Somewhere on a Namibian salt pan right now, a satellite is doing the work that used to belong to an explorer. It's cross-referencing elevation data, mapping soil stability, checking cloud-cover averages across twelve years of archived imagery, and identifying a parcel of land so genuinely remote that no hospitality scout has ever stood on it with a clipboard and a…

There's a version of Victorian travel that gets romanticised constantly – the Orient Express, the ocean liner, the grand hotel in Cairo. All leather and crystal and servants. But here's something that version tends to leave out: before the middle of the nineteenth century, a first-class cabin smelled almost exactly like a third-class one. The food went off at the…