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, but the other kind. Ports you’d never heard of, countries that didn’t make it into holiday recommendations, or people he’d met along the way on cargo ships, harbours, and in other places most people never ever dreamt to visit.

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, basically because those places tend to have something different, something the well-worn destinations have already smoothed away, more rawness if you like, a little more of whatever made them worth visiting in the first place.

This site is about those places.