Published
Bagpipes or bikes? In Scotland, the choice is easy: World-class singletrack ranges across the stark beauty of the Highlands, transecting the ancient kingdom and drawing fat-tire aficionados from far and wide. MARK LEVINE takes his lumps in craggy Caledonia.
ϳԹ, big and small, is all about risk. The risk that things may go terribly wrong. That danger will finally cut off your credit and hit you with a hefty bill. That luck will flee the scene as the dark tide rises. In the tales of calamity that follow, our 13 unlucky writers hold forth on their personal odysseys into the land of nightmares.
Searching and Fleeing and Hoping are the verbs that populated Atlin, an almost-mythical town at the very end of the road. Here, the free spirits blew in and settled like random leaves, dreaming of a life amid the wilderness. But society, it turns out, isn't so easily escaped.
Is paradise drowning? The serene South Pacific archipelago of Tuvalu wants the world to know it will soon be the first nation to sink beneath the rising waters of global warming—an early warning of biblical inundations to come. And guess what? It's your fault.
Deep in South Africa's interior sprawls Kruger National Park, the crown jewel of game preserves with 2,500 lions, 2,750 rhinos, 8,500 elephants, 30,000 zebras, 100,000 impalas...and 650 miles of boundary wire keeping animals in and poachers out. Welcome to the postmodern Eden, where everyone behaves—or else.
A gusty adventure in the wilds of Patagonia, both on bike and very suddenly off.
In the beginning was the family compound, and it was fine. Then came the oil companies with their wells, and they were foul. And lately have come the shootings, the wrenchings, the bombings—and what's to come of all that, only the prophet knows.
Can you feel it coming? Heat, hail, snow, rain. Wind, drought, flood, pain. Are you tired of waiting? Then hurry to Bangladesh, where the skies have already broken.
They dropped from the sky as if from a dream, undetected, bearing dire messages. They had set out from the edge of the world–a wild island isolated in a frozen sea–and they came to rest in the depths of what is sometimes called the pit of the earth. They were…