight. The good news is that there are a few ways that you can make...

DJ Tan, cofounder of the Singaporean startup Prefer Coffee, pops open a bottle of oat latte and pours some into my cup. The chilled drink feels wonderfully refreshing in Singapore’s heat—and it tastes just like coffee. And that’s impressive, because there isn’t a single ounce of coffee in it.

South Korea, as I learned on my nine-day tour with Intrepid Travel, is a country of curious contrasts. In Seoul, centuries-old palaces nestled in between skyscrapers and traditional markets elbowed shopping malls. Pharmacies sold both herbal concoctions and modern meds. Young Koreans donned colorful traditional Hanbok dresses to visit temples and palaces, and proudly posted their selfies on Instagram and TikTok.

The only thing hotter than Cartagena’s afternoon sun is the cooking oil sizzling in the pots of the city’s street food vendors. The sun in Colombia can burn you in less than 15 minutes, but that oil turns a flattened slice of a green plantain into a fried crispy patacón in just a few seconds. Frying an empanada takes a bit longer. Then the woman gives me the empanada wrapped in a thin napkin from which hot oil drips...

Jackson Madnick, a 76-year-old resident of Wayland, Mass., rarely mows, waters or fertilizes his lawn, and he never sprays it with weed killers. Even so, his grass looks like a thriving, emerald-green meadow year-round. It emerges green from under the snow, and it keeps its vibrant hue in summer droughts...

Our tour van parks next to a tall tree in Larués, a tiny village in the Aragon region of Spain’s Pyrenees, and our group pours out, hungry for lunch. We just spent the whole morning touring the 11th century Loarre Castle in Aragon’s Huesca Province, now known as the filming location of Kingdom of Heaven—and we are ready for food. I’m expecting some simple sandwich, soup or salad bites, but that’s not what happens. Turns out, we’re in for a real treat.