It was not the ruins of Machu Picchu, nor the mysterious pictures of the Nasca Desert that drove me to Peru. It was rather the green fields of coca and the mixed aura of danger and adventure Peru projected.

When Fabian met us in the morning to bring us to a small estancia in the Andes near Mendoza, he was wearing a gaucho beret. Like real Argentinean gauchos do, we thought. On the way to the estancia, our trail ride was supposed to start from, he spoke of 3 different ways to preprocess and prepare mate tea. Our companion definitely knew how to do things the way gauchos do them.

If you really want to go off the beaten touristic path while travelling you should visit a post office and try sending parcels from abroad. Here are our highlights: Bolivia, Ethiopia and Russia.

July 25, 2018 Petrozavodsk, Karelia, Russia On a sunny but cool morning, we jumped out of a train arriving from St Petersburg at a cracked platform in a train station in Petrozavodsk. In spite of the arrangements we had, nobody was waiting for us to bring us to the kayak basecamp, that our 5-day long kayak adventure tour in Russian Karelia was going to start from.

My trail ride in the Ethiopian Bale Mountains was a lifetime experience in the deepest sense of these words. Even though I’m always trying to get off the beaten path, I have never thought it was possible to get that far off it.

Here we will write about how we got to Svanetia taking the most challenging but most beautiful road from Lentekhi to Ushguli and about our first impressions of Ushguli.