Penny Hunter

The carry-on about carry-on-only travel shows no sign of abating, with travellers proudly touting their packing expertise on the likes of YouTube, Instagram and Reddit forums. These hardcore flyers will smugly head overseas for a month with one tiny bag weighing not a fraction over 7kg. The trend is even more visible on domestic flights, where people are often on short jaunts away.

“Get up! Get up!” The words are an order, shouted emphatically like a captain rousing army cadets from sleep. But we are very much awake, albeit lying down. Bobby, senior coach with the Rip Curl School of Surf in Bali, is urging us to our feet as our boards surge forward on to a wave.

This premium airport lounge impresses with its range of facilities and and views stretching all the way to Botany Bay.

On a trip to Canada back in February, I gently tried to read the room on Trump, tariffs and the idea of becoming the 51st US state. It turned out the room didn’t need reading. It was shouting back a hard “no”. Overwhelmingly, and unsurprisingly, Canadians were united in their opposition to trade barriers and the US President’s geopolitical manoeuvres. They were boycotting US-made products at supermarkets and cancelling holidays south of the border.

Winter has turned Edith Lake just outside the Canadian town of Jasper into a pale sheet of turquoise. Across the icy surface on the ­opposite shore, log cabins hunker among spruce and pine trees, overlooked by the snow-riven point of Pyramid Mountain. It feels like a classic Canadian Rockies scene, except for the stark silence. Normally, the breeze would be rustling forest fronds but where I’m standing, on the southern lake shore, there is no vegetation. Instead, I’m surrounded by the pencil-straight trunks of charred trees. When I hear a sudden crack and thump, it’s the sound of a dead branch falling into a thick blanket of ash. The landscape has been utterly transformed. It’s eerie but also strangely beautiful. Blackened logs shine silvery in the bright sunshine; tree trunks dotted with vivid golden patches, caused by sap boiling through the bark, are silhouetted against a brilliant blue sky.

The tourism industry’s best and brightest were honoured at the Qantas Australian Tourism Awards on Friday night.

‘Wind. Bus. Patagonia.” Type those three words into Google and you’ll find a video of tourists having a memorable but very chilly ride in a bus with its windows blown out. Southern Chile’s infamous wind has snatched gravel from the road and hurled it at the glass with such force that the panels have shattered. Before I arrived in Torres del Paine National Park, I’d heard tales of trekkers being blown off their feet. The town of Puerto Natales, gateway to the wilderness reserve, even has a waterfront sculpture called Monument to the Wind, depicting a man and woman joyously being held aloft by a gale.

We are sailing under a blanket of heavy fog somewhere between Canada and the southern reaches of Greenland in the Labrador Sea. All is white outside, with any trace of Newfoundland smothered in mist. If I were a Viking, I might release one of my ravens and follow its flight path to find solid ground. Fortunately, our ship, the appropriately named Viking Star, has far more sophisticated navigation tools at its disposal. Within hours, the haze clears and the jagged peaks of Greenland loom into view like a Tolkien-esque fever dream.

Norway is facing a dilemma. Its vast reserves of natural beauty, with their promise of the northern lights, combined with its weakened krone, are drawing increasing numbers of tourists to its shores. The Lofotens, a gorgeous cluster of islands off the northwest coast, experienced a reported 15 per cent surge in visitors in 2022-23. And while its citizens might welcome the money this growing interest in their country brings (representing almost 4 per cent of GDP), tourism presents a threat to something at the heart of the Norwegian psyche – a deep reverence for nature.

The dining experience is definitely a step up but the seats in this premium economy are not an improvement on the bulkhead ones in the class below.

American photographer Steve McCurry’s passion for travel and visual storytelling was sparked early in his career when he went to India for the first time. He has returned to the subcontinent many times in the ensuing decades. One of those trips led to his most famous photograph, taken after he crossed the border into Pakistan and visited the Nasir Bagh refugee camp in 1984. The Afghan girl, a portrait of nine-year-old Sharbat Gula, her vivid green eyes framed by a tattered red headscarf, graced the cover of National Geographic and helped to raise awareness of the plight of Afghans under the country’s brutal occupation by Soviet forces.

As the first American woman to captain a cruise ship, Kate McCue has been at the forefront of enormous change in the maritime industry. Under the stewardship of Celebrity Cruises’ president and chief executive Lisa Lutoff-Perlo, McCue has watched representation of women on the bridges of the line’s ships increase from 2 per cent in 2014 to more than 32 per cent today. “It’s definitely an accomplishment I’m extremely proud of,” she says.

Floor coverings inspire a certain fanaticism in hotel aficionados. You need only take a quick glance at Instagram to find multiple nerdy accounts devoted to carpets – #random hotel carpets, #questionable hotel carpets and #the hotel carpet chronicles among them. So perhaps it’s not strange to find myself photographing, somewhat obsessively, the green and cream terrazzo tiles of the new (but historic) Kimpton Margot Sydney. The flooring is so pleasingly and perfectly geometrical, as are the pastel tiles that line the corridors on this, the sixth level of the heritage-listed 1939 Sydney Water Board building. They’re just two of many features in a hotel with plenty of stories to tell.