Not maliciously, of course. We just tend to leave out the part where that spectacular sunrise required waking up at 3:45 a.m., the pristine drone footage came after three days of terrible weather, and the photo of an empty ancient temple was taken approximately twelve seconds before three tour buses arrived.
What you see on DESTINATIONS UNKNOWN is the finished product: the strange destination, ridiculous adventure, dramatic photograph, cinematic 4K video, and hopefully a story interesting enough to keep you from checking Instagram halfway through it.
What you don’t see is everything required to make it happen.
Since launching DESTINATIONS UNKNOWN in 2009, I’ve traveled around the world chasing places that fascinate me: active volcanoes, wildlife encounters, ancient ruins, abandoned places, UNESCO sites, remote islands, megacities, dark tourism destinations, and occasionally famous tourist attractions that actually deserve the hype.
This is the part of the site about everything that happens before you see the finished story.
IT STARTS WITH CURIOSITY
I’ve never been particularly interested in traveling somewhere simply because everyone else is going there.
DESTINATIONS UNKNOWN started with a much simpler question: What’s out there that’s actually worth seeing?
Borobudur Temple in Indonesia
Sometimes it’s something beautiful. Sometimes it’s historically important. Sometimes it’s completely bizarre. And sometimes it’s a volcano actively throwing pieces of the Earth into the sky, which admittedly gets my attention pretty quickly.
The common thread is that a destination needs a reason to be interesting.
My focus has always been on Earth’s beauty, history, wildlife, cultures, engineering, mysteries, and occasionally its spectacular ability to remind humans that we’re really not in charge here.
That means you’ll find plenty of remote destinations and questionable itineraries on this site. Tourist traps generally don’t make the cut unless there is a legitimate wow factor behind them.
If I’m going to spend 60 hours getting somewhere, I want there to be a damn good reason.
THEN COMES THE LOGISTICS
There is a romantic version of travel where you casually throw a passport into a bag, arrive at the airport, sip champagne on an airplane and magically appear somewhere exotic.
I have apparently been booking the wrong trips.
Getting to many of the places featured on DESTINATIONS UNKNOWN involves a combination of planes, trains, rental cars, ferries, motorcycles, questionable boats and occasionally walking much farther than anyone originally suggested.
Flights get delayed. Flights get canceled. Bags disappear. Weather changes. Roads close. Technology stops working. Language barriers suddenly become very real. Reservations vanish into the digital abyss.
And sometimes you lose your wallet in a foreign country.
I’ve been doing this since 2009, and none of that has magically stopped happening. I’ve simply become considerably better at improvising when it does.
Some of the biggest travel disasters have actually become my favorite stories. At the time, however, they generally involve considerably more profanity.
The story matters, but photography and video are what pull you into the destination.
Unfortunately, getting those images usually requires considerably more effort than standing somewhere pretty and pressing a button.
The best light might last five minutes. The weather might cooperate once during an entire trip. Wildlife has absolutely no respect for production schedules. A location that looks deserted online may have 400 people standing in front of it when you arrive.
So I wait.
And hike.
And climb.
And wake up at absurd hours.
And occasionally find myself wondering exactly which series of life decisions resulted in me carrying a backpack full of camera equipment around the world.
Getting the shot sometimes means stepping outside my comfort zone, but there is an important distinction between adventure and stupidity.
Some photographs on DESTINATIONS UNKNOWN may look dangerous. Camera angles can be wonderfully deceptive (men, you know what I mean). I’m usually considerably farther from that cliff than the photograph suggests, and when an environment actually requires safety equipment, I use it.
Kilauea Volcanic eruption
I don’t trespass for photographs, ignore safety barriers for Instagram, or deliberately put myself or anyone else in danger because the Internet might give me a few more likes.
There are plenty of ways to nearly ruin a vacation without manufacturing one.
Q: What was the craziest photoshoots you’ve ever done?
A: Hanging outside a helicopter in flight, wearing full safety equipment and securely tethered, to get the shot I wanted.
Completely reasonable behavior.
NO, IT’S NOT PARTICULARLY GLAMOROUS
The finished photograph might look glamorous. Getting it usually isn’t.
Travel photography involves jet lag, sweat, humidity, mud, dust, rain, mosquitoes and an alarming amount of expensive equipment strapped to your body.
The best locations are rarely located next to an air-conditioned parking lot.
One of the more memorable examples involved hiking roughly 15 miles across an active lava field in Hawaii. Volcanic terrain is spectacular to photograph and absolutely miserable to walk across. Much of it is essentially broken volcanic glass waiting for an opportunity to remind you that shorts were a terrible wardrobe decision.
By the end of the hike, my legs were covered in superficial cuts and enough blood had made it onto my sneakers that they were effectively retired from public life.
The photographs were fantastic. So naturally, I considered this a successful day.
AND THEN THE REAL WORK STARTS
Here’s the dirty secret about running a travel blog:
Traveling is the easy part.
Once the trip ends, there are thousands of photographs, hours of video, notes, GPS locations, research, recordings and half-formed ideas that somehow need to become a coherent story.
The process often starts before I even get home.
Flights and airport lounges become makeshift editing rooms because apparently sitting quietly and enjoying a drink is an unacceptable use of downtime. Thousands of photos get ruthlessly culled, hours of video get reviewed, notes get deciphered, and research begins. Somewhere between boarding announcements and wondering why I took 47 nearly identical photos of the same thing, I eventually figure out what the story actually is.
Because DESTINATIONS UNKNOWN isn’t intended to be a collection of “MUST Do” articles assembled from a hotel room.
I want the story to reflect what it was actually like to be there.
That takes time.
THE NUMBERS GET RIDICULOUS QUICKLY
Still phtography editing is daunting
For every photograph that makes it onto DESTINATIONS UNKNOWN, there may be 50 others that don’t.
A single article can require 3–4 hours of photo editing, and individual RAW photographs can exceed 100 MB before I’ve touched them.
Video is considerably worse.
For every 15 seconds of finished footage, there may be 15 minutes or more of raw video that never sees the light of day.
A long-form 16:9 4K UHD video typically requires another 3–4 hours of editing.
Even a short vertical video can consume 1–2 hours once footage selection, editing, stabilization, audio, color and everything else is finished.
Then there’s the article itself.
Writing. Research. Fact checking. Maps. SEO. Formatting. Publishing. Updating older content. Backups. Website maintenance. Social media. And the endless technical nonsense required to keep a travel website running quickly and reliably.
All for a story you might read while sitting on the toilet for six minutes.
You’re welcome.
WHY I STILL DO IT
Because occasionally everything works.
You find yourself alone beneath an impossibly dark sky on a remote island. A whale shark appears beneath the boat. A volcano erupts in front of you. You walk through a place you’ve read about for twenty years and discover that reality is somehow better than the photographs.
Those moments are why DESTINATIONS UNKNOWN exists.
The cameras, flights, editing, missed connections, ridiculous wake-up calls, bleeding sneakers and thousands of photographs that nobody will ever see are simply the machinery behind it.
The finished article is the part I show you.
This is everything that happens behind the scenes.
