Author Archive: Claire van den Heever

Claire van den Heever

Claire van den Heever is the editor of VoiceMap's blog and the monthly Senses of Direction newsletter. She spent a decade travelling overland between Europe and Asia, co-founding the travelogue Old World Wandering, praised by National Geographic for its "thoughtful, well-written slow travel writing." She's the author of Paint By Numbers: China's Art Factory from Mao to Now, written during four years in China, for which she travelled to contemporary artists’ studios to connect the dots between Mao-era propaganda and the country's explosive changes. Her human interest stories have appeared in Quartz, The Huffington Post, Mail & Guardian, and others.

How We Travel: Why Jo likes herself best in Greece

Jo’s three-month experiment in Greece with her partner Darrel in 2018 turned into a new, nomadic way of living. Since then, the couple have been moving between countries every few months, using South Africa and Greece as bases. Jo has taken around 25 VoiceMaps in several countries, from Georgia to Japan.

This interview is part of our new How We Travel series, in which we speak to VoiceMap’s community of curious explorers about how they travel.

Dolly’s Mountain Home, Bourdain’s origin story, and music’s links to places from Beethoven to Britpop

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 start with a mountain home in Tennessee that brings people from Kansas to Kenya together.

We also hear about the nineteen-year-old Provincetown dishwasher who became the most beloved traveller of his generation, and follow music to the places it came from: Beethoven’s Bonn, the Minneapolis club with a late-night entertainment exemption for the city’s favourite musician, and the home of the American folk opera, featuring a performance of Summertime by tour publisher Phil Biedron’s wife.

How We Travel: Why “home means Marc and Pam” wherever they are

Pamela and Marc retired in 2023, sold their house in San Francisco, and set off to travel full time. Two and a half years and 48 countries later, the nomadic couple have no plans to stop.

Their approach is deliberately slow – a month or more in one place, renting an apartment, doing the grocery shopping, learning the bus routes – so that a destination has time to become, briefly, home. They’ve taken about thirty VoiceMap tours in 15 countries around the world.

This interview is part of our new How We Travel series, in which we speak to VoiceMap’s community of curious explorers about how they travel.

Staying home, the world’s ‘oldest’ restaurants, bucket showers and Muji slippers

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 return to the blissful days of pre-smartphone travel, and reflect on what we’ve gained and lost. We also hear about landing in the “deep end” of India in VoiceMap’s new interview series, How We Travel – about what travel means to VoiceMap’s community of curious explorers.

Lastly, we pop into Goethe’s favourite watering hole in Leipzig, the establishment where Goya washed dishes, and find out how the word “restaurant” predates several establishments claiming to be “the world’s oldest.”

How We Travel: Why travel makes Yao Zhao a better version of himself

Yao Zhao is one of those people who seems to be perpetually travelling. Originally from Chongqing in southwestern China and now based in Washington, DC, these days, he spends roughly three months abroad each year.

He’s got piles of energy and runs his business, 50Hertz Tingly Foods, from anywhere in the world – yet he’s also drawn to slowing down on remote islands, and going nowhere in particular. He’s the instigator behind ambitious trips with his many friends as often as he strikes out alone, and has a remarkable talent for making new ones wherever he goes. He’s taken VoiceMap tours in around twenty destinations around the world.

This is the first interview in a new blog series, How We Travel, in which we speak to VoiceMap’s community of curious explorers about how they travel.

Heatwave noctourism, flotsam in Alaska, and football’s icons around the world

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 follow a journalist down Alaska’s coast as he rummages through “the tide pools of memory.” We hear a heat expert’s thoughts on how hotter summers might just make us better travellers – if we learn to adapt.

Finally, on the day of the FIFA World Cup final, we discover the near sanctity of icons like FC Barcelona and Maradona, then go behind the scenes of the TV shows that have helped popularise football in the US.

Tajikistani grandmothers, Stonewall’s chorus line, and Tiananmen, massacre and muse

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 the mountains of Tajikistan where a filmmaker remembers her grandmother, and grapples with what it means to belong to a place without ever living there.

We mark the memory of the Tiananmen Square Massacre, and learn about the art and literature that’s emerged from this epoch-defining event. We also remember the long struggle towards gay rights by hearing stories about the origins of International Pride Month from three cities in very different parts of the US.

London with Stephen Fry and Dan Snow, local languages, and sherry-drinking mice

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, VoiceMap’s founder Iain Manley explains why we have a new logo and the new tagline ‘curiously human audio tours’ in this Reel.

We explore how dying languages – and the loss by the end of this century of half of the world’s seven thousand languages – are a potent illustration of the ways words and culture connect. We also travel to Andalucia, where sherry-swilling mice won over a bodega’s workers.

But first, we have new tours by Sir Stephen Fry and History Hit’s Dan Snow to announce.

Nude hiking and the grandpapa tree

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’ve got a story that begins with a missing cherry tree, and ends somewhere near the roots of how we remember a place. We also consider the quiet art of not offending anyone abroad which, it turns out, extends to what you wear on a Swiss hiking trail. Lastly, we visit remarkable trees in Wānaka, New Orleans and Vancouver that have survived against the odds.

Ukrainian folk warriors, the mysteries of Hanoi’s pho, and soup from Tbilisi to the Sunset Strip

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

In this edition, we travel to Vietnam’s capital, arguably the only place where the nation’s favourite noodle soup dish, phở, tastes “truly good.” You can also treat yourself to an energising performance by a Ukrainian band who are using folk songs and captivating “ethno-dramas” to fight for a culture under siege.

We’re celebrating VoiceMap’s 12th birthday this month. Phở became a jumping off point to explore our catalogue of over 70,000 locations, created by a constellation of publishers from around the world. In this edition you’ll hear stories about… soup – in audio tours from Tbilisi, Tokyo, LA, and Geneva.

It reminded me of the nourishing power of storytelling, wherever we are.

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.