Strike out from Galway heading west and the landscape shifts and weather patterns turn into microclimates. There are formations of rock that were once part of the Appalachian Mountain chain from across the sea, ripped off like velcro when Pangea began to move. There are twelve peaks here, called Bens, and if you can see them, you are in Connemara. It is a place defined by sightlines. If you are too far to see the peaks, then you have ventured outside of Connemara.

In between the peaks are valleys, nooks, and crannies. The valleys, like the Bens, have names. There is the Inagh, The Maam, Glencoaghan, Owenglin, Polladirk, and Glencorbet.

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Some of the sand piles reached upwards of 300 feet high. They say the name of this desert means “you can get in, but you can’t get out” like some Central Asian Hotel California. The Taklamakan, the world’s second largest shifting sands desert, the backdoor of the Tibetan plateau. There is a part of this desert, a basin, that is the second lowest point on Earth, a stark contrast to the highest peaks close by.

T.E. Lawrence preached the gospel of the desert because “it’s clean,” for me it is something else, something deeper, the sublime, the fear and the size, it feels like some sort of ancient god, omnipresent and wrathful.

In the Taklamakan there are cities that are eaten by the moving sands only to be spat out years later, preserved and digested. There are amusement parks on the fringes of this landscape, where you can rent a camel to walk to the peak of a dune and slide down the backside of the sand mountain on a sheet of cotton wood planks, blasting down like a snow hill. On the really dry days there is a vibration that hums as you slide down, and the entire mound seems to hum. The Singing Sands (Mingsha Shan), located near Dunhuang, are massive, whistling sand dunes known for producing musical booming or roaring sounds when wind blows. The phenomenon occurs when dry, silica-rich sand grains shear against each other, creating vibrations that act as a natural acoustic resonance.

Typically the vibration is at a low frequency, deep, commonly in the range of 60 to 150 Hz. Specific studies have recorded other dunes around the globe creating notes between 90-150 Hz (F-sharp to D) like in Oman, and a consistent G-sharp (~105 Hz) in Morocco.

The dunes sing.

There is an oasis 10 km from the village of Dunhuang where all the roads converge. There is a large cliff of sand, and a small river coming out of the desert dunes, and a series of caves filled with iconography, from Greek gods to Hindu images and Buddhist Prayers. Here is the place where things changed, where one was either leaving China, or entering, where roads from India came north through the mountains, where trade routes from Europe converged into Asia, and Gods met for the first time: Buddhist, Christian, Hindi, Muslim, Jewish, Zen. Because it was the end and start of the road, it was a place of prayer. A place where thanks was given to Gods for having survived through the long haul, or hopes for being able to make it. A true frontier town. In the caves one would paint whomever one worshipped, letters would be left for lovers, friends or foes; books would be left, the oldest of books – it is where the Diamond Sutra was stolen, the oldest printed book we have presently in the world. A way station, a last will and testament, a post office, a library. The rooms in the sandstone wall were called the Mogao Caves, or the caves of 1,000 Buddhas, and for hundreds of years it was forgotten in the desert, like a dream, covered with sandstorms, encapsulated. In the late 1800’s a young Abbot from a sorted past, illiterate, and finishing his military work, decided to take on the caves as a moral obligation to watch, protect, and care for, a librarian who couldn’t read for the world’s oldest library; The Good Abbot Wang Yuanlu.

At the other end of the Taklamakan is the Oasis city of Kashgar, the farthest point on earth from the ocean. Kashgar looks up at the Pamir Mountains to the west, the Tian Shan to the north, and the Kunlun Mountains to the south. East is sand, like some city on the shores of a great body of water, but this body is composed of silica and stone as opposed to water. There is a market in Kashgar that has been going for over 2000 years, livestock brought in from Kyrgyz, Tajiks, Uyghur, Mongol, Tibetan, all sold with a handshake and a haggle.

When I first arrived in Kashgar I heard talk of the old British Embassy, a building named Chini-Bagh. This was in a time period when maps were illegal, both paper and online. The idea being if the people didn’t know where they were they were easier to control. Kashgar is in China, but it doesn’t feel like it is, it has more in common with Uzbekistan or Afghanistan, both are short drives away. It is the once capital of a separate kingdom called Kashgaria, or East Turkestan, but firmly in the grasp of Han China now, it is held and controlled and measured. Because of the lack of maps, places lived in mythos and story, and to find things, to research and look took conversation and community as opposed to google searching and digital landscapes. Reality was more fluid.

I wanted to find Chini-Bagh and see if it was still there. I had read about the gardens of this estate, and heard tales of spies in the great game seeking refuge. Kashgar was the center stage for a cold war of sorts between Russia and the United Kingdom in the early 1900’s. There are two estates in this Oasis that ebbed and flowed between friction and friendly, the Russian Embassy, which was now a bar I would frequent, and the British Embassy, which seemed to be lost to time. So I walked around the city and I asked people where this building might be, lost without maps. It took some time but I found it tucked behind a high rise hotel at the back of the staff parking lot, and the first floor had been converted into a restaurant. The bedrooms and patio on the second floor were locked, and after a bribe was paid I secured the keys.

When I walked up the mud brick stairs to the second floor there was a layer of dust over the doilies left on the dressers, clothes still neatly folded in the drawers, and a scene of abandonment from years before and days of old.

I talked with the owners of the restaurant and asked if I could bring friends back to have a cocktail on the patio of the second floor, a second bribe was paid and the path forward cleared. I was guiding a group of travelers and thought it might be the best place to talk about the Great Game, sitting on the patio of the old British Embassy in Kashgar, looking over the market and with the mountains and the sands on the horizon.

When we came back that evening it was glorious, and as we told the story of spies and espionage, of artifacts being stolen and hoarded from plunder, we looked to the horizon and saw a wall of blackness and wind. The speed of the sandstorm impressed me and instilled fear, and inside Chini-bagh we all fled as the antique windows rattled and the sands blasted the outer walls. Sandstorms here can toss a transfer truck like paper. And by candle light flickering in the dusty haze seeping in through the pane and cracks, we finished our cocktails and the stories of old hiding in the bedroom of the old British Embassy.

There were three tribes that we all were divided and folded into; Shawnee, Cherokee, and Muskogee, and in some grossly obscure way the appropriation of costume and language was ignored in the name of childcare and education all in the service of summer camp. I was an outdoor education specialist, and my job, at certain times of the week, was to put on a white and grey headdress made of synthetic feathers and twine, a loin and breech cloth out of burlap and hemp, and head out into the woods to roleplay as the “Great Spirit”. It seemed not to occur to the adults around me that this was absurd, that to cartoon and cosplay a culture that was brutally destroyed in the name of manifest destiny was grotesque, but this was also a land steeped in a history of slavery and there were more recent crimes swirling in the air leaving little room for the older sins.

The camp was in the central part of the state of Georgia and was based around an archeological effigy called Rock Eagle. The main camp was a large facility that held conferences throughout the year, complete with a dining hall, cabins, and auditorium. The archeological site was about 2 miles from the main camp in the woods. Alice Walker, the author of The Color Purple had grown up near by and had worked at the dining hall of the main camp in years past. In interviews she talks about her connection with the archeological site: “I had a job at the 4-H club, the white 4- H club as a salad girl (at the Rock Eagle center), and we would drive there and work. And I remember feeling the injustice of how we did all the work there on this place that was actually… had been taken over from Native Americans. Our whole town, all of Georgia was heavily Native American, and the colonizers had wiped them out. But where I lived, there was a huge eagle, it’s called Rock Eagle, and it’s a mound that you can only tell is an eagle if you climb up a tower and look down and you can see this beautiful eagle, so we always felt connected to that.”

Once or twice a week I was instructed to drive to the effigy, a mound 8 feet tall composed of bowling ball sized quartzite laid in the shape of a large bird (102 ft long from head to tail, and 120 ft wide from wing tip to wing tip). The site was surrounded by a chain link fence 10 feet high, and, at the tail of the bird, there is a three story high granite structure built in 1936 by the Works Progress Administration (WPA) to provide an elevated view of the mound. I was given a key to the padlock which would open the fence, and was told to enter the site, climb the mound, and make a spot to lay down on the belly of the bird. In this way I was unseen by observers walking up to the ground level, although would be seen from anyone in the tower. In the humid and hot Georgia summers I would climb up the effigy, make a nest in the quartzite, and fall asleep to wait.

Cabins of campers would then walk from camp on a nature hike, the goal being the bird, and would eventually saunter up to the fence from the woods. The campers were then asked to yell out “How! Oh Great Spirit!” at which point I would jump up from my hidden spot and deliver a speech in character on the mythos of the mound and the landscape. This was the summer of 1997.

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I. SUBSONIC ACCELERATION

At approximately 09:00 on April 22, 2026, I finished reading Bruce Chatwin’s On the Black Hill (1982).

Chatwin’s third book and first novel spans 80 years of the Jones twins, Lewis and Benjamin, born around 1900 on a hill farm, The Vision, straddling the border with Wales, which they never leave.

They sleep in the same bed into their forties and watch the world arrive in glimpses through the chiaroscuro of Welsh village and farm life.

Lewis keeps a scrapbook of air disasters as a way of reaching a world he’ll never access and can’t control.

In Chapter XLI, Chatwin writes: “The Fifties were years of spectacular air crashes: two Comets tumbling from the sky, thirty killed at the Farnborough Air Display.”

II. TRANSONIC FLIGHT (THREE STAGES)

A. Shock Wave Formation

At approximately 15:35 on September 6, 1952, a de Havilland DH.110 fighter jet disintegrated over Hampshire. The aircraft had completed a supersonic dive from 40,000 feet at the Farnborough Airshow.

Aerial debris scattered over three miles; one engine fired—like one of the V-2s the English countryside had so recently rid itself of—into a crowd gathered on Observation Hill.

31 killed, 60 injured. Among the dead (in the air): onboard flight observer Anthony Richards, and John Derry DFC, de Havilland test pilot and my great uncle.

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The series draws to a close with an intimate, honest conversation with British photographer Tom Parker — about the bold, controversial stories he’s drawn to, from Mongolia to India, from Greenland to South Sudan.

The Conversation

British photographer Tom Parker has collaborated on magazine and newspaper stories for over 15 years with Sophy. Since 2016, they’ve also worked on a long-form documentary project covering conflict and wildlife conservation on the African continent, from southern African to South, Sudan, Ethiopia, and the Democratic Republic of the Congo. With intimate knowledge of each other’s working practices in the field, Tom is a fitting episode to draw Season Three of the podcast to its close.

They discuss opportunities and crises in Tom’s working life, from when he first set out from London (where he was employed as an investment banker) to find his purpose in Nepal (as a rookie journalist on a left-wing newspaper). Tom speaks to the American photographer Sally Mann’s adage, that “luck, aesthetic luck included, is just the ability to exploit accidents”.

Highlights of the conversation include some to-and-fro about their shared ‘therapist’; the lure of the modern (vs. nostalgia); hanging high over Mumbai in a metal box to take a picture of India’s tallest bridge; and making pictures of open-heart surgery (the patient was awake). He describes sleeping beside a lava lake in the DRC, and the strangeness of social media influencers flocking to the sulphur-spewing Mount Igen in Indonesia.

Bold, confident and controversial, this episode gives access to the work ethic of an extraordinarily talented photographer — this year alone, he’s been nominated for the Wessing Photography Prize, the Prix Pictet for his work in Indonesia, and recently won Best in Show at the AOP Awards for an essay on Modern Day Mongolia — at the same time as being sprinkled by Tom’s rare and attractive self-deprecating humour.

About the host

Sophy Roberts is a British journalist and author who writes mostly for the Financial Times. Her interests combine travel, literature, history and photography. Her first book, The Lost Pianos of Siberia — a Times Book of 2020 — is published in eight languages. Her second book, A Training School for Elephants (2025), became an instant Sunday Times bestseller. She collaborates closely with other artists, including photographer Michael Turek. You can find out more about Sophy’s work here, follow her in the field on instagram, or get behind-the-scenes reading lists from her podcast guests at gonetotimbuktu.com

I was taught America never lost a war. It was set in some curriculum long ago and my teachers adhered. I remember asking about Vietnam and not understanding the careful distinctions being made through language in the answers given. I was taught all Presbyterians believed in predestination, but I recall sitting in Presbyterian church camp asking all around me who, who amongst us believed in this, and no-one, not even the preacher raised a hand. I was taught gravity is mass pulling because of its bigness rather than bending space and time, and that blood is blue until oxygen touches it, and that we only use 10% of our brains, that gum takes seven years to digest, and that Pluto is a planet. There are analogies used to teach that eventually break down and can, at times, become fabrications. Subtle things like the idea that good and evil are opposed. I remember hearing that we summited Everest “because it is there” and we went to the Moon “because we chose to.”

The complicated realities began to seep in when I first started to travel and I would hear other versions of histories, and the fluidity of historical fact began to make sense to me; that history is not locked in, that it can shift and change and morph, that there are different versions of the same act, and one should take note not to hold tight some singularity in the past and instead seek out a life experienced, awe, and wonder.

As a kid I watched rocket launches and dreamt of living the film Space Camp. I was a generation that watched, with so many others, the Challenger explosion, and was devastated. I dreamt of the heavens.

I read Tom Wolfe write about The Right Stuff and the space race, and the possibility that the reason for the time and investment in space exploration might not have just been science, but the idea of national security and fear.

This past month, in the middle of the madness of the modern state of things, I felt the temptation for the spark of hope in the launch of a rocket. Tempting as the one dimension of hope, yet it is complicated, and in the same impulse I felt hope I also felt shame in things we have and are doing. In one sense a launch like this is pure, human, exploration for the sake of knowledge and an earnest curiosity, and beautiful. An invitation for the idea of oneness on Earth. In another history, it is a race to stake claim, to put a flag in the dirt, to colonize and own, real estate. The invitation of oneness contrasted by the actuals of war and greed. The motivations for exploration are not binary questions, of either hunger for power or hunger for truth. These are some complex mixtures of both, interweaving and both serving and hurting each other.

There is a history that tells of exploration through the lens of commerce and economics; North America and the Northwest passage as a trade route to China, Columbus and his ships as investment for a faster routes for products, an alternative to the silk road; South America for Gold, the Galapagos for whale oil (a precursor to ground oil). The ever present drive of resource and commerce that manifests as destiny. This is one part of a whole though, there are many histories that can shine other sorts of light. Below are a few examples that came to mind that express complexities of motivations and effects, hope and fear:

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God, I love chairs. Empty ones, specifically. I’m a person who wanders about a lot in my daily life – funny enough, I often can’t sit still – and when I’m walking, I am always on the lookout for chairs.

Weathered wooden benches, mass-manufactured saggy plastic lads set out on the street, dainty little table-and-chair numbers perched in front of cafés – any and all chairs, to me, have their own true and unique characters, and completely bloom out my understanding and appreciation of the places where they sit. Who put it there? Did they put it there for themselves, or someone else? Are there perhaps even a few chairs grouped together – and why is one facing away? To me, chairs are people too.

This photo-taking, playmaking scavenger hunt of a passion project began pretty organically, and came from what I think was a rather lonely place. I came across a chair which gave such story and substance to its setting that it completely changed my perception of that place’s shape and personality. And, it made me feel quite a bit at home. The chair became a landmark on my mental map, where it now sits with many four-legged (no, not like that) friends splayed around it. These are big words for a few bits of wood stuck together. Let me show and tell you what I’m on about.

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“Happy Dyngus Day,” the man said as he passed, giving me a start.

I knew it was Dyngus Day; I had come to Buffalo specifically for the celebration. And I had already stopped by the Corpus Christi Church hall and seen the stacks of cellophaned buns and the lineup of stainless steel chafers awaiting the day’s bounty of kielbasa and pierogi. On the street outside, a little girl had appeared in a red dress and matching hat that vaguely resembled a krakuska. “We’re German,” her grandmother had told me, “but I like to introduce the children to different cultures.” Inside Broadway Market I had heard a band playing polkas and read the messages printed on red T-shirts and hoodies: POLISH WIFE – HAPPY LIFE. 716SKI. And, simply, POLSKA (above a white eagle). But there was something about hearing the words Dyngus Day used in a greeting that made the holiday suddenly real for me. And not just real but time-honored, almost Hallmarkian. It was a proper holiday, the man was telling me, that like the others can serve as a salutation.

I wished him a Happy Dyngus Day back.

For years, whenever I met someone from Buffalo, I didn’t reference the Bills, or the falls, or the wings, or the snow; I mentioned Dyngus Day. And it pleased me that even non-Polish Americans knew what I was talking about. In Poland, where I lived in the early ’80s, the Monday after Easter was known as Śmigus-Dyngus, and I found it appealing, if barely acknowledged, because it represented playfulness in a country, and a time, of tremendous seriousness. Traditionally, it was a day when boys chased girls and doused them with water, in a kind of mock purification ritual that took place almost exclusively in the countryside. I own a Polish wood carving of three po-faced boys in folkloric dress tipping buckets over the heads of two squatting and equally colorful girls. Yet there exist black-and-white photographs of young men in Warsaw heaving bucketfuls through the open doors of trams. And one year my wife, a Varsovian, had the remains of a perfume bottle emptied on her as she made her way to her bus stop.

Like a number of Polish names, Śmigus-Dyngus got shortened in the U.S., though observance of it expanded, at least in Buffalo. Other cities with large Polish populations – Cleveland, Milwaukee, Chicago – have not massively embraced the holiday, even though they too experience harsh winters and so, theoretically, should be open to vernal celebrations. Perhaps, for Buffalo, it has something to do with the proximity of Niagara, a people comfortable with the idea of spilled water.

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I like to dig, search, and poke around, and to stir up different ways to connect with a place. How to look at a city or a region with a different set of eyes, or better yet, with a different approach, like the way a pilot gauges the wind direction to land correctly on some small airstrip. It depends on the time and weather of the day. I feel the same with research for travel, and I spend most of my time daydreaming, reading, and pushing myself to talk with people in all sorts of different light.

There are different ways to enter that temple: read articles, read fiction and non-fiction, or focus on a sport or an activity that can be done in that place. I seek out people to connect with, to converse. I will pick up the phone, have meals and coffee and meet-ups just to talk about the place so I can wrap my head around what makes a place move, jump, and shout. To do this you must understand the stereotypes and archetypes.

I came from the culinary world, in a way, in an indirect way. I had to pay my way through university and decided that if I was going to work a part time job, it might as well be something I can learn from. So I applied to be a car mechanic at a few spots, as well as a chef. I didn’t know how to work on an engine or how to cook. I ended up in the kitchen and it taught me an ethos, a certain style of work ethic that only chefs know, a bleed-it-out loyalty. Although I wasn’t keen on a life in the kitchen, the late nights and hard living hustle, the work ethic stuck with me. After finishing my studies, I ran to as many places as I could and began a life on the road. A life in travel.

Oftentimes, because of my time in the kitchen, I start with food. I lived in Brooklyn in the early 2010’s (it was wonderfully/painfully hipster) and on a particular long weekend in Montauk one spring, a pop-up store was selling copies of a new culinary magazine called Lucky Peach. This magazine was something different, and even if you don’t know it, you know the effects it had on looking at food-writing and publishing. It is no longer in print, but for a few years it was a creative place for those interested in the pendulum swing happening in trends from tradition to street. It was vulgar, experimental, scientific and slapstick. It often focused on Asian culinary stereotypes as well, and after living in Asia for almost a decade, I was interested in what Lucky Peach was preaching, I was picking up what it was putting down.

David Chang, Peter Meehan, and Chris Ying began the magazine (Peter worked for the NYTimes as a food critic, Chris worked at Mcsweeney’s publishing, and David founded and ran Momofuku, which translates to Lucky Peach).

In the fall of 2012, the theme of the Lucky Peach was “Chinatown” and reading it I came across an article that set the hair on the back of my neck on end. It had all the bits that I find interesting when finding something to dig into for research. This mysterious article halfway through the magazine was called “The Mother of all Cuisine” and it began with this caveat:

(click on the image for full screen)

Then the article unfolded in what was really a quilt work of emails from Ms Finch to the editors of the magazine. The first few emails laid out a theory that certain dishes (pasta and tomato dishes really) were mastered and invented in Asia, rather than in Italy as many had thought; a theory I had come to like after personally experiencing pasta and tomato sauce in Xinjiang province China. I saw the use of tomato and pasta, all used in ways Europe had claimed as its own, and I was unsure of the origins and histories. Ms Finch claimed that she had heard tale of a chef who had been a stagiaire (an unpaid internship in the cooking world) at the top restaurants in the world, who had spent his late teens and early 20’s working with the greats, influencing them, and learning from them; that tomato sauce originated in Yunnan Province at the feet of the Himalaya, and that there was a Chinese antecedent to balsamic vinegar. All of this blowing the minds of the oral histories of European cuisine, an historically entrenched, white, male community. She writes “Gentlemen, there’s a Chinese cook passing through the best kitchens in the world, and I think he can lend support to a totally unconsidered rewrite of the way food traveled from the New World to the Old. I’m going to find him.”

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The acclaimed British artist George Butler draws in situ with pen, ink and watercolour, his travels taking him to Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan, Ukraine and more. His reportage illustration is the ‘art of travel’ at its most urgent — with this conversation zeroing in on the big question: can art make a difference?

The Conversation

, a British artist specialising in reportage, travel and current affairs illustration, takes us on a moving journey with his work in conflict zones.

Widely published all over the world, George’s work is now available in two books ‘Drawn across Borders: True Stories of Human Migration’, and ‘Ukraine: Remember Also Me’. His drawings have been published by the New York Times, the Guardian, BBC, CNN, NPR. He has also exhibited widely, with work held in London’s Victoria & Albert Museum.

He picks apart how the act of drawing in the field allows him to connect with his subjects, and how the slowness affects him — a human connection that will never be matched by generative AI. “I think if you want feelings of the heart, then you have to use your hands and your mouth and your eyes to see that,” he says; “In a way, drawing has taught me that.”

He recalls one of his first attempts at reportage illustration, in 2007, in Afghanistan, and how the bigger questions have consumed him from the beginning of his career: “What were the costs of sending young men and women to that part of the world and to what end?”

He shares stories from Syria and Ukraine, including an encounter in a hospital where the father of a critically wounded child tells him “art can make no difference.” Listening to George wrestle with these issues is what makes this episode one of the most emotionally arresting in the series thus far.

The episode ends with a conversation about the charity he helped establish, Action Syria, which has raised nearly £10 million over a decade to support education and healthcare. You can make your donations here.

About the host

Sophy Roberts is a British journalist and author who writes mostly for the Financial Times. Her interests combine travel, literature, history and photography. Her first book, The Lost Pianos of Siberia — a Times Book of 2020 — is published in eight languages. Her second book, A Training School for Elephants (2025), became an instant Sunday Times bestseller. She collaborates closely with other artists, including photographer Michael Turek. You can find out more about Sophy’s work here, follow her in the field on instagram, or get behind-the-scenes reading lists from her podcast guests at gonetotimbuktu.com

Then, in Soho, late afternoon, past Fortnum & Mason, lit for the holidays, I dodged crowds of folks leaving to go home from work. I took a turn down a side street to The Windmill, a Mayfair pub, where life seemed to have spilled past the sidewalk. The air felt damp, but no rain was falling, and even if the clock just turned 4:55PM, the night had been upon us for an hour. I didn’t need to know anyone there, I didn’t need a friend or a group because the crowd was a group I could melt into. A G&T doesn’t take long to make, and less time to drink, and before I knew it, I was off again to look for sustenance.

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A few years back, during the various covid lockdowns in Ireland, a trend took hold, and something elemental and primal came to the surface in this island country: the need to wild swim. Pat was telling me about this as he saw me walking back to my hotel after a swim in the Atlantic. I’m on Inis Meain, the smallest of the Aran Islands off the coast of Galway, the far edge of Europe, on St. John’s eve. He stopped me in the road and told me I had to talk to his wife who ran the “dry robe brigade” on the island, a wild swimming group that met twice a day for a swim on the old pier, rain or shine. He dialled on his cell and then handed me his phone and Martina on the other end of the line told me where to be and when, and said I had no excuse, I had to come with them.

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I went to Washington DC in early spring a few years ago. It was for a cocktail party in the Kennedy Caucus room of the Russell Senate building. Although originally intended for party caucuses, the size and grandeur of the room made it a likely site for major public hearings. The room served as a stage for some of the most dramatic Senate investigations, such as the sinking of the Titanic, the McCarthy hearings, and Watergate.

The cocktail party was in celebration of a project called Enduring Earth signing in an agreement with the government of Mongolia, The Nature Conservancy, The Pew Charitable Trusts, and the World Wildlife Fund; an economic package that will deliver USD 198 Million over the next 15 years in order to preserve and conserve 14.4 million hectares of grasslands, forests, deserts, wetlands, and rivers, as well as strengthen the management effectiveness of 47 million hectares of Mongolia’s network of protected areas (a chunk of land larger than the state of California). I had been involved in the process in a few minor ways and was invited to come, raise a glass, and join in celebration of the achievement.

It was that first day of Spring that really hits, especially north of the Carolinas, or perhaps it was especially noticeable to me as I was flying in from a still snow covered Toronto. It was warm in the day and walking the grass of the National Mall you could see snowdrops, hellebores, and crocuses starting to bloom. Cool in the evenings, a perfect season for sleeping with the window just cracked.

At the party I felt more like an observer than a guest; there were business leaders and politicians, as well as people deeply involved in Mongolia and its international workings. At some point I was introduced to a palaeontologist named Bolortsetseg Minjin (Bolor), Ph.D.: Executive director of the Institute for the study of Mongolian Dinosaurs, and was swept away into fascination. Bolor’s focus is on the protection of fossils in Mongolia and she works closely with the U.S. Department of Homeland Security to reveal illegal markets in Mongolian fossils. Since 1924, all Mongolian fossils have been considered property of the state. No private collecting was allowed, and no specimens were to have been taken from the country without special permission from the government. Despite this, fossils have been taken out in steady streams for years, and over the past 15 years real effort has begun to stamp out illicit trade. A few years back a skull of a Tarbosaurus bataar (a relative of the T-Rex) that had been poached from the Gobi Desert was sold at auction to Nicolas Cage. Bolor was the palaeontologist who identified the bones. Cage later voluntarily agreed to return it to the Mongolian government.

Bolor is involved with so many projects outside of this as well. Children’s education, Mobile museums, she works for the American Museum of Natural History (AMNH), she is a member of the Explorers Club in NYC, she is a National Geographic explorer. After the cocktail party that night I walked down from the Senate to my hotel just behind the White House, the Hay-Adams, a classic hotel that has windows you can still open. My mind raced and I knew I would keep in touch with Bolor and offer my help in any way I could, she does that, she is able to foster and inspire curiosity.

On the first day of Spring coming up in a week and a half I am flying south again, this time to New York City, to another cocktail party, this time to mark the start of something new, to help Bolor ignite a fire in the minds of those keen and able, at the Explorers Club in the upper east side. Below is an explanation of the context and the story of her dream coming to fruition. The spark that will become The Gobi Dinosaur Museum.

Humans have always collected things. There are ancient cave dwellings with shark teeth found that come from deserts thousands of miles away, things that were traded for inherent value. Greek muses were worshiped in houses called Museums (the particular entomology for this word being “house of muses”), places of inspiration.

In the Renaissance this word made a comeback but in the form first of small collections individuals would have from recent travels, small museums. They were stored in cabinets or small rooms and were called Cabinets of Curiosities, or Wunderkammer: wonder rooms. The concept of geology, of a world that shifts and moves and is not static, this idea is fairly new to us, an idea of ‘deep time.’ (The phrase “deep time” was coined by John McPhee in his 1981 book Basin and Range, by visualizing Earth’s 4.5-billion-year history as the span of a human arm. In this analogy, the history of the world begins at one shoulder, and a single swipe of a nail file on the middle finger removes all human existence.) In this mental framework mountains move and plates of the earth’s crust fold and morph like dough under the chefs hand; things once thought as locked and firm now fluid. In the 1830’s Charles Lydell published his Principles of Geology which sparked the imagination of many to look to rock and stone as a window to history instead of just rubble. It allowed for many to realize there were worlds of the earth’s history that no longer exist, and that we can see into those worlds through looking at rock and stone. It was the first time we realized extinction was possible, primarily through the work of French naturalist Georges Cuvier, that there were animals that ruled the land that no longer exist. Previous to this, fossils landed in the realm of myth and mistake, but there was a new science that explained it, and created a thirst for understanding, even the Queen of England had a mineralogist on call. The concept of the “Sublime” was written into thought by the Anglo-Irish philosopher Edmund Burke in his book A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful. This is the tide mark we can see where wilderness and mountains and oceans and deserts became beautiful, when we stopped fearing the snowy peaks and began to know the joy of feeling largeness and insignificance. In seeking out the sublime in mountains and caves we began to notice things like geology, plate tectonics, and fossils.

It was the trend for the wealthy to go on a trip and collect things, objects, art, artifacts, and fossils to bring and spark conversations and study in their wunderkammers back home. Some sort of shift was omni present in culture in these days, philosophy had changed and the idea of the new Sciences were emerging. You can see this in the writings of Francis Bacon and the idea of philosophy being about going out rather than sitting in a dark room engrossed in contemplation. A universal natural history and categorization. Travel was central to this new science, we must go out to get things and bring them back to study and look at. The frontispiece of Bacon’s book Novum Organum (1620) had, in Latin across the page: Multi pertransibunt & augebitur scientia (“Many shall go to and fro, and knowledge shall increase”), a quote itself from the Book of Daniel (12:4). Travel is linked with the success of the new sciences, with the wonder rooms, a going out must begin.

The grand tour was born from this, the gap year taken by the privileged where one would travel through Europe and the holy lands to bring back art and stories. A certain bacchanalia would happen as well, what happens on the grand tour, stays on the grand tour. The grand hotels of Europe were built to house this market, guide books were written to advise. As modern organized travel began, so too did the large museums of the world. The collections and Wunderkammers began to grow in size, and buildings were needed to house the curios. The Ashmolean Museum was a collection of Cabinets of Curiosities by Elias Ashmole donated to Oxford for the hope of study and knowledge. Something learned from the objects themselves. With objects brought back came ideas and influence; architecture, fashion, and music. The American Museum of Natural History was born through this.

By the late 1800’s the industry of collection was at its height and established museums were funding expeditions all over the globe in search for artifact, stone, and bone. There was a joining of interests in hunting, travel, collecting, geology, conservation, and science, as if all of these were one motion. Patrons of museums would be hired to go out into the world to gather and bring back things to house in the great halls. It was in this period Roy Chapman Andrews would thrive. Born 1884, in Beloit, Wisconsin, as a child, he explored forests, fields, and waters nearby, developing marksmanship skills. He taught himself taxidermy and used funds from this hobby to pay tuition to Beloit College. After graduating, Andrews applied for work at the AMNH. He so much wanted to work there that after being told that there were no openings at his level, Andrews accepted a job as a janitor in the taxidermy department and began collecting specimens for the museum. During the next few years, he worked and studied simultaneously, earning a Master of Arts degree in mammalogy from Columbia University. Andrews also joined The Explorers Club in New York during 1908, four years after its founding.

From 1919-1930 Chapman would spend a great deal of time in China and Mongolia as an explorer for the AMNH in search of bones, fossils, animals, and history. He wrote: “These expeditions went into Mongolia to explore the Gobi Desert, seek the ancestry of man, and study the natural history of the region.” There was a thread of thought in these years that was steeped in racism and cultural superiority. 19th-century race theories often sought to place the origin of the “white” race in Central Asia, Out of Asia as opposed to Out of Africa, and Andrews and these expeditions were not immune to these ideas; a sad impetus, only alongside that came dinosaur fossil discovery.

In 1922 the expedition arrived at a place called Bayanzag (also Ulaan Ereg) and later the place would be called the Flaming Cliffs by Andrews and the team. It was a geologically specific region where preserved dinosaur fossils, like a treasure chest, daily flow out of the gobi ground. Tonnes of ancient bone were extracted through the years, packaged, and sent to the American Museum of Natural History. This region is of immense importance in palaeontology and archaeology because they represent one of the world’s most significant fossil sites, offering an unparalleled window into the Late Cretaceous Period (75–71 million years ago). The site is most famous for yielding the first-ever discovered dinosaur eggs in 1923, which fundamentally changed scientific understanding of dinosaur behavior and reproduction, it is where the first Velociraptor was uncovered, and still to this day continues to provide essential data on dinosaur behavior, species diversity, and ecosystem evolution.

By 1930 politics shifted and the curtain began to close. It wasn’t until 1990 when the American Museum of Natural History would be allowed back in for another dig, 60 years later.

Bolor grew up in the 1970’s/80’s Ulaanbaatar. Her father, Chuluun Minjin was a geologist and taught palaeontology at the Mongolian University of Science and Technology. In the 1990’s when the American Museum of Natural History finally was permitted to return to Mongolia, they joined with the Mongolian Academy of Sciences and Bolor’s dad was asked to take part in the expedition. (Years later a shark fossil would be found and named after Bolor’s dad, Minjina tugenensis; the first shark fossil showing they once had bones). Bolor was keen to come along and was tasked with being a cook, though once in the field soaked up knowledge like the dry gobi and forever linking her with the AMNH. By 1997 Bolor had moved to Manhattan to work on a PhD in a joint program with the AMNH and the City University of New York to become the first Mongolian palaeontologist educated in the US and the first Mongolian woman to earn a PhD in palaeontology.

There was a glowing contradiction that continued to bother Bolor, that many of the paleontological finds in the Gobi were credited with scientists coming from afar, those who came and packaged the bones up and shipped them back overseas, that whole communities of Mongolians were seen more as help along the way instead of as equals on a dig; that if you stopped and asked someone on the street in UB about velociraptors they wouldn’t know they were discovered down the road, instead thinking they were from the Americas as that is what the movies looked like. She felt a sense of duty to bring things back, to teach, to establish a center of education and inspiration.

The Victorian age cabinets of curiosities grew into Museums, but the idea of small, movable collections of oddities continued both privately (I have boxes under my bed to attest) as well as use as a tool for education purposes. By the early 1900’s educators debated how best to teach the natural sciences in schools. Outdoor schools popped up in moderate climates, and museums started to send out cases of artifacts on loan, to travel the countryside and inspire generations of scientists. The then newly opened American Museum of Natural History began sending out cabinets of preserved birds, bones, and stones. Movable Museums went from suitcases to converted Ambulances in the 1930’s and by the 1990’s the AMNH had retrofitted buses that would drive around like a vaudeville traveling show teaching astronomy, palaeontology, botany, and anthropology. One can assume that as technology shifted and the internet became established the need for the physical was thought as not necessary, especially given the expense, and in the late 2010’s you could spot the last Dinosaur Bus permanently parked in front of the AMNH, a bus filled with exhibits on Gobi fossils and finds. In 2013 the museum discontinued the program and Bolor noticed an opportunity, a way to start a museum in Mongolia.

Through Bolor’s patience and passions she has a subtle way of convincing people to help her, she inspires. She was able to parlay a deal to get the bus and ship it to Mongolia, and by 2014 it was in the garage of a mechanic in Ulaanbaatar getting ready to drive around the country with the decade long goal of visiting every province in Mongolia. A poetic play given the past 150 years of archeological history and relationships between Mongolia and a museum in New York City.

Last summer Bolor and her bus rolled into the final province of a ten year program and the logical next step began, to move from the mobile to the fixed, to build a museum, the first of its kind. The last time I was at the Flaming Cliffs there were a few camels, some wooden stalls selling trinkets, the likes of which you find in the gobi; stones, fossils, old coral necklaces. No sign, no museum, no markings other than the plethora of fossils at ones feet, and there were many. It was hard to believe, my mind just couldn’t grasp that I was stirring the red sand and found old bones, deep time bones, bones from seventy million years ago. Over the past 150 years, some of the world’s most important paleontological discoveries have emerged from this region: the first Velociraptors, the armoured Pinacosaurus, early mammals. These finds have fundamentally reshaped our understanding of life on Earth.

For the past decade, the Mobile Dinosaur Museum has been roaming the provinces of Mongolia, but no permanent structure at the Flaming Cliffs to house new finds and teach generations to come what else might be under the sands and stars, until now.

The plans are drawn, the land set aside, and next week if you are in or near New York City and want to help and be a part of this, to be a patron; on March 20th, on an upper floor at the Explorers Club in New York City, the first day of spring when life laid dormant starts coming back up from below, a gathering will happen chiming in a new chapter to this story. I have been in the room as things began before, and there is a particular magic that occurs with the joining of action and intention. It is a sight to see when dreams come to life.

For more information on tickets to the event you can seek it out here

An extraordinary desert traveller and social anthropologist bursts all the cliches as she takes us on a journey into the heart of the Sahara to reveal its complex human history. Instead of an imagined city of gold, she reveals something of the real Timbuktu, unpicking the myths and the romance.

The Conversation

Finally, a guest who has actually been to the city of Timbuktu.

Dr Judith Scheele is a professor of Social Anthropology, and fellow of All Souls College at the University of Oxford. She is the author of Shifting Sands: A Human History of the Sahara — a new classic on a complicated region packed with natural resources, including huge underground reserves of sweet water.

In a fascinating, cliché-busting conversation, Judith dispels some of the ‘Western’ romance of the Sahara with her highly nuanced perspective. “The purpose”, writes Judith in her book “is to escape long-standing external perceptions of the Sahara – and of other ‘wastelands’ like it – as timeless, unchanging, empty and passive.”

She starts by telling us how her relationship with this part of the world began. In 2001, she was hitchhiking from Cote D’Ivoire to Marseilles across the Sahara when the news broke of the September 11th terrorist attacks in New York. She has since spent nearly two decades visiting the region, including Southern Algeria, Mali and Northern Chad.

She talks about mobility in the Sahara, how it’s navigated, and the nodes that connect families and communities across vast distances. Her conversation is rich with anecdotes, of accessing the women’s gossip (long siestas), of riding the long-distance trading trucks (friends in the right places), and the disbelief some of the smugglers reveal when she says she is writing a book: why work so hard for something that pays so little?

Fluent, eloquent, insightful, Judith gives voice to a lesser-known part of the world with the rigour of an academic, and the passion of a traveller.

About the host

Sophy Roberts is a British journalist and author who writes mostly for the Financial Times. Her interests combine travel, literature, history and photography. Her first book, The Lost Pianos of Siberia — a Times Book of 2020 — is published in eight languages. Her second book, A Training School for Elephants (2025), became an instant Sunday Times bestseller. She collaborates closely with other artists, including photographer Michael Turek. You can find out more about Sophy’s work here, follow her in the field on instagram, or get behind-the-scenes reading lists from her podcast guests at gonetotimbuktu.com

In the study of geology there are large boulders or rock fragments transported and deposited by glaciers, often miles from their original source, leaving them resting on bedrock of a different composition. Ranging from pebble-sized to house-sized, these wandering rocks are called ‘erratics.’ This story is something like that.

Once a year I head north on my own to sequester in a cottage by a lake, in the coldest months, a frozen retreat. It is a short 24 hours but I know how to stretch time and make it seem like more. I slow down, and I start a fire and read by it. A couple of years ago I sat by the fire reading and a surreal moment happened, someone I knew showed up in my book. I was reading Robert Macfarlane and he began to reference things that sounded so familiar to me, as if I was, in a loose way, entering into the rhythm of the words on the page, I became connected to the story. Macfarlane was talking about teaching and living in China in the early 2000s, something I too did. His descriptions and feelings I knew. Then he mentioned a friend who invites him on a hiking trip, and he names the friend, and the friend is a friend of mine as well, no mistaking, a man named Jon Miceler.

Jon is one of those people, out there, doing things, starting projects, finishing projects, writing books, producing movies, saving wildlife, all quietly while the rest of us sleep. Macfarlane writes about Jon inviting him along on a pilgrimage to a mountain in Western China, Minya Konka, an auspicious and pyramidal mountain peak on the eastern side of the Tibetan plateau, the highest mountain peak in Sichuan province. On the pilgrimage, Jon tells Macfarlane a story about the mountain, a warning to the impulse some have of summiting such peaks. There are many ways humans have worshiped mountains, one of which is an obsession to walk on the top, to climb to the great altitudes, and involves the word conquer.

Jon Miceler grew up near the shores of Lake Ontario in Rochester, New York. His mother was a Buddhist who studied Zen Buddhism under Philip Kapleau in the Rochester Zen Center, one of the oldest Zen centers in the United States. You can feel this somehow when you interact with Jon, some calming aspect that happens in what I know of Zen and Buddhism. After high school Jon moved to Colorado and forever folded into the mountains. From Colorado he went to China and the mountains continued to call. There are well worn connections between hunting, conservation, sport, and wilderness. You find the rare species on the fringes, in the hard to get to places, the places last developed in some urban planning scheme. Mountains and deserts, oceans and space. Jon enjoyed sport and science. After moving to China and exploring eastern Tibet he once wrote a letter to the famed adventurer and conservationist George Schaller describing animals he had been seeing on his adventures, “and George wrote back, that is the kind of guy he is.” The letter started a long friendship as well as helped usher in a career. Jon eventually became the Managing director of the Eastern Himalayan region for the World Wildlife Fund from 2008-2014, then the Senior Director of Asia programs for the World Wildlife Fund from 2014-2018. He also had his own expedition company helping climbers and scientists handle logistics for remote travel in western Sichuan Province, Tibet, and Yunnan.

I called Jon and asked him if he would tell me the story he told Macfarlane so I could write it down. It is not my story, neither is it Jon’s. It belongs to others as you will see, but there is something universal in it that touches and enlightens, something opaque and ghostly, but certainly real and true, qualitative as opposed to quantitative.

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I have always (starting from my first trips to Italy as a student in the 80s) loved the Fiat Panda. No, not the updated Panda of today, but the OG Panda first designed by Giorgetto Giugiaro in 1980. My favorite was a minty green, then the Sisley 4x4 edition in British racing green. The Panda was the great equalizer in Italy, affordable reliable and in my opinion beautifully designed in the most basic way. Designed for the family, the Nonna or the farmer, a one stop shop of a car for the people, not unlike the Fiat 500 of the 50s and 60s. A car that kept a generation of Italians on the road.

As the years rolled by I needed one. I met my friend Paolo Tommerelli at a tour of the Ferrari factory in Maranello, Italy. We were there as a bunch of journalists covering the launch of the latest California. That day at lunch at Cavallino, we were seated with the Ferrari head of design, Flavio Manzoni and he posed a question to the table of us journalist, “ What is your favorite Italian car? he asked. He went around the table for everyone’s answers… Ferrari this, Dino that, Maserati this, Lambo that… was the the usual answer and when he came to me just before Paolo, I without hesitation said the Giugiaro Fiat Panda. Falvio smiled and said “for the rest of the tour you are by my side” and showed me a photo of his beloved 80s Fiat Panda on his phone and Paolo did the same. At that lunch Paolo and I became quick friends sharing our love of Italian design and the Fiat Panda. So, when I was writing my book A Man and His Car naturally Paolo’s collection of Pandas had to be in the book and I made my way to his house on Lago di Garda. After the shoot and a few gin tonics I said “Paolo let’s find me a Panda, an OG early 80’s one that I can drive around in France” “ok sure he said and we opened his laptop searching for a 80s panda. He then looked at me and said “You know it would be easier to find a 50s Mercedes Gullwing than an 80s Panda is original condition” but after an hour of going through pages of listing and few more gin tonics we found her. A 1983 tan OG Panda just in the next town over in Brescia. I single owner car in perfect condition with one problem according to Paolo. It was too expensive! It was listed at 5000 euros which he felt was absurd. “I get these cars for like 1000 all the time, just be patient we will find one” he said. I wasn’t patient and by the next day on his boat we had made a call to visit the car in a few days. Paolo met me in Brescia, we met the family, drove the car and bought it! I said to Paolo. “Get the car to your place, have your mechanic go through it and I will pick it up in a couple months to drive to France”. Done! Now this is when the Panda 30 journey begins.

A couple months later in the end of July, Yolanda and I headed to Garda to pick up the car to drive to France together. We had max four days to get to Bordeaux as Clara was flying in with a friend to stay the week so there was to be no dilly-dallying around. We knew the drive was going to be long and as a couple that spends a good amount of time driving vintage cars, we knew we would be suffering a little bit driving over a 1000km in a 30 horse power car. The max speed on the Fiat was about a 100 km per hour (or around 60 mph). It has no radio, no air conditioning and no hazard lights (as we were to sadly find out) Only the basics on this beauty, raw simplicity. We arrived in Garda spent a day with Paolo on his Riva and had a great meal in a local favorite of his. The next day the Panda got a new set of Pirellis, an oil change, a full tank of a gas and we were off.

So, here was the plan. We would break the drive up into 4-5 hour drives that were mapped on the GPS (that of course always turned into 6 hour drives) Yolanda in her genius and wisdom understood the potential suffering of this journey and booked fantastic hotel stays with good bars and meals along our drive to ease the pain. Our only goal was to make each of these destinations in time for cocktail hour. The first stop from Garda was a little beach town called Alassio some 4 hours drive from Garda where we were to stay at the fabulous La Pergola hotel. Now, like I said I have driven and have by driven in a lot of vintage cars and I don’t care if that car is a million dollar Ferrari or a $1000 Fiat you are always thinking the same thing when driving these cars… will this brake down, will I make it, with I survive this and will I come out of this drive not stinking of exhaust and gasoline. Onward.

On the drive to Alassio I was getting into the rhythm of the car as one does. Understanding the gear box, the acceleration , the braking and the overall handling of the car. As far as I was concerned she was perfect and we were beginning to get in sync. The highway was great driving even though it was the hottest summer on record. I did not mind the lack of A/C (or the lack of the radio for that matter) We had the windows down and the breeze blowing through our hair experiencing things our senses would have not been privy to in a modern car, windows up and A/C on, sealed off from the road. We passed farmland with fields filled with planted basil and the smell was mind blowingly good! The was also pastures of cows and sheep (not so good) but overall the drive was going well and frankly fun.

Then the mountain pass came. A series of high elevation tunnels that will eventually drop you into to the town of Alassio. The Panda labored a bit under the elevation with her two cylinder, 622cc, 30 hp engine, but that was expected. We knew we would be slow and we stayed in our lane and took our time. Just how I had seen many a Nonna do in the past, with no sense of urgency, in her Panda. She knew the car would get her there eventually. Almost to the top of the pass there was a hesitation in the acceleration when I pushed the gas pedal down and I did what every experienced vintage car owner does, I ignored it. Until it happened over and over again and I was losing all acceleration and speed. On the uphill, IN the tunnel, with no hazard lights to signal the other drivers of my dilemma! Every Italian was beeping and flipping me off as they passed my laboring Panda. Fuck! this was my nightmare to break down in a mountain pass tunnel! How the hell was I to get out of this mess. In a panic I said to Yolanda “ I am going to have to stop and pull over!” and just then a bit of fuel pushed through and the car lurched forward and as I got to daylight, out of the tunnel, just before the downhill I said FUCK IT and slammed my foot down on the gas pedal!. You see there was no way this nightmare of a tunnel breakdown was to come true. What seemed to be a clogged fuel line, cleared just enough to get gas to the engine to get us over the hill and now we had gravity on our side to get into town. I looked at Yolanda with absolute fear in my eyes and she confidently said to me “we are going to make it”. These are the kinds of words you need to hear from your copilot even if no one believes it. As I was laboring into Alassio, Yolanda was frantically searching Google for a Fiat mechanic in town. “Got one!” she said right on the road to the hotel. We plotted course and somehow I kept the Panda moving. There it was the Fiat shop! It was a vision! The façade probably from the 50’s with the Fiat logo in tile mosaic in the front. We pulled up and parked with absolute relief. We did make it!.

I jumped out of the car with Yolanda and we were immediately greeted by a mechanic that you only find in Italy. He was handsome in his 60s , gray thick, crew cut hair with bright blue spectacles in a blue Gulf racing coverall. Amazing. I frantically tried to tell him our condition (in bad Italian) and he shook his head at me, looked at Yolanda and said “do you speak Italian?” (which she does WAY better than me) She explained the situation and he was charmed by her (and she enamored by him. I mean who wouldn’t be) He gestured to us to pull around to the back of the garage, and he took a look at the car. The garage was out a movie set. I found out (or Yolanda found out) the garage had been in the family since the 1950 working exclusively on Fiats. As I looked around the interior of the place it really was a time capsule, with even deadstock Fiat parts on shelves against the wall. Epic!

The hood was opened, the carburetor and fuel lines all removed and dissembled. A clogged fuel line was the culprit probably from old fuel picking up crud in the tank. He blew out all the fuel lines, reconnected everything, cleaned and put the carburetor back in place, turned looked at us and asked “What are you Americans doing driving around in this 80s Panda are you crazy?” He said to Yolanda in Italian. I got the pazzo part. We are a bit crazy to do this but we are just in love with the Fiat Panda. He shrugged and nodded like he absolutely understood. In meantime his son showed up (in his 20s) who was very proud to speak English with us. He was also very proud to say he learned English from listening to American hip hop and watching videos on MTV, genius. We all headed over to the local bar for a coffee and to tell the story of this journey . They just laughed. We paid for the coffee and we headed back to the garage to collect the car and get up the road to the hotel. “ How much do we owe you?” I asked. “Niente” he said and reached for a deadstock Weber carb for an 80s Panda and handed it to me “you we will need this eventually!” he said as he waved us on our way. The Panda cruised beautifully up the hill to the hotel Pergola. We tucked her in for the night, made our way to our room for a freshup and sat at the terrace sipping a well-deserved Negroni. “We made it” I said “I had no doubt” said Yolanda. Now that is a good copilot!

END OF DAY ONE.

The next day we were driving to St. Paul de Vence in France for a stop at one of our favorite places La Colombe D’Or. Yolanda was able to book one night at this fantastic place. That in itself was basically a miracle, as normally there is never a room free in Summer. What was also nice was the drive would be under an hour drive from Alassio. But, before we left town we stopped by the garage to say our goodbyes and drop off a couple bottles of wine and chocolates to say thanks to our saviors. We loaded up and just before we drove off Claudio (again in the blue Gulf coveralls and blue specs) leaned into the passenger side window, looked at Yolanda in her eyes and while dragging the back of his thumb against his right cheek he said ”Come tu sei furba” (how clever you are) Then slapped the roof of the car, waved and we drove off. I think Yolanda was in love. Again, I don’t blame her. Before the Autostrada was a quick stop at a historic tennis club we were told about, which was beautiful. We left with some towels for the Panda’s front seats, from the club. They were a necessary purchase because it was still 90 degrees outside and our asses were sticking to the vinyl upholstery. On the Autostrada the Panda was just cruising along. We stopped at the Autogrill for some panino and coffee and soon after crossed the border into France.

That’s when it started to happen again and yes I ignored the hesitation on the throttle once again. How could it be? Our beloved savior Claudio fixed the problem. But apparently not. We were running, but not well as we exited of the highway towards the Colombe D’Or. The Panda jerked and lurched desperate to find a steady stream of fuel. All while once again Yolanda was frantically Googling FIAT GARAGE IN ST. JEAN DE VENCE. “I got one!!” she said and as all luck would have it, the garage was just down the road from our hotel! The luck! I pulled into the garage. It was the exact opposite of our Italian experience. It was bland and commercial and the help unemotional and equally as bland but after my crappy French they understood the problem and agreed to look at and fix the car but … “demain” (tomorrow) Naturally it was 5pm closing time…So we slugged up the hill to the hotel parked the car with the valet, had a swim and tucked into the bar…until tomorrow. Dinner on the terrace at The Colombe d’Or is a special Provencal affair with the most epic crudité, duck, and wine and on that night I drowned my vehicular sorrows in rosè. The next day I was up early to get the car to the garage. I basically coasted into the lot and the Frenchies took control of my steed. The fix was simple and though bland and void of charm the French did a terrific job on the repair. They replaced ALL the fuel lines as Claudio should have done. Oh well. They handed me a bill (I think it was around 100 Euros) and they showed complete confidence that my fuel issues were solved and sent me on my way. I picked up Yolanda and off we were.

BEGINNING OF DAY THREE.

The next bit of road would be long. We plugged the town Montrèal into the GPS estimated time of arrival 4 hours. It was August one. The first day of French vacation. Something we did not think about. What does that mean you ask? It means every frog and his brother will be in a car on the road heading to their summer vacation destination. In a word TRAFFIC.

There was just miles and miles of bumper to bumper traffic that turned our 4 hours into 8 Eight hours in 90-degree heat. We were so soaked in sweat and so stuck to the upholstery that we just gave up and committed to the misery. At least there was no pressure to push the car and drive faster than she was capable of. When we finally rolled into Montreal it was late. AND we were lost in this little medieval town trying to find our stay for the night, a lovely old village house turned hotel. I will not bore you with the details of the story but we were driving all around this town up and down these medieval streets holding the clutch and stalling out with frequency, calling the owners (an American and an asshole of a South African…LONG STORY.. who were NO help on directing us to their place) until finally I said once again FUCK IT!I parked down in the town square, locked up the Panda, walked up to the hotel (that we finally found…) ate, DRANK A LOT and went to bed.

END OF DAY THREE.

The next day was the final push to Bordeaux. We gased up and started the drive. In the best case scenario it was a 3.5 hour drive. Which meant if we played our cards right we would arrive just as Clara’s plane landed. The drive was northwest as the crow flies around Toulouse and then a straight shot to the airport in Merignac outside Bordeaux. The Panda and I were one. At this point every squeak, grunt and rumble I understood. She was running great. The fuel line issue was really solved thanks to the French garage, and it seemed like smooth sailing home. As we puttered away at a whopping 80km (50mph) an hour it seemed like we were on schedule. Just… As luck would have it we pulled into the airport parking lot as Clara’s plane was touching down. We rented another car for Yolanda to drive Clara and her friend the final hour to our house and I would make the last leg solo. There was something melancholy about that solo drive. Even though Yolanda and I were silent most of the drive (we could barely hear ourselves think with the windows down driving the Panda) I missed her presence in the car. We convoyed up to our little house in St Yzans, the girls following me in their comfy air-conditioned Peugeot. Finally, off the highway on the back roads, winding through vineyards, there was such a sense of relief when I saw our house in the distance. I pulled into the driveway, turned off the ignition, took a deep breath and gently patted the dashboard of my Panda. We made it.

The multi-award winning German documentary photographer, most often found in the far edges of Russia and Eastern Europe, shares the challenges of making work that matters, for the New York Times, New Yorker, ZEIT and more. For visual storytellers, this is a masterclass in how to make people look, and look again.

The Conversation

The German-born documentary photographer Emile Ducke talks to Sophy from his temporary home in Tbilisi, Georgia, on the eve of his next assignment to the Arctic. Combining humility and conviction, he takes us on a rare journey in this podcast, from his early love of photography instilled by his father, who shot on large format cameras, to his first significant break, when he travelled to Tomsk in Siberia in 2016. This proved the beginning of a relationship with a region that still holds him close: Russia, Eastern Europe and its lesser-visited peripheries.

“It all came together when I started a journey along a river called the Ket,” says Emile. This led him to a place with a long history of exile, where he accessed a closed community of Old Believers — a religious sect that rarely lets outsiders in. On that journey, Emile takes the image of a burst pillow in an abandoned house which headlines this episode.

He discusses how nostalgia is a driving force in Putin’s Russia — “it’s interesting to work with nostalgia, but also break it, to find a small note that disrupts that idea.” Emile talks about his working practices in the field, how he prefers to drink tea with a subject before taking their photograph, the importance of narrative, slowness, listening. And the aesthetic influence of early Russian colour photography.

From Western Siberia, Emile ventures to the Russian Far East and the Gulags of Kolyma. Sophy and Emile discuss the influence of Varlam Shalamov — a Gulag survivor, and author of Kolyma Tales, and Shalamov’s haunting description of “the terror of indifference — how the cold that can freeze a man’s spit can also freeze a man’s soul.” He unpicks the nuances of working with human suffering, including his assignments in conflict zones, most recently in Ukraine. Emile is drawn to the stories that sit far behind the frontlines, each story an attempt to find new ways into the reality of war, to fight that terror of indifference.

“Rather than making a statement, I hope that my photographs can make someone stop and wonder and ask themselves questions rather than making a big, moral, loud statement.”

To get the most out of this conversation, see Emile website’s, www.emileducke.com to view his work.

About the host

Sophy Roberts is a British journalist and author who writes mostly for the Financial Times. Her interests combine travel, literature, history and photography. Her first book, The Lost Pianos of Siberia — a Times Book of 2020 — is published in eight languages. Her second book, A Training School for Elephants (2025), became an instant Sunday Times bestseller. She collaborates closely with other artists, including photographer Michael Turek. You can find out more about Sophy’s work here, follow her in the field on instagram, or get behind-the-scenes reading lists from her podcast guests at gonetotimbuktu.com

I took off my watch and put away my phone as soon as I arrived. Once or twice a year I leave my home and spend 24 hours alone, usually in winter, and usually in a cottage on a lake, a large lake, Lake Simcoe. I retreat and sequester.

I learned something a few years ago that I already felt most of my life, that time is not consistent, that it shifts and moves, even if ever so slightly. My perception of it is malleable, and I can stretch it and so can the sun.

This isn’t metaphysics.

Time is in flux, the idea of 24 hours ticking along at a set rate is something imposed, like the Gregorian calendar, on a world that just doesn’t function in the way we assume. We know our calendars don’t function correctly and we see this with the role of a leap year, left over time that our charts mess up, recalibrated every few years. Our 24 hours in a day is based on averages, the overall speed of time throughout a year, like calculating the average speed of a road trip. But time moves slow in some seasons and faster in others, based on solar measurements and distances, axis shifts and the motion of the Earth. You can see the measured mean time vs the actual solar time in the chart below (solar time being the wavy line). This is not a new idea, the difference between the two times has been known by astronomers and philosophers, and the apparent solar time (the one that moves and ebbs) was used as the standard measurement up until the 19th century through things like sundials. In the 19th century we began to build clocks and watches and Greenwich Mean Time was set. It was seen as more efficient. We inherently feel the ebb of time though in the distinction of seasons. Solar time slows down in January, February, and March, and speeds up September and October.

There are moments when in travel you are in total flow, timeless and spaceless, out there in it, not the “I” watching it happen, not the “I” documenting it with your phone to post later, not the “I” observer noting what to write later, nor the photographer, nor the conversationalist or social being; just the connected I, not in control of the sun’s motion, nor the spin of the earth, nor the wind flowing by; out and in Nature. I notice this sometimes on long night flights, when timezones are zipping bellow at five hundred miles an hour and I am high above in some other place, a metal tube shooting through the troposphere propelled with fire. Or when we no longer know the day of the week, or month depending on how long one is on the road.

There is a moment in Peter Matthiessen’s book The Snow Leopard (a book about travel and sequestering) where he takes off his watch and his relationship with space begins to shift in this same Zen way: “I remove my watch, as the time it tells is losing all significance.”

There is something in the cold middle winter that fits this as well. How ice is in flow but is not, at first, visible in its motion and flexibility. Ice and rock and plate tectonics all seem easier to perceive in cold northern climates, the midwinter retreat being a perfect season. There was a minor earthquake a week ago here, a rare moment of obvious motion by deep time rock and stone.

What all of this allows for is focus and attention. When I sequester I can focus and my mind becomes calm. This is something becoming more and more rare and I notice it being something people find important when talking about future travels to come, they want to slow time down, they want to focus and be attentive, not just pass through fast but be a part of a place, if just briefly. It is a magic trick of travel to shake the cage and remind us how to do this, to slow down, to be out of routine, to take the watch off like children again, out in this world.

The British author talks about his latest book, Lone Wolf — following in the footsteps of a wolf named Slavc, who crosses the Alps from Slovenia to the Italian Dolomites in search of a mate.

The Conversation

Adam Weymouth is a British author and environmental journalist. His first book, Kings of the Yukon, traced the 2,000-mile migration of the king salmon along the Yukon River — from the Bering Sea deep into the heart of Canada. His latest book, Lone Wolf: Walking the Faultlines of Europe, follows another extraordinary true journey, this time of a wolf named Slavc, who crosses the Alps from Slovenia to Italy in search of a mate. The result — shortlisted for the Ballie Gifford Prize for non-fiction, among other major literary accolades — is a book that will not only endure because of Adam’s exquisite, lyrical writing, but because of the gravitas of the enquiry, into how we respond to change in this bewildering moment of ecological and political upheaval.

In this conversation, Adam talks about how the genesis of the book, and how his journey evolved. He weaves in myth, fairtytales, werewolves. He brings to life characters and places he meets along the way, and shares candid insights into his working practices on the road, including the necessity of going slowly, at the pace of a walk.

Adam explains how the wolf and our fear of ‘the other’ also works a metaphor for the attitude to migrants from a rising Far Right. He and Sophy discuss anthropomorphism — it it such a bad thing? — and the presence/absence of the first-person voice in modern nature and travel writing. The result is a generous, thoughtful dialogue about what it means to be using journeys as a means to talk about much more than a single animal’s plight. And the imaginative power of writing into how it might be feel to be in another creature’s skin.

“Perhaps we’re all a little bit more animal than we’d like to think,” says Adam.

About the host

Sophy Roberts is a British journalist and author who writes mostly for the Financial Times. Her interests combine travel, literature, history and photography. Her first book, The Lost Pianos of Siberia — a Times Book of 2020 — is published in eight languages. Her second book, A Training School for Elephants (2025), became an instant Sunday Times bestseller. She collaborates closely with other artists, including photographer Michael Turek. You can find out more about Sophy’s work here, follow her in the field on instagram, or get behind-the-scenes reading lists from her podcast guests at gonetotimbuktu.com

Every Tuesday I walk from my home in the east end of Toronto, two blocks to a subway. I descend into the system and ride west to the center of town for twenty minutes and arrive at St George Station. When I emerge again into the light I enter the north end of the campus for the University of Toronto. The architecture is different from the city, the purpose, the feel, it is sequestered space, it is designed to optimize focus and thought, to harness and allow for attention. This is no place to diddle away on a phone or an app, at least it was not at first intended to be. It is a place designed to allow for study and thought, with quadrangles and courtyards, sitting rooms and nooks. It is a place for dreamers. I am here to audit a history course by Professor Timothy Snyder; audit, from the Latin “audire” to listen. I am here to listen to Timothy Snyder.

When Timothy Snyder lectures, his hands stand at attention like a porcelain doll, stuck in position, fingers taut and frozen, seldom bent at the knuckle. He uses them as if he is holding giant ideas in his hands, and indeed he is. In the hours and days after the United States presidential election in 2016, wrote down notes on a subject he knew well, Tyranny. He wanted to know what to do, he wanted to advise an action in the present after spending many hours and years looking to the past as an historian. He wrote twenty lessons learned from the 20th century on what to do in the face of tyranny, action notes. Twenty ways to fight oppression. A concise, deliberate list. Number 12 in this list is “Make eye contact and small talk.” Something in that idea and sentiment, the importance of human connection and focus in a treatise on how to resist tyranny, some feeling in that is what drew me out and in, to seek out this class and teacher, to listen to more.

In the first lecture he presented an analogy of what history might be, a frame and a way to think about it.

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