Travel stories told slowly,
so you can fall asleep to them
Henry Hartley spent thirty-four years drawing maps of places he never visited. Now he goes. Each story is one destination, told at the pace of a slow evening, with nothing you need to remember and nothing you have to keep up with.
Start here
Lyon, Between Two Rivers
Silver at the temples, wire-rimmed glasses, a heavy wool overcoat. He packs four maps and forgets his razor, and he overpacks tea, which is known and accepted. Rose has walked thirty-one years beside him and has stopped being surprised. He counts his thank-yous in the local language and reckons a day above twenty a good one, and he carries an atlas he corrects in pencil, one correction per journey. The first correction is Lyon, the one French city nobody ever asked him to draw.
The middle of Lyon, the heart of it, lies on the land between the Rhône and the Saône. On my colleague's sheet — I have seen it since, in the office archive — that strip carries the name Presqu'île. It is a common word on French maps — France has presqu'îles all along its coast — and I had written it myself, in other corners of the country, without ever once asking what it meant. It means almost an island. Thirty-four years in the trade and I confess I never noticed: there is a city in France whose centre is officially, on the maps, an almost. You live on the almost-island. You do your shopping on the almost-island. I unpacked my tea on the almost-island and slept like a man in the right place.
The sleep contract
- No music under the narration. Only the voice. A little at the open and close, nothing underneath the words, ever.
- No jolts. No sudden volume, no cliffhangers, no ad breaks in the middle of a story. The last minutes only get quieter.
- Nothing to keep up with. Drift off in the middle and the story has done its job.
- True places. The journey is imagined. Every street, dish and river in it is real and checked.
The newest story
Railay, the Place You Walk To
A headland in Krabi with no road to it, reached only by boat: two beaches, one street, and a jungle path that starts two hundred yards from the bars. Henry walks it end to end, and finds the sheet of paper he would have to draw it on has almost nothing on it.
New stories arrive two or three times a week, and every one of them carries its full written text alongside the video. Every episode so far.
