The fog does the introducing in Sintra. You climb the switchbacks out of town in a tuk-tuk that smells faintly of diesel and eucalyptus, the driver working the horn at every blind corner, and for most of the ride there is nothing above you but gray. Then, without warning, a canary-yellow tower punches through the cloud like something surfacing for air, followed by a dome, and the effect is less “castle in the mist” than …
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The ferry captain running the Isla Mujeres route makes the crossing roughly 14 times a day, and on each he continues to announce the dolphins, cutting through the wake with the kind of casual indifference only a wild animal that has seen fourteen ferries a day for years can manage. His passengers never fail to get a charge out of the water mammals. Twenty minutes after leaving the concrete high-rises of the Zona Hotelera behind, …
At Mountain Crossings, the outfitter built into the trail itself at Neel Gap, Georgia, there’s a rhododendron tree strung with boots. Thru-hikers who quit within the first thirty miles — and a startling number do, somewhere around fifteen to twenty percent by most counts kept at the shop — sometimes leave their footwear behind as a kind of offering, or a warning, depending on how you read it. I watched a man in his fifties …
The prayer cloths get you first. Long before you’re close enough to Devils Tower to feel small under it, the ponderosa pines ringing its base are hung with small bundles of cloth and tobacco pouches, faded pastel, blue, and red, tied by Lakota, Cheyenne, Kiowa, and Crow visitors who came to pray, not to photograph. A ranger at the visitor center will tell you, if you ask, that most climbers see the bundles and lower …
At the Devil’s Throat, on the Argentine side of Iguazu Falls, the mist arrives before the sound, and the sound arrives before the sight. You walk a kilometer of steel catwalk over a river so flat and unbothered it seems to be lying to you, and then the walkway simply ends at a railing above a horseshoe of water eighty meters deep, into which fourteen separate cataracts empty at once. Nobody finishes their sentence at …
The woman across the farmhouse table in the Val d’Orcia had flour to her elbows and no patience for my ravioli. “Too thick,” she said, pinching the dough between two fingers like she was checking a fever, then rolling it back into the machine without further comment. It was day two of a five-day cooking course outside Montalcino, and I had, by that point, produced roughly forty ravioli that would have been more accurately described …
A woman in a blue plastic poncho is screaming with delight eleven feet from a curtain of water falling fifty-seven meters onto rock, and nobody around her finds this strange. This is Table Rock, on the Canadian side, where the mist comes up off Horseshoe Falls in cold gusts strong enough to soak you through a poncho that was, until about ninety seconds ago, doing its job. Somewhere behind her, a busker plays “Can’t Help …
The drums start before the light is fully gone. On Kauai’s north shore, dusk does not so much fall as get absorbed; the sky over Kilauea falls dark while a line of torches gets lit along a gravel path. Somewhere behind the stage, dark and enormous against what’s left of the light, sits a mountain the old Hawaiians called Makana and the movies renamed Bali Hai. Nobody on stage mentions the second name. They don’t …
On the last night of October, on a low green hill outside the County Meath town of Athboy, several thousand people stand in the dark waiting for a fire to be lit. There is nothing spontaneous about it. A production team has rehearsed the lighting for weeks, a schedule lists the moment down to the minute, and a livestream camera is trained on the summit for anyone who could not make the trip. And yet …
The chalk went up on the walls, the color of old teeth, and the wind off the Channel was working hard to take every hat in reach. A small crowd had gathered above Cuckmere Haven, on the lip of the Seven Sisters, facing east toward a scalloped horizon of cliff and gorse, flags snapping and a portable PA system losing its argument with the gusts. It was the 19th of March, cold enough that nobody …
Queen Victoria visited Penrhyn Castle in 1859 and refused to sleep in the bed prepared for her. It was carved entirely from slate, weighed roughly a ton, and had been commissioned specifically for her stay — a grand gesture that struck her as macabre. “It reminds me of a tomb,” she is said to have remarked, before retreating to a different room. The bed still sits in the castle today, a strange monument to a …
Having traveled extensively throughout Mexico, I have no hesitation in declaring Valladolid my favorite city in the south. From diving into the clear waters of a cenote to sampling delicious local cuisine or checking out Mexico’s largest private collection of Mexican folk art, there’s no shortage of fun and fascinating things to do in this colorful colonial city in Yucatan.
Not only are there amazing things to do in Valladolid, but the city also makes …
Stretching across the hillside and Caribbean coastal plain, alive and resilient as its founders in a distant earlier century intended it to be, the original historic city of Cartagena today reflects a past that leaves a memorable imprint on the traveler. Approaching the outskirts of old Cartagena today from its outer perimeter that fronts the southern Caribbean, presenting a broad panorama of architecture and edifices. This intricate urban landscape extends well beyond its protective outer …
There are a few destinations in the Caribbean that have managed to retain an authentic sense of place while simultaneously establishing themselves among the region’s most exclusive escapes. Anguilla is one of them.
Situated in the northern Caribbean, just 19 kilometers north of St. Martin, this slender coral and limestone island stretches only 26 kilometers from end to end. Yet within its modest footprint lie 33 spectacular beaches, an internationally acclaimed dining scene, intimate luxury …