Place

Most likely we experience it first as children, on summer vacation or a school trip: the sensation that something really important from a long time ago happened right here, on this very spot. Visits to our national monuments still stir the same old feeling, but, as I am long past childhood, a question arises that did not then. How is it that by stepping literally onto the spot, we step out of our own heads and into the past? The conventional wisdom for the past half-century or so has been that historic sites demand explanation or, in professional jargon, interpretation.

James Eskridge cuts a defiant figure as he rides around Tangier Island on his motorbike. The weathered, garrulous water man known to all as “Ooker” is the mayor, spokesman and public face of one of America’s most endangered communities. Buffeted by rising sea levels and relentless erosion, Tangier is not so slowly sinking into the shallow waters of the Chesapeake Bay, threatening its ancient community of crab-hunting, God-fearing, Cornish-sounding fishermen with extinction. The Chesapeake, site of the first British settlements in America, has some of the highest relative sea rise on the planet. If Tangier disappears beneath its waves, America will lose a living link to its pre-revolutionary past.

Local chief Panta wore a government-issue khaki uniform with epaulettes, beret and swagger stick. On a pleasant stroll to our farm springs, he observed how plenty of blood had been spilled over this water. We sat on the glassy-smooth black rocks around the water pools and the chief retold for me a story more infamous in its day than the Happy Valley tale of Lord Erroll’s murder, but now completely forgotten. Welshman Dicky Powys, from a family of authors and philosophers and cousin of our ranching neighbor Gilfrid, arrived in Kenya in 1931 to farm. Young Dicky learned the local Maasai vernacular fluently and got on with everybody. His employer had rented pasture in Laikipia around our springs for a vast flock of sheep and Dicky pitched camp here.

India’s fast-growing population now stands at 1.38 billion, just shy of China’s ginormous 1.4 billion. China’s population is rapidly aging, so it’s only a matter of time before a youthful India —average age twenty-nine to China’s thirty-seven — overtakes its communist neighbor and becomes the most populous nation on the planet. I left India as a child, and just spent two months in Bangalore, selling some ancestral property. Bangalore is India’s booming tech hub and Silicon Valley; most major American tech companies, including Facebook, Google, Amazon and Microsoft have opened large offices there to manage their back-end operations.

The land around Erbil, the capital city of the Kurdistan region of northern Iraq, is mostly beige, flat and seemingly endless. The mountain has seen a lot of action. The terror group ISIS remains dug in around it and the Kurdish peshmerga, with whom I recently spent time, continue to battle against them. Iraq. Two syllables, almost two decades of conflict. When people think of Iraq they think of several things: the disastrous 2003 war, oil (like all Arab countries in the popular imagination), ISIS and, if they’re a bit older, the mustachioed features of Saddam Hussein that stood, in the early years of this century, for the type of dictator painted as the West’s greatest threat. I think of all those things, too. But they’re leavened by something else: family.

From my plush bedroom in the Beau Rivage, Geneva’s most historic grand hotel, I look down on the lakeside promenade where one of the most remarkable women of the nineteenth century met her dark, dramatic end. On September 10, 1898, Empress Elisabeth of Austria (commonly known as Sisi) was stabbed in the chest by an Italian anarchist as she was about to board a paddle steamer to Montreux. She was carried back into the Beau Rivage and up to the suite where she’d spent the previous night. Within half an hour she was dead. Today, the hotel’s palatial Sisi Suite still looks much as she would have found it.

Like a rocket launch from the Cosmodrome, a Russian ice fishing trip must be timed just right. During my month in Archangel, a city in Russia’s far north on the edge of the Arctic Circle, the temperature swung between -30°F and a balmy 36°F. For ice fishing, the closer to the lower end of that range, the better. In fact, it’s a matter of life and death — the ice must have enough time below zero to freeze to a safe depth. I make it up to this chilly harbor town about once a year to visit my in-laws. It’s always a dramatic touchdown at the local airport as the runway, dusted with drifts of snow, appears at the last minute from out of a heavy fog.

Tigray, Ethiopia’s most northerly region, makes its presence felt all the way down in Addis Ababa, about 430 miles to the south. Even before the current fighting, the prettiest beggars in the rambunctious and strangely endearing Ethiopian capital tended to be the Tigrayan single mothers. They made that daunting journey to escape a rural existence that struck me, during my trips around Tigray, as not dissimilar to European life during the Middle Ages. When I lived in Ethiopia, I reported from all over Tigray on humanitarian projects, tensions with Eritrea and the influx of Eritrean refugees, even on a brave British expat who was trying to establish a milk farm.

The Iranians, here for the booze and the vaccine, are impossible to miss. But Armenians reminisce that, only a few years ago, you couldn’t throw a stone in Yerevan, their zestful, rhubarb-hued capital, without injuring a Californian or a New Yorker. Americans, they say, used to be ubiquitous in Armenia. This is a claim animated more by nostalgia than fact. The truth is, even prior to the pandemic and last autumn’s horrific war with Azerbaijan and Turkey, Americans accounted for only a fraction of the tourists who flocked to Armenia: in 2019, only 63,000 among the nearly two million foreign tourists, and a majority of those members of the Armenian diaspora. I mention this to say that Americans really are missing out.

A wooden horse, a fallen hero and Helen, the most beautiful woman in the world. These three things transformed a hillock in Asia Minor into a legendary city. Few places can conjure up such stories of love and loss, homesickness and heroism, gallantry and grief as Troy. Over 3,000 years after Homer wrote in The Iliad of the 10-year siege of King Priam’s mighty citadel, I’m standing on an unremarkable patch of scrubland in northwestern Turkey. This unpromising site claims to be the real Troy — the very spot where Zeus’s daughter Helen fled to make love to Paris; where the mighty Hector, the Trojan general, fell at the hands of Greek warrior Achilles; and where the giant Trojan Horse entered the city concealing Greek warriors in its wooden belly.

I started my visit to Japan’s north country deep in the mountains, in hot water in a bath the size of a swimming pool. Quietly simmering, I was intrigued to notice that the glass which formed the outside wall was not misted up, though the water was steaming. Through the darkness I could make out trees, bushes and the glint of the lake below. I waded over and reached out my hand, only to discover that there was no wall. One side of the bath was entirely open to the air. For the Japanese no journey, particularly to the north, is complete without soaking in as many hot springs as possible. The mineral-rich waters are the upside of the geological turbulence that brought about the devastating tsunami of March 2011. Today everyone knows the name ‘Fukushima’.

It was not an auspicious start. Arriving at JFK the specified three hours before my departure to Athens I was met with a check-in line stretching out the door. The man behind me, in traditional dress and with a shocking amount of luggage for a single traveler, kept shouting ‘Senegal!’ Two hours later, check-in for my flight was closing. I was still at least half an hour away from the desk and so I shamelessly cut the line, earning myself a tongue-lashing from a dyspeptic German but also a boarding document one minute before the flight closed.

Hiking toward the Spanish border on my second day after setting off from Bayonne, I set down my backpack on a grassy patch beside a beach. It was bloody hot — August in the southwest of France — and the sight of beachgoers taking a shower had a cooling appeal. I stripped to my underwear and enjoyed the bracing shower burst. Then I looked down. Water was cascading over what looked like leprosy, breaking out over the right side of my chest. Feeling self-conscious, I got dressed and plodded on. Twenty-five miles later, at the sparkling city of San Sebastián, the pain proved too much. I lifted my shirt to two Portuguese pharmacists — and they pointed me toward the nearest hospital. I had herpes zoster, commonly known as shingles.

'You can get away from everything,’ said Harold Wilson of the Isles of Scilly, ‘not only in distance but also in time’. During the parliamentary recess, Wilson would frequently catch the sleeper from Paddington to Penzance before making the notoriously choppy crossing to Britain’s most westerly archipelago. There he would unwind in his cottage on St Mary’s. This family of five islands 28 miles off the nose of Land’s End has always enjoyed a somewhat secretive coterie of admirers — Jude Law and Michael Morpurgo to name but two. Deserted beaches with a Caribbean palette are surely part of the draw, as are hedgerows festooned with wild garlic, pink bells and exotic aeoniums.

'The Montecito real estate market has gone bonkers,’ says realtor Brian King of this leafy enclave which is often referred to as California’s last paradise. ‘It’s almost as though Montecito has been discovered for the umpteenth time.’ He’s referring to Meghan and Harry — the Sussexes, that modest young couple who in June 2020 chose Montecito, California as a quiet, safe and rarefied environment in which to raise their environmentally-friendly family and, they claimed, escape unflattering and mostly self-inflicted press coverage. That was before they confessed all to Montecito’s resident agony aunt, Oprah Winfrey. This village of 8,500 residents has been drawing the rich and famous from Los Angeles since the early 1900s.

It’s a nail-biting cliff-edge ride down switchback, stomach-churning, hairpin bends. When you finally reach sea level, the Atlantic wind may be so strong and the rain so sharp that you can barely stand on the crescent of sandy shore. The distant islands of Clew Bay — 365 of them to match the days in the year — are nothing more than blistery shapes in the sea mist and wave spray. Yet this nerve-wracking mountainous route is a journey worth making. Despite — or maybe because of — being far from the madding crowd on Achill Island, off the west coast of Ireland, Mayo’s Keem Bay has been voted one of the top 12 beaches in the world, beating contenders in Fiji, Hawaii and Bermuda.