Travel in Guinea

Spain now has the world’s most powerful passport, according to a new index.

Today I am where I want to be, strolling along almond-fringed beaches that, like cuffs of lace, fall from the dark sleeve of the jungle. Steam rises after a recent downpour and morning sunlight glances off cresting waves silver-threaded with the shoals of sardinella that ride their swell. Coconuts drop with a thud around me and begonia blossoms spiral slowly. This is a fecund forest of vastness that’s so alive you can practically hear the sap rising. I have been walking for more than an hour from my tented suite at the Sundy Praia retreat and seen no one. I have padded across sandbanks in the flipper trail of turtles who have come to lay eggs on these northern shores and clambered over rocky headlands. I’ve scaled the heights – and pushed through the insect drill—of the forest, into the shade of the towering oka. These trees have a presence not unlike Tolkien’s ents, those humanoid-like tree creatures. In Príncipe, it is customary to bury a newborn baby’s placenta beneath a trunk, so that everyone has a tree they consider their own. The forest is venerated and it is sacrilege to fell a tree, a belief embedded in law.

A European country has taken over the top spot as the world’s most powerful passport, according to a new index by VisaGuide.World. As of December, the Spanish passport has claimed first place from Singapore, a new study by the visa advice website has found.

Gunta and Greg Larsen were looking for an expedition cruise that colored outside the lines when they found a 15-day coastal Japan cruise offered through Lindblad Expeditions and National Geographic. And that's exactly what they got.

I meet Donald Macauley, the 37-year-old founder of Sierra Leone's first surf school, along a sunny swath of silky yellow sand at Bureh Beach, a surfing destination on the Western Peninsula where he’s been catching waves for more than 20 years. Macauley learned how to surf from a British soldier; before he had access to a proper board, he and other local teens would ride wooden surfboards shaped from busted fishing boats. In 2012, he launched Bureh Beach Surf Club—whose slogan, “Di waves dem go mak u feel fine,” says it all—and today he leads a handful of instructors, mentors street kids, and rallies behind some of Sierra Leone’s most promising young talents. Among them, I meet 25-year-old Kadiatu “KK” Kamara, the country’s preeminent female surfer. “My dream is to teach more girls in Sierra Leone how to surf,” says Kamara, who herself learned at Bureh Beach eight years ago and hopes to someday open her own school. When girls sign up for lessons, she refuses their money. “It’s my responsibility,” she says solemnly. “I want to motivate them not to be afraid of the water.”

For most travelers, entering the vast diversity of Ecuador’s Cuatro Mundos ("Four Worlds": the Pacific Coast, Andes, Amazon and Galápagos) requires nothing more than arriving with your passport.