Maruyama Eiko

We set off on Almaty's sleepy streets at 05:00 and were soon driving along the Kuljin, a 19th-Century road that became a concrete highway (A-351) during Soviet rule, despite keeping its colloquial name. The Kuljin stretched eastward to the Chinese border with the Tian Shan mountains appearing in the distance. Passing townships on the outskirts of Almaty, we veered south to begin our eventual ascent to Asy Plateau, a 60km stretch of breathtaking alpine meadow at a nose-bleeding altitude of 3,200m. This ancient landscape is an example of Turkic transhumance, a practice still alive in rural Kazakhstan, where shepherds set up camp with their herds on high-altitude pastures in the summer and move down the mountains at the season's turn.

Dimoto’s observations are the continuation of a study that a primatologist named Caroline Tutin began in 1984, when she and her colleagues established a research station that’s still operating inside the park. They wanted to understand how seasonal variations in the amount of fruit affected gorillas and chimpanzees. Tutin’s research ended in the early 2000s, but the monthly monitoring of hundreds of trees marked with metal tags bearing unique numbers went on, making it the longest continuous study of its kind in Africa.

Last summer, I spent a week in Ferienland, the Black Forest’s evergreen highlands, and I could barely stop grinning. As if sprung from the pages of a fairy tale, this portion of the Black Forest is thick with woodland cover, containing a far-reaching forest path network connected to hamlets, hilltops, high pastures and hangars of Scots pine, elm and oak. It was a joy to find the time to be alone; to lose myself in the forest. Was this the freedom so many Germans sought?

It was a stormy afternoon and I was stuck in a cabbage field in rural Berkshire. Walking through flooded English farmland during one of the wettest Marches on record, I'd slipped out of my left boot, leaving me balancing on one foot over a muddy puddle that was big enough to bathe in. In the sky, two red kites circled above me, letting out high-pitched whistles between swoops. At first, I thought they were laughing at my failed attempts to escape the mud, but it soon dawned on me that I looked like a drowned field mouse, and they were likely eyeing me for dinner.

Vadi has also seen a rise in the availability of entertainment options over recent years, especially the months leading up to the Bahrain Grand Prix (held in March), which sees top musical artists performing concerts along with art exhibitions and other creative activities. The annual Spring of Culture Festival brings together talent and showcases from across the world (like Turkish poetry and the Japan Film Festival), while also highlighting the country's own rich culture and historical sites. "There is always much to look forward to in terms of entertainment, allowing us to enjoy a good work-and-personal-life balance," said Vadi. "This makes it both exciting at times, and occasionally slow enough to make living here quite an enjoyable experience."

Bald cypress swamps were North America’s Amazon 120 years ago, covering an estimated 40 million acres of the serpentine forested wetlands of the South. They were home to magnificent ivory-billed woodpeckers, delicate Bachman’s warblers, and swarms of Carolina parakeets, not to mention a plethora of aquatic species. But protecting swamps has long been a hard sell. In fact, they are perhaps the only ecosystem that has been specifically targeted for destruction by the federal government.

The Reykjanes Peninsula lies about 17 miles southwest of Iceland’s capital city Reykjavik. It sits atop the continually spreading Mid-Atlantic Ridge, where the North American plate to the west and the Eurasian plate to the east are gradually pulling apart. Superhot, gassy magma, which is less dense than the surrounding rock, can sometimes rise into the shallow crust from buoyancy alone, but all that regional stretching also creates cracks where molten rock can infiltrate.

Beginning in Dawson Creek, British Columbia, and winding north-westerly 613 miles through BC into Yukon, and then another 577 miles to the US border, the road passes from the Rocky Mountains to subarctic alpine tundra to the jagged peaks of Kluane National Park and Reserve before ending at Delta Junction, Alaska. Along the route, parks, campsites, resorts and small towns welcome visitors while locals relish the opportunity to share stories about life in the northern frontier.

Until recently, it was taught in schools throughout Australia that there were no Aboriginal people left in Tasmania – that the last one, Trukanini, had died in 1876. But the truth is that the palawa people survived the cultural genocide and have had a continuous link to this stretch of coastline for tens of thousands of years, even if the government only officially recognised Aboriginal people as Tasmania's First People in 1996.