Travel Tales by Afar
Travel, at its best, changes the way we see the world. Join us each week as we dig into stories from people who took a trip—and came home transformed. Travel Tales by AFAR is your ticket to the world, no passport required.
Episodes
Antoni Porowski, our favorite culinary expert from Queer Eye, takes you behind-the-scenes of his new National Geographic show, No Taste Like Home (premiering February 23, 2025). In this episode, he shares the connection that sent him crying off camera with Awkwafina, the dish that defeated his adventurous palate with Henry Golding, and how his Polish roots served him well while helping celebrities explore the foods that taste like ...
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November 14, 2024 • 30 mins
How do you manage stress when you’re traveling during the holidays? And is it better to book with points or cash during some of the busiest travel days of the year? Believe it or not, it’s almost time to book your holiday travel, and our friends at NerdWallet have some tips for traveling stress-free. In this special episode of NerdWallet’s Smart Money podcast, their objective finance journalists answer real-world questions to help ...
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September 12, 2024 • 63 mins
No plan. No luggage. Five weeks in India. Joe Diaz and Greg Sullivan, dreamed up Afar on a beach in Goa more than 15 years ago. In this candid episode from our sister podcast, Unpacked, they reflect on what they’ve learned by helping people travel deeper. From the spontaneous trips that honed the company’s values to how they’ve helped shape the travel industry, get an inside look into the transformative power of rallying around tra...
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August 29, 2024 • 20 mins
Not only can you swim in the rivers of Bern and Basel— but thousands of locals regularly take the plunge. From a morning commute to a relaxing weekend escape, discover how rivers are at the heart of everyday Swiss life. In this episode of Travel Tales by Afar, Bonnie Tsui, author of Why We Swim, follows the currents of Switzerland's alpine rivers into the depths of history, culture and identity.
How Rivers Reveal Years of Swiss C...
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August 22, 2024 • 48 mins
Tom Turcich and his dog, Savannah, completed their world walk in 2022. On this week’s episode of Travel Tales, we hear their story.
We first talked with Tom and Savannah back in 2021, when they were in Kyrgyzstan, six years into their journey, which began in 2015. They had been held up by the pandemic, which was only one of many ordeals they faced on their circumnavigation. A year and a few thousand miles later, they were done and ...
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August 15, 2024 • 18 mins
Road trips are such funny things. They allow more room for whimsy and spontaneity. They can inspire frank conversation, sitting side by side with someone, looking out at endless stretches of highway. And they can be dull (all that endless highway) in a way that somehow opens your mind to other possibilities and maybe even other lives.
That’s what happened for Charlie Sprinkman as he drove back and forth—and back again—across the U...
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August 8, 2024 • 23 mins
Deesha Dyer never thought she’d wind up in the White House. As a kid growing up in Philadelphia, she desperately wanted to travel but it always felt out of reach. Until she landed a coveted internship in the Obama administration, working in the office that arranged all of the president’s travel. Over the next eight years, she would travel around the world with the President and First Lady—in style!—visiting embassies, hobnobbing wi...
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August 1, 2024 • 34 mins
Imagine this: You’re slowly driving through Etosha National Park, Namibia’s renowned conservation area. There are elephants and zebras and antelopes and lions all around you. In fact, you’ve been warned not to exit your car because of those very lions, which are pros at camouflaging themselves in the desert landscape. And then your car stalls—because you don’t really know how to drive it.
That’s the situation that this week’s stor...
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July 25, 2024 • 24 mins
Some of our favorite travel moments are the ones you’d never in a million years expect. These are where the best travel stories are born. And this week, Afar’s executive editor, Billie Cohen, has a very delicious, very serendipitous story for us.
As you’ll hear in the episode, Billie was in Estonia (one of Afar’s picks for where to travel in 2024) for work. It was 9 p.m. and she was due to fly home the next day. But then her guide...
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July 18, 2024 • 19 mins
When Afar editorial director Sarika Bansal was 22, she moved to Mumbai. As you’ll hear in her Travel Tale this week, she grew up in New York and visited India (where her parents were born) frequently. Yet the visits often felt cloistered. But many years later in Mumbai, she didn’t have to worry about meeting family expectations, and she was free to develop her own connection with the place. And therein lay the challenge. Because wh...
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July 11, 2024 • 20 mins
When it comes to relationships, often there’s the planner—and then there’s the go-with-the-flow-er. And today’s episode of Travel Tales by Afar is all about what happens when the planner hesitantly chucks the travel to-do list and lets serendipity lead the way.
Beth Santos is the planner in this particular story. She’s the founder of Wanderful, an online women’s travel community that grew out of her solo travels as a young woman, ...
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July 4, 2024 • 23 mins
This week, we’re replaying one of our favorite Travel Tales episodes: Comedian and actress Michelle Buteau—and her best friend—fly to Paris to meet their supposed French boyfriends. Only things don’t exactly go to plan . . .
Michelle Buteau is a comedian and actress, known for her roles in Always Be My Maybe, The First Wives Club, Someone Great, Russian Doll, and Tales of the City. She is also the host of The Circle and has stand-u...
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June 27, 2024 • 35 mins
In late 2016, Daniel Troia was struggling with grief. Grief over the loss of his parents and grief over the division he saw unfolding on his TV, night after night. It made him angry, and that made him want to do something to change things, or at least to change his perception of things.
So, in 2018, he set out on a cross-country bike ride. His plan was to ride from California to New York—with no food or money. He thought that if h...
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June 20, 2024 • 30 mins
When poet Tess Taylor’s son, Bennett, was three years old, he heard the violin for the first time. For weeks afterward, every day he asked her for a violin, so finally she took him into a local violin shop and asked for help. The shop owner put a tiny violin and bow in his hands and Bennett asked, “But how do I make it sound beautiful?”
Fast-forward nearly a decade and Bennett was still playing the violin—expanding into bluegrass ...
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June 13, 2024 • 33 mins
When most of us think about nature in Argentina, our minds go immediately to Patagonia—which is a spectacular place worth visiting (it’s one of the most memorable places I’ve been to). But in this week’s episode, we’re exploring two regions in Argentina that most travelers miss: El Impenetrable National Park in the north and Patagonia Azul in the south.
These places are relatively unfrequented in large part because, up until a few...
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June 6, 2024 • 25 mins
Today we’re launching Travel Tales, season five. And we’re kicking off this season with a roar, although the subjects of today’s episode (polar bears) are much quieter than you’d imagine.
Nearly two years ago, host Aislyn Greene attended a TED Talk event in New York, held in partnership with the Canadian tourism board. There she met environmentalist and entrepreneur Kevin Smith, who shared his tale in an episode from last season, ...
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December 14, 2023 • 37 mins
How often do you do something that scares you? This week on Travel Tales by AFAR, Jeff Jenkins—host of the National Geographic show Never Say Never—reminds us that life begins where our comfort zone ends.
On his show, Jeff tests the limits of his physical and mental abilities. He climbs mountains, cave dives, learns to sumo wrestle, races in a Maori canoe (called a waka), and does basically anything else that is likely to terrify-s...
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December 7, 2023 • 35 mins
The Great Bear Rainforest is one of the most spectacular, pristine protected places in Canada. But it wasn't always this way. Kevin Smith, a boat captain who grew up in British Columbia and now owns and operates Maple Leaf Adventures, was instrumental in helping turn the local economy from extraction (logging) to tourism. Since then, he's guided thousands of travelers through the wilds of the rainforest and helped build relationshi...
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November 30, 2023 • 31 mins
Can geometric shapes heal the world? That's what the artists of the De Stijl movement—which came of age in the Netherlands after World War I—believed. Piet Mondrian is one of the most famous members of this group, which forbade circles and embraced light, color, and geometry as a way to move past the chaos of the war. As AFAR contributing writer Chris Colin discovers on a trip to Utrecht, that's not quite as bizarre as it sounds. A...
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November 22, 2023 • 38 mins
For writer Ryan Knighton, surfing is one of the rare occurrences where he feels completely free. Because, in addition to being an excellent writer, a dad, and a curious individual, Ryan is blind. But that's never stopped him from exploring the world. So more than a decade ago, he learned to surf and has been riding the waves near his home in British Columbia ever since. But he’s always had a hankering to surf in a location he doesn...
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