Nevaeh Lloyd

"All these trails were trails that were here before, and most trails throughout American Indian country that people are using now for slow tourism, were our trails, wherever you go," said Judi gaiashkibos, the executive director for the Nebraska Commission on Indian Affairs and a Ponca Tribe member. She explained that the deed to the Chief Standing Bear Trail now belongs to the Ponca, and educational kiosks and signs along the route help tell their history. Gaiashkibos hopes to attract travellers "to come hear new stories, to slow their lives down and to be connected to the land".

Indigenous tourism is growing across North America. In Canada, it accounts for nearly $2bn of the nation's GDP, while in the US, Native tourism is a $14bn industry. Tribes are increasingly making use of their best assets to propel this trend: their people and their land.

Few, if any, countries in Europe overcame such formidable challenges as Norway in settling the land within their borders. Where Norway's leaders through the centuries used the story of Stiklestad to unify the country – building a strong national identity around the narrative of a united, independent and Christian country that had left behind its medieval past – its road builders and pioneers later stared down a forbidding Arctic and sub-Arctic climate and the challenges posed by a beautiful, but inhospitable terrain to chisel out routes like the Kystriksveien.

"We won the land" is something of a national mantra. Museums across the country construct exhibitions around the phrase, telling how Norway was tamed and made habitable. "If Mount Everest was in Norway," Stiklestad historian Mette Larsen told me, "We would have built a road to the summit."

Madeira's vast levada network spans an impressive 3,100km on an island that measures just 55km long and 22km wide. It's thought the first levadas, which date back almost 600 years, were engineered by Portuguese settlers to provide water for drinking and agriculture (the word "levada" comes from the Portuguese verb "to carry"). These water tunnels, however, also allowed them to develop a lucrative sugar cane industry – the first sugar cane plant was built in 1425, only six years after the previously uninhabited island was officially discovered.

Visitors to Ol Pejeta can meet Najin and Fatu, who are used to being around humans and are very friendly. Coming face to face with them from the open window of a safari car, I was surprised by how emotional I felt. It's moving to be so close to any wild creature, but to be able to see up-close an animal that represents mankind's destruction of the planet, just before its species goes extinct, is a moment that will stay with me for a long time.

We’ve all seen the adorable pictures of sea otters holding paws while asleep to ensure they don’t float away from each other. Just in case they’re concerned about the grip of their aquatic counterparts, otters also anchor themselves to each other with seaweed. As many as 100 otters have been spotted floating in the ocean, wrapped in kelp, like some giant furry raft.

The beaches where those first three necropsies were performed are popular holiday spots – Couture sometimes noticed visitors walking by, holding their noses.

To begin with, examining the animal involved looking at its skin – were any scars or lacerations visible that might offer a clue to trauma? Were fins or bits of flesh missing? Then the team would cut into blubber, carving out huge square pieces with knives. The knives would have to be periodically sharpened, so dense was the tissue. And cutting into it with blunt knives is dangerous, explains Couture. If you have to apply too much pressure, the knife can slip and injure someone.

Satellite telemetry has become a popular tool for studying patterns of marine turtle distribution over time. This is a fundamental aspect to conservation and provides the basis for all other aspects of research. Transmitters are attached to the shell, and orbiting satellites receive a unique signal for each turtle during the brief period when they surface to breathe. The satellite data are transmitted back to ground-based stations which estimate locations for each turtle.

On shooting days, I typically start prep the night before ­– formulating backup plans should my ideal shoot not work out, checking the weather multiple times and scouting locations via Google Earth to see what obstacles I might encounter. After that, I'll pack my camera gear. I usually arrive on location at least an hour before sunrise so I'll have enough time to scout for compositions. Once I choose my shot, I set up my gear and wait for the light to illuminate the landscape. The rest of the day involves scouting for sunset locations and capturing smaller details in more intimate photographs. Many of these hours are spent waiting for the right light and admiring the incredible scenery before me. Depending on cloud cover and moon phase, I may stay out after sunset to photograph the night sky, or in some cases, arrive on location in the middle of the night and photograph the stars prior to sunrise.

Roberts' fascination with Pokhara and Machhapuchhare began after reading a dispatch from Nepal written in 1936 by an army officer, who wrote of the mountain and a curious town on the banks of a lake. "To see Pokhara and Machapuchare [sic] and the villages in which my men lived, and especially the Gurungs [one of the main Gurkha tribes in the Himalayas] soon became an obsession," Roberts wrote in the preface to the book Climbing the Fish’s Tail by Wilfrid Noyce. "But in those days, the interior of Nepal was a forbidden land, more securely closed than even Mecca or Lhasa in their hey-day."

After an hour, we reached the end of the Y-905 at Caleta Eugenia. The ranch is home to just two people – a father and son – who act as caretakers for the navy, raising livestock and selling timber. As we walked along the beach, scanning the channel for cormorants and petrels, the father emerged from the rickety homestead for a chat, offering local gossip while leading a chestnut horse out to graze.

"Although there are about 1.2 billion cattle in the world, only very few – on a few oceanic islands, and at Chillingham – live free of human interference or management," explained Stephen Hall, professor of animal science at the University of Lincoln and a trustee of the Chillingham Wild Cattle Association. "They are the only British breed of cattle to have escaped 'improvement' by selective breeding during the so-called Agricultural Revolution of approximately 200 to 300 years ago."

That was something I was honoured to see first-hand. After descending wukalina, we trekked through endless bush, guided by the sound of the ocean. We brushed past elegant grass trees and over hardy tussocks of button grass, stopping to admire pops of colour in scarlet common heath flowers, yellow-coned banksias and tiny red carnivorous sundews. After several hours of walking, our camp for the next two nights, krakani lumi (meaning "place of rest"), was a welcome sight.

Here, we were met by several young Aboriginal men who had come for training, to both learn the ropes of running a tourism project ­– that night preparing a feast of scallops and damper, muttonbird and potato salad – but also to listen to the traditional stories and learn how to safely share cultural knowledge. Watching the more experienced guides like Jam, who has been guiding at wukalina for three years, give advice on the best way to throw a spear or summoning one of the lads over to listen as he told yarns around the fire, were among the trip's most powerful moments.

With little visibility ahead, there was a disorienting and quietly thrilling sense of uncertainty as the open-air Train d'Artouste – the highest narrow-gauge railway in Europe – rumbled daringly close to the mountain ledge and the vertiginous drop to the valley below. From my seat at the back of the train, I watched as the rail cars ahead disappeared into the clouds and mountain mist, making it difficult to anticipate the turns that swung us unexpectedly to the right one minute and then sharply to the left the next.

It was a stark contrast to the first leg of my trip a few hours earlier under bright blue skies, when every turn brought new perspectives of the unspoilt, tree-dotted, rocky alpine landscape into sharp, unfiltered view.

Ask Sonnemann what she loves most about the Aurora Australis, and her face lights up. She’s passionate about the topic and it makes sense when she tells me that people call her the “Aurora Lady”. “One of the nice things about our auroras is that most of them are not overhead,” she said, explaining that Tasmania is much further from the South Pole than many northern hemisphere aurora hotspots are to the North Pole. “What that means for photographers is that they get a better variety of colours if they’re looking at something that’s on the horizon. If you look at aurora photos from spots in the northern hemisphere, they're often green, which is pretty much the colour you’re going to get if it’s overhead. Because we’re looking more towards the horizon, we get just about every colour: red, greens, yellows, blues and purples.”

Ill-tempered, unpredictable and capable of a not-exactly-leisurely top speed of 30mph, Chillingham wild cattle are not to be trifled with. Crossley and I were observing the animals from a safe distance, amid the sloping meadows and ancient oak and alder forests of Chillingham Cattle Park in Northumberland, where they have roamed free from human interference for the better part of 1,000 years.

White as snow, with sinewy frames, a fierce temperament and vast horns that curve menacingly into jet-black tips, these are no ordinary oxen. Among the last remaining wild cattle in the world, they retain a primeval character. They are also some of the rarest animals on the planet; currently numbering around 130, they are far fewer in number than giant pandas, Siberian tigers or mountain gorillas.

Many of the words that endure today are names of seabirds. There are maalie (northern fulmars), tystie (guillemots), solan gos (gannets) and many more besides. Above them all, stands the great skua, or bonxie as it's known locally. The huge, brown gull-like birds can be difficult creatures to love.

Even Gear, who has spent most of her life around them, finds their characteristics to be challenging, bordering on disgusting. "The real problem is that fishing boats discarding catch has created an artificially high population, beyond what the natural ecosystem can support," she told me, between bonxie stories too upsetting to repeat here. "Where's that going to end? It's not sustainable."

A decade later, a young Peter Gash became similarly smitten with the island – or more accurately, its potential – during a sailing trip accompanied by the woman who would become his wife, Julie. Gaining his pilot's licence, Gash began flying tourists from Brisbane and the Gold Coast to Lady Elliot and Lady Musgrave, 40km north-west, for a taste of the Great Barrier Reef without the need to travel up to the main reef tourism hub of Cairns. Struck by the contrast between stark Lady Elliot and its densely vegetated neighbour, where colonial-era mining was less extensive, a seed was planted.

It's a moment I could have been lucky enough to experience just about anywhere on the Great Barrier Reef. But manta sightings are exceptionally common in the aquamarine waters lapping Lady Elliot Island at the remote southern tip of the World Heritage-listed reef, some 85km north-east of the mainland city of Bundaberg. Its proximity to the continental shelf helps, but studies have indicated that the island's regeneration likely also plays a role in the phenomenon.

At one point in the journey, on the cusp of the true Arctic, I pulled over to the side of the road. Steep mountains crowded the shore. The North Sea was a deep and perfect blue. And offshore, craggy islands rose from the ocean like the last stops on a journey out towards the very ends of the Earth.

The road continued north, crossing Helgelandsbrua (the Helgeland Bridge), which made possible in five minutes what would otherwise involve an hour-long detour. Mountains, snow-capped until well into summer, rose all around. Although I had not yet entered the Arctic, the road meandered across high plateaus denuded of trees, evoking the Arctic in all but geography. Then it descended to the shores of lakes and harbours and fjords. Water was everywhere.

This all came at a cost though. According to Zavodnik, most patients stayed for a month, and invoices from the time show that a month’s stay was initially priced from ₤12-15 and increased every year, a relatively hefty price tag considering that in 1880s England, an average worker's salary was only £20-30 per year. “In a way, he was basically offering glamorous camping or ‘glamping’, which is such a fashionable thing today,” Zavodnik said. “Some testimonials show that people were willing to pay in gold!”

The azure, 144-hectare Lake Bled darted in and out of sight as I followed a narrow track leading up to the top of Mala Osojnica, a steep hill in the Julian Alps in north-west Slovenia. The sun was tucked away under the horizon just beyond the mountains and the outline of a 17th-Century steeple rose from teardrop-shaped Bled Island in the lake’s centre below.

On a clear day, the entire Jomolhari Range – including Bhutan’s second highest peak and one of the country’s most sacred places – should be visible from where I was standing. But on that cold and gloomy June afternoon, all I could see were a blinding mist and grey skies.

While the area is technically made up of three small islands joined by a narrow strait of water (a ‘tickle’, in Newfoundland English), the 300-strong community mostly occupies the south and middle islands.

Now, as the archipelago opens up to tourism again after two long years of lockdown, a new programme called Ol'au Palau is offering a world-first initiative of "gamifying" responsible tourism, whereby travellers will be offered exclusive experiences based on how they treat the environment and culture, not by how much they spend.