Vorkuta, a former Gulag mining town, gets David Hearst's nomination for the title of least friendly place on earth
Beautiful but deadly
Luanda's dazzling sunsets and tropical flowers cannot mask the Angolan civil war's legacy of peril and poverty says Victoria Brittain, Guardian deputy foreign editor
The bitter taste of paradise
Patrick Barkham on Nauru, the tiny Pacific island transformed by a century of indiscriminate mining from tropical beauty spot to plundered wasteland
September 2001
Between a rock and a hard place
Derek Brown traces the disintegration of the Afghan capital Kabul, from a charming city which drew backpackers in the 60s to the victim of a superpower war fought by proxy