Hand-written essays on travelling without the tourist traps. Cities seen at walking pace, plus practical guides to using Google My Maps for travel.
Skip the Champs-Élysées for an afternoon. The Paris Parisians actually live in is quieter, kinder to a slow lunch, and one Métro stop sideways from the postcard.
Berlin is the easiest city in Europe to skip the obvious in. Mitte is the postcard; the real city is in Neukölln, Kreuzberg and the slow north of Prenzlauer Berg.
Times Square is for the airport bus. The five-borough city — the one that takes a year to learn — is built out of small streets, smaller cafés and a thousand independent restaurants Midtown will never tell you about.
La Rambla is for the cruise crowd. The Barcelona you came for sits one Metro stop north in Gràcia, east in Poblenou, or up the hill in Sant Antoni.
Where Londoners actually drink coffee, eat lunch and lose an afternoon — twelve places, one neighbourhood at a time.
Skip Shibuya Crossing for a minute. The Tokyo Tokyoites move through is a quieter, slower, more architectural city — and it sits one train transfer away.
Star ratings reward volume, not character. Here’s how seasoned travellers actually find the indie cafés worth a morning — and what to do when the algorithm fails you.
The free, under-rated Google product that turns a list of places into a working travel atlas — pinned, exportable, available offline.
A KML file is the cleanest way to load someone else’s map into your phone. Here’s exactly how to import one — Google My Maps on desktop, Google Maps on iOS and Android — in under three minutes.
Melbourne is the easiest big city in the world to spend a slow week in. Skip the obvious laneways for an hour — the better ones are two streets sideways.
The Centrum is one square kilometre of Amsterdam and it’s where 90% of the visitors stay. The other 218 square kilometres are where the city actually lives.
The 28 tram and Belém are fine; they’re also the same five hundred metres every visitor sees. The Lisbon worth a weekend is up the hill in Graça, east in Marvila, and across the river in Almada.