Lille (France) - Any journalist posted to AFP's Lille bureau inevitably cuts their teeth by reporting on the migrants in Calais.  Even now, four years after the notorious Jungle camp was dismantled, the first thing that hits you driving into the northern French city are the towering barbed-wire fences along the motorway, meant to stop stowaways on trucks and ferries bound for England. Despite the dangers, tragically highlighted in October when a Kurdish-Iranian family drowned when their boat capsized, the number of those crossing the Channel keeps growing.

“The road to the most isolated corner of the Indian Himalayas is almost overwhelming in its otherworldly beauty,” writes Bhuvan Bagga, AFP’s New Delhi correspondent. “But the scenery is harder to enjoy while hopelessly lost, in the middle of a rainstorm, and without a single other human in sight.”