“Words can be powerful—even stupid words in a travel magazine,” said David Ewing Duncan in Outside. That’s what I told my teenage son, and it’s what worried me as we flew toward Belize several months ago. Twenty-six years earlier, I had written a piece in Condé Nast Traveler that spilled the secret about Ambergris Caye, a Belizean island that at the time was a sparsely populated Shangri-la where a fly fisherman could haul out a tarpon on the first cast and scuba divers could spend time alone with one of the finest coral reefs in the world. Other writers followed my lead, and before long, hotels popped up on Ambergris Caye, flights to Belize multiplied, and cruise ships began dropping passengers at the reefs. I needed to get back to witness what I’d done.
From the air, most of the small coastal islands looked unchanged—a splattering of dark-green blobs against “a blue so intense it looked radioactive.” Ambergris Caye’s main town had grown significantly, though, and on the beach stood “a nearly unbroken progression of white bungalows and hotels.” One of them was Ramon’s Village Resort, the upgraded version of the place I had stayed at years before. The property’s thatched huts had been replaced by air-conditioned bungalows and a pool shaped like a stream. But when a beauty pageant filled the grounds with local families that night, “I didn’t have to ask if they preferred this life to the ‘paradise’ of palm trees and huts” I’d once written about. Clearly, their new day-to-day greatly pleased them.
The reef’s colors were dazzling when we dove the next day, but tourists had virtually stripped it of conch shells, and the fish population had declined too. Still, we saw a range of species, and Alex caught his first triggerfish the next day on a fly rod. By then, I was beginning to realize that blaming myself for any changes in Belize was as ridiculous as thinking I could capture life as it exists there after just a short visit. “My quick impression was that the wonder remained,” though. “New roads, bars, and hotels hadn’t ruined the place, even if the conchs were gone.”
India’s tranquil south
Several hundred miles south of Mumbai lies “a totally unexpected India,” said Maria Shollenbarger in Condé Nast Traveler. I discovered it on my first visit to the country, following the advice of a friend whose mother hails from the bustling capital. She recommended a road trip from Coorg to Kasaragod, two appealing districts in South India that turned out to be connected by a threeplus-hour drive through “monumentally beautiful” territory. The two ends of the journey differ greatly in topography and climate, but both “exemplify everything that is wonderful about traveling the rural byways of the subcontinent.”
Coorg is known as the Scotland of India. A swath of rain forest sitting atop a mountain range known as the Western Ghats, the district “has recently emerged as a high-altitude redoubt for India’s new elite, who come from the searing urban ovens of Bangalore and Chennai to hike, mountain bike, and inhale the oxygen-rich air.” It can be a pleasant shock to finish the challenging six-hour drive from Bangalore by stepping into the Vivanta resort in Taj Madikeri and looking across the open-air lobby and an infinity pool to the “astonishing” vista—“mountain after lushly forested mountain as far as the eye can see.”
A half-day’s drive on a “dizzyingly spectacular” road brought me down from the mountains a few days later. Passing waterfalls and painted temples, I rolled across the fertile plain that runs to the Arabian Sea. After a night at a beachfront boutique hotel, I took a room aboard the Lotus, a converted rice barge that ever so slowly plies an “eminently photogenic” backwater a half-mile inland. We stopped the first evening at a village where locals were preparing for a ritual worship known as the Theyyam festival. Smoke rose from braziers, “whirling up past the pale-pink buildings of the temple complex and into the faded sky,” while coals were lit for a worshipper to walk across. Before I fell asleep, I sat on the roof of the Lotus, listening to prayer calls while the village’s electricity occasionally flickered off and revealed “a sky extravagantly painted with stars.” In India, of all places, I’d found “a perfect distillation of solitude.”
Embracing the passions of Seville
Twenty years after I first passed through Seville, I have finally returned—“lured by a few mental postcards,” said Andrew McCarthy in Travel + Leisure. In just one night, the 2,200-year-old capital of southern Spain’s Andalusia region had imprinted on my memory a handful of images: a young woman in a bar who spontaneously danced the flamenco; a jasmine-scented piazza; a photograph of a statue of the Virgin Mary with crystal tears on her cheeks. “Like all places of real interest, Seville thrives on contradictions.” It’s a Catholic city defined by its 15th-century Moorish architecture. It’s home to 700,000 but “can seem like a small town.” I get to know the soul of the place not by chasing my old memories but by letting its rhythms guide me.
Despite its “jumble of ancient, narrow lanes,” Seville is “an easy city to settle to.” Sitting in the oldest tavern in town one night, I savor paper-thin slices of cured ham cut in front of me by my waiter but enjoy even more how he scribbled my tab right on the wooden bar where I sat. Behind the bar hangs a photo of that crying Mary, an image as prevalent in the city’s bars as flamenco. People sometimes deride flamenco as merely a tourist enticement. But in Triana, a working-class neighborhood on the west bank of the Guadalquivir River, midnight brings out the local dancers in bar after bar. At 3 a.m., “a lone guitarist strums a ferocious beat” while the crowd claps along and couples execute an erotic version known as sevillana.
Bullfighting is still big here, too. Some 14,000 passionate people pack the main arena the night I attend, and the drama that unfolds makes the ancient spectacle feel “deeply personal and alive.” But it’s a quest for marmalade that ends up completing my journey. Walking away from the convent that sells it, I follow my feet until I find myself inside the Basílica de la Macarena. A priest is presiding over a wedding at the altar, and as I turn to leave, I spot her hovering above the young couple: Without even looking, I have come face to face with St. Mary of the crystal tears.
Biarritz—France’s hip surf spot
Biarritz isn’t Cannes or St.-Tropez, said Luke Barr in Travel + Leisure. A century after its initial heyday, this resort town on southwestern France’s Atlantic coast is “a less polished place” than those Côte d’Azur enclaves—both “a little wild” and “a little young.” One grand beachside hotel remains from Biarritz’s pre–World War II golden era, but there are “no mega-yachts floating in the harbor here,” no private beach clubs or “Lamborghinis stuck in traffic.” The new Biarritz is a surfer’s town, trading again on its stunning landscape and churning, powerful waves. More than a decade into its rebirth, it has become a bohemian hot spot, but is in no danger of smothering the laid-back charm that brought it back from the dead.
I visited with my wife and children recently, and every day we hit a different beach. Some, like the Grande Plage, were “mad carnivals of blazing heat and people and sand.” Others, like Plage Marbella, were “quiet narrow strips backed by cliffs.” But all had sections for surfers, and the waves we watched them ride were aweinspiring. “Like any self-respecting French town, Biarritz is full of excellent bakeries, confiseries, butchers, épiceries, food shops of all kinds,” and we walked the streets in the late afternoons, settling in for out outdoor meals built around fresh seafood and accented by such Basque Country touches as stuffed hot peppers and marinated anchovies. We regularly wandered just down the coast to Guéthary, a small village that sits on a bluff. There we had the small beaches practically to ourselves, and hung out at Providence, an “art gallery/surf shop/boutique/café” run by a bearded video and music producer.
One afternoon, we meandered past Providence and settled at Heteroclito, “a bright colorful place with a hippiejunk-shop aesthetic.” Surfer Patrick Espagnet opened the bar 22 years ago, and he assured us as we sat on the terrace that the area’s resurgence hadn’t changed its essential spirit. He was right. “The sun was setting, the light was softer, and we could see a few surfers out on the water, catching the last waves of the day.”
Sochi—Russia’s oddly inappropriate Olympic city
The Black Sea port that will host the Winter Olympics next month has been effectively made over “from head to toe to soul,” said Andrea Sachs in The Washington Post. Long the “Summer Capital of Russia,” Sochi never before bothered to cut ski slopes into the surrounding Greater Caucasus Mountains, perhaps because the city’s movers and shakers were too busy enjoying the warm breezes and sunshine that sustain the area’s palm trees and tropical fruit trees. But Russian President Vladimir Putin had a dream of using the Olympics to transform Sochi into a year-round international resort, and neither the climate nor the threat of terrorism could turn back his bulldozers and cranes. Even a month before a pair of December terrorist bombings killed 32 people in Volgograd, military vessels were patrolling the waters off Sochi’s fabled coast.
I arrived during “anti-terrorism week”—a stretch of November when bombings were still a hypothetical and Sochi’s seaside promenade supported a genial outdoorcafé scene that felt “more South of France than southwest of Siberia.” But the city was changing before our eyes: Buildings seemed to vanish overnight, replaced by new streets, new bus stops. Within weeks, the Olympic Village and skating events will take over a section of the waterfront, while new trains will transport skiers, bobsledders, and their fans from a new train station through a new tunnel to a new alpine resort about 40 miles away. When I visited, the bases of the slopes were still “loud, messy, and muddy.” But a pristine tram lifted me high above the construction mayhem all the way to the Gornaya Karusel resort’s spectacular 7,283-foot peak.
I eventually spent a full day alone in Sochi without Russian interpreters and guides. I’d already visited a local tea plantation, and found myself on one of those trains, enjoying its cleanliness and quiet. Everything around me was new, except the one feature outside my window that grabbed and held my attention—“the Black Sea, which has soothed Russians’ souls during good periods and bad, from time immemorial.”
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