Travel journalist Kathryn Romeyn shares how to find Thailand off the beaten path—from Nan Province night markets to Khao Sok's rainforest—plus the best time to visit Thailand if you want fewer crowds and lower prices.

This week on Unpacked, host Aislyn Greene explores Thailand off the beaten path with journalist Kathryn Romeyn, who's covered Southeast Asia since 2014 and calls Bali, Indonesia home. Kathryn returned to Thailand again and again since her first real trip in 2018, and wrote Afar's guide to seeing the country differently.

In this episode, part of Unpacked's Off the Tourist Trail series, she and Aislyn dig into Bangkok's overlooked neighborhoods, the north's least-visited provinces, and—critically—the best time to visit Thailand if you want to skip both the crowds and the price surge of high season.

THIS WEEK'S GUEST

Kathryn Romeyn is a Bali-based travel journalist who has covered Southeast Asia since 2014. After spending years visiting nearly every other country in the region—Myanmar, Cambodia, Malaysia, Vietnam—she finally gave Thailand a real chance starting in 2018, and has been chasing its lesser-known corners ever since.

IN THIS EPISODE

CHAPTERS

00:00:00 Rethinking Thailand's Reputation

LINKS & RESOURCES

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The spices in your cabinet are probably five to seven years old—and that's not an accident.

On this episode of Unpacked, host Aislyn Greene sits down with Sana Javeri Kadri, founder of Diaspora Spice Co., who spent nine years dismantling a 500-year-old system and replacing it with something radically different: direct relationships with regenerative spice farming partners across India and Sri Lanka. What starts as a question about how old the spices in your cabinet really are unfolds into a conversation about colonialism, cultural erasure, and what it actually takes to trace a turmeric root back to the family who grew it.

THIS WEEK'S GUEST

Sana Javeri Kadri founded Diaspora Spice Co. in 2017 at age 23, after discovering that the global spice trade—largely unchanged since European colonization took hold roughly 500 years ago—left farmers earning almost nothing while spices sat in warehouses for five to seven years before reaching store shelves.

Sana built the company around regenerative spice farming partnerships, working directly with 140 farmers across India and Sri Lanka to source turmeric, cardamom, cinnamon, black pepper, and more, paying farm partners an average of 4x commodity price. Sana splits time between Mumbai and the Bay Area and is the author of The Diaspora Spice Co. Cookbook, a book five years in the making and built entirely around the farm families behind the spices.

IN THIS EPISODE

CHAPTERS

00:00:00 The Age of Your Spice Cabinet

INKS & RESOURCES

Diaspora Co.

The Diaspora Spice Co. Cookbook

Pragati Turmeric

Guntur Sannam Chilli

Stay connected

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And explore our second podcast, Travel Tales, which celebrates first-person narratives about the way travel changes us, and View From Afar, where we spotlight the people and ideas shaping the future of travel.

Unpacked by Afar is part of Airwave Media's podcast network. Please contact [email protected] if you would like to advertise on our podcast.

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An African safari doesn't have to mean a traffic jam. On this episode of Unpacked, host Aislyn Greene travels to Tanzania's southern circuit—visiting two parks most first-time safari-ers never consider—and discovers what happens when you trade the famous Great Migration crossing for a dry riverbed with not another human being in sight.

To get there, she consulted Elizabeth Gordon, co-founder of Extraordinary Journeys, who helped reframe what an African safari could be. What followed was eight days in Ruaha National Park and Nyerere National Park: a walking safari with a guide who reads the wind with a pouch of ash, a river full of hippos and crocodiles that Aislyn took to calling "danger soup," and a fly camp on a lake where a ranger stayed up all night speaking hippo so she didn't have to.

Come back next week for a bonus episode about what happens when a lion leaves the park—and meets a herd of cattle.

THIS WEEK'S GUESTS

Elizabeth Gordon is the co-founder of Extraordinary Journeys, a bespoke travel company designing African safari itineraries—and trips throughout South America and Asia—for travelers who want more than the standard route. Born in Kenya to a mother who joined the Peace Corps, earned her pilot's license, and built a house on a game park outside Nairobi, Elizabeth grew up between Kenya and France, studied in Beijing, and managed safari camps in Namibia before launching the company with her mother.

Pay Mbaryo is a walking guide and naturalist with Nomad Tanzania in Ruaha National Park. A farmer's son who grew up in the Gorongosa district, he has spent 15 years in the bush and navigates unmarked wilderness using what he calls a natural GPS. In a decade of guiding, he has never once had to use his rifle.

Gerald is a guide with Nomad Tanzania in Nyerere National Park, in his fourth year on the Rufiji River. He can identify a hippo's path out of the water by sight and smell—and he was the one who handed Aislyn a hippo skull to explain exactly why you don't want to be in that path.

IN THIS EPISODE

CHAPTER MARKERS

00:00:00 Introduction: African Safari, But Different

00:04:00 Why the Southern Circuit

00:08:00 Arriving in Ruaha

00:12:00 Walking Safari With Pay

00:20:00 The Small Five and the Keystone Species

00:26:00 Nyerere and the Rufiji River

00:33:00 Danger Soup: Life on the Water

00:38:00 Fly Camping With Hippos

LINKS & RESOURCES

Stay connected

Be sure to subscribe to the show and sign up for our podcast newsletter, Behind the Mic, where we share upcoming news and behind-the-scenes details of each episode.

And explore our second podcast, Travel Tales, which celebrates first-person narratives about the way travel changes us, and View From Afar, where we spotlight the people and ideas shaping the future of travel.

Unpacked by Afar is part of Airwave Media's podcast network. Please contact [email protected] if you would like to advertise on our podcast.

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By the end of this century, half of the world's 7,000 languages could be gone. On this episode of Unpacked, host Aislyn Greene hands the mic to travel writer Lucy Kehoe for a conversation about saving language with journalist Sophia Smith Galer, author of the new book How to Kill a Language.

For Sophia, saving language is personal: her Italian grandmother spoke Emilian, one of Italy's Indigenous tongues, and it's quietly slipping away. To understand what we lose when a language dies, Sophia traveled from the mountains of Oman to the hills of California, seeking out endangered languages and the communities fighting—or grieving—for them.

She and Lucy get into why these languages matter to every traveler, how language and landscape are woven together, and what it means to travel thoughtfully to a place whose language is at risk—beyond learning a few phrases. It's a conversation about treating language as part of the culture we come to experience, and about meeting it with curiosity and respect rather than as something quaint.

THIS WEEK'S GUESTS

Sophia Smith Galer is an award-winning journalist and author whose new book, How to Kill a Language, traces the forces—colonialism, globalization, migration, and war—pushing thousands of the world's languages toward extinction. Multilingual in English, Spanish, Italian, and Arabic, she reported it across California, Oman, Ghana, Ecuador, Italy, and Greece, meeting speakers of critically endangered languages in person to capture not only their words but their connection to a place.

Lucy Kehoe is a London-based journalist who covers travel, food, and the environment, with a particular interest in how people relate to landscape and place.

IN THIS EPISODE

00:00:00 A Grandmother's Vanishing Tongue

00:04:00 Why Endangered Languages Matters

00:06:00 Words Shaped by Place

00:10:00 Tourism Done Respectfully

00:16:00 California's Last Speakers

00:24:00 Ladino, Museums, and Hope

LINKS & RESOURCES

Stay connected

Be sure to subscribe to the show and sign up for our podcast newsletter, Behind the Mic, where we share upcoming news and behind-the-scenes details of each episode.

And explore our second podcast, Travel Tales, which celebrates first-person narratives about the way travel changes us, and View From Afar, where we spotlight the people and ideas shaping the future of travel.

Unpacked by Afar is part of Airwave Media's podcast network. Please contact [email protected] if you would like to advertise on our podcast.

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This kind of Japan travel doesn't show up in guidebooks. In January 2024, a major earthquake struck the Noto Peninsula, lifting the seabed 15 feet into the air and exposing an ocean floor that locals walked across—harvesting octopus and abalone—to get home.

This week on Unpacked, Five Questions, host and Afar executive editor Katherine LaGrave is joined by Afar contributing writer Ryan Knighton, who recently wrote a feature about traveling along the peninsula. Ryan, who is blind, visited Noto two years after the earthquake on a slow walking tour, drawn by the parallels between this remote coastal peninsula and his own earthquake-prone home on Vancouver Island.

What he found was a place not broken, but mid-repair—and a Japanese art form that made sense of everything.

THIS WEEK’S GUEST

Ryan Knighton is an author and Afar contributing writing whose stories consistently find the textures, flavors, and human stories that sighted travelers walk past. A former English teacher in South Korea, he brings a slow, sensory approach to Japan travel and beyond—listening to sushi chefs talk about their knives, walking earthquake fracture lines with his feet, and finding the people who hold a place together. 

IN THIS EPISODE

LINKS & RESOURCES

CHAPTER MARKERS

00:00:00 Introduction

00:02:00 Japan Travel on Foot and Without Sight

00:05:00 The Ethics of Disaster Tourism

00:07:00 Food as Craft, Craft as Place

00:10:00 The Scene That Didn't Make the Cut

00:12:00 Walking the Fracture Line

00:14:00 Mr. Squid and the Spirit of Noto

00:16:00 Kintsugi as Metaphor

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For the past several decades, writer and editor Lavinia Spalding has championed women's travel writing. She's helmed seven editions of the Best Women's Travel Writing—the celebrated Traveler's Tales anthology—including the latest, released on June 9th.

Over the years, she's read hundreds of submissions a year from women around the world and distilled them into one essential collection. So host Aislyn Greene sits down with Lavinia to talk about what two decades of editing these stories has taught her about how women explore the world, and why amplifying those voices matters more than ever right now.

THIS WEEK’S GUEST

Lavinia Spalding is the author of Writing Away: A Creative Guide to Awakening the Journal-Keeping Traveler , seven-time series editor of The Best Women’s Travel Writing, and co-author of With a Measure of Grace, This Immeasurable Place, and two editions of the Frommer’s EasyGuide to New Orleans. She has been teaching for more than 30 years and leads writing workshops online and around the world. She lives with her family in New Orleans. Watch her TEDx talk here, and subscribe to her Substack newsletter for updates and essays.

IN THIS EPISODE

CHAPTERS

00:00:00 Young, Fearless, and Filled With Wonder

LINKS & RESOURCES

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Buffalo, New York might be the greatest architecture city you've never heard of. In the fourth and final episode of our Unpacked by Afar series, we explore how this Rust Belt city became one of the richest showcases of American architecture anywhere in the country.

Host Aislyn Greene tours Buffalo with Ed Howard, a docent and guide with Explore Buffalo. Ed shares that Buffalo was one of the wealthiest cities in America and drew the biggest names in architecture to build here. Stand on a single downtown corner and you can see work by the architects behind the Flatiron Building, the Twin Towers, and the first true skyscraper.

Buffalo is also one of only two American cities with major works by the "holy trinity" of American architecture, Louis Sullivan, H.H. Richardson, and Frank Lloyd Wright, whose Martin House is here. Then come the surprises: the industrial grain elevators that inspired modernist masters, and the Frederick Law Olmsted park system that led the man who designed Central Park to call Buffalo the best-planned city in the country.

It's a story of boom, near-ruin, and hard-won revival, a city that nearly lost its treasures and fought to save them. This is cultural travel at its most rewarding, a piece of American travel culture hiding in plain sight. If great architecture is a reason you travel, Buffalo belongs near the top of your list of American travel destinations.

Meet this week's guest

Chapters

00:00 — A Secret Architecture City

03:32 — Five Masters, One Corner

06:40 — The Holy Trinity

11:05 — Saving the Landmarks

17:00 — Grain and Grass

Where to go to explore Buffalo's architecture

This is the fourth and final episode of our Buffalo series. New here? Go back for Buffalo's food scene, its neighborhoods, and its Black history. And follow Unpacked, a travel podcast from Afar, for more unique travel experiences around the world.

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For 185 years, some of the most important chapters of American history have unfolded on a few blocks of Buffalo's East Side. In the third episode of our four-part Unpacked by Afar series, we walk the Michigan Street African American Heritage Corridor, the beating heart of Buffalo Black history, with the man who has made preserving it his life's work.

Executive director Terry Alford grew up on these streets and is now leading their revival. He guides host Aislyn Greene through 185 years of Buffalo Black history: a church that was one of the last stops on the Underground Railroad, the home where the Niagara Movement was born, the club where jazz greats jammed until dawn because they weren't allowed to sleep in the hotels they had just played, and the radio station that became the megaphone of the Civil Rights movement.

Then he shares how urban renewal nearly erased it all, and how he is fighting to bring it back, guided by the Ghanaian principle of Sankofa: move forward, but never forget where you came from.

This is cultural travel at its most moving, a piece of American travel culture far too few people know. It is also one of the most powerful travel stories we have told, and a lesson in responsible travel: how to visit a place and honor the people whose stories made it. If Buffalo Black history is not yet on your list of American travel destinations, this episode, and this corridor, will change that.

Meet this week's guest

Chapters

Where to go to explore Buffalo's Black history

This is episode three of a four-part series. Next week, we explore Buffalo's astonishing architecture, one of the best-kept design secrets in America.

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This is the final stop on our five-part audio guide to Asheville, North Carolina, and we’re heading for the trees. In this episode of Unpacked by Afar, host Aislyn Greene laces up for Asheville hiking, and discovers why the oldest mountains on Earth are also some of the most beloved.

On a tour with Hike Bike Kayak Asheville that takes Aislyn and guide David into the Pisgah National Forest, Aislyn learns that Asheville hiking means far more than a simple walk in the woods. These are among the oldest mountains in the world, cloaked in one of the most biodiverse forests in North America, home to thousands of plant species and waterfalls around nearly every bend. David leads her to quiet swimming holes and points out plants that grow nowhere else on Earth.

She stands beneath Looking Glass Falls and hears how a single valley packs in world-class rock climbing, fly fishing on the Davidson River, and a 60-foot natural water slide called Sliding Rock.

Zoom out, and the scale is staggering. The Great Smoky Mountains and the Blue Ridge Parkway are among the most visited places in the entire national park system, and Mount Mitchell, the highest peak east of the Mississippi, rises just up the road. It helps explain why so many people who come here for Asheville hiking end up never wanting to leave, and why the outdoors are one of America’s great travel destinations. It’s a landscape you can dip into for a single afternoon or disappear into for a week.

It all adds up to a rich piece of cultural travel and a fitting finale to our guide: a reminder that in Asheville, the wild is never far away. Whether you want a gentle waterfall stroll or a hard climb to a summit view, the trailheads are closer than you think, and the payoff is some of the most beautiful country in the eastern United States. Consider it your guide to where to go and what to know.

Unpacked by Afar is a travel podcast that unpacks one destination at a time. That’s the end of our Asheville audio guide, so catch up on the whole series in the feed.

CHAPTERS

00:00:00 Older Than the Atlantic

GUESTS | David Teafatiller of Hike Bike Kayak Asheville, our hiking guide

PLACES WE VISITED

MORE FROM AFAR

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This is the fourth stop on our five-part audio guide to Asheville, North Carolina, and it may be the tastiest one yet. In this episode of Unpacked by Afar, host Aislyn Greene digs into Asheville food, and the surprising reason this mountain city punches so far above its weight at the table.

Aislyn joins a walking food tour with Sita of Eating Asheville, eating her way through a town where farm to table isn’t a slogan but a fact of geography. Along the way she:

It’s a scene built on tight relationships between kitchens and the farms a few ridges away, where the rice on your plate might have been grown just up the road, and where a devastating hurricane the year before only deepened the sense that these restaurants belong to their community.

But great Asheville food is also a question of who gets to make it, and whose history gets remembered. In a segment on the region’s Black foodways, Aislyn talks with two of the city’s most celebrated chefs, Ashleigh Shanti of Good Hot Fish and Rakim Gaines of Capella on 9, about Affrilachian cooking, representation behind the stove, and the stories layered into every plate. Their conversation is a reminder that a food town’s story has to include the people history has too often left off the menu.

It all adds up to a rich piece of cultural travel and a portrait of one of the best small food towns in the country. Whatever you come hungry for, consider this your guide to where to go and what to know.

Unpacked by Afar is a travel podcast that unpacks one destination at a time, with a real love of food and travel. This Asheville audio guide has one more episode to go, so look for it in the feed.

CHAPTERS

00:00 A Real Food Town

GUESTS

PLACES WE VISITED

MORE FROM AFAR

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