On community, good intentions and the economic disparity between host and guest
There’s a thread running through this month’s dispatches: the difference between visiting a place and actually being let into it.
Clare writes about Cambodia at a moment when it needs travellers more than it needs visitors passing through. Paul takes us to a Patagonian estancia where conservation isn’t a side activity but the very reason the landscape still works the way it does. Sue finds an island in the Sea of Cortez where the comfort is deliberately kept modest, so as not to ask the place to become something it isn’t. And Illona’s Congo journey – travelling deep into the rainforest with Tim Butcher – is, for me, everything Steppes should be doing when it’s at its best.
Further down, in our ‘question on our minds’, Rory Maclean’s account of a death-and-rebirth festival in Bhutan – I love his phrase “a bend in the river of becoming” – sits alongside a harder question: what do we, as travellers, owe the places that let us in?
None of these are the easy, familiar version of travel. That’s rather the point.
I hope you enjoy this month’s dispatches.
Justin Wateridge, Managing Director
Insights from the field
Cambodia | Clare Wiggins
Right now, Cambodia’s quieter than it’s been in years – which, if you’ve ever stood at Angkor Wat shoulder to shoulder with a coach party, is very good news.
Fewer crowds means space to actually look: the carvings picking out detail you’d otherwise miss, the causeways empty enough to walk slowly, the jungle pressing right up against the stone the way it must have looked to those who found it. Beyond Angkor, that same quiet runs through the whole country: floating villages on the Tonle Sap, the temples of Koh Ker, backroads through the countryside that feel, for now, wonderfully undiscovered.
It’s one of the great cultural landscapes anywhere in the world and, currently, it’s showing itself with fewer people in the way. That won’t last forever. Worth going before everyone else catches on.
If you want your money to land somewhere it matters, Cambodia certainly ticks the box. Spend well in Cambodia and you’re not just treating yourself to one of the great travel experiences, you’re helping keep expertise, livelihoods and local confidence in place at a time when the country could use more visitors who travel with intention.
Take this further with a conversation: Clare Wiggins
Chilean Patagonia | Paul Bird
In southern Chile, close to Torres del Paine National Park, there’s an estancia I’d point you towards if you want Patagonia to feel less like a scenic backdrop and more like a place that’s still very much lived in during your trip. It sits across 107,000 hectares of steppe and mountain landscape, where farming, wildlife and conservation sit side by side in the working landscape.
This co-existence fascinates me. You’re not just staying somewhere beautiful and then ‘doing’ conservation on the side: the whole experience depends on the health of the landscape, the people who work it, and the species that move through it. The foundation here is the protection of natural and cultural heritage together, recognising that livelihoods and biodiversity have to be considered in the same breath.
That is what makes a trip feel important as well as memorable. Meet the Chileans who keep the estancia running, see how closely human activity and wild ecosystems sit alongside one another, and come away understanding a place that’s not preserved in spite of local life, but because of it.
Take this further with a conversation: Paul Bird
Mexico | Sue Grimwood
There are places where the appeal is very simple: you arrive, look around, and realise there is almost nothing between you and the natural world. Isla San Jose, in the UNESCO-listed Sea of Cortez, has that feeling. It’s uninhabited, with no roads or crowds, just cactus-dotted desert, mountains, cliffs and pale beaches, with the sea right in front of you.
A new glamping camp now makes it possible to stay here without losing that sense of wildness. You wake with the shore at your feet and the desert behind you, then spend the day moving with the rhythm of the island: kayaking along the coast, swimming from the beach, snorkelling in clear water or watching for marine life in one of the richest seas on earth.
I like this set-up. It gives you access to somewhere that would otherwise be hard to linger in. There’s comfort, but not so much that the place feels softened. By evening, everyone gathers under the open awning as the heat drops, drinks become dinner and the sky fills with stars. It’s the kind of stay that feels rare because it’s so uncluttered: sea, desert, silence and the sense of having reached somewhere properly apart.
Take this further with a conversation: Sue Grimwood
Group Tours | Illona Cross
I’m delighted to see proper expeditionary travel back to the fore at Steppes. Not difficult for the sake of it, but journeys that ask a little more of you and give far more back; that’s what I like about the new small group trips we’re putting together, from Gabon’s forests and Bwiti traditions to the Great Game route through Pakistan and Uzbekistan.
The Congo journey is my personal favourite. It feels so true to what Steppes should be doing at its best. You travel into one of the world’s last great wildernesses, moving by river through the Congo Basin and deep into the rainforest. It’s not a place that has been smoothed out for visitors, and that’s where the magic lies.
There’s a real sense of depth to this trip. You have the Congo River itself, the wildlife of the forest, the chance of gorillas, bonobos and forest elephants, and the added perspective of travelling with Tim Butcher, whose writing honours both the legacy of the country’s turbulent past and the resilience of its people. If you’re drawn to journeys that feel exploratory, intelligent and genuinely rare, this is the kind of trip that reminds you why travel can still quicken the pulse.
Take this further with a conversation: Illona Cross
Bulletins on the board
The sound of the bush in Namibia
In Namibia, a new guided soundscape experience is making safari more accessible by placing listening at the centre. Sensitive microphones around a water-level hide amplify the African bush beyond the range of the human ear, opening up a richer experience for guests with low vision, neurodivergent travellers and anyone who wants to understand the wilderness through sound as much as sight.
An Australian ghost town rises again
In South Australia’s Flinders Ranges, the abandoned railway town of Farina comes briefly back to life each winter through its underground bakery. Volunteers bake bread, pies and vanilla slices in a restored 19th-century Scotch oven, with proceeds supporting the restoration of the town’s ruins.
Egypt looks beyond the Pharaohs
Around 100 kilometres west of Alexandria, Marina El Alamein is emerging as one of Egypt’s most significant new heritage sites. Recent excavations have uncovered 18 tombs, a sealed granite sarcophagus, gold funerary artefacts and an unfinished marble statue believed to depict Aphrodite, deepening the story of ancient Leukaspis, where Egyptian, Greek and Roman cultures met.
Filed by our Specialists
Uncovering Eritrea | Illona Cross
From Asmara’s old steam railway to the markets of Keren and the slow heat of Massawa, Illona Cross discovers Eritrea through its people: women in the milling co-operative, traders, herders and families carrying stories of war, loss and renewal.
Read Uncovering Eritrea
Hands that hold time | Anna Souroullas
In Suchitoto, Anna Souroullas follows freshly poured coffee to hand-rolled cigars, finding a town held together by small acts of hospitality. A cafe becomes a village living room, a maker’s hands carry generations of work, and she finds community in the everyday rhythm of the streets.
Read Table for one in Morocco’s southern Atlas
The song of the shells | Georgia Morley
On the Caribbean coast of Belize, Georgia Morley wakes before dawn to witness Garifuna Settlement Day, as boats, drums, maracas and shell music bring a community’s history ashore. What begins in the early morning stillness becomes a shared celebration of arrival, resilience and belonging.
A question on our minds
What responsibility do we have, as travellers, towards the places we visit?
An hour before first light, the prayers of the monks filtered into my dreams. Their haunting petition rose out of a hidden courtyard, echoing across space as if from another world. In a slow, stretched pulse, the hundred voices called for the spirits to come out of the darkness. Then dawn broke and the earth became luminous
I’d been drawn to Bhutan’s little-visited far east by Tibetan Buddhism, the extraordinary, esoteric faith which sees life as a continuous cycle and death as no more than a bend in the river of becoming. I’d timed my visit around an audience with the Lord of Death who was to make an appearance at the Mongar Tshechu, an extraordinary annual festival that celebrates the promise of reincarnation with whirling skeletons, wide-eyed dragons and ruddy-masked atsara mischief-makers who prank spectators while blowing penis-and-scrotum-shaped bugles.
As I watched, the Lord sprang into the wide monastery courtyard to the brash wail of discordant trumpets. His heavy carved mask seemed diabolic. His red silk cloak was stitched with fiendish demons. In his right hand was a dagger. The large, local audience hissed at his entrance, jeered as he dipped and spun, even though he was no Satan. He was judge and arbiter, able both to guide and to condemn. His dozen spirit aides closed around a crumpled brown cloth, surrounding it, suffocating it as – to the heartbeat of a deep-throated drum – the Lord plunged the dagger into the cloak, not to kill as the crumpled remains represented the newly dead but to subdue the ultimate devil of the ego. He destroyed the inner obstacles to spiritual rebirth: attachment, pride, prejudice and fear.
The Bardo Raksha Mangcham – the Dance of the Judgement of Death – unfolded across the morning until the moment of divination. Villagers with babes in arms, grandfathers in wheelchairs and teenagers in school uniform formed a snaking, thousand-souls-long queue that stretched around the dzong’s perimeter. Off-duty traffic policemen managed the flow, laughing as they greeted out-of-town relatives, filled with holiday good humour. I joined the serpentine line, following two young women as they touched their foreheads to the base of the effigy.
This was the moment that I had come for, a vital step in the five-year journey that was changing my life forever. In this fourteenth-century dance drama, the Lord holds up a karmic mirror to let us see the nature of our future rebirth. I lifted my eyes to the mirror that reflected my past actions, that reminded me that our actions determine the course of both this life and the next. In Buddhism there is no divine salvation, no way to absolve sins in a confessional or with a dip in the Ganges. No lama can brush away wrong doings with a wave of his hand. The only choice is of our path. We alone are the master. We alone have the power to transform our reality.
In the mirror I caught my reflection and whispered a spontaneous prayer. I dropped an offering into a metal box along with thousands of other notes. I lowered my eyes before a statue of the Buddha and turned the wheel of dharma.
Catch a plane, lie on a beach, buy a souvenir, and we change the destination. In an effort to protect its culture and environment, the Bhutanese government has placed a fee of $100 per person per night for visitors to the mountain kingdom. Elsewhere in the world, cities and countries actively sell themselves. Along Peru’s Inca Trail, Quechua bands play El Condor Pasa on the pan pipes. Fijian choral himene singers welcome arrivals in Bora Bora hotel lobbies. In Cancún, living Mayan culture is curated into manufactured tourist experiences. In northern Thailand with the ring of a bell, Padaung women – an ethnic minority from Myanmar who traditionally wear brass rings or coils around their necks – put on their finest Spring festival clothes – no matter what the season – to dance for visitors. The damage of cultural desecration and dumbed-down history increases with the economic disparity between host and guest.
Tourism accounts for 10% of the global economy, supporting 400 million jobs worldwide. Yet Bhutan is making a noble effort to prioritise the preservation of its unique culture and vulnerable ecology rather than maximise tourist numbers. ‘Bhutan is not a cheap destination,’ said former Prime Minister Tshering Tobgay. ‘We are a high-value, low-volume destination. The SDF is a contribution by tourists to the development of our country.”
The Sustainable Development Fee funds free healthcare, education and conservation. Yet it’s a controversial policy. Critics maintain that tourism fees make destinations elitist, block budget travellers and disproportionately impact small businesses that rely on high volume traffic: Airbnbs, hostels, street food vendors, tour guides. But compare the Bhutanese approach with the cultural cost of Nepal’s open door policy that draws ten times more visitors. In 2025 1,147,567 tourists travelled to Nepal in contrast with the 145,065 who visited Bhutan.
At the start of the 21st century, we need to accept the responsibility – as well as the pleasure – of being a traveller. And we need to become accustomed to paying for the privilege.
Rory MacLean, Author
Rory MacLean is the author of more than a dozen books, which in turn have been translated into a dozen languages. His writing has taken him from the missing civilians of the Yugoslav Wars for the International Committee of the Red Cross to divided Cyprus for the UN’s Committee on Missing Persons, and to North Korea for the British Council.
A Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and curator of the annual Sherborne Travel Writing Festival, Rory has won awards from the Canada Council and the Arts Council of England, received a Winston Churchill Travelling Fellowship, and been nominated for the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award.
Published by Little, Brown his newest book, Geography of Heaven: Travels to the Hereafter, is out now.
If something you’ve read has struck a chord, feel free to drop us a note. We’re always happy to continue the conversation.
