Unpacked by Afar | Travel Smarter, More Responsibly
Unpacked by Afar is your weekly guide to where to go, how to travel, and everything worth unpacking in between. Each week, host Aislyn Greene and the Afar team travel the world and dig into the big questions behind every great trip, from the best new hotels and national parks to traveling more responsibly. Some weeks we follow a story through music, food, and culture. Others we tackle a tricky topic, share our favorite destinations, or help you plan where to go next. Because the travel world is complicated. We're here to help you unpack it.
Episodes
September 10, 2026 • 36 mins
Travel journalist Kathryn Romeyn shares how to find Thailand off the beaten path—from Nan Province night markets to Khao Sok's rainforest—plus the best time to visit Thailand if you want fewer crowds and lower prices.
This week on Unpacked, host Aislyn Greene explores Thailand off the beaten path with journalist Kathryn Romeyn, who's covered Southeast Asia since 2014 and calls Bali, Indonesia home. Kathryn returned to ...
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September 3, 2026 • 40 mins
The spices in your cabinet are probably five to seven years old—and that's not an accident.
On this episode of Unpacked, host Aislyn Greene sits down with Sana Javeri Kadri, founder of Diaspora Spice Co., who spent nine years dismantling a 500-year-old system and replacing it with something radically different: direct relationships with regenerative spice farming partners across India and Sri Lanka. What starts as a question...
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September 1, 2026 • 37 mins
An African safari doesn't have to mean a traffic jam. On this episode of Unpacked, host Aislyn Greene travels to Tanzania's southern circuit—visiting two parks most first-time safari-ers never consider—and discovers what happens when you trade the famous Great Migration crossing for a dry riverbed with not another human being in sight.
To get there, she consulted Elizabeth Gordon, co-founder of Extraordinary Journeys, ...
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August 20, 2026 • 34 mins
By the end of this century, half of the world's 7,000 languages could be gone. On this episode of Unpacked, host Aislyn Greene hands the mic to travel writer Lucy Kehoe for a conversation about saving language with journalist Sophia Smith Galer, author of the new book How to Kill a Language.
For Sophia, saving language is personal: her Italian grandmother spoke Emilian, one of Italy's Indigenous tongues, and it's quietly slipping...
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August 18, 2026 • 25 mins
This kind of Japan travel doesn't show up in guidebooks. In January 2024, a major earthquake struck the Noto Peninsula, lifting the seabed 15 feet into the air and exposing an ocean floor that locals walked across—harvesting octopus and abalone—to get home.
This week on Unpacked, Five Questions, host and Afar executive editor Katherine LaGrave is joined by Afar contributing writer Ryan Knighton, who recently wrote a fe...
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August 13, 2026 • 33 mins
For the past several decades, writer and editor Lavinia Spalding has championed women's travel writing. She's helmed seven editions of the Best Women's Travel Writing—the celebrated Traveler's Tales anthology—including the latest, released on June 9th.
Over the years, she's read hundreds of submissions a year from women around the world and distilled them into one essential collection. So host Aislyn Greene sits down...
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August 11, 2026 • 26 mins
Buffalo, New York might be the greatest architecture city you've never heard of. In the fourth and final episode of our Unpacked by Afar series, we explore how this Rust Belt city became one of the richest showcases of American architecture anywhere in the country.
Host Aislyn Greene tours Buffalo with Ed Howard, a docent and guide with Explore Buffalo. Ed shares that Buffalo was one of the wealthiest cities in America and drew th...
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July 28, 2026 • 22 mins
For 185 years, some of the most important chapters of American history have unfolded on a few blocks of Buffalo's East Side. In the third episode of our four-part Unpacked by Afar series, we walk the Michigan Street African American Heritage Corridor, the beating heart of Buffalo Black history, with the man who has made preserving it his life's work.
Executive director Terry Alford grew up on these streets and is now leading their...
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July 24, 2026 • 22 mins
This is the final stop on our five-part audio guide to Asheville, North Carolina, and we’re heading for the trees. In this episode of Unpacked by Afar, host Aislyn Greene laces up for Asheville hiking, and discovers why the oldest mountains on Earth are also some of the most beloved.
On a tour with Hike Bike Kayak Asheville that takes Aislyn and guide David into the Pisgah National Forest, Aislyn learns that Asheville hiking...
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July 24, 2026 • 31 mins
This is the fourth stop on our five-part audio guide to Asheville, North Carolina, and it may be the tastiest one yet. In this episode of Unpacked by Afar, host Aislyn Greene digs into Asheville food, and the surprising reason this mountain city punches so far above its weight at the table.
Aislyn joins a walking food tour with Sita of Eating Asheville, eating her way through a town where farm to table isn’t a slogan but a f...
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July 23, 2026 • 26 mins
This is the third stop on our five-part audio guide to Asheville, North Carolina, and it takes us just outside the city to the small mountain town of Black Mountain, North Carolina. In this episode of Unpacked by Afar, host Aislyn Greene goes looking for the creative soul of the region, and finds it everywhere: in the galleries, in the glass studios, and above all in the music scene.
Aislyn starts with breakfast at Cousins Cub...
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July 23, 2026 • 21 mins
This is the second stop on our five-part audio guide to Asheville, North Carolina, and it reaches back a lot further than you might expect. In this episode of Unpacked by Afar, host Aislyn Greene unpacks the long, strange story of Asheville wellness, and why doctors have been sending patients to these mountains for more than a century and a half.
To understand where Asheville wellness began, Aislyn talks with David Freedman, an in...
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July 23, 2026 • 31 mins
Welcome to the first stop on our five-part audio guide to Asheville, North Carolina. And where better to start than at the beginning? In this episode of Unpacked by Afar, host Aislyn Greene sets out on foot to trace Asheville history from the ground up, and to answer a simple question: How did a remote, hard-to-reach valley in the Blue Ridge Mountains become one of the most creative small cities in America?
Aislyn’s first gu...
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July 21, 2026 • 23 mins
Buffalo, New York has called itself the City of Good Neighbors since 1940, and in 2023 Reader's Digest even voted it the nicest city in America. But is it true? In this episode of Unpacked by Afar, host Aislyn Greene turns a Buffalo travel story into a bigger question: what does it actually take to turn a stranger into a neighbor?
We begin 150 years ago, on the East Side patch that grew into the second-largest Polish community in ...
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July 14, 2026 • 22 mins
Everybody knows Buffalo, New York, for the chicken wing. Fewer people know the real story behind the wing—or the full story of Buffalo's food scene, which is grounded in tradition and full of innovation.
In the first episode of our four-part Unpacked by Afar series on Buffalo, we start where you should always start: at the table. Host Aislyn Greene digs into a food scene that has quietly become one of the most surprising in ...
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July 9, 2026 • 40 mins
Welcome to Unpacked Five Questions, a podcast that takes you behind the scenes of one great travel story. In this episode, executive editor Katherine LaGrave sits down with writer Latria Graham, Afar's Unpacked columnist.
Latria spent seven weeks driving the nearly 5,000-mile Lewis and Clark National Historic Trail—alone—to report a story about the Corps of Discovery's most essential and least credited member: York, a...
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July 2, 2026 • 37 mins
LGBTQ+ Americans are more than twice as likely as the general population to hold a valid passport. That stat sits at the heart of (Out )on the Road: The Radical Joy of Queer Travel, a new book from writer Lindsey Danis that's part memoir, part guide.
Most conversations about queer travel start and end with safety. Lindsey wanted to write past that, toward joy, belonging, and power. In this episode, they and Aislyn talk about the ...
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July 1, 2026 • 23 mins
Welcome to Travel to Listen, a new Unpacked series hosted by veteran music journalist Tim Chester. Over four episodes, Tim took us into the cities where music is more than entertainment—it's the shortcut to a place's soul. In this season finale, he heads to Detroit to explore the legendary Motown sound—and to find out what's next for the little house on West Grand Boulevard that started it all.
Meet this week's guests
...
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June 26, 2026 • 12 mins
It’s the last Feel-Good Friday before host Aislyn and producer Nikki take a summer break. And they’re sending the season off with two of summer’s great pleasures: a viral World Cup food obsession and a very American bourbon.
First, why international soccer fans are falling hard for ranch dressing—and getting stopped at airport security over it. Then, a first-of-its-kind whiskey blended from all 50 states, ...
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June 26, 2026 • 43 mins
On this episode of Unpacked, host Aislyn Greene and producer Nikki Galteland hit the road in Michigan and find epic adventures, gorgeous waterways—and a new way to connect.
Join them as they follow Michigan's mitten counterclockwise, exploring the state's many waterways. They paddle the Au Sable River, flying over the Lake Huron shipwrecks of Thunder Bay, ferry over to the car-free Mackinac Island, savor, the deep quiet of D...
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