Prospective postdocs are usually advised to pick a fellowship outside their home country. And the winners of Naturejobs's Postdoc Journal contest this year are nomadic even by postdoc standards. Such journeys come with strains. Differences in language and culture make the distance from home about more than just kilometres, and complicate a professional journey fraught with obstacles such as scientific competition, uncooperative data and learning to manage a lab.

More than 50 fellows competed to share their stories in our Postdoc Journal feature in 2008. Applicants came from around the world — including Switzerland, China, South Africa, the Philippines, Australia and Finland. All told tales of their career journey. But the four winners spun the best scientific travelogues.

Aliza le Roux is a South African primate-behaviour researcher recently arrived in the United States. She has two adjustments to make, first to working for a US university, then to fieldwork in Ethiopia, where she will be stationed as a fellow for the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. Amanda Goh, who completed her graduate work in the United States, is now a fellow at the Biopolis in Singapore. She is adapting to Asian life, and is already fielding questions about Singapore's big science budget and reputation for social strictness. UK-born Jon Yearsley is a self-described serial postdoc, in and out of fellowships for 10 years. He's giving himself one more year as a fellow at the University of Lausanne in Switzerland, where he hopes to complete a move from theoretical cosmology to ecology and evolutionary biology. And plant geneticist Zachary Lippman of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem knows that scientific travel can be dangerous, as a few summers back his field experiments were caught in the war between Israel and Hezbollah in Lebanon.

We'd like to thank all the applicants willing to share their travails, and congratulate the four winners. We wish them all a safe journey and a satisfying arrival — even as we anticipate reading about them navigating the bumps in their roads.