Travel on film

An aerial view of London on Kiritimati. A narrow strip of land separates the lagoon from the ocean. Kiritimati is also known as Christmas Island in Kiribati.

Waves break against the shore, sending jets of water through openings in the coastal rocks. Tonga.

A rope descent into a rocky cove in Tonga. Waves break around boulders below, with tropical vegetation on the slopes.

Surf at the foot of Tonga’s sea cliffs, with palms growing on the plateau above.

Children singing for visitors in a village hall with a palm-thatched roof on Lelepa Island, Vanuatu.

Filmed from our gyroplane: the Genghis Khan monument and yurts on the steppe near Ulaanbaatar.

Our flight over the steppe: a green valley and the low sun seen from the gyroplane cockpit.

The road through the steppe near Ulaankhus, filmed from our car on the way from Ölgii to the Altai.

A camel walks past the car on the steppe near Ulaankhus, with a herd in the distance.

Timofei peels potatoes inside a yurt in the Mongolian Altai.

Our morning boat ride on Khövsgöl: Nikita in the cabin, with blue water and the lakeshore outside.

A reindeer at a herders’ camp in the Khövsgöl area, with people and conical tents nearby.

A French flag on a flagpole in front of a large banyan tree, lawn and benches, a bus in the background

Turquoise shallow lagoon with the shadow of a light aircraft, then the view tilts up to the horizon, reef and mountains

View from a light aircraft: an identical amphibian flies alongside over the sea and coast; a selfie of a person in a headset in the corner

In the maneapa on Funafuti people sit together, clap and drum, then stand up to dance. A fatele is an ordinary community occasion: adults and children both take part. It starts slowly and is loud by the end.

At the northern end of Fongafale there is a mound of rubbish, with an excavator working on it. On site, you can see that it is higher than seven metres and higher than any natural point on the atoll. Calling it a “summit of Tuvalu” is easy, but it is not a hill: almost everything on the island is imported, and land is short. The only official landfill sits in a former borrow pit by the road. In 2015 some of those pits were filled with sand from the lagoon. The site is fenced, green waste is composted, and scrap metal is shipped away for recycling.

Footage on the Funafuti runway: it is open and clear, a shared public space. When no plane is due, people walk, play and talk on it, and they clear it before a landing. The plane in the frame is a private flight and is not part of the regular route.