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Calls wake us in the first light of day. Off Banda Neira, two longboats surge alongside the Le Soleal, each carrying around two dozen rowers while a stroke drums the beat.
The most beautiful pictures of Cape Verde: a cloud spills over the rim of the Cova crater and fills the Paul valley like milk. Dragon trees cling to the ridges of São Nicolau, salt dries at Pedra de Lume. And on Santo Antão’s coast, a path winds around basalt cliffs.
The best photos from Lotsane in eastern Botswana: where cattle grazed until a few years ago, giraffes, impala and sable antelope now roam. A reserve that shows what rewilding means.
In the Tuli Block in eastern Botswana, six cattle farms are turning back into wilderness. Four days with trackers, sable antelope, an archaeologist and a Berlin couple bringing back what had vanished – and needing a fence to do it.
By small propeller plane from island to island in Vanuatu: a cave you leave by swimming, rock art on Lelepa, a festival without phones and the Yasur volcano, which never stops rumbling and spitting lava – visiting a people who take only their happiness seriously.
45 pictures from northern Tanzania: Lake Manyara, where drowned acacias rise from the salt water. Then the Serengeti, where zebras and wildebeest cross the plains in their hundreds of thousands. And birds like living gemstones – from the violet-backed starling to the variable sunbird.
On some Cape Verde islands, a whole rainy season brings only about three centimetres of rain. Yet dragon trees and coffee grow on São Nicolau, and on Santo Antão terraces climb into the clouds. Four islands, one question: what does an archipelago live on when it lacks rain?
Eleven nights aboard Le Soléal across the Banda Sea to Raja Ampat – rowers who come out to meet the ship, the islands where nutmeg once grew and nowhere else, reefs home to three quarters of the world’s coral species and a yellow coconut leaf that closes a reef.
33 pictures from the Spice Islands to Raja Ampat: Banda Neira, where nutmeg was once worth a war. Karst cones in turquoise lagoons, a village marching out sixty dancers in feather crowns – and on the Kei Islands a monitor lizard that science has only known since 2019.
On 65 inhabited islands in the South Pacific, people often live without electricity and on very little money – and still top the Happy Planet Index. A journey to the Ni-Vanuatu, their caves, volcanoes and a sense of community that needs no rules.
30 pictures from West Greenland: Ilulissat, where icebergs the size of tower blocks lie stranded in the fjord. Oqaatsut – 45 inhabitants, 80 dogs and roast reindeer on the plate. And here the vast Greenland ice sheet reaches 550 kilometres to the east coast.
“Australia is a continent pretending to be a country.” Duncan Fraser of the Adelaide tourism office says it almost in passing over lunch. I note the line down – it sounds like a joke but reads to me like a riddle. And it will not let go of Annette and me for eight days.