The following four stories are the winning and shortlisted entries in our 2026 New Travel Writer of the Year Competition.
WINNING ENTRY
An Evening in Bishkek – Lucy Evanson
Three girls walk into a Mexican restaurant in Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan.
It might not sound like a prime spot for an authentic burrito, but after four months of living in Kazakhstan, a generously-seasoned respite from the delicate taste of boiled horse meat was sorely needed.
Potted cacti, folding chairs, yellow-washed brick. We were laughing, perhaps, a little too loudly, half-drunk on tequila and half on the exhaustion of travel. As twenty-one-year-old girls who laugh too loudly often do, we caught the attention of two local men at a neighbouring table, one overly confident and the other evidently embarrassed by his outgoing friend.
The more outgoing of the two pushed our tables together and ordered a round of shots. Seemingly sensing the skipped heartbeats of lone women approached by men in unfamiliar territory, he reached across the table and momentarily clasped his partner’s hand. A flicker of uncertainty danced across his eyes as he assessed whether his message had been received: we want nothing from you but your company.
Tequila turned to Kyrgyz cognac. Laughter turned to stories of childhoods in Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan, tales of lepyoshka bread sold by grandmothers on street-corners that tasted better than any Parisian baguette ever could. Exhaustion turned to plans to tour the city’s best speakeasies and underground bars, places we’d never be able to find by ourselves, in agreement to not tell our mothers until we woke up alive the next morning.
We set off for one such bar, too caught up in the romance of spontaneity to question our trust in these affable strangers. Outside, the sharp December air iced the ground with a biting sugar-crust. Rogue tendrils of wind coiled in on themselves, suspending fleeting, languid currents of white crystals above the cracked black tarmac.
The steam of our voices warmed the cold silence as we turned into a park, answering questions about life in England as hastily as possible so as to return to stories of grandmothers and bread.
“You chose the right part of the world to visit. You should go to all of the -stans.”
“Where should we go next? Which -stan is your favourite?”
“Oh, definitely Afghanistan.”
“Really?”
“Why wouldn’t it be?”
As we approached a derelict gardeners’ shed, the dirt began to reverberate with a faint bass. Pink light melted into the frosted air from an opening in the rotted patio.
We wobbled our way down a rickety ladder into an old storage basement, or rather, several old storage basements, linked by a series of graffiti-coated tunnels with bare dirt floors. The widest part of this burrow housed a bar made from barrels, accessorised with cracked mirrors, old curtains and haphazard plank-benches, illuminated by a light-and-sound-system that wouldn’t have been out of place in a licensed, above-ground nightclub.
A girl around our age bobbed side-to-side behind the makeshift DJ booth, one tattooed hand resting on the headphones crowning her shaved head and the other reaching down to fiddle with the equipment. The shyer of our two friends let go of his companion’s hand to squeeze his way to the bar.
“Isn’t it dangerous in Afghanistan?”
“Well, yes. But the food is so good, and the people are so nice.”
Bathed in artificial, crimson light, I watched two strangers kiss under an opening to the star-flecked sky. I thought about all of the people lying under those same stars who had to choose between love and survival. Schools reduced to rubble, fathers shot at the dinner table by foreign fighters. Teenage girls looking up at the moon through meshed blue cloth, wondering if their daughters would grow up into a better world.
Our companion returned with five bottles of beer. We clinked their necks, toasting to good health, good drink, and Kyrgyzstan. The food is so good, and the people are so nice.
In The Teeth of the Devil – Chris Baker
You can see them from the mainland on a clear day. That’s what the skipper told us. He said it with conviction too, as if he was trying to reassure himself that it was true. Because today is a day when we can barely see anything. A day when the Golden Gate Bridge floats above us like an outlined apparition, disappearing completely as it climbs into the fog. A day when the roars of the foghorns, rolling across the water with unmistakeable substance, are the only things that tether us to the real world; that tell us we’re not awash in a dream of ethereal greys.
The bright white bow of our small boat leads us into a darkening gloom, across sea the colour and calmness of a sheet of steel, through the Golden Gate and into the Pacific. Towards a group of rocks, cliffs and sea stacks that thrust through the ocean’s surface, 27 miles to the west. The Farallon Islands, they’re called, though days like today helped earn them another name. So many ships were ripped apart on their jagged, fog-shrouded shores, and swallowed by the surrounding seas, that sailors called them The Devil’s Teeth.
Travelling in our bubble of grey, we smell the islands before we see them. The stench could be the Devil’s breath: a tangy, musty miasma of ammonia and rotting seafood that penetrates the fog and spreads across the sea. The odour of accumulated guano; the stink of half a million seabirds. As we get closer to the islands, as sheer cliffs and jutting rocks break through a thinning greyness, we see them too. Cormorants, guillemots, murres, auklets and gulls, arrayed along every clifftop. Squawking, flapping and flying, they circle above beaches thick with seals and sea lions. Our boat hangs off the coast of the fog-shrouded islands, and the seals come to see us, turning the calm water into a churning, whirling melee. Until, without warning, the whirling stops, and a head pokes through the surface of the water, hanging in stillness, watching us with mournful eyes. Checking, for a moment, what we are doing.
Because we are strangers in this watery world of rocks, wings and fins. We humans always have been. And we are strangers who do not come with a record of kindness. In three years in the 1800s, hunters killed more than 150,000 seals on these islands; by the 1840s, there were no seals left. When gold was discovered in the Sierra Nevada and the world rushed to California, the Pacific Egg Company collected half a million murre eggs from the Farallon Islands every year to feed the growing city of San Francisco. The population of murre, once 400,000, decreased to just 6,000 birds. And when we had scraped the islands clean, removed every animal that could be sold, we found a new way to defile them. Between 1945 and 1970, 47,000 barrels of radioactive waste were dumped in the waters around the Farallon Islands.
On a day like today, it is easy to understand why sailors saw the devil here. Jagged rocks fade and reform within swirls of mist, emerging from nowhere beside our boat. Dark and ill-defined, they menace and brood. They are rocks that sunk ships; that claimed human lives. But those events were accidents of geography. They were not planned or systematic; they were not motivated by money. We humans are the ones with the teeth that have bitten and crushed and devoured. We are the devils.
But we can still change.
As our little boat chugs back towards San Francisco, the fog begins to lift. Our world is still grey, but a thinner grey, brightened by rays of sunlight arrowing through the mist. Bright enough that we can see spurts of water flaring from the surface of the sea.
“Humpbacks!” Shouts Becca, the boat’s naturalist, holding a pair of binoculars to her sun-browned face.
We rush to the rail and strain our eyes as Becca scribbles something on a pad. Because this is the purpose of our voyage. The Oceanic Society uses tourist trips to the Farallon Islands to monitor whale populations around one of the world’s busiest shipping lanes. The data that Becca collects – that we collect – is fed to an app called Whale Safe, which provides real-time information to nearby ships. Information they can use to avoid collisions with whales; to protect these animals.
Humans will always be strangers in this world, and right now our legacy is one of unkindness. Of rapacious greed and uncaring indifference. But despite everything that has happened, it is not too late. Human kindness – the kindness of strangers – can support the recovery of this marine environment. Can undo some of the damage. And it’s happening here, on this little boat.
Italian Tourist Dies of Trust – Tommaso Turi
The night before, over biryani in a Lahore hotel and a misplaced sense of confidence, I told another Italian I’d met that travelling in Pakistan was “absolutely fine.”
He was there for work – pale, nervous, scanning the restaurant as if someone might confiscate his passport. I, the self-appointed ambassador of adventure, assured him that Lahore was welcoming, safe, and full of good vegetables. That last point, in retrospect, was catastrophic.
By the next morning I was paying for my optimism in the most literal sense – violently ill, sweating like a broken fountain, and regretting every bite of the previous night’s beetroot salad. My new guide, Bilawal, whom I’d met only hours earlier, looked at me with deep concern and the serene confidence of a man who knew exactly what to do.
“Sir,” he said, “I can take you to the best doctor. In my village.”
His village. The words alone made me clutch my stomach harder. I pictured a long drive into the Punjab countryside, ending in a small hut, perhaps a goat, and my obituary titled Italian Tourist Dies of Trust.
But Bilawal was insistent, radiating sincerity. “He is a specialist,” he explained. “Sufi doctor. He uses herbs – very ancient, very proper. You drink his potion and you will be fine in thirty minutes.”
Thirty minutes. My European medicine hadn’t managed twelve hours. I looked at Bilawal’s hopeful face, the half-finished bottle of electrolyte in my hand, and thought: well, why not? When in Lahore…
The road unravelled into a dusty lane lined with tea stalls and bicycle repair shops. The air was thick with frying dough, petrol, and something herbal – perhaps destiny. When we reached Bilawal’s village, the bazaar was in full swing: shouting vendors, tinny music, and a haze of coriander and smoke.
He led me through a courtyard where dozens queued quietly. At the far end, enthroned behind a counter piled with jars, sat a man who appeared to be at least eighty – extraordinarily thin, wrapped in white cotton, with eyes sharp enough to cut fabric. Behind him rose a wall of herbs in bottles and sacks, like a library of dried miracles. In front, a long wooden bar gleamed with metal cups and pestles. It looked, disconcertingly, like a cocktail lounge for saints.
To my horror, Bilawal marched me straight to the front. No one protested. In Italy, this manoeuvre would have provoked an orchestra of insults and possibly thrown vegetables; here, people simply nodded, as if foreigners leaping queues were part of the day’s entertainment.
The old man studied me in silence for a full ten seconds, then barked a few words in Punjabi. His assistant, a boy of about twelve, set to work mixing powders, water, and what looked suspiciously like condensed milk. A small packet of seeds was wrapped for me in an old edition of The Dawn.
Bilawal translated: “He says you must drink this and chew the seeds. All. Quickly.”
I took a cautious sip. It was white, sweet, and faintly medicinal – imagine a milkshake made by an apothecary. I began dutifully chewing the seeds, which tasted of damp cardboard and determination. Halfway through, the old man snapped his fingers. The boy appeared with a scoop of crushed ice and dropped it into the glass.
Ice. In rural Pakistan. My inner European screamed. Every travel warning, every hygiene lecture, every parental voice since childhood rose in unison: You will die.
Bilawal beamed. “Very good, sir. Now you will feel better.”
I smiled weakly and took another sip, convinced that if the potion didn’t kill me, politeness might.
Yet within thirty minutes, I was fine. Completely fine. The fever vanished, the cramps dissolved, and my stomach felt lighter than my guilt for doubting the Sufi doctor. I stared at Bilawal in disbelief; he grinned like a man who had just proven both science and faith correct.
We drove on, surprisingly cheerful, towards Data Darbar, Lahore’s great Sufi shrine built over the resting place of the saint Ali Hujwiri. The domes shimmered through the haze, and the air carried the scent of rosewater and devotion. Drums echoed somewhere beyond the gates. I felt an absurd sense of reverence – or maybe relief. Perhaps the cure had been less about herbs and more about spirit.
Maybe I didn’t need a doctor after all. Maybe I just needed a miracle.
Water from Empty Hands – Simon Gibbs
I never asked his name.
I can still see the hard light around him – white, softly shared.
He didn’t call out; he didn’t wave. Just sat, still as the land itself.
A small nod. Not the kind that reaches out, but the kind that quietly makes room.
I had been walking alone for days, heading south through the highlands east of the Jordan Valley, following a track that was more memory than road.
By the third day, I’d stopped counting distance; the trail had faded into loose earth.
The air carried the faint sweetness of wild thyme. Heat shimmered on the horizon. Each step sent up a fine dust that clung to skin and boot leather.
It’s a strange thing to need – to feel your strength fall silent and realise you have nothing to offer back but hope. I measured the day by the shrinking stripe of shade at my feet.
My water was gone, and the sun was still unforgiving. My tongue, rough and heavy, lay like a stone in my mouth – and I realised I was closer to needing someone than I cared to admit.
I had braced for suspicion, forgetting how trust still lingers.
And then – him.
He sat cross-legged beneath a stunted acacia tree. The shade was a frail gift in that heat.
His clothes were the colour of the land ahead. His face carried years of sun, and a readiness to welcome.
He cupped his hands, shaping emptiness into an offering, a dark oval of shadow in his palms.
A moment. Then – water, cupped and offered.
He moved with the unhurried ease of someone for whom giving is a habit, not a decision.
He lifted it gently, the way a child shelters a candle.
No words, just a nod – that quiet Bedouin act of ḍiyāfa, that duty to give.
The silence between us settled into something almost like company.
I bent to fill my bottle. “Shukran,” I said – a simple thank you.
The first sip stung like truth; the second steadied me; the third reminded me what it meant to feel alive. His gaze stayed on the horizon, as if generosity needed no witness.
We sat, mirrored in quiet, bound not by words but by being seen.
For a while, I watched the space between us waver, the slow drift of dust motes in the light.
There was no language to bridge that silence, yet I felt something pass between us – as if gratitude itself had shape and weight.
In that stillness, I understood that travel isn’t only movement through the landscape but movement towards others – the fragile, generous space where trust begins. In a land of scarcity, his small gift was enough.
The way ahead was the same – bare, bright, unending – yet it no longer felt empty.
My bottle was full, but more than that, so was I – certain that even in the harshest places, compassion can appear, unmeasured and inexhaustible.
Even now, what stays with me is the simple, steady reminder that we survive through one another.
Every journey, however solitary, depends on unseen hands – the stranger who points the way, the one who shares what little they have, the one who offers shade.
Because of him, what lay before me didn’t feel mine alone. It was stitched together by moments of trust – small, quiet acts binding the world closer, one gesture at a time.
The light softened. The heat eased a little.
The path still wound through the same hard hills, but something in me had made room for it. I walked on, carrying the memory of water from empty hands – a silent testament to all we owe each other.
More information
For more information about our New Travel Writer of the Year competition and what it involves, head to our competitions page.