Weekly travel reads: Inside the world’s best airport

[The Travel Wire #84] One day in Jakarta, shooting for Lonely Planet, Ngorongoro Crater, and more travel reads.

Travel reads

• Inside the world’s best airport: Why does Changi keep winning? [BBC Travel]
“Singapore’s Changi Airport is famous for its waterfall, butterfly garden and seamless transit. But its real competitive edge is behind the scenes.”

• The ‘big durian’: one day in Jakarta, the world’s largest city [The Guardian]
“The UN has officially designated Jakarta the world’s largest city, home to 42 million. We explore a day in the life of the ‘big durian’.”

• Shooting for Lonely Planet [Seasfor Creative]
“Heading to Asia with a backpack and no real plan in the mid-90’s pretty much meant you had a Lonely Planet guide with you.”

• Ngorongoro Crater: the closest thing to Eden [Travelling Troubadour]
“Lions, elephants, and the calm of a self-contained world.”

• Suburban Kathmandu [Postcards from Rowena]
“Not quite the guidebook dream.”

• Phnom Penh, 1994: a party at the end of the world [Poste restante]
“The Killing Fields were a recent memory, guns on every street corner, yet Cambodia’s capital pulsed with a raw energy. An FT dispatch, from the archives.”

• Why people go to India and come back different [Never Quite a Local]
“(But not in ways they can explain).”

• ‘The Godfather’ descended on a tiny Sicilian village, and it’s never been the same [CNN Travel]

• Travel Diaries: Ella, Sri Lanka [Reverie Travel Journal]
“And a rant about how social media is ruining travel.”

• You can now walk the entire English coastline. And this photographer has walked every step [Adventure]
“Interest in long-distance, low-impact walking is surging as England opens the world’s longest continuous coastal walk. Photographer Quintin Lake, who’s walked over 6,835 miles (11,000 kilometers) of Britain’s coast, reflects on what it means to experience a country slowly, and on foot.”