Place

I recently found myself scrolling World Cement Weekly in search of news of a massive rewilding project in northern Mexico, created and funded by the cement giant Cemex. The growing success of the rewilding movement is strangely little known — though there are now places that are wilder, more vibrant, more teeming with life than they have been for centuries, few outside the movement know anything about them. Two decades ago, a nature-loving chief executive of Cemex decided that the company would acquire 346,000 acres of degraded land on Mexico’s border with America, an area larger than Los Angeles, renamed the El Carmen Nature Reserve.

After ten hours of flying and too much bad airplane coffee, the beef carpaccio from 8 East at the Circa casino was ecstasy. Topped with potato chips, served with drops of citrus-infused wasabi crème, it would have been fabulous anytime. But nursing a cold Sapporo, stoned on exhaustion and discombobulation, I shivered in delight with every bite. Just a single piece would have been worth the flight. It was my first time in Las Vegas — my first time in the States — and I was hoping to write a meaningful story about a too-much written about place.

The drive from Islamabad to Multan takes about eight hours. We passed through fields of citrus fruit and farmers tending weed-burning fires. Boys carried giant bunches of twigs over their heads or zipped by on old Honda 70s, balancing water tubs. All had early-Beatles haircuts and wore the shalwar kameez, the Punjabi suit of lightweight trousers and a tunic. Multanis, distinguished by their good looks and their own musical dialect, are called meethi churiyans by other Punjabis, meaning “sweet knives.” They are charming and generous, serving up piles of warm chapati and mutton chops, before stinging you with a hefty bill.

There’s cold, then there’s winter-in-Canada cold. The kind where I’m jamming hand-warmers into my ski gloves — yet still somehow my fingers go numb — and snowflakes keep their intricate patterns as they scatter over my clothes (back home in comparatively balmy England, they’d melt instantly). But what did I expect? I’d made it my New Year’s resolution to travel off-season. Think Rajasthan in the summer monsoon, Sicily’s midwinter citrus harvest, Portugal’s Atlantic Coast when the record-breaking waves roll in come November. I’m not the only one with this idea.

Kitted out in black Givenchy, huge sunglasses blocking out the snow glare, Audrey Hepburn is lunching al fresco in the French Alps when a meet-cute with Cary Grant ensues. It’s the opening scene of Charade, filmed just over sixty years ago in Megève — the chichi winter resort for both Hollywood royalty and true bluebloods during the 1960s. Back then, Brigitte Bardot, Yves Montand and Jean Cocteau were often seen swooping down its pistes. Imagine a snow-dusted Saint-Tropez and you’re on the right track. This medieval market town was hardly destined to become a darling of the beau monde. Megève was something of a backwater (the name even translates to “village in the middle of the waters”) until 1920, when Baroness Noémie de Rothschild spotted its potential.

At first, the sleepy little town of Mirleft looks like all the others on the 600-mile trek through the sands of the Sahara: half-gravel, half-concrete sidewalks, faded paint, brightly painted schools and the minaret of a new mosque jutting up toward the sky. But a mile past Mirleft’s dusty high street lie cliffs of California proportions — with swells to match. The cliffs arch down at a near forty-five-degree angle and into meaty waves rolling toward a point break. It’s here that a group of ten French and German surfers have joined up with Issam Surf School, heading down to Plage Sauvage, the beach below, in a 4x4.

Rebecca Illing’s résumé doesn’t read like your typical hotelier’s: circus school graduate, free diver, marine conservation advocate and certified death doula. So when the thirty-seven-year-old Londoner inherited a rundown guest house in Portugal’s northerly Minho region, the property was destined to be reimagined as something more than a straightforward B&B. Illing had spent childhood summers at Paço da Glória, roaming its cork oak woodlands and swimming in the nearby Lima River. But the circumstances of her return in 2020 were less idyllic. Europe was entering lockdown, and she was grieving the sudden death of her brother.

Who could resist the opportunity to visit a women’s island? Four years ago, I read an article in the New York Times travel section about an Estonian island called Kihnu, which the Times dubbed an “Isle of Women.” Its subhead asked “What would life be like without men?” and I wanted to find out, making a mental note to visit this peculiar island — “run by women” — someday, and my opportunity came last summer as part of a trip with my wife, Jen, and our teenage sons to Finland and the Baltic countries. But Kihnu, we discovered, isn’t a women’s island, or anything close to it. Before our trip, I reread the Times piece plus similar ones before combing YouTube for Kihnu videos.