Confessions of a Travel Addict: Ewan McGregor

If Betty Ford treated wanderlust, actor Ewan McGregor would be the first admitted. The 38-year-old gets his travel fix by working on multiple movies (coming up: Amelia—opens this Friday, Oct 23—and The Men Who Stare at Goats), then taking off for extended motorcycle tours across Africa and around the globe. For our annual travel issue, we asked the actor to share his hard-won wisdom. All of it, by the way, applicable to non-movie stars. —Ryan Bradley; photograph by Ron Gaunt/Getty Images

Go Far Out
I’d never considered traveling to out-of-the-way spots before I visited Churchill, Canada, to make a documentary about polar bears. Then I was hooked.

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Ken Burns's National Parks: Insider Escapes in Yellowstone, Yosemite

If you've been watching Ken Burns's The National Parks: America's Best Idea series this week on PBS, you've probably already started dreaming of your next escape. The first episode, which aired on Sunday night, captured the grandeur of Yosemite and Yellowstone enough to make anyone want to find their inner John Muir and head out West. 

Just makes sure you do it right and far from the crowds with these unexpected adventure trips. Then get more game plan ideas from Editor at Large Robert Earle Howells's national parks feature story and photo gallery. Or read an essay by Ken Burns about his love for the national parks.

The Amazing Race: A Previous Winner Tells All

Imagine a chance to travel all over the world with your best bud and share a million dollars—if you can handle the obstacles that true adventure travel throws at you. Well that’s The Amazing Race, which pits teams of two against each other as they race around the globe for the pot of gold at the finish line. With the premiere of season 15 at 8 pm EST on CBS, we wondered, what does it mean to win the race? ADVENTURE caught up with season three winner Zach Behr in New York. Behr, now a supervising producer on MTV’s Made, explains what you do when you win half a million dollars, the importance of experiencing local color, and the simple pleasure of eating Vietnamese chicken satay from a street cart.

So you won The Amazing Race and split a million dollars with your partner, Florinka Pesenti, a friend from your days at Vassar College. What'd you do with the money?

I took a chunk of it with my then girlfriend, now wife, and went to Costa Rica for ten days and traveled around. 

Legendary Explorer's Letter Found Behind Filing Cabinet in Tasmania

Though a recent expedition failed to find legendary polar explorer Roald Amundsen's lost plane, another relic of Amundsen's life recently re-surfaced—a letter Amundsen wrote soon after he became the first man ever to reach the South Pole in 1912. A Tasmanian yacht club discovered Amundsen's letter of acceptance to an honorary membership to the Derwent Sailing Squadron behind a filing cabinet, where it had been lost for years.

"Allow me to convey my very best thanks for the honour you have done me in electing me as an honorary member of the Derwent Sailing Squadron," Amundsen wrote in the letter. He was offered the membership while he stayed in Hobart, where local's discovered his identity after he telegraphed the news of the success of his Antarctic expedition to King Haakon of Norway.

The historic letter has been donated to the Tasmania Maritime Museum.

—Greer Schott

Explorer Jon Bowermaster on Kayaking the World's Oceans

Jon Bowermaster’s OCEANS 8 project spanned a decade and took him and his teams around the world by sea kayak—and six of the expeditions turned into feature stories for ADVENTURE. One, "Storming the Islands of Fire and Ice," is featured in our (great) just released anthology, The New Age of Adventure (order a copy). We asked the contributing editor a few question while he was (appropriately) on some tiny, nearly unpronounceable atoll in the South Pacific.

How did the OCEANS 8 begin?

I asked the National Geographic Expeditions Council for funding for the Aleutian Islands trip in 1998. This was soon after the EC had been formed, and I was among its initial grantees. We went to the Aleutians in the summer of 1999. 

What were you looking for in each trip?

Essentially we used adventure—in this case sea kayaking—as a way to get places that would be difficult to reach otherwise, in order to bring back stories about bigger issues, including environmental, cultural, and political stories. Of course, having great adventures along the way—from the Aleutians to Vietnam, French Polynesia to the Altiplano, Croatia to Tasmania, Gabon to Antarctica—that was a personal lure, too.

Ken Burns's New National Parks TV Series Begins This Weekend

"If you love the outdoors and American history, you simply have to watch it," to quote a review by editor in chief John Rasmus after the premiere of The National Parks at Mountainfilm in Telluride last summer. Award-winning director Ken Burns spent a decade in the parks, capturing 800 hours of jaw-dropping footage and interviewing scores of people, famous and unknown. The new twelve-hour, six-part series will begin airing this Sunday, September 27, on PBS. 

Burns wrote about the making of his new documenary, which looks at American history through our unique natural heritage, for our national parks cover story. He notes, "I prefer to think of...all national parks, a bit differently—not only as something this nation has preserved, but also something we've accomplished: one of America's best ideas." Read his essay here.

Photograph courtesy of Paul Barnes / Florentine Films

Nat Geo In The Field: Mike Fay - Tracking Down Every Last Redwood

After 333 days and 2,000 miles, wilderness savant Mike Fay found every last redwood. Now he wants to save them.

Text by Cliff Ransom; Photograph by Michael Nichols

“I thought I’d be able to just Google it,” says biologist Mike Fay of locating the country’s southernmost redwood tree. Instead Fay and his hiking partner, activist Lindsey Holm, found themselves on the southern border of Los Padres National Forest in California, clawing their way up a steep-sided canyon.

“It’s thicker than hell. Impenetrable chaparral and poison oak like crazy,” Fay says. “After half an hour I get up to the top of this drainage where I see [what I think is] the southernmost redwood. Then I look around. Sure as hell, there’s another tree in a drainage farther south. So I’m like, damn, I’ve got to do this all over again. And I do. Then I see another tree even farther south. And it’s going on like this all frickin’ day.”

“You know where I found the southernmost redwood in the continental United States? Fifteen feet from California Route 1. I could have driven there.”

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Watch "Climbing Redwood Giants" on September 29 at 10 p.m. on the National Geographic Channel. Learn more at nationalgeographic.com/redwoods.

High Performance: Drink Tea, Live Longer and Prevent Dementia

Text by Dan Buettner, author of The Blue Zones

Perhaps it’s too predictable: Experts find the world’s longest-living people in a remote mountain village on a tiny island in an exotic sea. They party hard, work into their hundreds, and still have sex into their 90s. But then the twist: Their secret isn’t red wine or yogurt or young lovers. The key ingredient to living and loving longer, it seems, is growing right in their gardens.

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Adventure Friend, Photographer Bobby Model Dies

Photographer Bobby Model in Kenya for ADVENTURE. See photos from that assignment here.

We are terribly saddened to deliver the news that our dear Bobby Model passed away yesterday. We do not have any details yet from the family.

Bobby first came to NG when he was part of the team that climbed Trango Tower in autumn 1995, a feat which was featured in the April 1996 National Geographic, and Bobby appeared on the cover of that issue. Images that Bobby shot on that expedition were published in the magazine. While Bobby continued to climb at an extremely high level, upon the urging of his climbing partner, Todd Skinner, he pursued a career in photography, and went on to cover relief work in Sudan, the Balti peoples in Pakistan, and other topics in Africa while he was based in Nairobi. He shot articles for NG Adventure, and worked with David Harvey on his coverage of Nairobi for the National Geographic Africa issue.

When Bobby was injured outside of Cape Town in June two years ago, he was miraculously able to survive what would have been for most a fatal head injury. 

The Tao of Surf Kayaking: How to Ride a World-Record Wave

There is at least one important difference between kayaking a two-story wave and riding it on a surfboard. “On a board, you can bail if things get ugly,” says pro paddler Tao Berman, 30. “But in a kayak, you’ll either get torn out of the boat and snap a femur or, if you’re lucky, stay in it and maybe crush some ribs.” Next year Berman will attempt to break the surf kayak record by riding a wave taller than 30 feet. (The highest ever surfed on a board was a monstrous 70-footer.) His secret weapon: a new boat designed specifically for big waves. Berman, who has barreled off 98-foot waterfalls and navigated 50-plus first river descents, is working with Ontario-based Murky Water Kayaks and designer Randy Phillips on a prototype (pictured below) that he’ll test off Hawaii’s North Shore this winter. Our R&D suggestion: an ejector seat.—Text by Andrea Minarcek