ExplWorld
Stories, investigations and conversations about travel, places, people and the forces shaping our world. ExplWorld goes beyond the postcard — from overtourism and geopolitics to remote destinations, culture, nature and the realities behind travel.
In Georgia’s Kakheti region, wine has been fermenting underground for thousands of years. In this episode, we explore the ancient qvevri method, the archaeological evidence behind Georgia’s 8,000-year winemaking tradition, how the practice survived Soviet industrialization, and why a Russian embargo helped turn buried clay vessels into a symbol of Georgian wine around the world.
What does your passport actually let you do? In this episode, we compare how travelers from different countries face radically different visa rules for the same destinations, and why simple “passport power” rankings often hide more than they reveal. From visa-free entry and e-visas to ETAs, bilateral deals and sudden rule changes, we look at how nationality shapes the practical reality of planning a trip and why checking your specific route matters more than any global ranking.
In Turkmenistan’s Karakum Desert, a gas crater has been burning for decades despite repeated presidential orders to extinguish it. In this episode, we trace the uncertain origins of the Darvaza fire, the attempts to reduce it, and the much larger methane problem hidden across the country’s gas fields. Why does the world focus on one spectacular crater when the more consequential leaks are almost invisible?
Uruguay rebuilt its electricity system in little more than a decade, replacing dependence on imported fuel with wind, hydro, biomass and solar. In this episode, we explore the policies, contracts and infrastructure that made the transition possible, how hydropower became a natural battery for wind, what the severe 2022–2023 drought revealed about the system, and why Uruguay’s real achievement may be less about renewable percentages than about removing energy-price volatility.
Some airports were built in places where, by all logic, a runway shouldn’t exist. In this episode, we explore some of the world’s most extreme airports from Lukla and Courchevel to Barra’s beach runway and the artificial islands of Osaka and Hong Kong. How do planes operate safely in these places, why were these airports built at all, and when are stricter rules simply no longer enough?
For years, one of the strangest stories about North Korea claimed that Pyongyang’s metro wasn’t really a metro at all — just two elaborately decorated stations, a shuttle train and passengers playing their part. The theory was wrong. In this episode of ExplWorld, we descend roughly a hundred metres beneath Pyongyang to look at the real system behind the myth: sixteen stations, Cold War-era blast doors, monumental mosaics, second-hand trains from Berlin and a railway designed partly to function as a civil-defence shelter. But the deeper story is about information. How did a false theory survive for so long? Which facts about the metro can actually be verified from outside North Korea? And what happens when a country produces plenty of numbers, but almost none of them can be independently checked? Because Pyongyang’s metro is neither simply a stage set nor simply a railway. It is both infrastructure and propaganda — carrying ordinary people beneath one of the least transparent cities in the world.
Can you still travel somewhere in the world for €30 a day? According to the ExplWorld cost index, the answer is yes — and in more places than you might expect. In this episode, we open the data behind our budget tool and explore some of the world’s cheapest destinations, from Laos and Bangladesh to Nepal, Vietnam, India and beyond. But the lowest number only tells part of the story. We look at what a €20–30 daily budget actually includes, why the gap between backpacker and premium travel can reveal two completely different tourism economies, and why places like Bhutan, Monaco and Antarctica are expensive for entirely different reasons. Plus: how to turn a daily estimate into a realistic trip budget — without forgetting the costs that usually sit outside it. Because knowing what a country costs is useful. Knowing what that number actually means is better.
A flood tore through the Nepal–China border region. At first, it was blamed on an earthquake. Within a day, that explanation collapsed. In this episode of ExplWorld, we reconstruct what happened in the Bhotekoshi valley — from the seismic signal that turned out not to be an earthquake, to the glacial collapse and debris flow that devastated one of Nepal’s most important northern corridors. We look at why there was almost no warning, how the same river flooded catastrophically just thirteen months earlier, why casualty and missing-person figures can change so quickly, and what this disaster reveals about the limits of cross-border monitoring in the Himalaya. Because in this valley, water can cross the border faster than information does.
Venice charges day-trippers. Bali collects a visitor levy. Kyoto redirects tourists away from overcrowded transport. Bhutan limits tourism through price. But do these measures actually solve overtourism? In this episode of ExplWorld, we look at what these destinations are really trying to manage — crowding, infrastructure strain, environmental pressure and the concentration of visitors in a handful of famous places. We also ask a bigger question: how do you actually measure whether an overtourism policy works? Because fewer tourists is not always the goal. Sometimes success simply means making a destination more livable for the people who call it home.
The Democratic Republic of the Congo is fighting the largest Ebola outbreak in its history — caused by Bundibugyo virus, a species with no licensed vaccine and no licensed treatment. Six thousand confirmed cases in fifteen weeks, an armed conflict at the epicenter, and a world that had prepared for a different strain. In this episode, we go through what the numbers say, which institution stands behind each of them, and where the numbers cannot see: how the outbreak began in a gold-mining town in Ituri, why the world's Ebola toolkit doesn't apply here, the day-by-day spread across six provinces, the gamble of deploying Ervebo against a virus it was never licensed for, the war that shapes the response, Uganda's textbook containment — and what all of it means for travelers. Everything in this episode is a verified snapshot as of August 31, 2026. The situation changes daily — check current advisories before you travel. Read the full written story, with every number, its institution and its cutoff date: https://www.explworld.com/journal/ebola-without-a-vaccine Chapters: Where It Began · The Virus the World Did Not Prepare For · From One Health Zone to Six Provinces · The Fastest Ebola on Record · Three Registers, One Epidemic · The Fatality Ratio That Keeps Rising · The Price Health Workers Pay · What the Numbers Cannot See · The Vaccine Gamble · War at the Epicenter · The Money · Uganda: How an Outbreak Ends · The Bans WHO Advised Against · The 42-Day Rule · What We Know and What We Do Not · For Travelers