Forbes story on Travel Writers' Top Escapes

In a story this week for ForbesTraveler — “My Best Adventure Ever” — I polled nine adventure-travel writers to discover destinations and adventures not often featured in print. These are the places travel writers will go when not on assignment — personal top adventure picks culled from hundreds of assignments and years on the road.

Take Robin Esrock as example. This 33-year-old South African freelance writer and host of Word Travels on the National Geographic Channel gets paid to travel and explore the planet. A dream job, many people would call it. But talk to any veteran travel writer and tales emerge of trips that transcend the workaday beat. For Esrock, who’s toured more than 70 countries, destinations like Volcan de Lodo, a spewing cone of mineral mud propped improbably on barren land by the Caribbean Sea, come first to mind. “Suspended in mud, it’s what we imagine it must be like to sleep on a cloud,” he says.

Another writer, Seth Sherwood, a Paris-based freelance correspondent for the New York Times, cites Palmyra, a remote ruin site and a little-known archaeological adventure in the desert of Syria. Sherwood hiked Palmyra’s endless ruins for a day, exploring what he described as “an ocean of timeworn pinkish stones, date palms, blocky half-collapsed buildings, ranks of high columns, rows of soaring arches, cracked amphitheaters, monolithic carved blocks, crumbled statues and hillside tombs.”

Read “My Best Adventure Ever” to discover where the people who travel for a living choose to go when an editorial board is out of the picture and a deadline for the story does not exist.