Soon after the turn of the 20th century, rumors began making their way west that man-eating lizards, 10 feet long and weighing up to 350 pounds, with fearsome talons, chain mail scales, and serrated teeth dripping with venom, had been found living on a remote Indonesian island. The source of the reports was Lieutenant Jacques Karel Henri van Steyn van Hensbroek, a Dutch colonial officer, who revealed the existence of Varanus komodoensis, the world's largest extant reptile, in 1910. But it was a 1926 American Museum of Natural History expedition to capture live specimens, led by a flamboyant Vanderbilt scion named William Douglas Burden, that caused interest in the creature to explode in popular culture. Burden's gripping account, Dragon Lizards of Komodo, inspired his friend Merian C. Cooper to dream up the primordial Skull Island for his classic 1933 film, King Kong. Civilization was steaming forward, and yet, in that era, the map still seemed to hold places that hid ancient secrets.
I arrived in Labuan Bajo, on the western coast of the Indonesian island of Flores, to find out if, nearly a century later, there was still anything left to discover. The town is the gateway to the 670-square-mile Komodo National Park, a UNESCO World Heritage Site that encompasses the forbidding volcanic islands of Komodo, Padar, and Rinca as well as numerous smaller ones. They're home not only to Komodo dragons but also to whales, turtles, dugongs, manta rays, and more than a thousand fish species. I had come to meet Adrien Portier, a young French entrepreneur, who, with his business partner Dimitri Tran, commissioned Vela, a luxurious 164-foot sailboat that is designed to cruise Indonesia's wildest and most beautiful islands.
Diving off Vela, a luxury yacht built in the traditional Indonesian phinisi style, into the sea around Komodo National Park
Vela is a modern take on the phinisi, a two-masted, eight-sailed timber boat. Traditionally, phinisis sailed throughout Indonesia's 17,000 islands, but they were built mostly by Konjo-speaking people from the village of Ara, on the island Sulawesi. The boats fell out of favor as Indonesia's commercial and fishing fleet modernized, but in 2004 American expat Patti Seery pioneered luxury phinisi travel with the launch of a boatship called Silolona. Seery wanted the journeys to be as amazing as the destinations themselves; she also wanted to honor the cultural legacy of her adopted home country. Vela, its descendant, has room for 14 guests and a crew of 18—including a mixologist, a yoga instructor, and a photographer on request. It was designed by Tresno Seery, Patti's son. Tran and Portier commissioned the boat after falling in love with phinisi cruising, tweaking the design
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On Monday 14 August, when the tide is right, an antique sailing ship will manoeuvre through the lock of Plymouth’s historic Sutton harbour and point herself south-west towards the Canary Islands. It will be the start of a two-year voyage around the world taking in 32 ports and involving thousands of people in a groundbreaking geographical project, Darwin200, which aims, among other things, to inspire the environmental leaders and scientists of the future.
Answering the decades-long call of Native American tribes and environmentalists alike, President Joe Biden earlier this week created a new national monument buffering parts of Grand Canyon National Park in Arizona. Meaning “where tribes roam” to the Havasupai people and “our ancestral footprints” in the Hopi language, Baaj Nwaavjo I’tah Kukveni covers 917,618 acres across three distinct sites north and south of the natural wonder. Home to wildlife like bison, elk, mule deer, desert bighorn sheep, and rare cactus species, the protected area encompasses plateaus, canyons, Colorado River tributaries, and countless culturally and spiritually significant sites for the Indigenous peoples of the Southwest.
The chance to spot a bear, bison, or bald eagle in the wild is one of the major reasons travelers visit the United States’ 63 national parks. You might assume that a megafauna mecca like Yellowstone National Park would offer the best odds of seeing multiple animals.
When the U.S. National Park Service (NPS) proposed drastic hikes to admission fees last fall, the reaction was swift and negative. It seems the NPS heard what people will saying.
Glacier National Park is one of the most gorgeous parks in the national park system. The sprawling park is in northern Montana and is home to some of the oldest glaciers in the US — not to mention wildlife like grizzly and brown bears, mountain goats, bighorn sheep, pumas, wolves, elk, moose, and more. The park has gorgeous day hikes running between half a mile or 20 miles, and some of the best backcountry backpacking in the US. You can even hike from the US into Waterton Lakes National Park, the attached national park just on the other side of the US-Canada border.
American trains are not the fastest in the world. They also severely lack the network of tracks necessary for people to ditch their cars or forego flying to rely on them entirely for their domestic travel needs.
Big Bend National Park shares a border with Mexico in a stunning stretch of southwestern Texas, where evenings are defined by orange skies reflecting against red-rock canyons. While such stunning scenes are commonplace within Big Bend, the massive desert preserve remains overlooked among US national parks. It’s never had more than 500,000 visitors in a single year since it was made a national park in 1944, making it one of the least-visited parks in the lower 48.
Winter may not seem like the ideal time to visit the wilds of a national park, but really there’s no bad time to enjoy the beauty of America’s public lands. Some national parks in temperate or even tropical climates are better to visit in winter when they’re free from the scalding heat of summer. If you don’t mind the potential for a bit of snow, you’ll enjoy relative quiet in some of the larger parks visited en masse during warmer months.
Abutting the US border with Canada, North Cascades National Park is a land of contrasts. Cerulean blue lakes sit at the foot of mountains forested in deep green pines, with their peaks capped in snow and pointing to the heavens. The park mirrors the various landscapes of the Pacific Northwest, shifting from mountainous areas dominated by rain showers and heavy snowfall to arid plateaus cut by glaciers since melted into alpine rivers and lakes. The park is remote, accessible only by the beautiful North Cascades Highway or from hiking trails to the north.