A literary travel journal. One place a week — written, narrated, layered with the sounds of where it was made. Mahale chimpanzees in the dawn canopy. Monastery bells in Bhutanese fog. The call to prayer rising over Old Jeddah at dusk. For people who've already been to the obvious places, and want to go further. From Tanzania to Bhutan, Saudi Arabia to Uzbekistan. <br /> If a story lands, the link in show notes connects you to the operator who lives there — the people we'd send our friends to. <br /> farside.earth · Sundays.
On The Far Side of the Earth
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Podcast Overview
A literary travel journal. One place a week — written, narrated, layered with the sounds of where it was made. Mahale chimpanzees in the dawn canopy. Monastery bells in Bhutanese fog. The call to prayer rising over Old Jeddah at dusk. For people who've already been to the obvious places, and want to go further. From Tanzania to Bhutan, Saudi Arabia to Uzbekistan. <br /> If a story lands, the link in show notes connects you to the operator who lives there — the people we'd send our friends to. <br /> farside.earth · Sundays.
Language
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Publishing Since
5/3/2026
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Recent Episodes
June 10, 2026
The Smell of Heat — Central Mongolia
<p>The first thing to know about central Mongolia in late spring is that it is cold enough that you stop minding what is on fire.</p><p>This week's issue: six days in a ger camp three hours west of Ulaanbaatar, with a stove fed on dried horse dung, six adults to a yurt, and the kind of quiet you only get when the nearest town is forty kilometres away in every direction.</p><p>The trip orbits four scenes. The horse-dung stove in the ger, which we will spend the entire episode reasoning about. A bonfire under a total lunar eclipse, where Otgon, the camp's host, started to sing — and where the throat-singing of central Asia stops being a YouTube curiosity and starts being a thing a person is doing about three metres from your face. A morning with a falconer named Davaa, on a day so clear the horizon was a single ruled line, watching a saker falcon do its working day. And the new Chinggis Khaan statue on a hill outside the capital — forty metres tall, stainless steel, exactly the scale a country might choose if it had finally decided to put its founder on a hill after eighty years of being officially discouraged from talking about him under Soviet supervision.</p><p>Between those scenes: the dune climb, the silence at the top, the vodka in small ceramic cups, the grandmother who walked me to the door of the ger on the last morning with a small wrapped gift in indigo wool, the drive back to UB across six hours and twelve thousand sheep, and the departure-board font of the traditional Mongolian script that I sat watching at the airport the way you might watch a writing system being remembered.</p><p>This episode is read by the editor, layered with the field sounds of central Mongolia: the wind off the steppe, the horse-dung stove ticking in the ger, the bonfire and the throat-singing under the eclipse, the saker falcon's wings, hooves on grass, a single eagle's call, and the long quiet of the drive back.</p><p>The Farside Pick for Mongolia is the operator we'd send our friends to — a small team in UB who run small-group trips for travellers who want to actually meet the family running the ger camp. Submit an enquiry through the journal entry below and we'll make the introduction directly.</p><p>If you enjoy this and want to help us keep going:buymeacoffee.com/farside</p><p>Read the full journal: farside.earth/journal/005-mongolia.html</p>
May 24, 2026
The Blue at the Centre of the World — Samarkand, Uzbekistan
<p>There is no adequate preparation for the Registan at dawn. You know it from photographs — the three madrasas arranged around the square, the blue and gold tilework — but photographs cannot tell you about the scale, or the silence, or the way the mosaics change colour as the sun moves.</p><p>This week's issue: four days in Samarkand at the moment of its reopening. Uzbekistan opened to general visa-free Western tourism in 2018, after twenty-seven years of effective closure under Islam Karimov. The country I walked is unrecognisable from the country a foreign traveller would have seen in 2010 — not because the buildings changed, but because the stance toward visitors did.</p><p>Five mausoleums in five days — Rukhobod, Gur-i-Amir, Hazrat Khizr, Bibi-Khanym, and the long avenue of Shah-i-Zinda. The buried pre-Islamic city of Afrasiyab on a hill at the edge of town, where seventh-century wall paintings still show the Sogdian merchants and Chinese envoys and Korean delegations who met here before the Mongols came. Bread that lasts a month, baked to a durability the people who eat it have used for centuries. Pomegranate juice every day. A wedding in deep ruby, turquoise, apple green and saffron, the bridesmaids' dresses against the white-gravel star paths of the park. And a tea house on a wooden platform under carpets, where an Asian sitting in a Central Asian shaded courtyard recognises the furniture.</p><p>This episode is read by the editor, layered with the field sounds of Samarkand: the open square at dawn, the vaulted brick of the mausoleums, the lanes of Shah-i-Zinda, the Sogdian wind at Afrasiyab, a market at lunch, the bulvar at six in the evening, the platform tea house, and the hill at Hazrat Khizr looking down at the city.</p><p>The Farside Pick for Uzbekistan is the operator we'd send our friends to — a small team that started off in the Nuratau Mountains who recently won international the TO DO! Award for Socially Responsible Tourism by ITB Berlin. Submit an enquiry through the journal entry below and we'll make the introduction directly.</p><p>If you enjoy this and want to help us keep going:buymeacoffee.com/farside</p><p>Read the full journal: farside.earth/journal/004-samarqand-uzbekistan.html</p><p>Audio credits:'Day_Kids_Playing_In_The_Park_4_Overhead' by JonathanTremblay, CC-BY 4.0, https://freesound.org/s/253407/'basement noise 02 140209_0075' by klankbeeld, CC-BY 4.0, https://freesound.org/s/218355/'R4_00343-1-FR-CountrysideSummerMorning' by kevp888, CC-BY 4.0, https://freesound.org/s/650404/Also includes CC0 field recordings by bassimat (dutor) and T_WAZ (tanbur) — credited in full at podcast/audio/beds/licenses.txt.</p>
May 17, 2026
At the Gate of Mecca — Jeddah, Saudi Arabia
<p>The restaurant had no chairs and no tables. There was a long room with cushions running the length of three walls, and when I sat down the waiter laid a clear plastic sheet on the carpet in front of me, and on the sheet he laid the food. I had no idea what to do with my legs.</p><p><br>This week's issue is a walk through Al-Balad — the historic district of Jeddah, the port that processed pilgrims to Mecca for a thousand years before Saudi Arabia opened to general tourism in 2019. Coral-stone houses with carved wooden lattice balconies (rawasheen) painted faded turquoise and sienna. A trainer in his fifties who waved me over and asked, smiling, "Would you let my students practice on you?" Three relay teams of nineteen-year-olds learning English and Hijazi history at the same time. A blonde tourist on the corniche in a tank top, drawing polite second glances at fifty meters from a country whose dress code shifted faster than its public expectations. And the cushion-room dinner — kabsa, kunafa, sugar cane juice, and the kind of cardamom coffee that arrives unannounced everywhere you go.</p><p><br>This episode is read by the editor, layered with the field sounds of Old Jeddah: the cushion-room restaurant, a distant adhan over Al-Balad, the wind through the Hijaz residential lanes, the evening bazaar of the souq, and gulls over the Red Sea corniche at sunset.</p><p><br>The Farside Pick for Saudi Arabia is the operator we'd send our friends to — a Saudi specialist who works the western coast and the Hijaz. Submit an enquiry through the journal entry below and we'll make the introduction directly.</p><p><br>If you enjoy this and want to help us keep going: buymeacoffee.com/farside<br></p><p>Read the full journal: farside.earth/journal/003-saudi-arabia-jeddah.html</p>
5 total episodes available
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