Hello everyone,

We’re thrilled to officially announce the reopening of VoyageForum, now under the MyAtlas Group banner (click here to learn more about the acquisition of VoyageForum)! After four long years of closure, VoyageForum and its community are finally coming back to life! 🙂

Starting next week, we’ll begin sending out the newsletter announcing the forum’s reopening to all registered members, gradually over several weeks. This approach will give us enough time to train the new team while ensuring the new site server runs smoothly. So, please bear with us a few more weeks before the forum returns to its pre-2020 levels of traffic and participation.

We have plenty of ideas to not only grow VoyageForum further but also make it more financially stable. It’s important to note that the forum’s closure in 2020 was due to a lack of profitability following the impacts of the COVID-19 crisis. We’re committed to doing everything we can to prevent this financial situation from happening again, while ensuring a good balance between user experience and displaying our partners’ offers on the site.

We’d also like to publicly thank François Boucher, the founder of VoyageForum, for not only creating VoyageForum in 2002 and managing it for so many years with his team, but also for recognizing the skills within MyAtlas Group to ensure a smooth transition and continued development of the site. François will continue to collaborate with us for at least a few more months, mainly handling the technical aspects (programming and server management) and training the new team. Thanks again, François, for everything! 🙂

We can’t wait to see VoyageForum come back to life, with thousands of travelers helping each other, sharing great tips, and celebrating their passion for travel! Dear VoyageForum members, it’s now your turn to breathe new life into the forum by coming back regularly to share your travel experiences. Welcome back to your travel forum, and we look forward to seeing you all in large numbers! 🙂

Happy travels,

Hervé Degauchy, President of MyAtlas Group

I’m kicking off my first travel journal since VF reopened!

This will mostly be to share my impressions and a few photos, with a bit of a delay, but I’m starting this journal while I’m still here.

A big thank you to those who helped me plan this trip!

I was able to organize this trip to one of the most expensive countries in the world thanks to the home-exchange principle. Not necessarily a direct swap, but through a points system, which is more flexible for choosing where you want to go without it having to be a reciprocal exchange.

I’m adding my small contribution to the reopening celebration by posting this travel journal from India, which we did in January 2024. There were four of us—two couples—and we spent three weeks looping through Rajasthan, stopping in Delhi and Agra (which, as everyone knows, aren’t actually in Rajasthan).

While borders were closed, I started imagining what an ideal itinerary might look like—one that strings together all the Southwest’s must-see spots in just two weeks, during the best time of year: September to October. When the U.S. announced in September 2021 that borders would reopen in the coming weeks, I regained hope and began scanning for flight tickets for a departure in September 2022.

Dear members of this forum,

*With the pandemic, travel guides have been replaced by cookbooks. With lockdown, there’s no need for the globetrotter’s guide—the cookbook is gospel, and your daily life turns into a Spaghetti Western. It’s no longer about the good guys and the bad actors, but the good and bad fats. And for a few extra pinches of salt. To the tune of Ennio Morricone, it’s hard to diagnose your pastalogy—sorry, your pathology.

On this forum, I shared my first trip to Tunisia from mid-February to early March (voyageforum.com/...en-direct-d11460662/), a trip I enjoyed so much that six weeks later, I’m back in Tunisia for a full 15 days.

This was my first time returning to Japan since the COVID lockdown. My trips are always intense. We're not here to relax. We're here to explore, mingle with locals, be welcomed into associations and museums, and discover things most people wouldn’t even suspect exist on the other side of the world.

Here we go, the big day has finally arrived. A trip eagerly awaited by the whole family (my two kids, my husband, and me). To keep it short, we left Nice and arrived in Namibia on June 25, 2025, then left again on the 21st—so four weeks later.

All aboard our tuk-tuk! Yes, you read that right: a real tuk-tuk, a tiny, colorful, rattling box on wheels that putters along at a snail’s pace. The idea? Well, first off, Sri Lanka and its winding roads leading to vast expanses of lush nature are *perfect* for this kind of ride. And since it’s one of only two countries in the world that let foreigners rent and drive these mini speedsters, we’re gonna crisscross the island behind the wheel of our rolling two-square-meter adventure.

Hey everyone! We see some amazing plans—and also posts that go unanswered despite being for pretty popular destinations. We want to liven things up to help you travel more often with travel buddies and in total safety. Let us know what you're missing!

There’s a region in the United States that stands apart—deeply American yet surprisingly familiar.

My wife is asking for San Francisco and stuff we haven’t seen yet... so I’ve decided to skip the big parks and head for some unlikely spots.

So, off we go on a somewhat adventurous trip with three domestic flights (two on the first day and one on the last day), two overnight bus rides to make short hops, several car rentals, the services of multiple drivers to improve travel comfort, and even a tour operator for crossing the Salar...

This short stop in Doha is part of a longer trip. It lets us break up a flight to the Seychelles.

Last February, I took an overland trip using "public transport" from France to southern Senegal via Spain, Morocco, Western Sahara, and Mauritania.

We’re going to have our hot-air balloon baptism over the Teotihuacan site and the Pyramids of the Sun and Moon! We had to give up on this experience about a dozen years ago in Myanmar, over the temples of Bagan, for budget reasons. In 2019, we were supposed to do it over the Wadi Rum desert in Jordan, but the unpredictable weather (too much wind) didn’t allow the flight to go ahead. So this year, we didn’t want to miss the opportunity.

New landscapes, a radically different climate, unknown dishes... Is it really surprising that I associate all these elements with the urge to travel?

From March 27 to 29, 2026, the Occ'ygène festival returns to the MEETT in Toulouse. My Atlas / Voyage Forum and Les Rencontres Voyageurs are welcoming Cimalp as a partner for this year's event.

This is a trip of about a month (from September 3, 2025, to October 4, 2025), or rather a part of that trip. This part matches the title exactly: an opera festival in Verona (one evening) and the Dolomites in the Veneto region.

Some trips are born twice.

Ours was supposed to happen in 2020. Everything was ready: the itinerary, the flight tickets, the hotel reservations and Machu Picchu, the rental car, the dreams of high altitudes and wide-open spaces. And then the world stopped.

For Avenue Bourguiba at nightfall, I wouldn’t say it was deserted—far from it! There were *so* many cats! During the day, you don’t see them much on this avenue. I think they’re scared off by the people and traffic, but in the evening, they come out—it’s incredible how many cats there are in Tunis!

Hello everyone,

Previously, I shared a trip report/safari in southern Tanzania in June 2024, in the Mikumi and Selous reserves. This time, still in southern Tanzania, I invite you to join us in the Ruaha Reserve.

In this story, written by Richard and illustrated by me, we’ll take you through the journey of four friends: Catherine, Richard, Nathalie, and Bruno. A reinvented but overall successful trip, filled with discoveries and surprises, the scents of spices and frangipane flowers, food that was (way too) spicy, sunsets, and... one major hassle.

Mark your calendars: from March 26th to 28th, the MEETT in Toulouse turns into base camp for all adventure enthusiasts. At My Atlas, we wouldn’t miss this for the world!

This monastery is stunning and houses immense treasures. It’s located at the tip of the peninsula near the Mekong. It’s one of the most beautiful in Luang Prabang. The temple walls are covered in mosaics. Its façade is gilded on a richly decorated red background.

A must-attend event for all adventure and discovery enthusiasts: My Atlas will be back at the Occ'ygène festival in Toulouse from March 26 to 28, 2026! Just like last year, we’ll be partners of the Les Rencontres Voyageurs space—a place for authentic exchanges between globetrotters, adventurers, and dreamers from around the world.

If you're planning your trips for 2026, Bruno Maltor's latest video should interest you.

We’ve noticed we’re having issues with sending out the newsletters. Could those of you who signed up to receive it let us know if you didn’t get the December 2025 one?

In 2026, traveling becomes a choice. While the same destinations are buckling under mass tourism, there are still preserved alternatives—often just a few hours away from the well-trodden paths. This guide doesn’t ban any countries but instead suggests different approaches and destinations that still have room to breathe.

The next day, it's pouring rain when we wake up, but after a good breakfast, the rain has calmed down... off to the medersa, which allows for a relatively sheltered visit. We had visited this palace 15 years ago—it’s been renovated since then.