Asia
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Prepare for sensory overload—regal palaces, wireless tech, urbanized elephants, Bollywood style, and more than a billion coexisting citizens—in the giant, baffling spectacle of modern India
Unique, irreplaceable, and still largely unknown—our must-see-now list of the UN's latest World Heritage picks
Scientists proclaim Indonesia's Bird's Head Seascape the most biodiverse marine area in the world.
A tourism industry hobbled by years of civil war and political instability looks to rebound as Nepal makes moves toward a lasting peace. Is it finally safe to go back?
Sending Jon Krakauer to Everest was my idea. After the news broke, I spent the better part of a day wondering if I'd put him in a frozen grave.
Survivors from Everest '96 recall a day of terror and confusion that many still believe was distorted in ways that oversimplified complex events and dishonored the dead.
David Sharp's lonely death on Mount Everest revived the old, raging debates about personal ethics and the wisdom of commercially guided climbing. But whatever went right and wrong in 2006, the bottom line remains: You challenge this peak at your own risk, because its punishments are swift, terrible, and blind.
You need to learn your lesson! So listen up to Mike Roberto, a fast-talking consultant who uses the '96 saga as a teaching tool for students, lawyers, and businessmen.
Is it possible to guide safely on Everest? Or will the mountain always demand its pound of flesh? MARK JENKINS talks to a dream team of veterans—between them, they've reached the summit 17 times—in a frank look at the risks, rewards, and nightmares of taking clients to the top.
Befuddled and heartbroken after watching the New York Yankees end their beloved Boston Red Sox’s 2003 playoff run, Jeff Neumann and Ray LeMoine needed to get away. Far away. So, using the money they’d earned from selling “Yankees Suck” T-shirts in Boston, they hopped a plane to Jordan and bussed…
Strap in for a road trip through the Himalayan kingdom of Bhutan with Robert Thurman—Uma's dad and one of the planet's most magnetic Buddha boosters—and get set for stunning scenery, harrowing S-curves, and face time with the wild side of your soul
SCOTT LINDGREN, whose first descent of Tibet’s deadly Tsangpo was chronicled in our July 2002 issue, continues to paddle and film the world’s most dangerous whitewater. His upcoming DVD, Burning Time II (out in May), features first descents in China and Turkey. And during a recent trip to Zambia,…
Get steeped in Sri Lanka's tea country at four new lodges in the southern highlands
Surrounded by the beauty of the world's highest range, thousands of people live without sight. The Himalayan Cataract Project is curing blindness—literally overnight—in the most remote villages of Nepal and India. And, hey, as long as you're performing mass miracles, why not run up a 21,000-foot peak?
Some two to three million people have been left homeless by the 7.6-magnitude earthquake that struck South Asia, according to a press release issued by the North Face and GlobalGiving. Here, find out where you can donate gear to the help in the relief effort. Donated gear will be collected…
A veteran documentary photographer, Teru Kuwayama frequently finds himself on the front lines in Iraq and Afghanistan—the latter of which he calls his “hands-down favorite country on earth.” This despite the fact that he and ϳԹ Reconnaissance Agent and Hard Way columnist Mark Jenkins were arrested after traversing Afghanistan’s northeastern…
HARDY IF NOT HEFTY, the 125cc, two-stroke, Soviet-era Minsk motorcycle is the vehicle of choice on the intermittently paved roads between Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City (formerly Saigon). Put one to the test on this 18-day Easy Rider–meets–The Motorcycle Diaries tour, which parallels the route of the historic 1,500-mile…
The catastrophic Christmas tsunami hit Thailand's climbing meccas hard. Railae Beach resident SAM LIGHTNER JR. reports on the nightmares and miracles of the aftermath—and on the Thais and expats rebuilding their slice of paradise.
Read “The Light of Seven Mountain Suns,” about the Himalayan Cataract Project and Sight-to-Summit Expedition, by senior editor Nick Heil in the December issue of ϳԹ, now on stands, then see more of photographer Ace Kvale’s shots here. Sight-to-Summit Gallery To view an exclusive gallery of the expedition, click…
They say the Himalayan hideaway of Malana is Lotusland, home to the world's highest high. But here's what they don't tell you: Getting there can mean surviving a late-winter forced march over an avalanche-choked mountain pass, and dealing with locals who treat you like a loathsome alien. Wow. Sometimes Shangri-La can really suck.
With a swell of rebel violence this past summer and a fresh attack in early November, climbers and trekkers are weighing the risks of travel to Nepal. How real is the danger?
Leave it to Bhutan—the Switzerland-size Buddhist kingdom wedged between Tibet and India that’s become the pinnacle of exclusive adventure travel—to be the new home of two ultra-indulgent lodges. Opening this month, Uma Paro, owned by Como Hotels and Resorts, is a 20-room, nine-villa mountain getaway set on 38 forested acres…
Skip the well-trodden tourist routes and join this trek through a pristine mountainous area virtually unknown to Westerners.
It's climbing season again on Everest. And as hundreds of summit hopefuls converge at Base Camp, the great debate persists: Has the Big E become the Big Easy? Alpinists Greg Child and Dave Hahn take sides.
Winding a thousand miles from India to China, the Burma Road was built to defend China in World War II, but the atomic bomb made it irrelevant and the jungle reclaimed it. Mark Jenkins vowed to do what no one had done for nearly 60 years—travel the entire Burma Road—and discovered the madness of present-day Myanmar.
This spring, a quarter of a million Americans took a trip. It was noisy, hot, and violent. Accommodations were poor. Some of them didn't come back.
ϳԹ Editorial Director Alex Heard is auctioning off two pieces of Everest history on eBay this week. Both items were carried to the mountain’s summit by writer Jon Krakauer during the disastrous 1996 climbing season that inspired his bestseller, Into Thin Air. Proceeds from the sale of these items will…
In honor of the 50th anniversary of Hillary and Tenzing's historic first Everest summit, we're opening the vaults to bring you the best stories ever written about the planet's tallest mountain. From Jon Krakauer's groundbreaking article, "Into Thin Air," to Brad Wetzler's account of sex, death and bad behavior at Base Camp, a collection of ϳԹ's
In the sixties and seventies it was the hippie trail that brought foreigners to Afghanistan. Two decades of war and terror later, Kabul is a nonstop rave of C-130s, NGOs, soldiers, and spooky nation-builders. The freaks are back on Chicken Street—where everything old is new again.
Mount Everest becomes a prize on TV's Global Extremes. Is this a Good Thing?
Set loose in the land that invented terrorism ten centuries ago, Tim Cahill finds crumbling castles, legends of hash-smoking hit men, and Iranians who won't stop being nice. You call this the axis of evil?
After a decade of failed attempts and fatal rebuffs, an ϳԹ-sponsored expedition runs Tibet's Upper Tsanpgo Gorge—and lives to tell about it.
In the fall of 2001, big-wall climber Mike Libecki went from the vertical to the horizontal, ditching his ropes and portaledge for trekking poles and a sun hat to complete a grueling 600-plus-mile crossing of the Taklimakan Desert in northwest China. Beginning in late September some 3,000 miles west of…
For a preview of the Taklimakan Desert Traverse, click here Uighur people in the ancient market town of Kashgar, China October 23, 2001 The plan was relatively simple. Every few weeks during his 60-day, 870-mile walk across China’s formidable Taklimakan desert, 28-year-old Mike Libecki was supposed fire-up…
Irish photographer Seamus Murphy’s work accompanies Patrick Symmes’s story of the Nepalese guerrillas who revere Mao and seek to take over the country. To bring his incredible photographs even more to life, Murphy answered some of our questions about the trip and about his work. Related Articles Photo…
Accompanying ϳԹ's behind-the-lines special report on Nepal's Maoist insurgents ("The Last Days of the Mountain Kingdom," by Patrick Symmes, September) is this haunting photograph by longtime Kathmandu photojournalist Thomas Laird. Here, in an exclusive account, Laird offers an equally haunting first-person look at the most extraordinary 24 hours in
A half-mad dash to Hkakabo Razi seemed like a good idea at the time. And hey, how tough can it be to sneak past the Chinese Army?
She was making her way across Laos, when a jury-rigged bus slammed into her. A survivor's tale—and some hard-won advice.
There's nobody more qualified to drag you to the top of the world than Babu Chiri Sherpa. And he'll gladly do it. But when he's through, he's got some business of his own to attend to. Namely, obliterating every last climbing record on Everest, shattering the myth of his people as high-altitude baggage handlers, and taking the Sherpa brand global.
Last May, the elite climbing community told Erik Weihenmayer he didn't belong on Everest. In this exclusive preview of the new afterword to Weihenmayer's book, TOUCH THE TOP OF THE WORLD, the blind mountaineer fires back.
He was packing for a trek through roughest Afghanistan when the world shook. Sometimes adventure has to wait.
Rejected–twice!–by the people behind the phony "reality-based" TV adventure show, our vengeful writer pays a surprise visit to Survivor's Island shoot to wreak some authentic havoc.
Take three travelers, a nation of Buddhists, and one unfortunate rodent. Add a forbidden journey and a dark childhood secret, and you could have the time of your lives.
On a sunny day in 1953, a tall young New Zealander named Edmund Hillary became the first human to stand atop the world's highest mountain—and, thereafter, a paragon of grace and bonhomie for explorers who would follow.
After a lifetime of wanting, Jon Krakauer made it to the world's highest point. What he and the other survivors would discover in the months to come, however, is that it's even more difficult to get back down.