My Strava doesn’t lie. It shows me walking 300 metres across the water from Helsinki’s shoreline, just near Kaivopuisto in southern Helsinki, to the island of Harakka. I walked over water that is six or seven metres deep! In winter, Helsinki can spend weeks below zero Celsius, which means vast areas of the sea freeze into thick ice. The water I walked over was covered by about 1.5 metres of solid sea ice. Ice that is strong enough for people to walk, ski, and even cycle across. A whole harbour below me! Surreal and exciting.…
Cape Town: Beautiful and Complicated
I came to Cape Town hoping to like it and ended up loving it. I want to encourage other visitors to look beyond the surface here. It’s a complex and fascinating place. Introducing the City The road from the modern Cape Town airport passes through the sprawling townships of Langa, Nyanga, and Gugulethu, dense settlements of shacks with varying degrees of access to electricity and water, and unemployment rates over 50%. Literally around the corner are the well-lit, well-patrolled suburbs of Sea Point and Camps Bay, where mind-bogglingly priced sea-view homes cling to the slopes…
Seventeen Mega Groups: How Airline Consolidation could rewire the World
In my last post, I showed how the airline industry has consolidated significantly, with most European and US airlines falling into just three mega-groups that control a significant share of the world’s seats. But the consolidation appears nowhere near over. The airline industry is genuinely hard to forecast. Hub airports, widebody fleets, equity stakes, and airline alliances play out over 10 to 20-year lifespans. The economic forecasts they are built on are inherently uncertain, however. Demand, fuel prices, regulation, geopolitics, industrial issues, climate policy, or air accidents can derail what looked like a sure path…
Are You Really Choosing Your Airline? Three Groups Control Our World.
Johannesburg: First encounter with the City of Gold
Firstly, three fascinating facts about Johannesburg for your next Trivia Pursuit Competition: I flew to Johannesburg expecting not to like it, but there is something about its youthfulness, energy, hustling, humour and beauty that got to me. I rate all the cities I have visited or lived in, and Johannesburg ranked 52nd among my 306 cities.1 I feel similarly about a diverse mix of cities, including Liverpool and Newcastle upon Tyne, Portland (Maine) and Santa Fe in the USA, Tangier in Morocco, and Yala in Thailand. Birth of the city To make sense of today’s…
Grounded for Good: The Airlines That Didn’t Survive 2025
For over a decade, I’ve been keeping note of which airlines go out of business each year. Do you recognise any of these? Air BelgiumBelgium. Founded: 2016. Commenced: 2018. Passenger operations ceased: 2024 (bankruptcy). Passenger flying had already stopped following the 2024 insolvency. After that, it was limited to wet‑lease and cargo work. In 2025, it finally vanished. Aerolínea Lanhsa Honduras. Founded: 2009. Commenced: 2010. Ceased: 7 April 2025. Aimed to connect the Hondouran capital, Tegucigalpa, with coastal and island destinations such as Roatán and La Ceiba using three turboprops. On 17 March 2025, Flight…
Very Frequent Flying: My best and worst of 2025
One hundred and one flights in 2025, bringing me to 1782 lifetime flights. Flew to or from twenty-seven countries. Five continents. From the midnight sun grazing Helsinki’s summer sky to the crisp air of Hobart’s harbour, 2025 took me 213,054 kilometres (132,386 miles) around our planet. Roughly five times over. My lifetime total? 102 full circumnavigations of the earth. The only continent I missed in 2025? Antarctica. Next time, penguins. Next time! This year earned a 93% of flights I was happy with. This is my highest score since 2001. Not because I’ve gone soft…
Rating a city: From First Crush to Favourites
How do you rate a city? A good memory? The food? Its beauty? The first time I landed in Paris, I fell hard. I loved the art, the tree‑lined streets, the river, the metro, the food and markets, and even the people (yes, I mean Parisians). Twenty‑three visits later, I still love Paris. Barcelona was the same. Since then, there have been many other cities I’ve been smitten with, a small number of places that bored me, and a very small number I couldn’t wait to leave. Most sit somewhere in the middle, with moments…
8 Fantastic Train Trips That Made My 2025 Unforgettable
Trains, for me, are one of the most interesting, practical and romantic ways to get around the planet, and I love them more than I love planes (and I love planes a lot). I have ridden railways now on every inhabited continent, and in 202,5 I added these eight beauties: #1. Flåm Railway, Norway “the best train ride in the world” (Lonely Planet) I captured 161 photos on one of the most beautiful train journeys I have ever taken. The line climbs 864 metres from the Fjord to the mountain, twisting through 20 tunnels, including…
Come on lets do better! Watching terrible passenger behaviour
Some things drive me quietly mad. In 2025, I’ve watched travellers with the fascination usually reserved for wildlife documentaries. This includes territorial battles, questionable public grooming and aggression. Travel is back in business, but it feels like basic manners clearly missed the memo. Passenger behaviour is objectively worse than pre‑pandemic, and slightly worse than 2022, but there is also more enforcement and more media shining a light on it. IATA’s own data shows that unruly incidents have jumped in a very short period, from about one incident every 835 flights in 2021 to roughly one…
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