Friday Flyday
One dream trip, every Friday. The hero shot, the moments worth crossing the world for, and what it actually costs.
One dream trip, every Friday. The hero shot, the moments worth crossing the world for, and what it actually costs.
Halong Bay gets four million visitors a year. Ha Giang, which has the same limestone standing on end and a road cut a thousand metres above a jade-green gorge, gets a fraction of that — because it is six hours north of Hanoi and nobody has built a pier there.
When India abolished the privy purses in 1971, Rajasthan’s royal families were left holding palaces they could no longer heat. So they opened them. Which is why, in this one state, you can book the actual bedroom of an actual king — not a replica, not a themed suite. His room.
Sri Lanka is about the size of Nova Scotia and holds eight UNESCO World Heritage sites, the highest density of leopards anywhere on earth, tea country at two thousand metres, and a south coast most people have never seen a photograph of. Nothing is more than a few hours from anything else.
Perito Moreno is thirty kilometres long, sixty metres tall at the face, and one of the very few glaciers on earth that is not retreating. You stand on a walkway and wait, and eventually a piece the size of a house lets go. People gasp. Then everybody waits again.
Gladiator. Lawrence of Arabia. The Mummy. Kingdom of Heaven. Aït Benhaddou is Yunkai in Game of Thrones. All of it shot within a few hours’ drive of each other in southern Morocco, because for sixty years this has been the film industry’s desert. The season opens in October.
Ludwig II spent his country’s fortune building fantasy castles from opera sets, then drowned at forty in three feet of water and nobody has ever explained it. In late November the towers get snow and the markets open.
Las Vegas puts on a costume every night of the year. This is the night it has a reason — and Halloween falls on a Saturday in 2026, which lines up about twice a decade.
Edmontonians save for years to see the aurora in Iceland. Yellowknife sits directly beneath the auroral oval, has it on roughly 240 nights a year, and is one hour fifty-five minutes from home.
Four blockbusters have used this one valley as an alien planet, and it is a two-hour drive from Amman. The Treasury at first light, a night under the stars in the desert, and the lowest dry land on Earth.
The last place on Earth that is still an expedition rather than a holiday. Two days across the wildest water on the planet, then walls of blue ice and a hundred thousand penguins who could not care less that you came.
The real lands behind the greatest fantasy saga ever filmed — a sea-walled city on the Adriatic, a haunted avenue of ancient beeches, and the frozen edge of the map.
Britain, walked the way the books were written — the viaduct, the great halls, the crooked streets and the castle in the north, all of them real and all of them standing.
The one that started the series. Aotearoa end to end — the green hills of the Shire, a fiord in the rain, and a volcano standing in for a mountain of fire.
A new one lands every Friday. They never come down — if one of these is still the trip you think about, it is still a trip I can build you.