Raja Ampat is “one of the most physically ravishing places I’ve ever encountered,” said Maria Shollenbarger in Condé Nast Traveler. A chain of 600 islands “strung like rough-cut emeralds” across the tropical waters of eastern Indonesia, the archipelago that once was the sole home of the bird of paradise still teems with life and remains largely untouched by human habitation. Once battled over by the Dutch and English when the two maritime powers sought to dominate the 18th-century spice trade, Raja Ampat has, in more recent times, “become a destination for divers, nature enthusiasts, and escapees from modern life.” If Raja Ampat “sometimes feels like the setting for Jurassic Park, below it’s pure Finding Nemo.” Sperm whales, giant turtles, and “every colorful, delightful, and freakish coral-dwelling fish you can imagine” share the same subsurface neighborhood.
One of the few ways to enjoy this Eden is by booking a cabin on a chartered luxury craft, as I have. Aboard the gorgeous Alila Purnama, a traditional phinisi wooden sailing boat, my six fellow travelers and I quickly become friends as we share daily adventures and meals on deck. Being outnumbered by an attentive crew, “we want for little”: “Glasses are never allowed to empty, wet towels disappear, and warm dry ones are quietly draped over shoulders.”
The moment we start thinking about what the chef might be making for dinner, appetizers reliably arrive. One morning, we awake near a reef where massive manta rays swoop by the dozen beneath us before we put aside our diving masks and slip away to a “tiny, castaway-perfect island.” Sometime during our lunch, the crew sets up a line of daybeds under umbrellas, and we watch the sunset from that beach before moving on.
For our last dinner, the crew surprises us by pulling at twilight into a hushed cove where a table set with linen and silver awaits amid dozens of lanterns. Filet mignon, Balinese stuffed duck, and skewers of fish are prepared nearby in a makeshift barbecue pit. “We eat and drink barefoot in the sand to a gentle soundtrack of waves lapping the beach a few feet away.”
A reawakening Cape Town
South Africa’s so-called Mother City “bursts at the seams with excitement for its future,” said Stephanie Allmon in the Fort Worth Star-Telegram. Twenty years after the end of apartheid, this beautiful port is the 2014 World Design Capital, and that’s giving it a chance to show off its new energy and affirm its standing as a leading global city. The New York Times recently named it the world’s No. 1 place to visit this year, and I can’t disagree. Plan a culinary tour of Cape Town and the nearby wine region, and you will collect memories to last a lifetime.
The sun woke me early on my first morning in the city, rising high enough by 5 a.m. to “peel back the curtain of night and reveal the majesty of Table Mountain.” The flat-topped mountain looms over the city; when Nelson Mandela was imprisoned on nearby Robben Island, he looked back upon it imagining it a beacon of hope. I set out that first day to the Old Biscuit Mill, a village-like collection of cafés, shops, and restaurants in Woodstock, a neighborhood that’s undergoing a renaissance. By 11, I’d sampled buffalo mozzarella, a pastry called the Flying Dutchman, and a tuna jerky, but we pushed on for more noshing in the Bo-Kaap, or Cape Malay Quarter. Brightly colored homes and cobblestone streets make this district a popular choice for photo shoots, while the food—like sumptuous lamb curry and samosas—reflects the district’s Muslim heritage.
“Entire vacations can be spent in wine country,” stringing together stays in boutique hotels in the region’s charming small towns. The Cape Winelands are so beautiful that even teetotalers should see them. But my luxurious hotel, the One&Only, kept calling me back to Cape Town, and on my last night, I indulged in the child-like fun of riding the Ferris wheel on the Victoria and Alfred Waterfront. From the ride’s highest point, I looked back at Table Mountain as clouds hovering above it began spilling down its sides, creating an effect locals call a “white tablecloth.” The sight “made my last sunset in this exotic and storied city as memorable as the first sunrise.”
Exploring remote Haiti’s natural wonders
If only visitors to Haiti could get to the waterfalls at Cascade Pichon, said Dean Nelson in The New York Times. Dubbed one of the country’s greatest tourist attractions by former dictator Jean-Claude “Baby Doc” Duvalier, the stunning falls are fed by an underground lake and burst from a verdant mountain face “like so many faucets stuck in the open position.” But Duvalier probably reached the site by helicopter, because even four decades later, the land journey from Port-au-Prince remains a “tire-shredding, neck-snapping” seven-hour drive across gravel, flood plain, and dry riverbed. That said, you won’t regret the detour if you take it.
I discovered the falls while reporting on community rebuilding projects in Haiti. Four years after a devastating earthquake, the nation is still recovering from the devastation and subsequent cholera outbreak. But you can see why some officials want to start positioning the country as an eco-tourism destination. Two hours from Cascade Pichon, which is tucked into the southeast corner of the island nation, the small coastal city of Belle Anse makes a promising jumping-off point. The town of 51,000 is full of young, educated, and energetic people, and yet it “embodies the contradictions you find in Haiti. The natural beauty of the beaches stops you dead in your tracks. So does the poverty.”
The final climb to Cascade Pichon looked impassable for our SUV, but we “fishtailed and swerved and hopped our way to the top,” blasting past a soccer field and a small church on the way. The falls and the lake below were so spectacular that I didn’t need much from the only lodging nearby—the one-story Hotel Deruisseau, located on a mesa across from the cascading water. Meals were served about 50 feet from the building in a community gathering area under a metal roof. The hotel had no hot water or private showers, and offered no electricity after 10 p.m. But none of that mattered. “As I lay in bed, all I could hear was the falls—the greatest white noise ever.”
One night inside a mammoth Vietnam cave
Under the mountains of central Vietnam lies a vast hidden world, said David W. Lloyd in The New York Times. A series of “mind-blowing” caves—some used as shelter from U.S. airstrikes during the Vietnam War—dots Quang Binh province. But the largest have been so recently explored that you can still meet their discoverers. When I traveled to the village of Phong Nha recently, I stayed at a guesthouse owned by a local hero who, in 1990, stumbled upon arguably the world’s largest cave. I was planning to instead visit Hang En—a cave whose main cavern is big enough to house a 747—when I had dinner with the English scientist whose team first explored it. Visiting Hang En, he told me, is “one of the best, most amazing things it’s possible to do in Vietnam.”
He wasn’t kidding. Our group was dripping with sweat the next morning by the time we reached the valley floor in the nearby national park. But the rest was bliss. As we followed the Rao Thuong River, “swarms of butterflies wove a dance in front of us,” and “magnificent” lime-green hills rose on either side. The shallow river flowed right into the cave, and we waded in darkness through the cool water before encountering a wall of boulders. At the wall’s summit, “we were stopped dead in our tracks by the view before us”—a cavern 300 feet high, with a natural turquoise pool far below us and beams of sunlight pouring in from above. It was here we’d camp for the night, in tents pitched on the pool’s sandy beach. After a refreshing swim, we drank rice wine and enjoyed dinner cooked by our porters over an open fire.
By the next evening, we were back in Phong Nha, chatting over dinner at a roadside joint with a sign that read, “The Best BBQ Pork Shop in the World…Probably.” We all knew that Son Doong, the region’s largest cave, is visited by a small number of tourists each year. But everyone agreed that Hang En was everything he or she had hoped it would be, and that the pork we were eating was only the world’s second best: It couldn’t top the dinner we had had the night before.
The Mediterranean’s best-kept secret
Chances are, you’ve never heard of Cavallo, said Peter Hughes in the Sunday Telegraph (U.K.). That’s because the tiny Mediterranean island, which is tucked between Corsica and Sardinia, has long been a closely guarded secret, its quiet charms shared by only an upper echelon of the international elite. “From a distance, it doesn’t look like much”—just “a low green mound” one and a half miles across. But in the 1970s, it became a private playground for celebrities like Catherine Deneuve and Marcello Mastroianni, and it’s recently served similar duty for Beyoncé and possibly Alicia Keys. The island belongs to a syndicate of private owners who are mostly Italian and, though it’s technically part of France, feels Italian in its culture, too. It was long easier to reach from Rome than Paris.
Approaching by ferry, you see the granite outcroppings that put Cavallo on the map. The island “is a glory of stone”—a collection of elephantine gray and tan boulders left behind by the Romans who harvested the island’s granite for their statuary. The surrounding sea is “lens-clear, great for snorkeling,” though such sports are pursued discreetly. Cavallo’s 10 sand beaches are mostly wild, and it’s the kind of place “where luxury is defined as having not much to do, but costing a lot to do it.” Because you’re not allowed to have a car, “you bump around in electric golf carts.” The island has only one store, plus a café, a yacht marina, and—in July and August —a hilltop pizzeria that becomes the local hot spot.
Cavallo has one hotel plus some private residences for rent, but I can’t imagine it becoming a major tourist destination anytime soon. In 1990, Corsican nationalists who feared its despoilment firebombed some new villas, and last year, all new construction was banned. Additional laws have been put in place to protect island wildlife, including a rare orchid, and “it’s not just the orchids that are being preserved, but a patch of the Mediterranean as it was a generation ago.”
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