Apologies for the delay, everyone. Shockingly, I was traveling.

Before I left for Cuba, I went to the bank and took out $3,000 in cash. That's far more than I'd normally bring on a trip, but you can't withdraw money from an ATM in Cuba. American banks can't do business there. They're sanctioned, they're embargoed, and if the US gov catches a business operating there, they’re hit with treason.

$3,000 in US cash, in Havana.

My buddy Colin was flying in from Brazil and asked if I’d grab cash for him too. I grabbed some for our buddy Kieran while I was at it. Which is how I ended up in a taxi from the airport in Havana with $3,000 US in my backpack.

The average monthly salary in Cuba is under $20. Google will tell you it’s something like $17. What we heard from actually talking to people is that it’s closer to $8. So I’m sitting in the back of a car with what amounts to a lifetime of wages in a bag on my lap, and I’m the only one who knows it. Knowing that puts a strange sensation in your brain.

Old Havana the day we arrived. No tourists.

Arriving in Havana is a unique experience. The streets are beautiful. The facades are some of the most breathtaking anywhere in the world, and they’re totally untouched. Everything was built forever ago, and there’s almost no modern restoration happening. So it looks like the 1950s because in a lot of ways it is still the 1950s.

There are places in Europe with colonial architecture where you get a similar feeling of being back in time. The difference in Cuba is that there’s no tourism. None. You show up, and you’re the only tourists on the street. If you zoom in on the people in that photo, not one of them is there on holiday. Those are people walking through their own city on a normal day. You feel immersed immediately, because there’s no one else around to break the spell.

What we didn’t realize when we got there is that there was no power. We’d arrived during a blackout.

Nighttime during a blackout.

Cuban dusk.

Anywhere else in the world, the sun starts going down, and lights start coming on. That doesn’t happen here. As the sun starts to disappear, a level of darkness you’ve never seen before sweeps the streets. Once in a while, a lone building will have one lightbulb powered by solar, but those are far and few between. Candlelight is a frequent solution.

The whole city goes black at night. Except the Capitol. The government buildings keep their lights on. The buildings where people live don’t.

Some of the people we met. I censored every identifying detail.

These are some of the people we met. I had to black out every identifying detail of them, because they appear in my videos speaking badly about the Castro cartel, which is the colloquial name for the people currently running Cuba. The punishment for speaking badly about them is life in prison. So I can’t publish their faces.

Havana from the roof of a government hotel, sun going down.

This is from the roof of a government-owned hotel where friends of ours were staying. Colin and I couldn’t stay there, because we’re American and the embargo means Americans can’t stay in places the Cuban government owns. The only way for us to be there was to stay somewhere owned by an actual person, so we got an Airbnb from a local. For my own legal safety, I should clarify that at the hotel, we bought nothing. We walked in, went to the roof, looked at the view, and left.

The sun’s going down over the whole city, and you can look at every building in the frame and not find a single light on. Nothing happening in any of them. In the bottom right of the above picture, you can see one building’s roof collapsing in on itself. Also not an uncommon sight.

Inside a building that fell in on itself. It killed a couple of people when it went. Nature’s taking it back now.

There’s a fundamental difference between how we live in a capitalist society that doesn’t translate to the Cuban way of life at all. If you notice the place you live in is starting to wear down, you can’t ring up a guy who owns a roofing company, because that guy doesn’t exist. There is not really a private sector at all. And you wouldn’t be paying for it yourself anyway, because you don’t own your apartment. The government does.

So what you can do is tell the government. And the government says, okay, it’s been noted that you need that fixed. And then what? You’re one of a million people on a list of people living in unsafe housing, waiting on new houses that aren’t being built.

What happens instead is that the buildings fall in on themselves with people still inside. It happens constantly. A building comes down, and 15 families were living in it, and it doesn’t matter that they knew it was coming, because there was nowhere else to go. Move outside Havana, and there’s no work, and no work means no money, and no money means you can’t feed your kids.

The floor of one of the derelict buildings, after a while.

Once a building has come down, it turns into something else. People who don’t have homes move in, because there’s still sort of a roof. Sometimes a chunk of the second floor is left over, and you can get under it when it rains. So these places fill up, and this is what the floors look like after a while, because there’s nobody left whose job it is to care.

Then the government looks at the same wreckage and sees usable real estate. Somebody tells them they need housing, and the answer is no problem; there happen to be vacancies in this one block of the old city, on account of everyone having moved out when the building fell. We’ve got room for 15 families on the first floor. Go move into your new ‘apartment.’

The government told her this was her new home.

This is one of those people. She lives in what is basically a shack. You can see the house behind her. It’s an abandoned building with a piece of tin laid across some dilapidated walls, and that’s what she calls home, because that’s what she was told it was. She’s raising a baby. Maybe pregnant with another one. I couldn’t tell.

Same spot as the prior photo. I turned 180 degrees to face the other direction.

This place used to be 3 stories tall. There’s no third story now. There’s no second story either. It’s a floor with walls all the way around it and open sky above. In the bottom right of that frame is another house people are living in, which again is a series of decrepit walls with a piece of wood on top, and I remember seeing 2 kids no older than 7 living there.

This one’s fenced off. Look toward the middle, and you can see it’s already starting to fall in on itself.

We walked past this one and looked in. It seems like it might have caught fire at some point. They’d put fencing up so people couldn’t get inside, and what it’s become instead is a place to throw trash. The reason for the fence is probably that it’s structurally unsound and the roof could go at any moment.

I’ve been to poor places before, but this was different. The failure is so total and so slow that people have organized their lives around it. To be upset by your building falling in on you and your kids would imply that you expected something different. But this is just the way it’s been here for as long as most people remember. Then we left Havana for a few days to see the rest of the country, and discovered what life looks like for those who don’t have the privilege of living in the capital.

Part 2 will be out on Friday.

It’s 4:30am in the morning and I’m standing 25 meters down inside the mouth of an active volcano in eastern Java, wearing a heavy-duty gas mask and protective goggles, surrounded by roughly 150 other people who all woke up at midnight to be here. We are all looking at the same thing. It’s blue fire, rolling out of the rock, and it’s the reason every single one of us made this trip.

And I’m standing there thinking, “This is sort of stupid.”

The blue fire.

I mean, it’s cool. It’s blue fire. But it’s a patch of flame about 2 square meters across with 150 humans crowded around it in the dark. That’s the thing I came to this island for, and it took me about 90 seconds to feel nothing about it.

The good part was 200 meters straight down, in the dark, where I could see headlamps moving around. And the guy I came with had just told me nobody was going down there today.

Ijen is an active volcano on the eastern side of Java, in a part of Indonesia packed with them. It’s famous for two things. First, sulfur dioxide leaks out of the rock, and when it ignites, it burns blue. A permanent blue flame in a volcano. That’s the vision that gets the tourists out there.

The second reason it’s famous is something totally different. Ijen is a working sulfur mine. Every morning, men hike up the volcano, climb into the caldera, break sulfur out of the rock by hand, and carry it out on their shoulders. You’ve seen the tourist version on TikTok: little gas mask, selfie, a miner hands you a chunk to take home. But these dudes do it every day and make next to nothing doing it, and that was the only thing I wanted to see.

My crew.

I met up with Andrew, one of my best friends, in Singapore, and a few days later we were exchanging names with strangers in a hostel at midnight.

4:30 am at the top.

We got to the top around 4:30am, and there were hundreds of people up there. But the thing that I noticed wasn’t the crowd. Look at the far left and far right of that photo. Those wheelbarrow-looking things are for tourists who want to go see the blue fire but don’t want to walk. They pay a local about $10 to push them up.

The men who work here are scrawny little guys. They’re not yoked. They just have more mental fortitude than we do.

About the gas masks: sulfur smoke escapes constantly from the vents down there. The wind is strong, and it moves. That morning it was billowing away from us. If it turns, everybody’s inside it. The smell is intense to put it lightly.

There’s a big sign at the flame that says do not enter, blocking the path down deeper into the volcano where the miners are. I was told earlier that it is too dangerous today with the wind, so going down is not an option. I explain to my guide that I’m willing to take the risk if it means meeting the men that make a living off this. He explains that not only is the health risk a factor, but it’s also illegal when the winds are this strong.

I give one last-ditch effort and share with him my perspective. He’s a sulfur miner. The second he drops us off, he’s walking right back up here and past that same sign. The gas isn’t a death sentence; it’s an irritant. You breathe it, you cough, your eyes water. It’s riskier, but we could do it.

He said sorry, not today. That was my low moment. I’d woken up at midnight for a little blue campfire I didn’t care about, and the one thing I came to document was 200 meters below me behind a sign.

Ten minutes later, I’m sitting off to the side, and he walks over and goes, we’re taking a small group down. Do you want to come meet the sulfur miners?

Yes. Yes. Let’s go.

The first miner we met. He’d broken out something like 20 or 30 kilos, maybe 40. He was about 5’6”, and there’s no way he weighed more than 70 kilos himself.

Raw sulfur looks like a giant piece of chalk, and the process by which it gets mined is super interesting. They run clay tubes deep into the volcano to funnel sulfur gas onto the caldera floor. It cools into a liquid when it touches the atmosphere, drips down into a pile, and sets solid, so at the base of every tube there’s a deposit sitting there. The miners break it away and carry it out. The next morning it’s replenished.

The tubes, the deposit, and the cloud.

It’s pitch black down there when the miners do their first round; everything runs on headlamps. A few steps to the right and that man is inside a toxic gas cloud, crying, wheezing, unable to breathe.

65 kilos on my shoulder.

They asked if we wanted to try lifting a load. This basket was about 65 kilos, and getting it off the ground almost felt like a max squat, or at least at 4:30am after climbing a volcano it did. Not to mention it’s all off balance. The sulfur shifts inside, the load sits on one shoulder, and that shoulder isn’t holding a smooth barbell. It’s a rugged stick cutting into your trap.

65 kilos is the light load.

The standard is 85 kilos. That’s 190 pounds. One entire me, on one shoulder, carried by a man who is 5 feet 6. They haul it 200 meters up out of the caldera and 600 meters back down the volcano. Every day. Multiple times per day.

The guys who’ve been at it long enough will pull their shirt aside and show you their trap, concave and black. The nerve endings are gone. That’s what a career here looks like.

Loading a basket properly is most of the job. If a piece shifts on the climb, it all shifts.

Packing a basket is its own craft. They lift, shift, feel whether anything moves, set it down, adjust a piece, try again. If it won’t sit right, they break a chunk smaller and rebuild. Almost like carpentry.

A piece of sulfur.

First light. Until this moment the entire experience had happened in the dark. See the miner at the bottom left for scale.

Then the sun came up, and until that moment the whole thing had run on headlamps and gas masks. Suddenly you get the size of everything. That’s not a wisp of smoke. That’s a wall of sulfur dioxide moving through a bowl of rock, with a man in it a few meters from being swallowed.

Andrew, one second after the cloud turned. Hands up, eyes shut, mask tight, wait it out.

I was taking photos of Andrew when the cloud turned and got us. He didn’t have his eye gear on. That’s his first reaction, pure instinct: hands to the face, eyes shut, mask pressed tight, and then you wait for the wind to let you breathe. The one time it caught me without goggles, it was brutal.

The miners don’t wear goggles. I never saw one in eye protection. That was only for us.

Our guide. The man who said no, and then said yes.

This is the guy who came over and said a few of us are going down. He’s a miner too. When the guide shift ends, he comes back and starts mining.

The small group that walked past the sign. Not the hiking crew. Just the people who wanted to meet the miners.

The crater lake, from about halfway between the top and where the sulfur work happens.

The lake only shows up in full daylight. The volcano holds a basin of sulfuric acid, and I’m pretty sure I remember them saying it’s the biggest in the world. It’s this vibrant turquoise that seems like it shouldn’t exist in nature, and you can stand a step from it. If you jumped in, you’d burn, from acid.

Our hostel sold us an “East Java” package: 3 days, a crazy waterfall, another volcano, and Ijen, all for $100. Ijen was about 1/3rd of it. Call it $33 for the drive, the gear, the hike, the blue fire, the descent, the acid lake, the miners, and a friend group I’d keep for a week.

$33. And the guys who didn’t want to hike could buy a human wheelbarrow ride for $10.

The miners sell that sulfur for 8 to 10 cents per kilo. Which means a man who hikes a volcano before dawn, climbs down inside it, breaks sulfur out of the rock by hand with no eye protection, breathing in plumes of sulfuric acid, and carries 190 pounds on one shoulder, roughly 125% of his own body weight, up 200 meters and down 600 more, makes about $20 for the day. Maybe. If even.

Experiences like that really blow mind as a privileged westerner. I am not a harder worker than these guys. I am not more skilled than these guys, and I’m definitely not more deserving than them. I happen to have been born in America, and these guys happen to have been born in Java. That’s the only difference.

Last week I left you with a question. What exactly were our two government-mandated babysitters for?

I think those guys were never there to protect us from the “danger” that exists in Libya. They were there to protect the Libyans from us.

To explain how we got to this point, I have to give you a brief history of Libya, with the disclaimer that I’m not an authority on this. This is the version I pieced together from being there and absorbing everything I could.

A dove, built entirely out of bullet shells, in front of a military building from the Gaddafi era that's now the Museum of Libya.

Up until 2011, Libya was ruled by Muammar Gaddafi. He was a… character. He’d show up to UN conferences draped in golden robes and wild outfits while everyone around him wore tuxes. He had big, grand ideas about a unified Africa that wouldn’t need the US dollar, and he had a massive reserve of oil money to play with. And he spent a lot of it on the people. Free healthcare, free education, free housing, interest-free loans to start businesses. I even heard that if you wanted a degree the country couldn’t provide, he’d pay for you to study abroad and send you $2,000 a month while you did it. I got a quote from our guide, Jamal, where he described, “Gaddafi times were our dream.”

Progressive and cool as this stuff was, he was also a dictator. He silenced people, funded terrorist groups, and was openly anti-West and anti-Israel, and that’s the half of the story that gets told in the States. In 2011, during the Arab Spring, the economy went to shit. US-backed rebels kidnapped him and stomped him to death in the street. The economy collapsed after that, and Libya today gets called a failed state. It’s a splintered one, too: the western half is the UN-recognized government, and the eastern half is a rebel state, which is where the kidnapping-and-militias reputation exists (or so this is the version we were told). We stayed in the west.

So that’s the country we were walking around in. And walking around it was strangely pleasant. Libya was an Italian colony, and you feel it everywhere: most people’s second language after Arabic is Italian, the coffee is damn good, the pizza is legitimately solid, and the gelato was on par with my favorite spot in Florence. There are spots in Tripoli where you’d swear you were actually in Italy.

A Tripoli courtyard. Italian-esque.

A work of art on a big piece of sun-dried cowhide, folded by hand. I really wanted it, but it didn’t fit in my bag :(

The pleasantness, I believe, was forced. Every stop was delicately scheduled. The Museum of Libya. A soap factory. Our guide’s brother’s clothing shop… We kept saying: “Guys, we want to talk to people.” That’s the entire reason I travel to places like this. I want to interact with those that live a life that I could never imagine… What’s it like to live in Libya? Is it scary? Is it misunderstood? What’s one thing you want the world to know? Yet every time we met somebody who spoke any English, our guides rushed us along.

Then came the biggest incident of the entire trip, and it all came from a 2-minute convo.

The street where a kid walked by and said: “I love you.”

This kid walks past us on the street, sees us, and yells out, “I love you.” This dude speaks English. So I walk over. My guide taps me on the shoulder, says let’s go. I follow him for 15 feet before doubling back and hustling over to the guy anyway. He asks what part of Europe I’m from. I tell him I’m from America and he goes: “Wow, America.” Then he tells me something nobody else on the trip has said: he wants to leave Libya. He doesn’t like living here. Everybody else we’d talked to only has amazing things to say about Libya, but everybody else we’d talked to was part of the itinerary. His fractured English and knowing this would be a short interaction prevented us from going deeper, so I shook his hand, got his WhatsApp, and walked on.

I caught back up to the group, and my buddy Eli goes: “They were pissed you were talking to him for so long…” That day we had a fourth guy following us, supposedly just a local who knew the city, except he was barking instructions at our military escort, which is not a regular civilian thing to do. And while I was having my chat, he was apparently chirping at the military guy: “Go get him, right now.” That was the moment it clicked in my head. We were never the ones at risk. We were the risk. Whether they were worried that we were spies or just megaphones for Western agendas, our escorts existed to manage what we touched, who we met, and what we saw.

You might think by the way I’m writing about it that I’m thinking critically of this dynamic, but I kinda get it. The security rule, as it was explained to us, applies specifically to Americans and Brits. Other nationalities sort out a letter of invitation and, for the most part, roam freely. So why us? Well, from where a lot of Libyans stand, America’s one big appearance in their history was 2011, when their leader, the guy responsible for the free housing and the free healthcare and all of these other amazing things upon which they look back very favorably, got dragged into the street and killed with our fingerprints on it, and life’s been worse ever since. If that’s the one thing you know about Americans, you might want a chaperone on us too.

A Gaddafi hat. Plus: the bed bug bites from Tunisia, still on my neck.

Part of our whole mission there was to find Gaddafi stuff, because outside of Libya you only ever hear one version of the man, and inside Libya he’s still everywhere you look. We found this hat in a shop, which is pretty sick. You can also see the bed bug bites from Part 1 still on my neck.

Libyan dudes in a store full of lamps.

This is the Libya nobody shows you. Guys chilling in a lamp shop, chatting, doing regular business. We walked by, wishing a language barrier didn’t separate us. I thought it was a cool composition, so I took the photo. That’s it. That’s the level of danger we experienced in one of the most feared countries on Earth.

Our last sunset in Tripoli.

On our last night, we watched the sun go down over Tripoli. I left Libya conflicted. I went in to learn what it means to be Libyan in modern-day Libya. Between the escorts and the ambiguity about what three American “social media influencers” were really doing there, the country kept me at arm’s length the whole time. If you want to see Roman ruins and a soap factory, you’ll love Libya. If you want to actually meet Libya, it’s not ready for you yet.

The food, though, needs no chaperone.

The knee bone is the dark one on the right, fat still on. Texture like boba. Sounds terrible, was delicious.

We ate knee bone, we ate lamb head, and all of it was really, really good. Kieran and Eli posted videos about it, and because their stuff gets pushed to local audiences, the comments filled up with the Libyan diaspora. Stuff like: “My family left Libya in 1996, we moved to Manhattan, I can’t find decent Libyan food anywhere,” and “I miss it so much.” Makes me think of a future where Libya isn’t sealed off and labeled as a “scary destination” in the eyes of the West.

Next week: a different kind of restricted area. I wake up at midnight, put on a gas mask, and walk past a do-not-enter sign into the mouth of a volcano that leaks blue fire.

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March 2026

The first thing you get when you cross into Libya as an American is an entourage. Waiting for us at the immigration booth were Jamal, a kid around 20, and a big military-looking dude in a black puffer jacket. Our government-mandated babysitters for the next 3 days.

In February 2026, I was in Cuba with my buddy Kieran, and somewhere in the middle of that trip, he goes, “I think I’m going to go to Libya in April. If you want to come.” It’s super difficult to get into; the visa process is tricky, and it’s one of the top 10 least visited countries in the world, in the company of places like Yemen, North Korea, and Eritrea. I don’t really know anything about it either. So obviously I say yes.

^{Ben Gardane, Tunisia. Libya that way.}

Kieran and my buddy Eli are trying to visit every country in the world, and Libya was still on their list. The plan was to meet in Tunis and go together. I got to the hostel and found bed bugs waiting for me. That was probably one of the most physically difficult things that’s ever happened to me while traveling, and I wouldn’t wish it on my worst enemy. I spent 2 or 3 days in Tunisia recovering. Eli met us, and we headed south for the border.

The last town on the Tunisian side is Ben Gardane. There’s a sign on the street that just points and says Libya, this way. If you type Libya into Google and hit news, you read about militias, rebel groups, a splintered state, headlines asking if Lebanon is hurtling toward a Libya-style civil war. And I’m going in blind, basically because my boys invited me. You can see it in my face in that photo. Apprehension.

We waved down a taxi in Ben Gardane and asked if he’d take us to Libya. On the drive, the guy noticed me filming and goes, “No photo. Problem, problem. No photo.” So I put the phone in my pocket and got my passport out.

People ask if I actually appreciate how crazy this stuff is, or if we’re just reckless Americans who think we’re cool. And the honest answer is that there are very few places on the planet where entering the country is a death wish. I’d just come from Ukraine, where there’s an actual war happening every day. Kieran and Eli have been to Afghanistan, Iran, and Yemen. The thing you learn in places like that is that you can’t paint an entire country over in your brain with the word dangerous. Anything can be dangerous.

Leaving Tunisia took an hour and a half of standing around waiting for a stamp. I’m thinking to myself, “ if it takes this long to leave Tunisia, what’s it going to take to get into Libya?” Then we walked the 100 meters to the Libyan booth, and that’s where Jamal and the other two guys were waiting.

Here’s how it works. Americans can’t just show up to Libya. You need a letter of invitation, and there are agencies in Libya that will formally invite you as their welcome guest. Those same agencies package it with the other requirement, which is that you’re accompanied by armed security at all times. They tell you it’s for your safety. You never know what can happen in Libya, so you should have guards to keep you safe from all the dangerous, scary things that go down here. That’s what they tell us anyway… Jamal was the only one who spoke English, and not much of it. The military guy and the kid spoke none. They took our passports and had us through in 10 minutes.

^{Two kids insisted on meeting us at Sbratha, wearing their finest Libyan clothes.}

We first went to Sbratha, an ancient Roman city on the coast that’s one of the most incredible ruin sites in the world. We walked in, and two kids insisted on coming to meet us, shaking our hands, taking photos with us. They were dressed in traditional Libyan outfits. They rarely get to meet any tourists.

Then we got to the amphitheater:

^{The amphitheater at Sabratha, 3:51 pm on a weekday. Nobody there.}

Nobody’s been edited out, no AI removal, no waiting an hour for a clean frame. I took it at 3:51 pm on a weekday, and there was just no one there. If this exact structure were in Italy or Greece or Croatia, it would be flooded with thousands of people. Zoom in on the right side, and you can count the entire crowd: 4, maybe 5 local Libyans. Turn around from where I’m standing, and there’s a sprawling ruined city behind you, and behind that, the Mediterranean. You’re backed right up against the sea.

^{Carved into the base of the stage.}

These carvings at the base of the stage were cut thousands of years ago, and they’re still crisp, partly because there’s no foot traffic wearing the place down. The Roman Empire is fascinating because of how developed a society it was, and here’s some of the best preserved evidence of it, sitting in a country that’s too scary and too misunderstood for anyone to come look.

^{Corinthian pillars at Leptis Magna, a second ruin site.}

And Sabratha isn’t even the only one. Leptis Magna is a second Roman site, 400 hectares of ruins, and we saw maybe 4 other people in the entire place. It has its own Colosseum, and standing in it blows your mind a little, because it feels like the Colosseum in Rome isn’t even this big. The one in Rome gets overrun by hordes of tourists every single day. This one had exactly us in it, framed by the Mediterranean right behind it.

^{The Colosseum at Leptis Magna, backed by the Mediterranean.}

A globally special sight, perfectly preserved, and nobody’s there, all because of what the rest of the world assumes is happening on the other side of that border sign. And the longer we stood in these empty, peaceful places, the louder a question got in the back of my head: where was the danger? No militias, no chaos, just regular people doing regular life. So what exactly were our babysitters for?

^{The only photo I managed to get of our military escort. Every time I pointed a camera at him: “No, no, no.”}

Next week: Part 2. The truth about what the entourage is actually for.

April 2026

The day we went to the Great Pyramids of Giza, I could not hold down anything. I don’t know if I caught something in Garbage City or if it was the shawarma we ate after. I was absolutely destroyed the night before. By morning, it hadn’t let up. My friends pressured me into going, so I went anyway. Cool as it was, I spent more time than I would have liked vomiting.

^{My pyramid experience.}

I’ve been traveling through North Africa for weeks at this point. Tunisia first, then Libya, then Egypt, progressively working our way back toward what my brain recognizes as normal civilization. Libya wasn’t a gentle transition. But Egypt felt more approachable at that point. I thought I had a read on what I was walking into.

^{Garbage City. Every rooftop you can see has waste being sorted and processed. The smell is off-putting to say the least.}

I was humbled pretty fast. Garbage City is a neighborhood in Cairo, also called Recycling City. Most of Cairo’s garbage gets sorted and processed there, all by hand and with livestock. The smell hits you right when you walk into people’s homes.

Garbage City and its trash system were also overwhelmingly inhabited by Christians. How come? My first read was discrimination. Christians pushed into the worst job available because of their religion. It turned out that this was not true, though.

As I understood it from what our guide told us, it comes down to pigs. Pigs are vital when sorting organic waste. They’re also haram in Islam. So over generations, this became a Christian trade because of what each community could and couldn’t use in the process. Not prejudiced. I learned after posting my video that despite what the neighborhood looks like from the outside, the people who live and work there are actually doing really well, according to the comments from people who live in Egypt. The recycling operation runs at a level of efficiency that is super impressive. They have a nearly 80% efficiency rate, which is miles better than standard recycling systems in other countries that hover around 20-25%.

_{A cave church in Garbage City. Carved directly into a cliff. One of the biggest churches in the Arab world.}

Christianity is preached in Arabic, which is, by and large, the language of Islam. But Christianity started in the Middle East; Egypt is right there, and Coptic Christians have been in this country for a very long time.

Standing at the base of a cave church, looking at depictions of Christ carved into rock, in Egypt, in a neighborhood built around sorting garbage, every assumption I’d carried in with me was wrong. I find that this happens all the time while travelling. Maybe one day I’ll learn to stop thinking I’ve got a place figured out before I’ve seen it myself.

_{On top of an abandoned consulate in Zamalek, Cairo’s embassy district.}

The other thing I found while my body was still deciding whether to let me function again was 2 kids running around a neighborhood called Zamalek, where most of Cairo’s consulates and embassies sit. I was at the base of a big abandoned skyscraper looking for a way in when I heard them barreling down the street on electric scooters. I asked if they knew how to get into the tall abandoned place, but they said this one was impossible. Then, they offered to show me a few others. I’m never one to decline an offer for an adventure, so off I went.

I asked who they were.

They’re the children of Russian diplomats. Both are living inside the Russian embassy in Cairo. The 2 of them are 15 years old. I’ve just come from a few months prior to being in Ukraine for 3 weeks, where my social media had basically been a Ukrainian propaganda distribution channel. Pretty openly anti-Russia. These kids did not know that. I did not tell them. I did, however, interrogate them slightly about their opinions relating to the war, and you could tell, despite their young age, they were already being indoctrinated to believe that Russia was in the right. Very interesting.

There was something kinda strange about standing on the roof of an abandoned consulate with an Egyptian security guard whom we’d bribed to let us in and who was visibly terrified of everything we were doing, next to kids whose parents’ government I’d been pretty vocally opposing for months.

_{Cairo during a sandstorm.}

One morning I woke up, and Cairo was just gone. The whole city was wrapped in a haze. Buildings barely visible, the air itself thick enough that it looked like a musty filter had been dropped over the entire world.

A massive sandstorm had blown in from the desert overnight. Apparently, this just happens in Cairo. And when it does, you start to understand why Cairo looks the way it does. Every building, every car, every window in the city has a half-centimeter-thick layer of dust on it at any given time.

While I was wandering around Cairo, I noticed something outside a restaurant we visited: a disassembled police car sitting in the street, wheels removed, engine clearly tampered with, just left there.

^{An abandoned police truck outside a restaurant in Cairo. All 4 wheels gone. Hood up. People walk past it like it’s no big deal.}

Then, not far away, I found a massive compound with a giant wall going all the way around it, completely abandoned. I looked into it and couldn’t find a clean explanation for why a building that size, in a populated district, was just sitting empty. Then, I noticed the emblem sitting at the top of it was the same as the police car I’d seen earlier. I found it strange that one day I found an abandoned car and then only a few days later, an abandoned former police station. With that new info, the only thing I could find was some evidence of reported mistreatment of prisoners at a Cairo police facility. I don’t know if there’s a connection. But the two things together, the dead police car and the dead police station, made me wonder.

^{An abandoned police compound the size of a city block.}

^{The City of the Dead. The family whose yard this is doesn’t even know the person.}

The City of the Dead started as a graveyard. Cairo needed somewhere for its deceased, so they built one. Mausoleums, tombstones, and generations of burial sites going back hundreds of years. Then, as Cairo grew, eventually the graveyard was sitting in the middle of a city that needed housing for a lot of people.

So people moved in. Around the tombstones, between them, and eventually right alongside them. When I went to explore it, I met a family living there, a mother and a father and at least 2 kids, and in their backyard, there are 5 tombstones. Not relatives. Not anyone they know. Just people who happened to be buried there, a long time ago. They hang laundry between the stones. The kids run around in that space. It’s as normal to them as a trampoline would be in the backyard of the American suburbs.

I was waiting for my Uber when a group of kids came up, playing soccer under the highway. One of them spotted a bracelet on my wrist and asked if he could have it. I had spent 60 euros on it in Italy (solid silver), but I instead gave him one that I had just bought a few months prior in Morocco.

^{The kids and I.}

When the Uber arrived, the driver looked at me with alarm. “This area is very dangerous. Why are you here?” I genuinely didn’t get that vibe. I’d been standing around watching kids play soccer, and I could tell it was an economically disadvantaged area for sure, but it didn’t feel unsafe in any way.

After I posted the video, I got a flood of messages from Egyptian people: why are you only showing the bad parts of Egypt? Genuinely, this confused me a lot, because in my head, I wasn’t. I wasn’t at the City of the Dead because I thought it was a bad place. I was there because it’s totally fascinating. People living among the dead, completely unbothered, because that’s just where they ended up. The gap between how I read it and how some Egyptians read me being there was very wide.

^{More City of the Dead.}

^{Looking out from inside the Grand Egyptian Museum toward the Giza pyramids. It’s the largest archaeological museum in the world, and it keeps going a long way back behind me from this perspective.}

Everything I’d seen online treated the tourist experience at the Great Pyramids of Giza as basically a scam gauntlet. Free camel rides where they then charge you to get off. Vendors following you for kilometers. The whole thing presents as a grift with ancient monuments in the background.

But our experience couldn’t have been more different.

After thinking about it for a while, though, we came up with a theory. My friend Kieran told me about a friend of his who had filmed a taxi driver in Egypt a few years back trying to overcharge him, and posted it online. As Kieran heard it, the driver ended up in serious legal trouble over the video, and the friend felt bad enough about it that he flew back to try to help. So we were thinking that the Egyptian government has been cracking down hard enough on tourist scams that most people working those areas have done the math and decided it isn’t worth it. I will note that I can’t verify any of that as it’s a story passed down by a couple of people. All that we saw, though, fit that idea.

At the pyramids, the guys with camels kept their distance while we were filming. The camera goes down; one walks over. “Want to ride a camel?” No thanks. “Okay.” And that was it. That was the whole interaction, every time. Maybe Egypt is no longer the “scam capital of the world” as it’s gotten the rep in the past.

My 2 friends with whom I was traveling eventually left for their own adventures. I had 5 days in Cairo alone and a plan to keep exploring and make more content.

Instead, as it was mid-April, I spent the next 96 hours on the hostel rooftop going through my TurboTax. Sitting on a roof in one of the most fascinating cities I’ve ever been to, going through receipts. Then I flew to Bali, met up with Kieran, and we lived in a house there for a month.

Here’s what I kept noticing in Egypt, because it showed up every single time.

I went into Garbage City thinking I was going to see discrimination and prejudice. I went to the pyramids expecting to get my money scammed from me. And even the City of the Dead carried an expectation of danger. But every time, the preconceived interpretation was wrong.

The only reason those assumptions were extinguished was that I didn’t let what I thought to be the truth be final. I didn’t trust the story I’d been handed, disregarded the discomfort, and let the actual place be what it was. Every time, what was there was different from the version in my head.

This isn’t unique to Egypt, and it has become a recurring theme throughout all of my travels.

Next time: I meet some of the last sulfur miners on the planet who have to climb down into the caldera of an active volcano every day.

September 19, 2025

You cannot go to Chornobyl. Nobody can.

Since the war started, it’s been sealed off, packed with landmines, and run as a military base by the Ukrainian army. It sits about 8km from Belarus, which is pretty much as close to Russia as you can get without being in Russia. There are no tours, and no tourists. If you ask to get in, the answer is no, to everybody.

I’d wanted to go ever since I was a kid. The history was always interesting to me, but more than that, for the same reason I used to hop fences on construction sites and climb the stairwells of half-built skyscrapers: I love nothing more than to see a view few others have earned. I’m drawn to the abandoned world, the places that are left to rot. And Chornobyl is the holy grail of that. The second a Ukraine trip came together, it was the first place my brain went.

Below I’ll explain how two Americans talked their way into the most forbidden place on Earth, and what it did to my body afterwards...

_{I learned to read Cyrillic in Ukraine, enough to sound out the sign at the edge of the zone. “Chornobyl”}

At my core, I’m a stubborn person. Which means I hate being told no… I can’t stand it. The second I read that Chornobyl was off limits, that nobody was allowed in, I wanted in ten times more.

So for most of our 3-week trip through Ukraine, Colin and I were firing off messages to anyone with even a loose connection to the place. “Hey, you posted a photo inside the exclusion zone last week. Any chance you could get my buddy and me in, 6 days from now, when we make it to Kyiv?” The replies came back fast, and they were all basically the same: No chance. The people who go in now sneak in, and the zone is massive, like 30km across, so sneaking in is its own gamble. If a local gets caught, he gets a ticket. If a local gets caught with two Americans, he’s looking at years in prison, and the two Americans are looking at something a lot worse than a few years in prison. Nobody wants to take that risk.

Eventually we messaged a guy who I’ll call Mark. That’s not his name. He used to be a Chornobyl tour guide, for years, the kind of guy who’s so dialed in you could show him a photo of any building in the zone and he’d tell you exactly where it is. When the war hit, and Chornobyl got shut down and then occupied, Mark joined the army and asked to be put in the Chornobyl unit specifically, because he knows the grounds better than almost anyone. At first, he told us the same thing as everyone else. No way. The military’s got it locked down tight.

A week later, he messages again. “I think I found a loophole.”

The unit stationed at Chornobyl needed supplies, and if we showed up with “humanitarian aid,” they’d give us a tour in exchange. What they needed, specifically, was a flat-screen TV… so, that’s the “humanitarian aid” that got Colin and me into the Chornobyl exclusion zone. A TV. We’d been working it out with Mark for weeks, and he’d run it up his chain of command. I believe their platoon genuinely did need it. The guys stationed there are probably bored out of their minds, and a TV would make a meaningful difference in morale. And as I learned during my time in Ukraine, high spirits can make a serious difference. From Mark’s commander’s perspective, it was probably pretty simple: a TV the unit doesn’t have to pay for, worth maybe $350, in exchange for letting two guys walk around for a day and make content that in his mind would maybe only get a couple thousand views. Fine.

What they didn’t account for was me posting a TikTok about “a loophole I found to get around the Chornobyl ban” — the video got 300k views in less than 12 hours, and that night my phone blew up from Mark telling me I had to take that video down ASAP. So I did, which sucked, but I wasn’t trying to get my boy Mark in a bunch of trouble (Mark, if you’re reading this, I really am sorry; I was obvi being a little ignorant). Months later, Colin and I eventually released our content, now being much more mindful about the way that we positioned the TV exchange so as not to attract the same attention it did before. The last time, numerous groups of random people started pulling up to the gates of the exclusion zone with flat-screen TVs in their trunks, because they’d heard a TV gets you a tour. The whole thing climbed the chain of command, far enough that I have to assume somebody important started asking why there’s a line of strangers at the gate holding televisions.

In that first draft, I’d cut the part where the deal was set weeks in advance and made it look like a live, will-they-won’t-they decision, which is the kind of editing choice that hits the algorithm really hard, but ages terribly when there are real-world consequences. (again, sorry Mark…)

For the record: a Chornobyl tour before the war ran about $150. We paid $175 each for the TV. We weren’t journalists; we weren’t aid workers. We were, effectively if not officially, the first tourists inside the exclusion zone since the war started.

We had one day inside. About 8 hours, and Mark was next to us the whole time.

_{A room in an abandoned school, the floor buried a meter deep in books. Thousands of them left exactly where they fell.}

We dropped the TV off when we got there. Met the commander, shook his hand, handed it over, grabbed one photo with the soldiers, on the condition that their faces never show. They were kind and weirdly chill about the whole thing. Most of them are friends with Mark. They live in Kyiv and spend their days at a base inside a dead zone, so they don’t see a lot of new faces, and two American guys rolling up was a fun little break for them. None of them spoke English. Mark stood between us and translated every sentence.

_{Two chairs on a dock in Pripyat.}

We were told that the most radioactive thing in Chornobyl is the water. When radioactive particles land on the ground, dirt covers them, new pavement buries them, and over the years, they sink out of reach. Water doesn’t let the particles settle. It keeps moving and keeps carrying them around. So the calm-looking water is actually the most dangerous thing you could come in contact with.

So what happens if you actually do pick up some radiation? I never really got a straight answer. Maybe a particle finds a tiny cut on your finger, and that’s it for you. Or maybe you just rub it off. That uncertainty lingers in my mind the whole time we’re there.

_{An abandoned basketball court inside the old cultural center.}

_{From inside, the building looks straight out at the Ferris wheel. That’s me on the ledge.}

The Ferris wheel is the shot everyone knows. Show it to anyone who’s into abandoned places, and they’ll recognize it instantly. What most people don’t know is that it was never in operation. It was built for a theme park in Pripyat, the city next to the plant, and the park was supposed to open a few days after the reactor blew. The grand opening never happened. That wheel never carried a single person. The whole park went from brand new to abandoned with hardly a single day in between.

_{The bumper cars from that same park. Left unused forever.}

_{The Duga radar. Towering nearly 500 feet in the air.}

“The Duga radar”, is a giant antenna that the Soviets built to patrol for incoming missiles during the Cold War. Pictures don’t do the size justice. Standing where I am in this photo, I’m literally craning my neck upward to see the top of it. People called it the Woodpecker because when it was running, you’d hear this faint knocking come through your phone line. Eerie stuff.

_{Cold War graffiti on the roof of the command center by the Duga, decades after anyone was meant to see it.}

_{A corridor in the control-center building. That’s Mark.}

Mark told us that when he was a kid, the USSR ran chemical warfare drills the same way Americans grew up doing lockdown drills. An alarm would go off, and every kid would put on a little child-face-sized gas mask and file down to a basement to wait out a hypothetical chemical attack. Somebody had collected all the masks from a school and dumped them in one pile. Dozens of doll-sized PPE equipment in a dark room.

_{A pile of kids’ gas masks from one of the schools.}

Throughout the day, Mark assured us that we didn’t have to worry about accidentally picking up radiation particles because on the way out, we would stop at a checkpoint where they scan your body for radiation, like an airport scanning your bag. We pull up, and it’s empty. Closed. Nobody there. We’d spent the whole day grabbing branches, crawling through brush, stomping over grass, picking gas masks up off the ground, and now there’s nobody to tell us what we’re carrying. Mark shrugged it off. “I guess you’re good.”

I was not good.

I got to Warsaw and fell sicker than I’ve ever been in my life. I couldn’t stand up straight for more than about 4 seconds before my vision tunneled to a pinhole and went black. Every square inch of my body that touched my hostel mattress ached. Shoulders, elbows, knuckles, hips, every notch of my spine. I went to three hospitals. The first one told me “an ER is for emergencies”, decided it was probably a stomach bug, and sent me away. When the second couldn’t take me without Polish insurance, I actually broke down in tears in the lobby. I didn’t know what to do. I’d never felt this much pain in my life; I hadn’t been home in months, and I just wanted to know if I was dying. I would have done anything to feel human again in that moment. The third finally let me in. A doctor put a stethoscope on my stomach and said it seemed like a stomach infection. When I gave her some necessary context, "This might be worth mentioning, but I was inside the Chornobyl exclusion zone about 36 hours ago.” When the puzzled expression was wiped from her face, she said the symptoms did line up with radiation poisoning, but it’s so rare that they don’t really treat it as a real option. It also didn’t help that I’d just spent six weeks bouncing around southern Africa, through places where dengue and yellow fever and Zika are everywhere, so my symptoms matched half a dozen things at once. She sent me out with nine different prescriptions, and I had a flight home the next morning.

I took a dose of everything she gave me and crashed in a bed in the party hostel I had mistakenly booked myself at. The kind with drunk guys yelling down a hallway and whose floor is sticky from years of spilled everything. Around 11 pm (only 7 hours before my flight home was taking off), somebody knocks on my dorm door. The girl from the front desk.

“Hey Nick? The doctor’s here; she has something important to tell you.”

What the hell is happening, I wonder while trying to figure out if this is some absurd dream…

I crawl out of bed, hunched over, hand on the wall the whole way, and at the end of this dark, graffiti-covered hallway, backlit, music thumping somewhere behind her, is the doctor from the hospital.

Yeah, this has got to be a dream…

It was not.

She’d realized she had over-prescribed me and drove to the hostel near midnight to make sure I hadn’t taken it. We figured out I hadn’t gotten to the second dose yet, and she tossed it and left. She’d tracked me down from the address I scribbled at check-in.

I never got a real diagnosis of what was plaguing me, but when I flew home, the worst of it had miraculously passed, and I stopped worrying about it. Could’ve been radiation. Could’ve been Zika. Could’ve been a stomach bug after all. I just decided I would rather not know.

People ask why I’d do something like this, and the real answer goes all the way back to those rooftops from my teenage years. I’ve always wanted to stand where almost nobody’s allowed to stand and see what nobody else gets to see. When my ambition and fear disagree, I let the ambition win every time. My time in Chornobyl is the best representation of that logic I’ve ever found. A place the whole world agreed was off limits, that I wanted to see exactly because of that, that I walked through for 8 hours and paid for with a TV and, maybe, a few days of my health I’ll never fully get back.

Tune in next week for my adventures in Egypt.

Nick

September 2025

I’ve always looked up to my older brother. When everyone else was doing France or Italy summers, he was talking about his trips to Albania and Montenegro. When people said Africa, he thought of his trips to Somalia and Ethiopia. He came home with stories from places nobody else thought to go, and those stories became the inspiration for my travels.

So, when my buddy Colin floated the idea of going to Ukraine, I was all in. A country almost 4 years into a full-scale war. Drones, missiles, soldiers on the front lines every day. People back in the States aren’t really talking about it anymore, and I wanted to see for myself what life there really looked like.

The trip was supported by an NGO called Mission for Ukraine, run by two American guys — one of whom was actually born in Kharkiv. The photos below are a look inside the 3 weeks I spent in a country that most Americans have stopped thinking about.

The Palanca border crossing. Moldova into Ukraine.

You cannot fly into Ukraine. The airspace is closed. Exclusively used for things like Shaheed drones, fighter jets, and whatever other war-related things occupy the sky. Instead, we flew into Chisinau, Moldova. The least-visited country in Europe — and where a drunk dude reached into Colin’s hostel locker the first night and stole $300 out of his backpack. It wasn’t my money, which was good for me. In the morning, we took a taxi to the border town of Palanca.

This was only a few months after the US had significantly cut its financial support to Ukraine. We were Americans walking into a country that had every reason to have animosity towards us.

We walked up to the booth. Handed over our passports. And just like that, we were stamped in without a single question asked.

That was it. To us, it was the craziest thing we had ever done, but to the border guards, it was just another Tuesday.

The central square in Odesa. Babies, strollers, grandmothers, park benches.

The first thing that hit me about Ukraine is how normal it feels.

Odesa is the third-biggest city in Ukraine, and this square was a 3-minute walk from our Airbnb. Grandmothers on benches. Kids on bikes. Somebody blowing bubbles. Nothing about it told us that missiles have been hitting this country every day for 3.5 years.

The Black Sea beach in Odesa. Loaded with water-based mines.

The beach was the same. Before we got to Ukraine, we were told not to swim. Following the 2022 Russian invasion, both nations laid hundreds of naval mines in the Black Sea for coastal defense. But when we got there, it was packed. Hundreds of people in the water, vibing, sun up. When we asked a local about it, he basically shrugged. The bombs rarely kill swimmers. So, why worry?

It reminded me of Covid. When it first started, it was all anyone could think about. A year in, people just didn’t wanna talk about it anymore. The war raged on, but people were not going to stop seeing their families or eating dinner because of it. Ukraine has a curfew; you cannot be out past midnight, and there are alarms on your phone telling you a Shaheed is incoming in your Oblast. People make a decision every night, sometimes multiple times a night, whether to get out of bed and go to the bunker or just take their chances. In the same country where this is a fact of life, there are eight hundred people on a beach in September. My first day few days in Odesa taught me that people do not stop being people because their country is at war.

A recovered Russian surveillance drone on display in a public square in Odesa.

There is an outdoor display of recovered Russian weapons in one of Odessa’s squares. Tanks, drones, and a police car destroyed by an FPV strike in the back.

My first photo stepping off the bus in Kharkiv.

Kharkiv is Ukraine’s second-largest city, and on the map it sits as close to the Russian border as any major city gets. The first thing you notice when you step off the bus is the architecture, old and nothing like what we expected. The second thing you notice is that the building directly across from you has every single window blown out.

The government building in Kharkiv. Every window gone. The white marks on the brick are shrapnel impacts.

We were 20 miles from the zero line. That is what they call the boundary where Russia and Ukraine are actively determining who controls what ground, right now, today. The first line back from that is 5 kilometers further. Then the second, then the third, each one a different world: operations, barracks, logistics, support. We were 20 miles from all of it, and the shrapnel from nearby strikes had already painted the side of the government building in front of us.

The enlistment billboard on the front of the government building.

All the young people are gone. Kharkiv used to be a university city full of students. Not anymore. Advertisements like this now cover the fronts of the bombed-out buildings. In this one, 2 Ukrainian soldiers, the flag behind them, promoting Ukrainian defense slogans.

This is one of my favorite photos I took while in Ukraine. A grandmother, a mother, a young boy, three generations in one frame. The people who live here never could have dreamed their lives would look this way if you asked them 5 years ago. And now this boy is slowly approaching fighting age.

A bunker school was struck by a drone after its location was leaked.

One of the things that shocked us most in Ukraine was what Russia is actually trying to do. The goal is to erase the Ukrainian way of life. When schools, places of worship, and community centers are just as vulnerable of targets as military bases, it makes daily existence unpredictable enough that people leave.

An NGO called Code IT 4 Life, run by a Ukrainian-American, builds fortified underground schools so kids have somewhere safe to get an education every day. One of the schools they funded was beneath this building. The location got leaked, and it was immediately thereafter struck by a Russian drone.

Inside a school that was occupied by Russian forces.

This one speaks for itself.

We were told that going to the front lines is a decision in the moment that is more important than your life. Not motivated by bravery but perhaps naivety, we decided to go see it for ourselves.

Two FPV drone pilots took us out. They showed us destroyed tanks, walked us past things I do not know the names of, and pulled over when we spotted 2 other soldiers in a field packing up a drone after a bombing mission. We got out and shook their hands. The remote controller they fly with looks like something you would use for a hobby helicopter. The drone looks like a paper-mache project. This is the type of weaponry used in this war.

Soon after that, one of the soldiers, Oscar, got a call. A farmer had been trying to plow his field and found a live Russian FPV drone with a bomb still attached sitting in his corn. If he had driven his tiller over it, he would be dead.

On a mission to disarm the bomb, we drove out to the field. “If you hear something in the air, run in different directions.” This way it only hits one of us. ¼ is better than all of us.

Walking through the empty corn field with no cover in sight, Oscar stopped and motioned for us to be quiet with a finger up in the air. We all froze. He stood there scanning the sky for a moment, then put his hand down and kept walking. He had heard something, or thought he did, or was not sure. We kept looking for the drone. Then Artem got a phone call, spoke in Ukrainian, and said: there is something in the air, we need to go. So we got back in the truck and drove away.

We found out on the drive back that a village eight kilometers from where we had been standing was struck that same morning, eight hours before we arrived. 2 Shaheeds, 2 KAB missiles. When we arrived, there was an ambulance, 2 men on a roof patching holes from debris, and a crater in the ground where one of the missiles had hit.

A depot destroyed by a firefight earlier on in the war.

Oscar kicked around in the dirt and pulled out a piece of a KAB missile. It was still warm when I picked it up. It weighed around four pounds, was an inch and a half thick, and had torn through someone’s morning like it was paper. Oscar insisted I take it home as a reminder of our time with him and Artem.

Saltivka, the northernmost suburb of Kharkiv. The tallest buildings for kilometers in any direction, and some of the first targets of aerial strikes during the full scale invasion.

A nightclub in Kharkiv.

We went to a club that night — only four hours after being on the front lines. I had a pounding headache and could not really enjoy it, but I wasn’t there for the sake of enjoyment. We decided to visit because we heard it would be full. People were dancing, and embracing the music. The same city where twenty percent of the buildings on the north end have their windows blown out also has a nightclub that is jumping on a Tuesday. The same day, we stood in a field listening for drones; people here were living their lives in a dark room with a DJ. We interpreted it as a way for people to distract themselves from the harsh realities they endure each day here.

A Banksy piece on an anti-tank hedgehog. Freedom Square, Kyiv.

We ended the trip in Kyiv. Banksy had come through and made a piece on one of the anti-tank hedgehogs that line the streets, the metal X-shaped barriers designed so that a tank trying to roll over them breaks its own axle. He turned one into a teeter-totter with children on either side. A homage to the impact the war has on the lives of the youth in the country.

The main highway north out of Kyiv, running toward Russia.

There is a highway on the north side of Kyiv that leads directly toward Russia, through the towns of Bucha and Irpin. At the start of the invasion in 2022, Russian forces came south down this road toward the capital, occupied both towns, and did things to the people there that I am not going to try to summarize. When Ukraine liberated the area, the streets were found littered with the bodies of civilians. Men, women, and children. The Ukrainian military blew the bridge on this highway to stop the tanks from reaching Kyiv.

Cars recovered from Bucha and Irpin.

A Kyiv woman named Tanya mentioned, almost in passing, that her friend’s grandparents lived in Bucha. When the invasion started, they got in their car trying to leave. As they drove with their hands out the windows, and a white flag raised, they were shot.

The reason we had access to any of this is something I kept turning over the whole trip. We were two Americans with iPhones. At the time, I was 23 years old. Why is everyone being so hospitable to us?

The answer came in pieces. We were introduced everywhere as content creators. And slowly I started to understand that the people in Ukraine, from Alex, who funds underground schools to Artem, who pilots drones, were giving us their time because the United States had basically stopped paying attention. The war had stopped making headlines. The funding had been cut. And everyone we met was looking at us and seeing a way to put Ukraine back in front of eyes that had looked away.

For my entire life, social media had been, in my head, a way to sell things. A Kendall Jenner Pepsi ad. The most-liked egg on Instagram. Meaningless shallow stuff. I had never once thought about it as a distribution system for something that actually mattered.

Forever, making videos on social media didn’t feel like it could ever be a substantially impactful skill/job. Entering Ukraine, I didn’t fully know what I was doing. But after those people greeted us with open arms, showed us respect, and treated us with kindness and graceful hospitality, my whole identity underwent a shift.

In my next post, I will tell you about the last thing we did in Ukraine, which was also somehow the most surreal: Chornobyl.

Nick

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August 2025

Before visiting, I only knew a few things about Namibia: it is incomprehensibly large, there is little to no tourism, and it has some of the most incredible landscapes in the world. It’s roughly half the size of the United States and home to the fewest people per square kilometer of any country on Earth. Transportation is precarious, hospitality is at a minimum, and the wildlife is… wild.

I had always wanted to visit Namibia, but there are no convenient hostels or transportation, and almost no other young solo travelers there. When Colin Duthie (a fellow travel creator) posted that he was running an eight-day trip with 9 other young travelers, I saw it and thought, “That’s adventure.” The logistics were handled, the group was set, and before I knew it, I was on my way.

The photos below are a look inside my trip, my thoughts, and some of the behind-the-scenes during my time in Namibia.

The dream team, heading back to the trucks at dusk on our first night. At the time, just 10 strangers.

Booking a spontaneous group trip to Namibia is like a filter. If you lined the 10 of us up anywhere else in the world, you could not find a connecting thread. Christina was at least 10 years older than me. Usama works a high-up job for the Qatari government. Thomas is a nuclear scientist. On paper, nothing about us makes sense. But every one of us had said yes to putting our lives on hold and flying to Africa on a whim, and that single common characteristic turned out to be stronger glue than any background alignment could ever be.

Token Africa. Endless grass, a couple trees, and nothing else for miles.

Getting there was its own gauntlet. 37 hours from Austin (my hometown), through Washington DC, a fuel stop in Lomé, Togo, then Addis Ababa, where I had an 11-hour, 56-minute layover and no yellow fever vaccination. The rule is that 12 hours in an epidemic country counts as having been there, which would have gotten me turned away at the Namibian customs desk with no way to fix it. I cleared it with 10 minutes to spare… alhamdulillah.

The first thing I saw driving out of the capital was a pack of 6 baboons patrolling the highway, the closest thing to a human I had ever seen that was not actually one. This genuinely scared me — I had officially left my comfort zone.

Sunrise view from our campsite. A rooftop tent, a ladder, and near-freezing temperatures.

We picked up 2 4x4 Toyota Hiluxes. They had rooftop tents, which sounds like a blast until the temperature drops. They are not insulated, and our packing list had said, and I quote, “Bring one light hoodie for cold nights.” We were not prepared. One night got so cold we abandoned the two-per-tent plan and crammed three, three, and four of us for the body heat. The other detail nobody warns you about: climbing down a truck ladder at dawn after 9 hours of sleep, body stiff as a board, in the freezing cold. This experience reinforced my philosophy that I will choose the bottom bunk in every hostel I stay in for the rest of my life.

The first thing we saw after making it to Etosha National Park.

We often drove between towers (a group of giraffes) and dazzles (a group of zebras), finding entertainment in researching the plural names for all of the animals we saw on the safari.

At one point, a baby elephant stepped into the road in front of us, stopped, turned, and flared its ears. We were too close, our engine was running, and that was enough to set it on edge. As the rest of the troop (group of elephants) arrived, we started to realize just how serious a situation we were actually in. You cannot understand the scale of an African elephant until one is towering over your lifted four-by-four at more than 2.5x its height.

The mother pulled up, saw us in her baby’s space, and more of them kept coming. I have a video of Christina in the back seat saying, calmly at first and then much less calmly, “Guys, can we please go!” Honestly, we could not. I genuinely believe that if we had taken the car out of park and tried to move right then, we would have had our truck flattened.

Spitzkoppe’s dramatic rock formations rise.

A morning stroll toward the rocks at Spitzkoppe.

The thing I will actually remember, though, is how often we stopped. A few of us were chasing content, so any time the light went gold, we would pull over, set a phone on a tripod, and sprint off into the frame. But we never just got the shot and left. We would sit on the shoulder of an empty road for a while afterward, looking around, saying out loud to each other stuff like, “This is insane… look at where we are.” How often does anyone pull over simply because something is beautiful? Usually, you say “Wow” and keep driving. On this trip in particular, with this group, we made a point of getting out of the car and being present while we were in it.

Genuinely what the whole country looks like.

In Namibia, there are no handrails, no giant asphalt parking lots or hordes of tourists with selfie sticks. The Lewis and Clark feeling, where you crest a dune and could almost believe you are the first person to ever see it. That’s what I love about places like this.

Big Daddy, one of the tallest dunes on Earth. The speck near the crest is a person.

Deadvlei, the Louvre of Namibia, and still almost empty when we arrived.

I came home with photos of some of the most dramatic landscapes I have ever stood in front of. But the thing that stuck was the eight people I saw them with. Just recently, I got a text from one of them saying, “I’m going to be in Italy soon, you should come.” Another offered to show us around Venezuela. I lived with a third in Bali. You can find a beautiful place anywhere, but the rare part is finding people crazy enough to go see it with you.

A thousand-year-old tree in the Deadvlei clay pan. Nothing here is alive anymore.

A wildebeest and a springbok.

The food was nuts. In Etosha, this meant eating the safari. I had zebra, giraffe, and springbok, sometimes off a single platter of five different game meats. It was weird because you couldn’t just eat it blind… you’d take a bite, ask what it was, and then you'd be sitting there chewing and picturing the animal. I didn’t love that feeling.

Springbok was the tastiest, basically venison, a deer in a different font. Giraffe was super lean. Zebra freaked me out, and I could not get past it. I have the dietary range of a six-year-old, so all of this was a stretch.

Gravel and dirt roads.

The Skeleton Coast, where decommissioned ships are left to rot. And Thomas.

The most beautiful thing I saw was Sandwich Harbor, where the oldest desert in the world runs straight into the Atlantic. For a couple of hundred miles, it is one clean zipper: desert on one side, ocean on the other, nothing in between. To reach the point we wanted, we had to mob up, over, around, and through the dunes. When the sun set, the tide pulled out, and we dropped down onto the hard shore and raced along the waterline at 70 kilometers an hour, waves breaking to our left, the dunes glowing on our right in the blue light. It is one of those places that totally resets something in your head. You stand there and think, “Where the hell am I right now?”

Sandwich Harbor. The oldest desert on Earth pouring straight into the Atlantic.

Mobbing the dunes in the 4-by-4s as the light starts to fade.

Racing the other truck back along the waterline at dusk.

Not every night went to plan. The drive from Sandwich Harbor toward Deadvlei was 5 hours, and we lost the daylight to one of our roadside stops. Namibia’s roads are gravel and dirt, with no streetlights. The absolute bare minimum infrastructure. Classic. Our truck was in front, kicking up a wall of dust, and the group behind us decided the conditions were too dangerous to continue. So they peeled off and found a random roadside hotel on Google Maps. The four in my truck pushed on and reached the campsite Colin had hand-picked for its beauty around 9 pm, in total darkness. It was so dark that I couldn’t even see it with my own eyes. I took a photo in night mode anyway, a 10-second exposure, and the image that came out of my phone was of a place I never actually got to see.

The campsite I never saw with my own eyes. A 10-second night-mode exposure in pitch black.

An elephant at a watering hole at sunset.

Namibia felt like the emptiest place on earth. Nothing, in every direction, for longer than your brain can imagine. But empty is not the right word. Everything there is operating on a scale that does not include you. The desert does not notice you. The elephants do not make room. The dunes were here before anyone even thought to name them. You are a very small thing moving through a very old place.

Most places in the world have been processed. There is a sign for it, a parking lot, a curated route that tells you how to experience it. Namibia couldn’t be less like that. It is still raw, still inconvenient, still willing to strand you in pitch dark or put a 9,000-pound animal between you and where you’re going. There are no handrails.

I went because I saw a trip that I thought would be an adventure. I came back with something much more intimate. The emptiest place on Earth turned out to be surprisingly full. Full of people I would not have found anywhere else, full of moments nobody was ready for, full of places so vast and so indifferent that the only thing to do was pull over and bear witness to it.

In my next post, I’ll tell you about the time I visited a country that everybody I know told me not to go to. A country where drone strikes and military checkpoints have been a fact of life for the past 4 years. A country that I visited, hoping to understand what life looks like during a war: Ukraine.

Nick

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The question I received most when I started posting my travel content was: “Why?”

Content creation started as a way to catalogue my adventures, but as it took off, my phone evolved into the reason I am allowed to travel. My audience has opened doors that I am lucky to enter. I love nothing more than venturing to the most misunderstood corners of the world, and it is my honor to share these stories.

Growing up in Austin, Texas, I used to climb cranes, dangle my feet off skyscrapers, and do all of the activities labeled “do not try this at home.” I did this because I craved adventure more than I feared risk.

Social media gets a ton of criticism for “taking people out of the moment,” but I don’t see it that way. My content has forced me to pause and take in the reality of every new place I walk through. It’s a medium that allows me to absorb more along the way. The better I can do that, the better I can understand and hopefully convey some of the energy that is so special about the countries I visit.

That’s what this Substack is for. My videos capture the surface, but I often export a project and think, “damn, there’s so much more to this story that I wish I could tell.” Platforms limit video lengths, and navigating the algorithm means cutting content that doesn’t fit perfectly into the narrative.

This is where I’ll show you the full story. The photos, the conversations, the things I’m thinking about while I’m there. If you’re curious about travel, about the world, about what it’s like to move through places most people never see, I want to bring you along. And if I’m lucky, help you find the curiosity and confidence to get out there and explore all of our world’s mysteries for yourself.

In my next post, I’ll tell you all about my first trip to Sub-Saharan Africa and how it completely took my expectations for a turn.

Nick