In August of 2018 I went on a weeklong camping trip with a few others to Cape Scott Provincial Park on the northwest tip of Vancouver Island. The backcountry park encapsulates a pristine and wild stretch of coastal temperate rainforest known for its beautiful trails and stunning campsites on the beach. We spent much of […]
Category: Travel
Canadian journalist, and friend, Adnan Khan, has been covering South Asia and Middle East for over a decade. When not traipsing around Turkey, his home turf, the Maclean’s correspondent can usually be found in Pakistan or Afghanistan working on his next feature story. In 2012, Khan took a much needed break from his reporting duties and embarked […]
Last spring I spent a week with a group of mountaineers at a remote glacier camp in Yukon’s St. Elias Range near the base of Mount Logan, Canada’s highest peak. Sometimes referred to as “Canada’s Himalayas”, the St. Elias Mountains (the highest in North America) sit within the largest glaciated region outside of Greenland and the […]
On a recent trip to Yukon, I visited Kwaday Dan Kenji (“Long Ago People’s Place”), a First Nations cultural interpretive centre on the old Alaska Highway near the village of Champagne. Harold Johnson and his wife Meta Williams of the northwest Champagne-Aishihik First Nation live on the wooded lot, an ancestral site, where they’re sharing the […]
Brent Liddle, a wilderness guide from Haines Junction, Yukon has spent over three decades exploring one of the most remote corners of North America. Between 1975 and 2002 he served as an interpretive guide at Kluane National Park: a 22,000 square kilometer wilderness area in the Yukon straddling the southernmost limit of the Arctic. Kluane […]
For decades a small indie bookstore has been operating, virtually in secret, beneath the corporate hustle of Toronto’s downtown core. “Open Air Books and Maps” is a quirky and clandestine establishment located in a basement-level nook at the corner of Adelaide and Toronto streets. Since 1976, this cramped and largely unannounced subterranean haunt has been […]
Muhammed “al-Sharif” al-Idrisi (c. 1100-1165) was a major Muslim scholar, geographer and mapmaker of the medieval Islamic period. He was born in the town of Ceuta, in Morocco, and was descended from a line of nobleman who traced their lineage to the Prophet Mohammed. Al-Idrisi took an interest in foreign lands and travel early in […]
Travel writing may often entertain and sometimes astonish, but not often does it take the reader past a constellation of anecdotal experiences into the true essence of a place beyond all preconception. Jason Elliot’s Mirrors of the Unseen: Journeys in Iran takes aim at the blunting assumptions and false perceptions of this little understood country, […]