When I was a kid, my dad would tell me stories about wherever he travelled when he was young. Not the kind about beach resorts or all-inclusive hotels. The other kind. Ports you’d never heard of. Countries that didn’t make it into holiday brochures. People he’d met along the way on cargo ships, in harbours, in places most people never dream to visit, living different lives to anything I knew.

Those stories stuck. While my friends were dreaming of summer holidays on crowded beaches, I was more interested in the kind of places my dad had passed through. The ones that didn’t have a tourist board. The ones where you had to figure things out as you went.

That never really changed. The less visited places are still the ones that pull me in. Not because avoiding the obvious makes you a superior traveller. It doesn’t. But because those places tend to have something different. Something the well-worn destinations have already smoothed away. A little more rawness. A little more of whatever made them worth visiting in the first place.

This blog is about those places.