We had one very unimportant question. So unimportant—and yet precise—a question, in fact, that we might be the very first people in history ever to have asked it. Does homemade apple tart taste nicer when eaten at 8202 feet? There was only one way to find out. We started our […]
I love to go on little adventures. Whether it’s climbing a jungle pylon, or trekking in a river, or running down Europe’s biggest sand dune or trying (and failing) to hammock overnight in the Bornean rainforest, a day with an adventure in it always feels like a day well spent. That’s […]
Walks next to rivers are nice. Walks in rivers are better. You get a different perspective when your legs are freezing cold and you keep stepping on jagged rocks. And it’s usually a more memorable one. When a few friends and I spent a week in France, we trekked a couple […]
So, the field season in Borneo is over and the numbers are in. We cut through nearly 25 km of logged forest, making a trail system which will be used over the next thirty-years to track whether removing vines can speed up forest recovery after logging. That’s a whole lot […]
Just over two hundred years ago a young girl happened upon a 17 foot long fossilised sea monster along the cliffs of the English Channel. Now known as the ichthyosaurus, her discoveries were only just getting started. Over the next thirty-five years Mary Anning would discover the first plesiosaurus and […]
I am very lucky to live ten minutes away from a deer park. It’s one of my favourite places on the planet. I’ve been going several times a year since I was maybe four and so a week away from my 23rd birthday, and having just got back yesterday from […]
Do you remember running full tilt down a hill as a toddler and it feeling like your legs were moving faster than the rest of your body? The closest I’ve come to reliving that sensation is running down Europe’s tallest sand dune. The Dune du Pilat near Bordeaux in France has […]
We were two kilometres away from camp and several hundred metres into the rainforest when we heard the howling. At first, I thought it was gibbons but it sounded nothing their distinctive calls, nor like anything else I’d ever heard in the forest. Redly, one of the local guys leading […]
I’ve always wanted to sleep in a hammock on my own in the rainforest—it looks so cool in that “Filmmaker Diaries” bit at the end of nature documentaries. Last night I came the closest I’ve ever come to fulfilling that dream. But then it all went wrong. The day before, […]
As a general rule, climbing tall things is fun. When those tall things happen to be slap bang in the middle of a rainforest…well these are the best things to climb. Today, Paddy and I headed to a tower we’ve been to many times before to watch the sun rise. […]