Williams, Arizona bills itself as the “the gateway to the Grand Canyon,” and for good reason: here, just as would be sightseers have for decades, you can board the Grand Canyon Railway and ride to the canyon’s South Rim. But before we go any further, let’s clear up a few things about the Grand Canyon: it’s a canyon or, in others words, a great big hole in the ground. Like all holes, there are multiple …
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If you pick the wrong time to climb the “999 steps” of the Palamidi Fortress, those first 857 are the most difficult. In fact, there are not 999 steps; there are 857, and even for the physically fit, especially beneath the midday summer sun, the climb is strenuous. The best time is early morning or the last light of evening. The cooler the air, the better, and no matter the time of day, take water
… Hallstatt, Austria, has made an entire identity around being too idyllic to be real. However, its reputation is well-deserved and, for a reputation, strangely problematic, which is why the place is worth knowing for what it is rather than simply being photogenic.
Humans have harvested salt from the hill above Hallstatt for roughly 7,000 years, and its history has been well-documented, perhaps ironically given salt’s uncanny ability to preserve whatever it touches. In 1838, some
… It is noon on Castle Hill, and the shot fires from a small battery near the old fortress walls. It has been going off at noon since 1860, when a Scottish resident, Sir Thomas Coventry, reportedly sick of his wife’s habit of serving lunch late, asked the city if he could pay for a daily noon shot to keep the household on schedule. He eventually moved back to Scotland and took his cannon with him.
… The sign at Gouverneto Monastery described a thirty-five-minute walk down into a gorge. Almost casually, it informed me that the monastery we were looking for had been abandoned for roughly four hundred years. The walk descended a series of cut stone steps, switchbacking down a cliff on the Akrotiri peninsula. At the bottom is Katholiko: a roofless church, an arched bridge with crumbling columns spanning a dry streambed, and a cave that housed a hermit
… A man selling roasted sweet potatoes wheeled his cart directly into six lanes of moving traffic, set up between two idling buses, and kept working as though he were standing in a quiet kitchen. Around him, cars braided past each other with no visible signaling system beyond the horn, which in Cairo functions less as a warning than as conversation. I asked my hotel doorman how anyone crosses that road on foot. He shrugged and
… Animal tourism’s worst offenses don’t come with an abuse sign per se. They come with an opportunity sign. Ride an elephant. Cuddle a tiger cub. Swim with a dolphin. Drink the world’s most expensive coffee. Such operations often use the word “sanctuary,” which in most countries literally means nothing and could apply to both a legitimate rescue center and a roadside pen with a gift shop. If you truly love animals, and as difficult as
… The island of Madeira is about 500 miles southwest of mainland Portugal, and 320 miles west of Morocco, closer in latitude to Casablanca than to Lisbon’s cafe tables. One of only two inhabited islands in the archipelago also includes the smaller Porto Santo; the other islands, the uninhabited Desertas and Selvagens, are reserved as nature reserves rather than resort destinations. Funchal, the capital, sits on the south coast of the island, behind a natural amphitheater
… Somewhere ?between Waterbury and Stowe, a section of Vermont Route 100 holds up traffic every October. You round a hill, and it clicks: forty cars have pulled onto the shoulder, their hazards flashing, doors open, figures standing in the road with phones held aloft, trained on a hillside of sugar maples that have, overnight, blazed the color of a struck match. No one is ashamed. A man in a fleece vest is telling his kids
Chiang Mai has a charm that feels like Bangkok yet unlike it. The inhabitants of both cities share the same warm, mild disposition characteristic of Thai people, the same reflexive smile visitors often misread as shyness, and locals will tell you is closer to patience. Chiang Mai is small enough to notice your surroundings rather than overwhelm you as Bangkok tends to do. Bangkok is the country’s engine room. Chiang Mai is where that same
… The conductor on the Railjet from Vienna to Salzburg pointed my friend Claudia toward car 21 without being asked. She carried a folded stroller under one arm and a four-year-old by the hand, wearing the particular look of parents who had already tallied the price of three different forms of transportation that morning. “Family coach,” he said politely. It turned out to have a small cinema screen showing something with a cartoon fox, a shelf
… At ?the rental car counter inside Tirana’s airport, the clerk asked if I was heading straight to the coast like most of her other customers. Albania’s beaches are two to four hours south, cheaper and much less crowded than Croatia’s or Greece’s, and enough people who land here treat Tirana as an airport-to-highway stop, change some money, pick up a coffee, and keep going. I told her I was spending three nights here. She thought
… Crushed grass, green and slightly sweet-smelling, is piled higher than the people making the pile. It’s the second week of June on the banks of Peru’s Apurimac River, and four Andean Quechua communities, Choccayhua, Chaupibanda, Huinchiri, and Collana Quehue, have gathered on either side of a canyon to do the one thing they’ve done every year for as long as anyone’s grandparents can remember. Women plait thin cords of ichu grass into thicker ropes. Men …
The bus crunches to a halt. Up ahead, a blond grizzly is working soapberry bushes on the tundra above the road. The female driver, who has clearly done this many times before, turns off the engine and murmurs into the microphone something barely louder than “there he is.” Forty pairs of hands grip forty cameras. The bear doesn’t look up. He has no reason to. He’s about three hundred yards away on the other side
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