Alannah Chance travel tips

Stranded in the Mediterranean between Europe and North Africa, Malta has always attracted curious travellers. It has been colonised by everyone from the French to the Phoenicians, its culture, language and architecture shaped by many civilisations – but even more than this by the rocky land itself. Malta today is full of intriguing contradictions: a southern European culture with a Semitic language; a deeply Catholic population with some impressively progressive social policies; and home to both harmonious limestone cityscapes and monolithic concrete hotel complexes.

Forget review sites and apps, local tips and even (whisper it) guidebooks – maybe the best way to find your perfect destination is to spit in a tube. Not just any tube, of course, but one you send to a genetic testing company, who will then analyse your DNA and tell you where in the world your genes come from. And what more rewarding way to travel than to connect with your roots?

Welcome to Season 3 of the Rough Guide to Everywhere! In this first episode, Rough Guides web editor Neil McQuillian (@NeilMcQuillian) joins author Thomas Rees (@ThomasNRees) as he dives deep into the vodou culture of Haiti – encountering artworks made from human skulls and plenty of evidence that it could be the best trip you ever take.

Do sea shanties have a voice in 2018? The coal mines, keel boats and whaling parties that brought them into being may be long gone, but Northeast England's shanty tradition has eternal qualities pulsing through it: folk memory, togetherness, oral tradition, protest and celebration, love and loss.

What does “solo female travel” mean now – and why are so many of us still afraid of it? In this episode of The Rough Guide to Everywhere, host Rebecca Hallett tries to get to the bottom of it with three intrepid guests: one-time Rough Guides senior editor turned freelance travel writer Rachel Mills; Jay Abdullahi, a black, disabled travel blogger, freelance writer, charity ambassador and show host; and human rights journalist Rebecca Lowe, who spent a year cycling alone across the Middle East.

In 18th-century Louisiana, escapee African slaves would make a break for the bayous. Here they might encounter Native Americans and occasionally find asylum with them: two peoples who had in common a struggle for freedom from oppression.

We’re in Iceland for episode two of the Rough Guide to Everywhere podcast. The home of monster glaciers, thunderous waterfalls and bubbling hot springs, there’s plenty to take in here, from lively Akureyri on the north coast to the ever-popular Reykjavik in the south.

A safari without rhinos? That’s the sad future we may be facing. Right now South Africa is home to eighty percent of the world’s rhinos, but poaching is reducing their numbers every year – in 2017, three rhinos were killed every day on average. Anti-poaching units across the country are fighting to protect these and other magnificent animals, and this week on The Rough Guide to Everywhere podcast we learn about one particularly unusual group.

Would you consider travelling somewhere with no wi-fi or GPS? Or no mobile phone signal at all? How about living there? In the first episode of series four of our podcast series, The Rough Guide to Everywhere, we explore the sleepy mountain village of Green Bank, West Virginia, USA. This small, intriguing town in West Virginia is unlike any other: mobile phones, digital cameras and even microwaves are all banned.