written by Katherine McLaughlin

If luck is on your side, it’ll take 7 to 10 days to get to Tristan da Cunha, a 38-square-mile volcanic island in the South Atlantic Ocean. If the weather is bad, that timeline shoots way, way up—sometimes reaching several weeks. And even once you reach Tristan, as it’s colloquially called, there’s no guarantee you’ll be able to set foot on land. “Our harbor is too small to accommodate ocean-going vessels, so the seas need to be calm enough for our ferry rafts and boats to come and collect you from the ship,” explains Kelly Green, the island’s head of tourism. These tame conditions “happen roughly 70 days a year.”