Claire van den Heever, Author at VoiceMap's Blog

London’s last offline days, America’s Chinatown microcosm, and chocolate fortune cookies

Welcome to VoiceMap’s newsletter, Senses of Direction, where we share stories from around the world that spark curiosity and stimulate your senses.

This month, we travel to London’s kaleidoscopic past, back to that critical point in the 90s when “we sensed that we were living our last moments in the material world, before all our visions migrated online.”

A few days into the Year of the Fire Horse, we venture to Chinatowns across the United States to consider what creates – and challenges – people’s sense of culture and belonging. Lastly, we visit the Golden Gate Fortune Cookie Factory, where this sweet treat has been produced for decades, to find out how Chinese it really is.

Soapie safety videos, Bridgerton set-jetting, and 2026 travel trends

Welcome to the twentieth edition of VoiceMap’s newsletter, Senses of Direction, where we share stories from around the world that spark curiosity and stimulate your senses.

With a new year ahead of us, we find out about the rise of luxury train travel, “grocery shop tourism” and other travel trends for 2026. We see how safety on board can be surprisingly amusing with a Filipino soap opera-style inflight video, and go behind the scenes of Bridgerton, which inspired up to two million set-jetters to visit Bath last year.

Caravans of the sea, songs in search of home, and Christmas in Copenhagen

Welcome to the nineteenth edition of VoiceMap’s newsletter, Senses of Direction, where we share stories from around the world that spark curiosity and stimulate your senses.

This month, we join Paul Salopek aboard a container ship, where men spend their days on “watery caravans,” moving the contents of our material lives – including most of the world’s Christmas presents. We also hear an astonishing performance by a bridge-building musician who’s learned to find “different homes” with his cello. Lastly, there’s a moving Christmas story about a fir tree, told with Hans Christian Andersen’s archetypal flair.

And, if you’re looking for a last-minute gift to celebrate Christmas – or simply curiosity – allow me to suggest VoiceMap’s vouchers. They’re simple without being commonplace, plus you can schedule delivery by email with a personal message for friends and family that share your delight in discovery.

Rosalía outperforms AI and Mona Lisa goes viral in 1911

Welcome to the eighteenth edition of VoiceMap’s newsletter, Senses of Direction, where we share stories from around the world that spark curiosity and stimulate your senses.

This month we whet our appetite for wide-ranging musical traditions via Rosalía’s visceral – and very human – new album, then we go to Paris to find out about a theft from the Louvre that generated more clickbait than the French Crown Jewels.

Lastly, we continue with art as a theme in Prague, where the city’s cheekiest sculptor created a witty memorial to the country’s “rock ‘n’ roll president.”

Jane Goodall’s travel writing, British ghosts, and Switzerland’s entitled cats

Welcome to the seventeenth edition of VoiceMap’s newsletter, Senses of Direction, where we share stories from around the world that spark curiosity and stimulate your senses.

This month we travel to Tanzania, where the late Dr Jane Goodall changed lives. We also get a glimpse of how the legal rights of cats have shaped Zurich.

Lastly, in celebration of Halloween – and because our Kickstarter campaign only has six days to go – we’re sharing spooky stories from VoiceMap tours across the UK. It’s a tiny sample because when you sift through the almost 350 tours we have there, you come to understand that the British are peculiarly fascinated by ghouls and ghosts.

London Special Edition

Welcome to this special edition of Senses of Direction where, today, we’re sharing stories about one city in particular: London. We’ve dropped a pin on the UK’s capital to celebrate the launch on Wednesday of our first ever Kickstarter project.

The focus of our project is a new set of features for the growing number of curious locals that take VoiceMap tours regularly – sometimes every weekend. We’re going to give this community early access to new tours, as well as a say in what we publish next.

We’re starting with the UK because we already cover 82 destinations there and we see an opportunity to offer something truly comprehensive, with a pipeline of new walks, drives, museum tours, and train trips.

In London itself, our count of tours has more than tripled since 2019 and today’s edition of Senses celebrates the “city of villages”. There’s the award-winning author Zadie Smith talking about her neighbourhood, a collection of iconic photographs, musings on what it means to be a Londoner, and three locations from VoiceMap’s latest tours there, pointing out the city’s foundation stone, a poetic guide to Covent Garden’s prostitutes, and a flat shared by Jimi Hendrix and the Beatles.

Go-go Shanghai, border bricolage in Baarle, and a rerun of the Gilded Age

Welcome to the sixteenth edition of VoiceMap’s newsletter, Senses of Direction, where we share stories from around the world that spark curiosity and stimulate your senses.

This month, we travel back to Shanghai’s boom at the turn of the millennium when, as one expat put it, “nothing was allowed but everything was possible.” In New York City, we hear about the exuberant Gilded Age and how it’s having its time in the sun again, thanks to the HBO series.

Lastly, we get a taste of life in the town with the world’s most complicated border, where picking your jurisdiction is part of daily life for teenagers and taxpayers alike.

Orwell, Hunter S, Japan’s microseasons, and a final generation for French wine

Welcome to the fifteenth edition of Senses of Direction, VoiceMap’s newsletter, where we share stories from around the world that spark curiosity and stimulate your senses.

This month, we travel to Bordeaux, where a way of life is declining alongside wine consumption. In Japan, we find out how microseasons with names like ‘evening cicadas singing’ might help us stay connected to the natural world and its rhythms. Lastly, we hear about two very different writers – George Orwell and Hunter S. Thompson – and their very different relationships to place.

Rome’s wolves and river crabs, sonic violence in Korea, plus Mandela’s mark on the world

Welcome to the fourteenth edition of VoiceMap’s newsletter, Senses of Direction, where we share stories from around the world that spark curiosity and stimulate your senses.

This month, we travel to Korea’s Demilitarized Zone to meet the people who live in this strange, liminal space. We also visit Rome’s wild side to find the many types of animals that have made their home in the city’s ruins.

Lastly, we put a spotlight on Nelson Mandela – who would have celebrated his 107th birthday yesterday – and share a smorgasbord of audio tracks about his life, from Stockholm to Madrid.

Inimitable Bourdain, Harvey Milk’s Castro HQ, and a 27-year-long walk home

Welcome to the thirteenth edition of VoiceMap’s newsletter, Senses of Direction, where we share stories from around the world that spark curiosity and stimulate your senses.

Today we remember Anthony Bourdain – the inimitable travel icon who was born and also died in the month of June – as well as ‘The Mayor of Castro Street,’ who would begin speeches with “I’m Harvey Milk, and I’m here to recruit you!”

Finally, there’s a story about a Brit who’s been making his way home on foot to Hull for 27 years, via hair-raising routes including the Bering Strait.

Catching luck in Mumbai, centuries of overtourism in Italy, and remembering George Floyd

Welcome to the twelfth edition of VoiceMap’s newsletter, Senses of Direction, where we share stories from around the world that spark curiosity and stimulate your senses.

Today, we’re sharing a delightful video that explains why Mumbai Local passengers are suddenly excited about buying train tickets. You’ll also find ideas from 18th century Florence for mitigating overtourism today, and a personal perspective on what Minneapolis was like the week George Floyd died, on the anniversary of his death.

Metal worms, portraits from Greenland, and hygge’s link to Hans Christian Anderson

Welcome to the eleventh edition of VoiceMap’s newsletter, Senses of Direction, where we share stories from around the world that spark curiosity and stimulate your senses. This week we’ve got a short musing on trains, created by the Mexican filmmaker known as Gawx. You’ll also find out what declining an offer of fresh whale meat from a plastic bag may or may not mean when you’re a foreigner living in Greenland. Lastly, there’s a moving story by Denmark’s favourite fairytale writer, Hans Christian Andersen, tracing the origins of the national concept of hygge.

Earth’s largest, “god-mad” gathering, London’s endagered cabbies, and pints of DNA

Welcome to the tenth edition of Senses of Direction, VoiceMap’s newsletter, where we share travel-inspired stories that spark curiosity and stimulate your senses.

This week we travel to the banks of the Ganges, where a mind-bending 420 million people took part in the Hindu pilgrimage, Maha Kumbh Mela. We also look back at the history of London’s iconic black cabs, at a moment when their days may be numbered, and return to a pub in Cambridge that serves an ale named ‘Eagle’s DNA’ as a tribute to the pivotal scientific breakthrough that was first announced under its roof.

Land of the (white) lotus eaters, Notre Dame 2.0, and brilliant women hidden in plain sight

Welcome to the ninth edition of VoiceMap’s newsletter, Senses of Direction.

This week, we dive into the crowded waters of Koh Samui, where the ‘White Lotus effect’ has brought a new tide of tourists. We also step inside the gleaming interior of Notre Dame 2.0, with a French YouTuber as our guide. Then, in celebration of International Women’s Day, we’ve got a story about a ‘wild’ woman who shocked 18th century Scotland by riding a sow through Edinburgh, but managed to leave her mark on the world nevertheless.

McSpaghetti, jam sessions, and the bank of Scrooge

Welcome to VoiceMap’s newsletter, Senses of Direction.

In our eighth edition, we take a sensory journey to the Silk Road, where music remains one of the trade route’s most enduring exports. Cultural exchange through commerce is also the theme of a new book, taking us to the far corners of McDonald’s’ surprisingly eclectic empire, where you’re as likely to find macarons and McSpaghetti as you are a Big Mac.

And from Gloucester, on the site of a McDonald’s that was once a bank, there’s the story of a very real miser who inspired Charles Dickens’ fictional Scrooge.

Time wealth, travel in 2025, and Bangkok’s backpacker hub

Welcome to the seventh edition of VoiceMap’s fortnightly newsletter, Senses of Direction.

In our first edition of the new year, we’ve got a selection of stories, trends, and conversations to inspire your travel plans for 2025. There’s a podcast with Tim Ferris and Rolf Potts, who talk about everything from long-term travel tactics and “vagabonding,” to redefining one’s mindset around success and seeing a city with new eyes.

There’s a series of larger-than-life vignettes from the pulsating heart of Bangkok’s traveller hub, and an engaging collection of trends for 2025 that shed light on how – and why – travel is changing. We also voyage to Paris to hear an esoteric take on why many a traveller’s aspirations culminate in this city, and the Champs-Élysées.

Christmas mythmaking, perfect strangers, natural wonders and Paul Theroux

Welcome to the sixth edition of VoiceMap’s fortnightly newsletter, Senses of Direction.

This week, we’ve got a behind-the-scenes look at a beloved symbol of the holiday season, the Rockefeller Center Christmas Tree. There’s the unlikely story of a man who set off on his first-ever long distance cycle – all the way to India – after a chance encounter in a London pub, and a series of astounding photographs from this year’s Wildlife Photographer of the Year competition.

Lastly, there’s a reflection on travelling to Burma over the course of 53 years by Paul Theroux, “who, it’s fair to say, reinvented travel writing as an art form.”

The best self-guided audio tour apps for New York City

New York, New York: it might be so nice they named it twice, but in a way it’s also two cities. One is at the mouth of the Hudson River. The other exists in our collective imaginations – and the sitcom Friends proves it.

Friends was actually filmed at Warner Bros. Ranch in Los Angeles, nearly 3,000 miles away, but in Manhattan’s West Village, you’ll find people taking selfies outside the apartment building that was used for cutaway scenes, to show where most of the gang were supposed to live.

How do I know this? From a self-guided audio tour by TellBetter. Its Emmy-nominated producer Tom Darbyshire calls this “one of the least deserving tourist attractions in the Village,” but it’s an almost perfect example of the imagined NYC, even if it makes “real New Yorkers choke on their lattes.”

Audio Tour Case Study | Building your own white-labelled app vs. publishing with VoiceMap

For award-winning ad man Tom Darbyshire, white-labelling an audio tour app seemed like the perfect way to find an audience for his New York City walking tours. “It sounds cool to have your own app,” he says, “but I didn’t anticipate the headaches”.

Marketing was turning into a fulltime job. Tom also found GPS playback unreliable. At the beginning of 2022, he decided to try moving one of his tours over to VoiceMap, where he publishes as TellBetter. GPS playback worked well. Tom became “a GPS convert” and moved the rest of his tours across. When he crunched the numbers at the end of 2022, he realised VoiceMap was responsible for 83% of annual sales.

Audio Tour Case Study | Using self-guided tours to monetise your podcast or blog’s fanbase

Annie Sargent’s travel podcast has provided her with the perfect audience for a series of VoiceMap audio tours in Paris. In 2022, her sales were up by six times on 2021, and half of her listeners buy more than one of her five self-guided tours.

Annie Sargent knows two things for certain about people who become fans of her travel podcast, Join Us in France: they enjoy audio, and they like France. They also really like her, it turns out, and with those three ingredients, she has a ready-made market for VoiceMap tours.

This is one reason why Annie sells almost as many tours through her own website as she does through VoiceMap’s website and apps. It’s also why she sells more than one tour to most of her listeners. It helps that Annie’s tours are excellent, of course, with over 750 five-star ratings, and she has become one of VoiceMap’s most successful publishers, selling thousands of dollars’ worth of tours in 2022.