For a long time, I believed that the city of Mompós was only a myth, said Nicholas Gill in The New York Times. “Mompós doesn’t exist,” Gabriel García Márquez wrote in his 1989 novel The General in His Labyrinth. “We sometimes dream about her, but she doesn’t exist.” I trusted the truth of those lines until 2008, when an acquaintance opened a boutique hotel in García Márquez’s fictional Colombian city. Mompós, or Santa Cruz de Mompox, as the municipality is officially known, is home to 30,000 people. Set in a river valley that’s rich in history and “ripe with romanticism,” it’s also a “perfectly preserved” colonial city.
Getting to Mompós isn’t easy. In Cartagena, I had to catch a 4:30 a.m. seat on a Toto Express pickup truck that plowed inland for seven hours before we reached a ferry on the Magdalena River. The Magdalena explains both Mompós’s rise and its decline: It once facilitated a booming trade in tobacco, slaves, and precious metals, but it silted up in the early 19th century, and currents shifted. Property prices are rising on hopes that Mompós is about to be rediscovered, but mule carts still outnumber cars, and visitors frequently number in the single digits. During the day, intense heat sets a “drowsy rhythm.”
Just past dawn, I watched students walking to school and men in straw hats unloading pineapples from dugout canoes. But the city goes quiet until dark, when locals head to cafés and booths in central plazas and bats swoop down into the streets. I hired a boat on my last day in Mompós to explore its surroundings. “We cut through streams and wetlands, where herons flew over fields of yucca and howler monkeys slept in the trees.” The boatman pointed to high-water marks set by a 2010 flood that lasted seven months before locals brought in the Cristo Negro, a black Christ figure from a Bogotá church, and the floodwaters receded. The story sounded like a tale out of a García Márquez novel, but in a town as “preposterously fantastic” as Mompós, the miracle “just might not be fiction.”
The snowiest ski resort in the world
Niseko, Japan, “has quietly become the stuff of legend among the skiing cognoscenti,” said Eric Hansen in Outside. Located a 90-minute flight from Tokyo, the town on the nation’s northernmost island gets more snow each January than any other ski area in the world, and that snow is generally as dry as the finest powder found anywhere in North America. Australian skiers discovered Niseko after 9/11, when getting to Whistler in British Columbia suddenly became a challenge. Their support has kept the area in business while nearby Japanese slopes were failing, but Niseko still combines “movie-quality powder” with the laid-back vibe of a locals’ hill. Of the 48 feet of snow that fall on the town in an average year, 15 feet arrive in January. “Finding fresh powder is almost never a problem.”
My guide tells me I’m lucky when my first day of backcountry skiing is greeted by a bright sun and bluebird sky. I am, but I’m happier still when Niseko is once again “thoroughly snow-fogged,” as it can be day after day for weeks at a time. I spend most of my off-slope time touring Niseko Village, one of four base areas, then ski powder at night under the “impressive constellation of lights” of neighboring Hirafu. Natural hot springs called onsen bubble up everywhere, and I make a point of soaking my weary body at Goshiki, a “legendary” onsen—half indoor and half out—that sits at the end of one backcountry run.
Feathery snow is falling heavily as I part ways with the members of a snowboarding club I’ve enjoyed most of another day with. They were curious to hear about what it’s like to ski Whistler, but took for granted the blizzard then enveloping smaller Niseko. For a while longer, I ski alone, “poofing through fluff and leaping off pillow drops” while the flakes keep coming. “‘Aoooooooo!’ I howl, bringing my skis to a hissing stop after another half-dozen untracked runs.” I’m completely alone, and I’m beginning to believe that Niseko might just be the best ski resort in the world.
Driving North America’s most isolated road
The Trans-Labrador Highway might be “the loneliest road in the world,” said Josh Eells in Men’s Journal. A half-paved, 706-mile road that cuts across Labrador in northeast Canada, it passes through a vast wilderness so sparsely populated that a road tripper will often see no one else during a full day of driving. Built in the early 1980s to spark a commercial boom that never arrived, the two-way highway today remains “one of the last places in North America where it’s possible to be truly alone.” What’s more, the land itself is often dazzling. “In just a few days of driving, you can go from ancient woodlands to permafrost taiga to icy Atlantic fjords.”
A three-plus-hour flight from Montreal deposited me in tiny Labrador City, and soon my rental car and I were off. The land just to the east was “like an alpine valley, with shag-carpet grasslands, thickets of evergreens, and lakes the color of Darjeeling tea.” The packed-gravel road challenged my small SUV, but I made it to Churchill Falls in time to settle in for the night. By the third day, I so craved social interaction that I vowed to stop and talk to every person I passed. I talked to a Subaru driver at 9 a.m. and never saw anyone again. At one point, I stopped in front of a fox that stood in the middle of the road. He stared at me, disappeared, then popped up to my left. “He was playing with me,” so I got out until he got bored and trotted away.
Labrador’s Atlantic coastline is composed of some of the oldest known rock in the world, carved by a glacier 800 million years ago. My last day was spent pressing southward along the windswept shoreline, and it struck me that I could stop almost anywhere and walk to a patch of land no other human had ever touched. At the end of the road, the “mist-shrouded” town of Blanc-Sablon, I feasted on fresh cod and crab and considered the news that paving of the Trans-Labrador has begun again. If you hope to follow my tracks, “now may be your last best chance.”
Soaking up San Juan’s hipster phase
San Juan is beginning to percolate, said David Amsden in Condé Nast Traveler. Not long ago, Puerto Rico’s capital was the kind of vacation destination where “you put up with mediocre food and ignore the local culture in exchange for a lounge chair facing the ocean.” But in part because steep tax breaks for investment income are bringing in wealthy young Americans from the mainland, neighborhoods that once were best avoided now welcome after-dark exploration. In short, the city might well remind you of Brooklyn circa 1999—“scrappy but sophisticated,” briefly occupying “that sweet transitional spot” where it is “still possible to feel part of a secret, part of something new and indisputably thrilling.”
I had only been in San Juan a few hours recently when I happened upon my first happy surprise. Jose Enrique is one of the city’s most celebrated young chefs, but the easiest way to find his eponymous restaurant on a mostly deserted street in the Santurce district is simply to look for the attractive young people gathered outside, waiting for tables with cocktails in hand. The group I dined with on stools at the bar “soon felt like old friends.” Not far away, on Calle Loíza, I passed a “whiskey pizzeria” and a small-plates restaurant operating out of a bright-yellow shipping container, and every venue was “teeming with people.” One formerly vacant lot was hosting outdoor film screenings.
Neighborhood after neighborhood seemed to be undergoing a similar transition. Puerta de Tierra, once a high-crime area, has emerged as the city’s first art and design district. The old auto-repair zone, Tras Talleres, now feels like “the street-art capital of the Caribbean, with intricate graffiti covering every other building.” One sunny day after a particularly long night of hot-spot-hopping, a friend took me to an old-school restaurant for a lunch of fried steak and plantains. Once again, “I could have been in Brooklyn, with one notable exception: Less than a mile away I was able to find a nearly empty stretch of beach, where, in the shade of a palm tree, I happily passed out.”
Exploring a German town built by violins
It was in the pretty village of Mittenwald, Germany, that I learned that my oldest companion was a fraud, said Emma John in Afar. The Alpine town of 7,000 “couldn’t have been more inviting” or its residents more knowledgeable about the subject that had brought me there: the provenance of the ancient violin I had been playing since I was 12. Mittenwald is a very musical place: “Violins were everywhere” as I made my first stroll through town. They adorned shop signs, menus, even bottles at the liquor store. But when a master luthier peered inside my violin, he was unimpressed that the label inside said “1732” and bore the name “Mathias Klotz”—the craftsman whose handiwork had turned Mittenwald into a capital of violin-making. “This is not a Mathias Klotz,” he said. And I was crushed.
Mittenwald’s varied charms helped soothe my disappointment. The town’s main thoroughfare, the Obermarkt, is a pedestrian avenue lined with 17th- and 18th-century houses and decorated with murals depicting Bible scenes and the renowned medieval market once based there. The pinktowered town church is lavishly decorated with trompe l’oeil paintings, and though I never adapted to the almost vegetable-free local diet, I “invested a lot of time in the town’s secondary industry: bakeries.” I even found a banjo player and a violinist to play with in the evenings, and on their recommendation, I hiked one day to the Lautersee, a mountain lake where tiny flowers stud the banks with subtle color.
Eventually, I felt I had no choice but to visit the town’s violin-making museum, which held a Mathias Klotz violin that looked so unlike my own instrument that viewing it was “like staring into a stranger’s face.” But the museum’s curator had asked me to bring in my impostor, and when an expert she called in told me that my violin had indeed been made in the 18th century, “a rush of relief flooded me.” The expert wasn’t done, either. The label, he said, was authentic—produced by Klotz and granted to a contemporary luthier who was imitating him. My violin’s label turned out to be the true marvel—one of only seven in the world.
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