Ilya Varlamov

While editing this video, I kept thinking about the wild otters I met on the waterfront. In a city where humans are fined thousands of dollars for almost everything, these little animals run completely free, stopping traffic and attracting crowds of local journalists. It's a bizarre contrast: absolute control for humans, absolute freedom for nature. That moment with the otter family made it into the film — their run across the road starts around the middle ⬇️

https://youtu.be/gdDYW8nKDG0

2 days ago | [YT] | 12

Ilya Varlamov

A $10,000 fine for feeding a pigeon and $2,000 for walking naked in your own apartment. During my layover in Singapore, I decided to calculate exactly how much money a tourist could lose just by behaving like they do at home. It turns out, even peeing in the bushes can cost you a small fortune. How a pristine eco-utopia became a high-tech police state where everyone is constantly squealing on each other — that's what the new video is about ⬇️

https://youtu.be/gdDYW8nKDG0

4 days ago | [YT] | 13

Ilya Varlamov

In a park in the middle of Cape Town I stood watching squirrels for ten minutes. White squirrels. Not one, not two, a whole park of them, digging through the bins, completely unafraid of people. Two hours earlier a police officer had been walking me out of a township for my own safety, and now I was arguing with a squirrel about eating out of the trash. That is this country in one afternoon: beauty and fear share the same postcode, and both feel completely normal to everyone who lives here. Curious if there is a place near you where the two sit that close together. The squirrels made it into the film, right before the part about District Six ⬇️

2 weeks ago | [YT] | 17

Ilya Varlamov

Our walk through Nyanga lasted about four minutes. A police car pulled up and the officer said we would be mugged within a minute, then made us follow him to the station for an escort. In one quarter of 2024, 79 people were killed in this single township in Cape Town. Twenty kilometres away, behind razor wire, Afrikaner families pour wine for tourists in Stellenbosch. How two places that close ended up in two different centuries, that is what the new video is about: vrlmv.com/gx6fg7

2 weeks ago | [YT] | 40

Ilya Varlamov

I went to the whitest country in Africa expecting one story — and found the opposite of what everyone told me. In South Africa, 30 years after apartheid ended, there are now white ghettos: families living with no electricity for years, cooking on open fires, sorting scrap metal to survive. Two miles away, other white farmers ring their vineyards with razor wire and train for a war they're sure is coming.

Meanwhile the townships haven't changed — 79 people killed in one Cape Town neighborhood in three months. Everyone here is afraid of someone. I drove through all of it to answer one question: is South Africa really a powder keg about to explode? New video drops Thursday.

3 weeks ago | [YT] | 89

Ilya Varlamov

A lot of you from Lesotho felt my video was one-sided. You're saying I only showed the poverty and the problems, and ignored the modern malls, the suburbs, and the successful people.

I hear you. But my job as a journalist isn't to create a tourism brochure. It's to understand how a place works, and that means looking at the problems. I saw a country that sells $200 million of water to its neighbor, while its own people in villages drink from dirty streams. I saw a school with broken toilets and a city with a massive, burning landfill.

These are the paradoxes that interest me. Of course there's more to Lesotho than that, but these are the things I saw with my own eyes.

See the full story in my new video.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8EGha...

3 weeks ago | [YT] | 9

Ilya Varlamov

The Lofoten Islands are one of the most beautiful places on Earth. It used to be a God-forsaken spot with a harsh climate where fishermen caught and dried cod. But with the rise of social media, crowds of tourists flooded in, and their numbers keep growing every year! That wouldn't be so bad on its own, but unlike other mega-popular travel destinations, Lofoten simply runs out of room. This archipelago of a dozen major islands is connected by a single road that dead-ends in the village of Å. Yes, the name is literally just one letter. There is no space left for hotels or parking lots. Anything that could possibly be converted into tourist rentals already has been, yet the influx never slows down.
People head into the mountains all for the sake of that perfect Instagram shot. At first, there were just regular trails, but they quickly got churned into mud. The Norwegians literally hired Himalayan sherpas to build stone staircases straight up the sheer mountain slopes. Now, those stairs suffer from human traffic jams, and the viewpoints sometimes feel like a bus stop during rush hour.
Travelers arrive with a checklist of must-visit spots just to take the exact same photos. On one popular route, a sign reads: “Already 200,000 people have launched their drone here to take this exact picture. Think about whether you really need to.” Of course they need to! Why else would someone travel all the way from distant China, Italy, or the US?
Tourists resemble supermarket shoppers darting between aisles with checklists, filling their carts with photos. And it's hard to blame them—it really is gorgeous. The only shame is that beautiful, secluded places where you can actually enjoy the view in peace are becoming rarer by the day. Soon, there will be a paved road to every mountain and waterfall. And I can't say that's a good thing.

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3 weeks ago | [YT] | 78

Ilya Varlamov

Many of you who watched my Vancouver video were shocked and saddened by what you saw. My video shows police mostly standing by while people use drugs openly on the street. So what's going on?

This is part of a radical experiment in the province of British Columbia. They've decriminalized the possession of small amounts of hard drugs — up to 2.5 grams — for personal use. The idea is to treat addiction as a health issue, not a criminal one. Police are directed not to arrest people for simple possession or use, which is why I was able to film what I did.

But this doesn't apply to drug trafficking, theft, or violent crime. The police are still active on those fronts. It's a very controversial policy, and the results are debatable, which is what I explore in the full video.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z3iUz...

4 weeks ago | [YT] | 18

Ilya Varlamov

Vacation is coming to an end, and school is right around the corner!
The biggest lie of childhood is that it's a carefree time and that things only get worse from here. It's completely baffling why adults project these ideas of a horrific adult reality onto their kids: “Enjoy the holidays! Value school—once you grow up, you’ll miss these happy times.”
In reality, adulthood is fantastic! It's freedom! It’s the opportunity to make your own decisions and take responsibility for them. I’ve never missed my childhood, even though it was very safe and comfortable, thanks to my parents. But it was still a lack of freedom. Essentially, childhood is just a comfortable prison. You are forced to live on a schedule: “school — break-on-pass — minimum-security colony at grandma’s cottage.” Food is on a timer, they don't let you drink, and you're entirely dependent on care packages from adults. Brrr. I wouldn't want to live through that again. The only upside of childhood is that almost nothing hurts, and you don't have to watch your diet.
Adult life is freedom! There is nothing better than shaping your own life. Here, of course, what matters is how you “served” your 18-year sentence in childhood, what you walked away from the joint with, and how you invest those skills and knowledge into your free adult life.
So, kids, study hard, listen to your prison guards—oops, I mean parents. School is starting soon 😉 And from there, it only gets better!

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4 weeks ago | [YT] | 156

Ilya Varlamov

In Vancouver, the police won't even respond to thefts under $3,600. Shop owners are forced to board up their windows with plywood just to stay open. Why the city stopped prosecuting and what it means for residents is in the new video ⬇️

1 month ago | [YT] | 7