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It looks as if hundreds of little worms have wriggled and writhed the night away on a 30-centimeter patch of sand below our feet. Four of us have been tracking rhinos on foot since sunrise at Phinda Private Game Reserve, a 70,560-acre reserve in KwaZulu-Natal where seven ecosystems collide, hosting everything from crocs to cheetahs. Watching Thembinkosi (aka Mr T, assistant head tracker) at work is mesmerizing. He picks out our path, following where the rhinos have been chomping on grass, breaking branches, and even offloading on a midden, a communal pile of rhino dung that functions like ‘rhino Facebook’—spreading rhino gossip.

It’s gone through a number of dramatic upheavals in recent decades, and most recently, we’ve seen the escalation of the Rohingya crisis, with tens of thousands of the Muslim ethnic group being killed, and hundreds of thousands more being forced to flee to seek refuge in neighboring Bangladesh. Marley Burns runs an adventure tour operation called Silk Road Adventures. Initially, we felt it unfair to withhold our investment to local suppliers, guesthouses, roadside street-food vendors and all manner of other micro-businesses that have essentially nothing to do with the creation or implementation of their government’s strategies,” he says. We made the decision that we couldn’t, with clear conscience, run a trip to one area of a country when just a hundred miles away another region was experiencing a disaster.

Instead, I give the more complicated (and truthful) answer: I’m staying at a hotel in Burbank called the Safari Inn. A throwback to the golden age of motor travel, the low-rise Safari Inn has been a Burbank landmark since 1955. Ever since irreverent crime flick True Romance was filmed here in the early ‘90s, I’ve always wanted to bed down at the Safari Inn. A trip 20-plus years in the making, it’s a miracle the small hotel was still in business.

They bring color to the streets of Dhaka, but as populations rise and cities modernize, Bangladesh’s rickshaws, and the traditional art that adorns them, are at risk. On one of Old Town Dhaka’s narrow lanes, two men toil away in a cycle rickshaw workshop. Beside them is a new rickshaw, decorated with hot-pink illustrations of three film stars, a festooned hood, metal stud detailing and handlebar streamers. Creating art for visitors has become a new income stream—because these days there isn’t enough rickshaw painting work to sustain Yousuf and his family.