Amelia Duggan

Amelia is an award-winning freelance travel writer for publications including National Geographic Traveller magazine, a UK title for which she also worked as an in-house editor for several years. Her professional adventures have taken her to curious corners of the planet, including the Mayan temples of Mexico, the neon-lit nightclubs of Miami and the rolling tea plantations of Malawi.

My most memorable travel experience? Seeing animals in the wild never fails to take my breath away, be it humpbacks leaping beside my boat in Colombia or walking with elephants in Botswana. But my most treasured experience occurred in the dizzyingly-high Himalayan region of Ladakh, a remote part of India often referred to as ‘Little Tibet’. Leaving behind settlements strung with fluttering prayer flags and monasteries clinging to the sides of mountains, a group of us set up camp in Hemis National Park, where days of hiking and scanning craggy peaks led to a rare sighting of the world’s most reclusive big cat: a snow leopard. I couldn’t believe my eyes.