The myrtles and eucalypts that rise to 90 metres were saplings when Queen Elizabeth I ascended the English throne.

They cast soft shadows on floors tangled with moss and fern, vivid puce and white fungi sprouting like sea creatures on damp timbers. Traveller, beware, for enchantment has a sting in its tail. Get lost and you may never be found.

The spectre of the thylacine, an Alsatian-sized carnivorous marsupial, still haunts these glades. Shadows lurk behind locking walls of ancient Huon Pine. Look, over there! A glimpse. Gone. Species vanished.

There’s another flicker just after dawn up the Pieman River. Something is skulking, paws padding noiselessly over logs encrusted with fungus and fern, boughs curtained in silvery-green lichen. What’s that? A scurry. A scat.

A thylacine?

The story begins, as it often does, at the pub.

Not a drop had passed her lips, but Susan Gray was intoxicated by The Dromedary Hotel in the tiny timber town of Central Tilba, on the far south coast of NSW. Years of drought had leached away vitality in the public house that had connected history and community with heart for more than 125 years. The paint was peeling. There was a For Sale sign out front.

“I have no idea why Jeremy and I bought it,” Susan

confesses. “We were insane. I hadn’t even pulled a beer behind a bar at that point. Three years later, I still wonder ‘What have we done?’”

It’s a frigid afternoon in the Southern Highlands and the Wingello Village Store is closing. The warmth inside is palpable. On the inside, there’s a wall papered with newspaper clippings; local celebrities and feats of heroism. An open fire flickers in the book corner. There are postcards picturing children in green meadows under homespun slogans: Wingello — Where summer walks are a short step away and Wingello — Where the grass is greener.

The grass is green again yet this was ground zero in last year’s apocalyptic Black Summer bushfire. And nothing was going to stop the Currowan Fire …

It is not the day to go bushwalking. There have been no gale warnings or sheep grazier’s alerts, but the cliffs on this wave-carved island are gauzed in sea mist. Rain sweeps across the boulder- strewn ridges and pelts into the dense glacial valleys that have remained almost untouched since the last ice age. Time stops still. Wet. Cold. Alone. Then Tasmania conjures one of its magical moments.

There are probably more beautiful landscapes packed into the relatively confined geography of New Zealand than anywhere else in the world.

The simple way out from a paralysis in planning is to follow the road, more or less, northwards from Auckland.

It’s a good idea until the information desk attendant at Auckland Airport fails to provide a printed roadmap beyond the fringe of New Zealand’s largest city. “Sorry,” she says. “We don’t have pamphlets for driving to other places.”

There are many things to discuss at the end of a four-day hike over wild terrain in north-eastern Tasmania but ten urban trekkers are seated in a circle of reflective silence. Clyde Mansell, one of the Aboriginal visionaries behind the wukalina walk, is telling a story.

It’s the story of his people …

“You can’t see under the opening because it’s dark,” he confesses breezily over breakfast, “but it only takes four or five fin kicks and you’re in.”

The Resort Manager is disconcertingly short on detail about the cavern concealed within the limestone coast on the northwest tip of Tanna island in Vanuatu.

He is pointing to a small boat moored at the water’s edge beyond a tussle of garish pink bougainvillea ...

It won't last for long. If you're not there at the right time you miss it. And nobody knows when it will next occur.

So, James Wood is on a mission, to collect and store genetically diverse seed from the trees most at risk from climate change in the Tasmanian Wilderness World Heritage Area.

He is not a survival expert. He's a botanist from Kew Gardens in London, and he has never been on the Overland Track. It’s the middle of the pandemic. He is alone in the wilderness. Almost.

The lottery that guarantees 10 permits to visit one of the most psychedelically spectacular rock formations in the United States is about to begin.

NOZAWA ONSEN used to be a well-kept secret revealed only to those able to keep the details confidential.

“You mustn’t tell anyone,” instructed my intrepid colleague after returning from its powdery slopes last year plastered from knee to thigh.

Sorry friend. The secret is out …

“You cannot leave this city without having ‘la tire d’erable sur neige’,” says the guide. “‘Maple sugar on snow’ IS Quebec City.”

Molten maple syrup cooled on fresh snow is as much a part of life in Canada’s predominantly French-speaking capital as a glass of vin rouge and a bowl of garlicky escargot.

The acclaimed British novelist Nicholas Shakespeare describes it as "the only trek".

"If asked by the right person to nominate one of my favourite spots on earth, I would pause and, in my mind's eye, take a breath of sea-air from a long deserted beach on the Freycinet Peninsula," he writes. "I would try and describe a walk on white sand, past an island lagoon flecked with black swans … to a lodge concealed in the trees."

THE YORKSHIRE DALES was as restful and refreshing as the summer rains that announced our arrival at the imposing stone mansion in Malhamdale. No response from a knock at the heavy front door on the pillared portico at Newfield Hall. We entered anyway …

“You are now entering the rarest rainforest on planet earth: the remnant of a 65-million-year- old Gondwanaland Antarctic cool temperate rainforest.” Trevor Beltz pauses for effect. “If you were to walk 20 metres off this track in any particular direction, you would more than likely be the first person, Indigenous or otherwise, to stand on that spot.”

Humans are meant to leave only footprints in the remote wilderness of south-west Tasmania but they are not alone.

The wildlife expert leading our boat-based expedition around pristine Bathurst Harbour stops abruptly when he spots three huge raptor claws carved into the buttery sand along spectacular Stephens Bay.

There was a full moon when John Whelan joined his friend for a little backcountry night skiing in the snow-capped Canadian Rocky Mountains.

“It would be rare for the coyote pack to take down a couple of adult men,” recalls Whelan, “but you don’t tempt fate out there.”

Ask David Greatorex about benefaction at the Art Gallery of New South Wales and there’s a memory that burns too bright to ignore.

THE purplish hues of Uluru blackened into shadow and the majestic mound was swallowed by night.

Not far away, we dined on white tablecloths, a bush tucker buffet under a coldly crisp and cloudless central desert sky….