Travel

Thursday

Sean Thomas

Tourists are the new pariahs

From our UK edition

Think of Majorca and what do you picture? Maybe it is elegant tapas bars in the Gothic quarter of Palma, full of yachties and foodies from across the world. Maybe it is literary pilgrims trekking to the house of Robert Graves or noisy parties of Brits and Germans, squabbling over sunbeds in Magaluf. In one Japanese town, residents have erected a screen to block a much-prized view of Mount Fuji Any which way, what you picture is tourists. Lots of tourists. So many tourists that the reality of Majorca as an authentic place is quite obscured, invisible under the weight of visitors. And if you think that sounds bad, so do the Majorcans, which is why they are finally – perhaps belatedly – rebelling.

Thursday

Leaf Arbuthnot

My summer of love with God’s gift

From our UK edition

When the author and podcaster Viv Groskop first visited Ukraine, she travelled there from Moscow, on a long train that ran eventually beside a field of sunflowers. They were, she recalls in her lovely and modestly scaled memoir, like a ‘blast of sunshine screaming: “Welcome to Ukraine! You are no longer in Russia!”’ The year was 1994, and Groskop had been in the former USSR for a little under a year. A modern languages undergraduate at Cambridge, she had decided to take her year abroad in St Petersburg. Until she got there, she had barely thought of Ukraine. It was one of a bunch of newly independent states; it hadn’t come up on her course.

Wednesday

Amy Rose Everett

A solo summer sojourn in the Algarve’s Pine Cliffs resort 

Strong, old pine tree branches cutting through a cloudless cerulean sky — a sight I find hard to beat. Throwing open the curtains at Pine Cliffs Resort in the Algarve, I wondered why I’d been away from Portugal so long.  Bleary-eyed, I reflexively photographed my first glimpse of the Atlantic from my Junior Ocean Suite’s balcony, seagulls cinematically swooping into the frame. Another vain attempt to capture the colors that always keep me coming back; the pictures somehow never as good as the real thing. I’d posted up from Tokyo gone dinnertime the previous night, just outfoxed by Japan’s famed pink sakura (2024’s late bloom meant I missed them by twenty-four hours). Waking up deathly early, I soaked away grizzly jet lag in my spacious room’s egg-shaped tub.

pine cliffs

Saturday

Amy Rose Everett

Where to eat, drink and stay in Cape Town

Setting an early alarm while on vacation never comes easily to me, but making time to wander Babylonstoren’s fruit and vegetable garden before the day’s searing heat took hold was no problem. One of the oldest Cape Dutch farms, set at the foot of Simonsberg in Cape Town’s Franschhoek wine valley, it’s a sprawling, fantastical, technicolor utopia — positively Eden-like, with a lot more than apples to tempt you. Scarecrows made from terracotta plant pots wave from fields teeming with 300 edible crops, fat pomegranates growing alongside tangy tamarillos, willow trees swaying in the breeze.

cape town

Wednesday

James Donald Forbes McCann

A Midwest road trip

The Midwest Notre Dame is not an Ivy League university and, in what I assume is some sort of intentional point, its buildings tend to be ivy-free. Perhaps it is the absence of ivy, perhaps I am just flat after a long day’s drive across Ohio and Indiana, perhaps it’s just winter, but the campus seems more sterile than I had expected. It’s Good Friday, and my friend Margot is studying classical architecture here. She’s showing me around the grounds. I don’t really know what I’d hoped to see. Amy Coney Barrett? Multiracial friendship groups, skipping across the green? As soon as I see the stadium, though, I am transfixed. Margot is visibly disappointed when I say that I adore the stadium above all the other buildings.

james donald forbes mccann
Ross Anderson

Loving Las Vegas

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.

Vegas
Kevin Petersen

The Galápagos evolution even Darwin didn’t foresee

Lonesome George, a Pinta Island giant tortoise, spent the latter half of his hundred years munching on cacti and roaming around the Charles Darwin Research Station on the Galápagos island of Santa Cruz. He borrowed his name from the 1950s American comedian and actor George Gobel and one of the three B-52 Stratofortresses that completed the first non-stop jet circumnavigation of the world in 1957. But the name was ultimately more fitting for the tortoise who was the last of a million-year-old species. In 1959, fishermen introduced three goats to Lonesome George’s home of Pinta Island, one of the smallest islands of the Galápagos archipelago. Just ten years later, they had multiplied to around 40,000.

Galápagos
Josie Cox

Dispatch from an unloved borough

Once a year, Nick, a surgeon who lives on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, visits Staten Island. Almost as soon as he arrives, he literally runs back to where he just came from. Nick is a marathon runner — he’s done New York seven times — and like millions of similarly masochistic athletes and wannabes, he’s lined up at the mouth of the Verrazzano Bridge, the eastern edge of New York City’s least exalted borough, with the sole aim of getting back to more familiar territory as briskly as his legs can carry him. “Of course I don’t have anything against Staten Island,” he explains. “There’s just not that much of a reason to go there.” Many others, it turns out, feel the same. I moved to Manhattan just over four years ago.

Staten

Friday

Amy Rose Everett

Swapping aprés ski for aprés spa 

“Welcome to your thirties,” my friend Rich roared, throwing open the balcony door leading onto our hotel room’s private loggia. The sound of gushing water filled the room as I flopped, exhausted, onto the bed. The Ziller River rushed through the valley below, fast. Verdant hills stretched upwards to create a preposterously bucolic scene, practically begging for your best Julie Andrews impression, arms outstretched. I laid there, and took it in through the window. I pretended I didn’t mind that I was missing the party, Snowbombing Festival raging on in Mayrhofen town. The “Snolympics?” Didn’t sound like much fun. Pond skimming on skis, surely soggy and impractical.

Instead of stomping on the bar in our ski boots, we’d zipped home in a taxi to ZillergrundRock Luxury Mountain Resort, with high hopes

Thursday

Rory Sutherland

How to solve ‘range anxiety’

From our UK edition

In ‘The Adventure of Silver Blaze’, Sherlock Holmes mentions ‘the curious incident of the dog in the night-time’. ‘But the dog did nothing in the night-time,’ argues Inspector Gregory. ‘That was the curious incident,’ replies Holmes. You never hear anyone say: ‘We finally stumbled across a charming little petrol station nestling among the trees’ Along with Donald Rumsfeld’s ‘Unknown unknowns’, this is perhaps the most famous example of what you might call ‘perceptual asymmetry’. We mostly act instinctively based on what is salient, giving little thought to what is easily overlooked. It is hence surprisingly easy to change what people do simply by changing what they pay attention to.

Thursday

Wynn Wheldon

Alone and defenceless: the tragic death of Captain Cook

From our UK edition

The principal purpose of Captain James Cook’s last voyage, which began in Plymouth on 12 July 1776, was to discover the elusive Northwest Passage. Attempts had been made before, in vain, from the Atlantic, but this time it would be from the west, from the Pacific.  On the way, Cook was to return an Anglicised Polynesian named Mai to Raiatea, ‘a ragged volcanic island’ about 130 miles north west of Tahiti. Mai takes up much of Hampton Sides’s narrative, offering ‘a poignant allegory of first contact’, before being deposited home with his cargo of English domestic farm animals and his suits.  Prior to that, Cook had investigated, in New Zealand, the massacre of ten crew members of the Adventure, the Resolution’s sister ship on his previous voyage.

Douglas Murray

Following Napoleon: my exile in St Helena

From our UK edition

St Helena In an attempt to escape from the world, I have come with friends to St Helena. It is quite a good place for the exercise. Until a few years ago the only way to get to the island was a five-day boat voyage from Cape Town. Shortly before Covid, an airport for this British overseas territory was finally completed at UK taxpayer expense. To protect some local insects the runway was put at a slightly wrong angle, making it difficult – sometimes impossible – to land. The weekly flight from Johannesburg therefore refuels in Namibia in case landing is impossible and the plane has to about-turn. A lifesize statue of Napoleon stands on the balcony.

Monday

Cindy Yu

Was Marco Polo a ‘sexpat’?

From our UK edition

25 min listen

When I recently came across a book review asking the question ‘was Marco Polo a "sexpat"?’, I knew I had to get its author on to, well, discuss this important question some more. The 13th century Venetian merchant Marco Polo’s account of China was one of the earliest and most popular travelogues written on the country. Polo spent years at the court of Kublai Khan, the grandson of Genghis, and whose family founded the Yuan dynasty in China. My guest today, and the author of that book review, is the historian Jeremiah Jenne. Jeremiah has lived in China for over two decades, and he is also the co-host of the fascinating podcast Barbarians at the Gate, all about Chinese history.

Tuesday

Guy Stagg

The true valour needed to go on pilgrimage in Britain

From our UK edition

Every summer solstice, thousands of people gather at Stonehenge to greet the longest day of the year. Judging from the druids in the crowd, you might think this tradition dates back to pagan Britain. In fact, it was started in 1974 by members of a hippy commune who decided to host a free festival among the stones. The Pope, the Dalai Lama and John Lennon were invited, along with a handful of British Airways hostesses. These ‘interactions between ancient and modern faith’ fascinate the travel writer Oliver Smith. On This Holy Island is a journey across Britain, telling the story of a dozen pilgrim destinations and the spiritual seekers drawn to them. As well as recounting the history of these places, it explores how later generations have re-enchanted them.

Sunday

Dave Seminara

Don’t let climate activists stop you from traveling

A decade ago, when I first started contributing to the New York Times’s annual “52 Places to Go” list, the top user comments were about the destinations: Why was Calcutta chosen but not Chattanooga? This year, in a sign of the times, the most popular comments suggest that we should all just stay home to save the planet. The climate-obsessed among us are falling out of love with travel, particularly with the idea of exploring far-off places where your carbon footprint is greater. If their movement gains steam they won’t save the world, but they might well wreck the global economy and deprive themselves and others of much-needed perspectives and experiences that make the world a better place.

travel
Montréal
Estella Shardlow

Montréal serves up a surprising array of off-season delights

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.

goose
Amber Duke

My first family goose hunt

It's a slow Sunday in Paducah, Kentucky, the day before our snow goose hunt. Morning Mass down the road, where the priest quizzingly asked where we were from. Brunch with my husband’s family at a cozy café. Chocolate cake with that crackly boiled icing and fresh coffee in the late afternoon at his aunt and uncle’s house. It isn’t until close to dinnertime that we pack up our bags and hit the road for the bootheel of Missouri, where we will hope to catch a few hours of sleep at our hotel before we meet our local hunting guide. About halfway through our drive, the phone rings with bad news. Our guide, Scooter, spent the day scouting and could find no signs of geese at his usual spots.

Thursday

Tanya Gold

‘You can stare at a cow you will soon eat’: The Newt, Hadspen, reviewed

From our UK edition

The Newt is an idealised country house in Somerset which won the World’s Best Boutique Hotel award last year. It is small, beautiful and mind-meltingly expensive, even for the Bruton Triangle and its mooing art galleries. Poor Somerset! It never wanted to be monied enough to have a triangle, but the rich make their own mythology. Since they paint every-thing grey – and now green, I learn at the Newt – they need it. A triangle fills the day. The Newt is for people who think that Babington House is stupid (it is) and though the Newt has its own issues – like the King, its taste is almost too immaculate – you never feel that the chief executive of a media conglomerate will bounce past you on a space hopper eating a fishfinger sandwich and shouting into an iPhone.

Thursday

Estella Shardlow

Megève’s enduring magic

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.

Megève
Finland
Amy Rose Everett

Mökki life and Moomin minutiae in Finland

Moomins are synonymous with Finnish life, like saunas, porridge and mökki (summer cottages) culture. The large-snouted white fairytale creatures feature in the Moomin books, which are published in nearly sixty languages. Moomin World, a theme park 100 miles from Helsinki, crawls with tourists come summer — some feat, in a country with roughly twenty-one inhabitants per square kilometer. Moomin merch is ubiquitous too; fans are cult-like in their collection of rare mugs and first editions. Every day, Tove Jansson’s iconography is inked into skin. And it’d got under mine, in a way. In my twenties, a boyfriend’s collection of paraphernalia from a Finnish former partner quelled any curiosity about Jansson’s imaginary oafs (and Finland).