Place

Brussels is the source of all evil to many of those who supported Brexit, and even for Americans. “What’s a good Christian boy like you doing in Satan’s den?” was the question of an Austin friend when I told him work had brought me to the capital city of the European Union. To its critics, Brussels is the bastion of the worst sort of Big Government, with the European Commission and Parliament issuing diktats to more than 500 million people across twenty-seven nations. But while the city is “full of nets” with which to trap you, as described by another friend who worked here on human rights legislation, it’s also a city of “hope.” Brussels has a rich comic book culture. There are the intrepid reporter Tintin and his sidekick Snowy.

Planning a foreign trip is a bit like watching a trailer for a film. The research is a preview of coming attractions. I almost never made it to San Antonio de Areco, a charming country town about seventy miles northwest of Buenos Aires, because it seemed extravagantly expensive and complicated to visit. But trailers can be misleading, perseverance is a virtue, and Areco, as the locals call it, turned out to be the highlight of my visit to Argentina last summer. With just a week to spend in the world’s eighth largest country by land area, my plan was to spend four days in Buenos Aires and three in a small town, a place I hoped would give us an idea of what the country’s gaucho heartland is about.

Much is said, chiefly by Americans used to Amtrak, about continental Europe’s wonderful train system, though just how wonderful depends on where you want to go. On a recent journey from Southampton, where we had disembarked early morning from the Queen Mary, to The Hague where we missed our evening dinner reservations at the Hotel des Indes, I made certain discoveries. One was that The Hague, seat of the Dutch government, home to the king and queen, venue of the World Court and other august institutions of world government, is now off-line: i.e. it is not on the high-speed rail network that links up London, Paris, Brussels and Amsterdam. This seems curious and, in a way, charming.

It’s been a nearly seven-hour drive up and down the Atlas Mountains from Marrakech before a roundabout appears at the entrance to Ouarzazate, the Amazigh (Berber) outpost where we might be able to stave off hunger, thirst and fatigue. But first, follow that roundabout — the one featuring a gigantic director’s clipboard. Then turn left and enter the parking lot of the Atlas Studios, known to the outside world as Ouarzawood, the must-see largest studio in the Sahel, just 230 miles from Merzouga: the gateway to the Sahara. Park before a half-dozen faux Egyptian Ka statues — think gigantic copies of King Tut’s tomb — then a gate opens and just beyond lie the sets to a dozen or more popular movies.

I’d heard that KwaZulu-Natal province in South Africa delivers life-changing memories. Roaming Shaka Zulu’s hunting ground. The Big Five. Bushveld soil on your shoes. Falling asleep to the music of the night, curtains open in anticipation of a burning sunrise. I flew there for a thrilling, once-in-a-lifetime safari experience. And I got it. While sitting on the toilet. It’s a unique frustration, hearing the phone ring out, from the bathroom. My first morning at Thanda Safari transports me back to my teenage years in the 2000s; the last time I had a house phone. “I’m coming!” I shout to no one in particular, having quickly dashed to my digs, post-crack of dawn game drive. “Miss Everett! Oh, thank goodness! You ARE there! You must not leave your room!

When rulers are thrown out of their countries, they cannot expect all that much. Think of Napoleon, first cooling his heels in Elba, then ending his days in the damp-infested confines of Saint Helena. Which is why the former Edward VIII, later the Duke of Windsor, was comparatively fortunate that the Parisian spot in which he found himself living after his abdication in December 1936 was Le Meurice in Paris: then, as now, a hotel that offers not only glitteringly luxurious accommodation to its well-heeled denizens, but a tangible sense of history — its lavishly appointed suites and restaurants exude an atmosphere that’s simultaneously relaxing and conspiratorial. Turn an unexpected corner, and you half-expect to see the ghost of Wallis Simpson, barking orders at some hapless minion.

From the lilting normcore of Sally Rooney’s Normal People to the frenetic genius of poetic, post-(post?) punk band Fontaines D.C., I’m drawn to talented Irish voices of late. Martin McDonagh’s Oscar-nominated tragicomedy, The Banshees of Inisherin, won three Golden Globes, and my heart, to boot. And quite rightly. It’s news to no one that the Irish have always been exceptional storytellers; some stereotypes stick because they are true. Plenty of the finest words ever written hail from the town of the hurdled ford, Baile Átha Cliath, Dublin. This fact was recognized by UNESCO in 2010, when they named it a City of Literature.

I rarely open, let alone read, promotional emails, but one I got last summer about the World Equestrian Center in Ocala, Florida captured my attention. The place was described as a “playground for the 1 percent... where that Ralph Lauren picture-perfect fantasy is within reach — if only for a night.” The message referred to rubbing elbows with the rich and famous and I wondered what on earth they were talking about. After all, the super-rich in Florida mostly congregate further south in Palm Beach and the affluent bits of Miami, right? Ocala is a small city ninety miles northwest of Disney World and it’s long billed itself the horse capital of the world.

I am completely naked, shivering and mildly terrified. The word “vulnerable” goes partway to describing my state as my toes curl over the edge of a slippery jetty, in pitch-darkness. Did I mention that I am completely naked? This is not a fever dream, but a midweek wellness pursuit on the island of Nacka, where Stockholm city and countryside meet. It’s 7 p.m. and the sun is long gone. I inwardly curse a previous incarnation of myself, who booked this intrepid getaway while holed up in my warm apartment. The trip grew from my preoccupation with two Nordic lifestyle concepts currently in vogue: Swedish lagom (loosely translated as “balanced living”) and Danish hygge (retreating somewhere cozy, often with friends).

While most travelers compile bucket lists of dream destinations, some revel in the pursuit of everywhere. Self-styled “extreme travelers” are seduced by hard-to-reach islands like Norway’s Bouvet, South Africa’s Prince Edward Islands and hundreds of other geographic oddities, in the same way children are tantalized by Disney World. In this subculture, visits to forbidden destinations like Guantánamo Bay, the Gaza Strip and India’s Andaman Islands, where the missionary John Allen Chau was murdered by spear-brandishing natives in 2018, confer status. And so do visits to pariah states and conflict zones, at least until Russia invaded Ukraine. The close-knit, extreme-travel community, who you might think would be an anything-goes bunch, is divided over the war.

I first visited the Greek monastery of Agios Stefanos on the rocks of Meteora in the early spring of this year, one week after my baptism into the Orthodox Church. Greece was heavy with Great Lent fasts and preparations for Christ’s resurrection — Easter. I had just escaped the clutches of an extremely sweet but annoying young tour guide with whom my very Greek now-father-in-law had set my fiancé and me up for a tour of the ancient churches. I wanted nothing to do with this young man in a tour van who sounded like he was reciting words from a tape recorder. Later I found out he was, and had taught himself English by doing so (which is pretty endearing in hindsight).

Turin at the end of August is pleasingly melancholic. The city has emptied after the feast of Ferragosto on August 15 and won’t fill up again till September. Solid bourgeois streets, with eighteenth- and nineteenth-century buildings now housing banks, are deserted save for the occasional confused tourist. What brings others to Turin in August I cannot say. For me, it was a wedding in Milan at the end of the week and the prospect of a little vacation ahead of it. Turin was a whim. I was meant to meet a college friend in Genoa on Monday, but my Sunday-night redeye from New York was canceled. Saturday was the only option, and so I was left at a loose end. Options abounded: I could stay overnight in Milan and head to Genoa with my friend the next day.

Getting there was penitential. The coach from my home in Bad Ischl, Austria, to Salzburg stopped a hundred times, to let on women in dirndls carrying shopping baskets. The train to Munich was subject to delays, messing up subsequent connections. The S-Bahn linking Ostbahnhof with a place called Pasing suffered a derailment, so I had to struggle backwards to the Hauptbahnhof, only to discover my alternative train to Murnau was canceled, then reinstated on a distant platform, resulting in mass confusion. (The Germans are bewildered very easily when things stop going to plan.) At Murnau there was a long wait for the two-carriage shunter service to Unterammergau, outside Oberammergau, where it was by now pitch dark and pouring with rain.

Everyone comes to Bogotá looking for something. It’s always been that way. A thousand years ago, indigenous traders traveled to the markets in the Bogotá savanna to barter with the Muisca and exchange gold, emeralds, salt and cotton. The Spaniards arrived five centuries later in search of the treasures of conquest and the mythical city of gold that now lends its name to the international airport: El Dorado. The great revolutionary Simón Bolívar came in search of the capital of his South America republic Gran Colombia and to liberate the continent from Spanish rule. I didn’t know what I was looking for when I first arrived in Bogotá.