Podcast: Adventure writing

If you stand still long enough, Costa Rica’s flora and fauna has a way of making you feel like it’s closing in, threatening to drag you into the dense vegetation’s fold. It’s difficult to not linger when you see a busy chain of leafcutter ants crossing the trail or when you marvel at an ecosystem bursting with trees and vascular plants like angel’s trumpets, lipsticktrees, or—my favorite—wild sensitive plants, with leaves that curl and close when touched.

It’s hard to know if Milan’s fashionistas are bemused more by my driving or by my vehicle as I stall, splutter and crunch the gears while double-parking the tuk-tuk on Via Monte Napoleone, the city’s swankiest street. Both it and I look comically out of place on a thoroughfare dripping with designer shops and high-end motors. I’ve just seen a Hermès shirt with a €10,500 price tag and spotted the Argentina World Cup winner and Inter Milan star Lautaro Martínez laden with Gucci shopping bags, and bouncing into a blacked-out Hummer with his girlfriend and minder.

This series of articles about credit cards, points and miles, and budgeting for travel is brought to you in partnership with The Points Guy.

Aruba, home to the most sunny days in the Caribbean, boasts an overwhelming sense of warmth and happiness that you’ll feel all across the island. In addition to the perpetual sunshine, people come to this pristine island for many reasons: delectable cuisine; a romantic retreat; the welcoming culture; destination weddings; and the abundance of water activities. From cave exploring to shipwreck snorkeling, here are some of the must-see adventures throughout this Caribbean country, also know as the One happy island.

It happened at an indoor wall for the sport of “bouldering”. I was standing watching some athletic young men conquer a tricky route that was beyond my abilities, half-listening to their banter, when I suddenly understood what they were discussing. A proposal to climb outdoors. They had never done it. They dreamed of it, but were uncertain how to go about it.

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Visually, parts of AlUla feel like the set design for Star Wars: A New Hope thanks to an expanse of beige-colored desert mountain ranges in each direction. On a recent visit, myself and a group of travelers joked that we half-expected Jawas and Jedis to appear from behind a 12-story chunk of aeon-old sandstone rock.

Winter is a magical time to visit Tetonia and Driggs, Idaho, when the region transforms into a snowy wonderland with endless opportunities for outdoor winter activities. On a recent trip, we stayed at the Teton Peaks Resort in Tetonia, which served as the perfect homebase for all our cool (pun intended) adventures.

If all you do in Queenstown, New Zealand, is while away a few hours at the airport, you might still feel as if you’ve escaped to an alpine chalet. The mountains overlooking arrivals alone fulfill Peter Jackson’s promise of a landscape befitting the fantastical world of Tolkien’s creation, with every inch of the drive into town solidifying the suspicion that Middle Earth may have been discovered, not invented.

From 11,362 feet, summertime in Switzerland’s Jungfrau region looks like a half-colornized photograph. Peering down from the viewing platform at Jungfraujoch, the mountain saddle that connects the Jungfrau and Mönch peaks in the Bernese Oberlands, you can trace the jagged, piny line where the limestone-and-ice mountains melt into the fertile green valleys below.

The Banff Mountain film festival opens the door to the inspiring stories of people who simultaneously confront their physical and mental limits and the elements. And with this year’s festival featuring films on a lawyer running ultra marathons to help women in Afghanistan, a mountain-biking family living with disability, and the first woman to kayak down a 30-metre waterfall, there’s more than a hint of activism over environmental and equality concerns.