Oman has to be the Middle East’s most laid-back nation, said Vivian Nereim in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. The peaceful sultanate, which occupies the eastern corner of the Saudi Peninsula and sits just a boat ride from Iran, has an “easygoing energy” that could calm even the most antsy visitor. “Most Omanis are warm, soft-spoken, and, above all, relaxed.” The followers of three sects of Islam coexist peacefully in this Arab nation, alongside large populations of Hindu, Christian, and Jewish expatriates. In Muscat, the capital, children often play unsupervised in the streets and women in long black robes walk alone at night without fear. I moved to the city last year, and its spirit has “bewitched me—altered me even.” Oman frequently attracts tourists with its spectacular scenery, but it’s the population’s patient, tolerant attitude “that makes the country so special.”
The nation’s natural wonders shouldn’t be ignored. At Oman’s easternmost tip, guides help tourists spot sea turtles laying eggs on a white-sand beach, and I’ve ridden a boat off the Musandam Peninsula to watch dolphins at play. At Wadi Shab, an inland canyon adorned by turquoise pools of water, hikers can enter a sun-dappled cave and swim in the pool below a cascading waterfall. “Few places in the world inspire as much awe.” Closer to Muscat, a waterfall near the mountainside village of Al Hoqain acts as a popular weekend gathering spot for Omani and Indian families, who swim together in the cool water and barbecue on the shores.
If you come to Oman, “take at least one day” just to wander the streets of Muscat. The Mutrah Souk “retains the atmosphere of old Arabia,” its warren of shops peddling frankincense, clothing, and colorful handicrafts. In the quiet Al Hail neighborhood, “you may stumble across a tiny tea shop, a pickup soccer game, or a band of goats.” But “when I think about Oman,” I think about evenings on Muscat’s beaches, when the heat of the day fades and picnicking families, young soccer players, and women in their long robes all are drawn to the glistening water. There, “in the soft darkness and the sound of distant laughter, I find peace.”
A Tijuana you might not want to leave
Believe it or not, there’s “never been a better time” to visit Tijuana, Mexico, said Patrick Symmes in Sunset. The famous border town suffered a wave of violence last decade when it was plunged into the nation’s drug cartel wars, “but the misery years had a surprising effect”: When the tourists fled, local artists and entrepreneurs moved in. I took a walk into Mexico recently to assess the changes (avoiding the hassle of getting a car back through the border crossing). Even on the city’s main tourist drag, I didn’t see the old regulars like U.S. Navy officers on furlough or gaggles of Southern California bachelorettes. What I saw was a new Tijuana emerging.
The scene hadn’t completely changed. Mariachi musicians thronged at one corner looking to be hired, and the strip’s pharmacies “hocked Viagra, Cialis, and dental surgery on demand.” But a reformed police force has taken back control of the streets, the red-light venues were mostly shuttered, and I walked four blocks before I encountered a crowd of revelers—“Mexicans, young and old, dancing salsa in the courtyard of a pizzeria.” Over the next two days and nights, I discovered that hip cocktail lounges and top-notch restaurants were springing up all over the downtown neighborhoods. At the bar La Mezcalera, I sipped top-shelf mescal amid a crowd of young Mexican creative types. At Misión 19, the city’s restaurant of the moment, chef Miguel Ángel Guerrero told me how a young city like Tijuana—which was essentially built on Americans’ Prohibition-era thirst for booze—offered greater freedom for culinary experimentation.
By day, the city shows its confidence in new buildings like the “swooping” $9 million Tijuana Cultural Center and the glassand-steel skyscraper where Misión 19 is housed. Two blocks away, I happened upon a sight one day that gave me even more hope. It was a procession of six men on horses, followed by 21 nuns, followed by thousands of people— children, grandmothers, choirs, bands—all of them marching joyfully and carrying banners calling for peace. “They were taking Tijuana back.”
Living a nomad’s life in Kyrgyzstan
I was in Kyrgyzstan for only a day before I found myself “in the dream world of Central Asian cliché,” said Henry Wismayer in The New York Times. I was sitting crosslegged in a family yurt awaiting a lunch of boiled dumplings while just outside lay a high alpine lake surrounded by prairies and opalescent mountains. “The land felt protean, inviolate, and the hospitality sincere,” yet I had merely followed routine to enjoy such luck. Since 2003, this Nebraska-size former Soviet republic has encouraged backpack tourism by establishing humble community-based tourism, or C.B.T., offices in more than a dozen locations. Everything I needed for my three-day stay here had been arranged in minutes. For $12 a night, “I was enjoying a glimpse of a nomadic culture hewed over centuries on the old Silk Road.”
“For three days, I threw myself into the old rhythms” of life on the jailoo, or high prairie. “On walks around the lakeshore, I met toddlers on horseback and drank bowls of koumiss, a mildly alcoholic drink of fermented mare’s milk.” I helped children milk goats and corral turkeys, and awoke in the mornings to see the mountains dusted with fresh snow. When I left, riding a minibus east to Karakol, I had to get used to a different rhythm: the occasional bleak, Soviet-style settlement appearing between long stretches of majestic landscape and charmed rural life. Karakol, a former military outpost near the Chinese border, offers flavors of both Kyrgyzstans. Now a hub of adventure tourism, the small city acts as the gateway to “the icebound scarps” of the Tian Shan, also known as the Celestial Mountains.
Ten hours south of Bishkek, the nation’s capital, I found a region barely touched by Soviet shadows. Osh, an erstwhile Silk Road trading post and Kyrgyzstan’s secondlargest city, felt more alive than Bishkek, and made a pleasant pit stop before my final adventure. Four years ago, violence that toppled the president flared up in this region, resulting in more than 400 deaths. But in the peaceful village of Arslanbob, where I stayed three days, “such turmoil seemed remote.” Besides, my mind was focusing again on the surrounding wilderness, “where rumors of waterfalls and holy lakes promised more high adventure.”
Discovering Shangri-La
I’m still not convinced that the original Shangri-La is a place that only exists in fiction, said Scott Wallace in National Geographic Traveler. The 1933 James Hilton novel Lost Horizon described it as a valley in southwest China where enlightenment and longevity reign. But just two years before, my own grandfather had written to The New York Times claiming to have discovered in the same region a “lost tribe” whose members lived in harmony and drank from a fountain of youth. My grandfather disappeared not long after filing that report, so when I decided recently to visit the area that so enthralled him, I figured I had only one chance of finding him still alive: by locating his Shangri-La.
My itinerary took me “into one of China’s wildest landscapes”—a national park where the Salween, Mekong, and Yangtze rivers “thunder off the Tibetan Plateau” and “cut through mountains as they funnel into gorges twice the depth of the Grand Canyon.” A company named Songtsam has dotted the area with five lodges and provides guides for traveling between them. At the first, “I felt I’d stepped into Hilton’s novel the moment I entered” because the scent of incense filled the air as I was handed a cup of ginger tea. Isolated ancient cultures endured in these mountains well into the 1930s, but time hasn’t since stood still. On the road the next day, we passed old women “stooped under loads of hay,” but many nearby fields were studded with boxy new homes.
If Shangri-La really did exist, the Meili Mountains would be a picture-perfect place to hide it. Waking one morning in the lodge nearby, we looked out on five colossal snow-covered peaks, including Kawagebo, a towering, almost-perfect cone that Tibetan Buddhists consider sacred. The rest of my journey would take me south toward larger towns, so this was my last chance to imagine that the utopia my forebear claimed to have found might lie just a valley away. The road out took us past 13 ceremonial towers, or stupas, and we stopped at one to placate Kawagebo with offerings. As I slid my pine boughs into a ceremonial oven, I said a prayer for my grandfather, hoping he’d found the inner peace he was looking for all those years ago.
St. John, an unspoiled Caribbean gem
One of the world’s great, unspoiled tropical-island escapes lies closer than you think, said Stephanie Pearson in Outside. St. John can be reached only by sea, but the ferry from St. Thomas requires just 20 minutes, and flights from Miami to St. Thomas take less than three hours. After just half a day of travel, I recently found myself unwinding at an oceanfront eco resort amid 7,000 acres of white-sand beaches and pure wilderness. Other Caribbean islands can have their golf courses and megahotels. Two-thirds of St. John is preserved as U.S. national parkland—most of it donated in the 1950s by Laurance Rockefeller. Offshore, coral reefs spread across another 12,700 acres of federally protected underwater land. Together, they add up to a getaway that’s “almost too perfect for snorkelers, divers, kayakers, and beach loungers.”
Looking out from my luxury tent at Concordia Eco-Resort, “the view is seemingly endless ocean.” Here on the island’s scarcely populated southern tip, cactus grows on the cliffs, and trails lead to various park highlights. A two-mile hike takes me to Cabrite Horn Point, a great place to spot humpback whales. On a four-mile trek the next day, I pass the ruins of sugar plantations on my way to Salt Pond Bay and its crescent of white sand, where about half a dozen people are sunbathing. Soon, I shed my shoes and snorkel among sea turtles and manta rays.
Some 4,100 people live on St. John, mostly in the town of Cruz Bay, though there’s “a surprisingly lively food scene” in smaller Coral Bay. At some point while paddleboarding with a guide on the island’s northern coast or snorkeling in the “vibrantly turquoise” water of Hurricane Hole, it dawns on me that almost everyone I’m meeting along the way is an expat who caught “St. John fever” and has stuck around for decades. My favorite bartender at the Tourist Trap in Coral Bay is from New Hampshire; my paddleboard guides are from Tennessee. When we end our three-plus-hour adventure at an open-air restaurant in Cruz Bay, I almost envy the “sunburned, windblown” customers around me. “Some of them might just end up sticking around.”
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