Stanley Stewart
Kilmartin Castle, Scotland
You never know about castles. Some have had their life restored out of them and end up as atmospheric as a Marriott in Cleveland. Some are prone to “castle kitsch” — all fake suits of armour, baronial furniture and acres of velvet curtains. Some are almost too authentic — cranky plumbing, rising damp and medieval draughts. In Argyll last month, I followed that idyllic road round Loch Fyne to Kilmartin Castle with some trepidation.
Bought in 2016 by Simon Hunt and Stef Burgon, a young couple keen to swap the bland heat of expatriate Dubai for the cool green of Scotland, 16th-century Kilmartin Castle turned out to be my discovery of the year. In an eight-month restoration, they gutted the interior — mercifully the exterior walls were in good nick — to create an exclusive-use property of real panache and charm. Up the winding staircases are five stylish bedrooms and a great hall with a fireplace you could park the Volvo in.
The delight of the place, beyond the rain showers and the underfloor heating and the option of a private chef, are the eclectic furnishings, decor and art work — everything from Persian carpets to French shop signs, collected from antique emporiums and flea markets around the world.
The other delight is the castle’s location. Kilmartin Glen has the richest concentration of prehistoric monuments in Scotland: standing stones, stone circles, a linear cemetery of burial cairns, mysterious rock carvings. Take a walk down the glen with Kilmartin Museum’s resident archaeologist, one of several unique experiences Simon and Stef offer their guests.
Kilmartin Castle (kilmartincastle.com) sleeps 10 and costs from £1,000 per night. Stanley Stewart was a guest of Scottish tour operator Away from the Ordinary (awayfromtheordinary.com), which creates bespoke themed itineraries
Disappointment A return to Mongolia this year revealed what has happened to Ulan Bator. Twenty years ago there were still horsemen in Sükhbaatar Square and sheep grazing the flower beds. The Mongolian countryside may be as pristine and stunning as ever, but progress has meant Ulan Bator is now such a nightmare of traffic that it is almost impossible to move around, while its air quality places it among the most polluted cities on Earth.
Sophy Roberts
Baths of Diocletian, Rome
I was in Rome in October because I wanted to see the largest retrospective yet of a British photographer I greatly admire, Don McCullin, at Palazzo Esposizioni Roma.
A co-curator of the retrospective, which runs until January 28, recommended that while I was in the city, I should also visit the Baths of Diocletian — a sleepy site of domes and cloisters that once formed part of the biggest complex of bathing pools in the Roman world. Some of McCullin’s most recent images, she explained, included striking black-and-white compositions of objects exhibited at the baths.
So off I went, wandering through ochre rooms half-open to the watercolour skies. With Stéphane Verger, director of the Museo Nazionale Romano (of which the baths are a part), I sneaked into the Great Halls, due to reopen in January for the first time in 50 years after a major renovation. The space will be used to display rescued archaeological objects.
Verger’s descriptions lingered with the dust motes, like flecks of gold in the shards of Roman light. He drew a picture of the baths from another time, when they were filled by 3,000 people. He talked of emperors and bloody Gothic wars, which in the mid-sixth century AD, cut off the water supply and silenced the babble in the caldarium for a thousand years. The Baths of Diocletian were abandoned until Michelangelo transformed part of the complex into a church in the 16th century.
We wove among the various state treasures, passing busts of gods topped by snail-shaped curls, reliefs of Neptune emerging from the waves, and one of the earliest known carvings of a Christian baptism, cut into a third-century sarcophagus.
Verger explained that less than 10 per cent of the complex’s larger collection has ever been displayed — a reminder of Rome’s abundance of culture at one remove from those Pantheon crowds. He talked about how he was raising funds to restore numerous pieces, including the most ancient inscription in Italy, from the eighth century BC.
That’s a discovery I think is worth sharing, even if it risks the irony of bringing footfall to a place that is rare and beautiful because of what it hides in its quiet shadows.
The Baths of Diocletian are open Tuesday to Sunday from 9.30am to 7pm, entry €10; museonazionaleromano.beniculturali.it
Disappointment A summer trip to celebrate my father’s 80th birthday on the Hebridean island of Mull turned into an experience of Scotland’s capricious ferry services — which must test the patience of locals. A cancelled run from Oban (in fine weather) meant we had to try and catch a ferry from Lochaline instead.
This detour meant we had to take the Corran ferry to the Ardnamurchan peninsula to get us to the right port. But that shortcut wasn’t functioning for cars, and hadn’t been for months. There was a silver lining when we did eventually make it across to Mull: walking the glens came with the very real feeling that we had this little bit of Scotland all to ourselves.
Ruaridh Nicoll
Imperial Hotel, Amador, California
In a fold in the Shenandoah hills, California’s least populous incorporated city splits in two directions just by the Imperial Hotel. I imagine John Wayne shooting a baddie off its white balcony before stepping in and ordering an ale from the nearby Break Even brewery, perhaps the hoppy beer known as The Head of Joaquin Murieta.
Amador, in the Sierra above Sacramento, is home to a mere 200 souls. Its hotel, built in 1879, was still being renovated when I showed up at the start of the year, but it had its grand opening in March when locals were invited in for a viewing and pizza. Kevin Carter, a young Silicon Valley venture capitalist who is also the founder of the brewery, gave me a tour of his latest venture.
The red-brick hotel is small but beautiful. Its heavy bar feels as if straight from the gold rush — with a rail to rest your boot on, and globe lights to illuminate your game of poker.
The six bedrooms upstairs feel big, calm and airy; there are three more in a nearby cottage. The level of detail and quality is clear, coming from Carter’s enthusiasm (he’s 37), his hands-on approach (he was working on the place himself), and his resources (he was an early investor in social media platform Snapchat). The menu is described as “hyper local”.
But the city is prospering beyond Carter’s intervention, with people moving up from the Bay Area to start sweetly original businesses. There is Dreamy Whites Lifestyle, which made its name selling pale furniture, clothes and knick-knacks online before opening an “atelier” on Main St, and 3 Fish Studios, an art gallery and print shop that has become famous for its print of a bear hugging a map of America’s most populous state, with the slogan, “I Love You California”.
And there is the region itself — rolling hills of oak, ponderosa and manzanita. Over the past three decades mom-and-pop vineyards have sprung up, giving it the feel of Napa or Sonoma back in the day. “It’s a lot more homely than Napa,” says Michael Long, head winemaker at Amador Cellars. “In a lot of places you’ll still find the owner or the winemaker in the tasting room.”
On Wednesdays, the Imperial has a neighbourhood night with casual food and music. There can’t be many better terraces to sit on, and I am keen to go back.
Double rooms at the Imperial Hotel, Amador (imperialhotelamador.com) cost from $175; see also visitamador.com
Disappointment The number of European visitors to Cuba has collapsed this year, in large part because of a vicious little final act by Donald Trump as US president. He returned the island to America’s list of “state sponsors of terrorism”, meaning no one who visits Cuba can then use an ESTA visa waiver to enter the US.
What it also means is Cubans are beginning to go hungry because their ailing state can’t pay for food imports. Sir George Hollingbery, Britain’s excellent ambassador, calls it “desperately unfair”. He’s spot on.
Tim Moore
Saaremaa, Estonia
Finns aside, beyond Tallinn there aren’t many foreign holidaymakers in Estonia. On the unexpectedly vast, low-slung island of Saaremaa, there aren’t even many Estonians. From the little ferry port, it’s a 125km drive to Saaremaa’s western tip, through ancient forests and yawning plains, studded with massive boulders left by ice age glaciers.
The sparse settlements pay dusty tribute to the island’s wayward history: mighty but mouldering churches put up after piratical “eastern Vikings” were finally brought to heel in the 14th century, poignantly ramshackle aristocratic villas from the island’s fleeting late-Tsarist holiday heyday, and derelict Soviet tenement blocks.
Throw in a meteorite that left a 100m crater right next to a Bronze Age settlement and there’s a pervasive, beguiling sense of a fairytale island where spurts of dramatic activity are interspersed with centuries of spellbound stasis.
Kuressaare, home to half the population, is dominated by a grandly turreted coastal fortress, the legacy of successive occupations by the Teutonic Order, Denmark, Sweden and Russia. I stayed in one of its decorative 19th-century gatehouses, gazing down at the sun-dappled moat and the weed-pierced, cobbled back streets.
How delightful to be reminded that even in bustling, well-trodden Europe, there are still places that time, and other tourists, forgot.
The Ekesparre Boutique Hotel at Kuressaare Castle has doubles from €155 (ekesparre.ee); see also visitsaaremaa.ee
Disappointment A hire car is a hire car, so why not always pre-book the absolute cheapest? Yes, I know. Anyway, my hallowed policy’s many inherent flaws all made an overdue appearance this year. The half-hour minibus ride from airport terminal to dusty, distant compound; the scratched wheels I didn’t scratch. The coup de grâce: a fly-by-night rental office in the basement of a Nice hotel that flew by night, stranding me and my 88-year-old father at 11pm.
Erika Fatland
Koks, Greenland
I’m not sure if turning 40 was the highlight of 2023, but the celebration at Koks, a pop-up gastronomic restaurant in Greenland, certainly was.
Running the original Koks, a two-Michelin-starred restaurant out in the sticks on the Faroe Islands, was already an eccentric undertaking. While waiting for the construction of a slightly more central restaurant to be completed in the Faroese capital Tórshavn, the Koks team decided to make a pop-up restaurant in Greenland, some 2,100km further north-east. For their Arctic adventure, they chose Ilimanaq, an isolated village with about 50 inhabitants and an unknown number of Greenland Dogs.
To get to Ilimanaq, you must fly to Kangerlussuaq, catch a domestic flight to Ilulissat and continue your journey by boat. The boat trip itself is a memorable experience, passing the famous icefjord, a Unesco World Heritage site. I stayed at the wonderful Ilimanaq Lodge, with panoramic views of the icebergs drifting past. With some luck, you’ll even see a whale or two while you eat dinner. I didn’t, maybe because I was focused too much on the sumptuous wine pairing.
Koks occupies the oldest house at Ilimanaq, a charming wooden building with creaky floors. The menu is inspired by local ingredients and includes combinations like ptarmigan, blackcurrant and reindeer lardon. Or sea snail and fermented green gooseberries. I’m still ambivalent about turning 40, but I’d do it all over again for a two-star dinner in Ilimanaq.
The restaurant in Tórshavn is still not finished, so Koks will stay open for another season in Greenland in 2024. The tasting menu costs DKK3,200 (£368) plus DKK1,800 for wine pairings; see koks.fo
Disappointment The Rio Carnival. The Uber driver sighed when he understood where I was going. From the car stuck in traffic I witnessed two muggings; when I finally arrived at the Sambadrome, a girl covered in glitter stumbled and poured a litre of Coca-Cola on me. The parade itself, albeit very glitzy, was utterly boring. It takes almost an hour and a half for one single samba school to slowly parade by, with the same song on repeat. Then you must brace yourself the next one. And the next one.
William Dalrymple
Siwa Oasis, Egypt
The most revered oracle of the ancient world did not perch on a mountainside at Delphi in Greece; it lay instead in the Siwa Oasis of Egypt, deep in the shifting sands of the far edge of the eastern Libyan Desert.
Delphi was respected and feared, but it was also regarded as corrupt and open to manipulation. When Xerxes’ Persians invaded Greece, Delphi’s prophecies seemed to side with the occupying invaders, rather than the Athenians and Spartans. The allies nevertheless went on to successfully block the path of Xerxes at Thermopylae, then Salamis.
In contrast, the independence of the incorruptible oracle of Siwa nearly led to its destruction. Some time in the 520s BC, the Siwa Oracle issued some prophecies that were interpreted as being critical of the great Persian king, Cambyses, who had just conquered Egypt. Furious, he sent his army marching across the Sahara from Thebes to put the troublesome priests to death.
They never made it. A week into their journey, a strange “wind arose from the south, powerful and deadly, bringing with it vast columns of whirling, which entirely covered up the troops and caused them to disappear”, wrote Herodotus. This sent Cambyses into a spiral of madness from which, at least according to Herodotus, he never recovered. “I have no doubt,” he wrote, “that [by the end] Cambyses was completely out of his mind.”
Today the Siwa Oasis is still a gruelling, epic whole-day journey across the desert. You leave Cairo before dawn and pass the pyramids at first light. The road then takes you past the great Coptic monasteries of the Wadi Natrun, then on to Alexandria. Here you turn left and follow the Mediterranean coast for 150 miles, past the battlefield of El Alamein. Then, in the early afternoon, you turn left again, into the desert.
You arrive though the relentlessly swirling sands in time to see the sun setting over the strange moonscape of Siwa; the eerie blue waters of the lake reflecting the lapis lazuli sky and the strange white, wind-eroded salt-cliffs that surround it. Beyond stretch unearthly mountains that look like they belong to some far-distant galaxy.
Today, just as in antiquity, Siwa feels not quite of this earth, somehow part of a different dimension, or what the ancients clearly felt was a parallel world of the gods.
It may have been this that led Alexander the Great to attempt to visit Siwa in person. He aimed to win over the oracle as decisively as Cambyses alienated it. In 332BC, soon after founding the city that would eventually become Alexandria, Alexander set off with only a small group of his Companion Cavalry to consult the oracle. He is said to have followed the path of birds to find the quickest way across the sands, to the Siwa lake.
According to Arrian, he is said to have been seized by a burning desire to know who he was, “because he was already referring part of his parentage to [the God] Ammon . . . and he meant either to discover about himself or at least to say that he had done so”. Alexander never revealed what the oracle said but, after his death, the coins minted in Alexander’s name referred to him as Zeus-Ammon and depicted him adorned with Ammon’s curling ram-horns.
We spent last Christmas in the unworldly peace of Siwa, swimming in hot springs, riding over sand dunes and, like Alexander, visiting the eerie temple of the oracle on its knob of rock overlooking the palm trees of the oasis. We stayed at somewhere suitably spectacular: Beit Michael at Adrère Amellal, the inspired creation of a London art dealer.
It was designed by India Mahdavi, and constructed entirely of local materials: kershef, mud brick and salt. It contains major art works by Richard Long and the only James Turrell installation in Africa. It also uses no electricity and has no internet connection. It is just as otherworldly and fabulous as the rest of the oasis.
If you want to get away from the world and recover from its stresses in peace and complete comfort, there could be nowhere further from the mundane than Siwa.
William Dalrymple was a guest of Beit Michael and Wild Frontiers (wildfrontierstravel.com), a UK-based tour operator which arranged transport and an overnight at the Marriott Mena House in Cairo. Beit Michael sleeps 12 and costs from $3,000 per night; contact [email protected]. Beit Michael is adjacent to the boutique hotel Adrère Amellal (adrereamellal.com), which has double rooms from about €750 per night
Disappointment The effective closure of Iran. The political situation and the tendency of the Iranian regime to arrest random western travellers, has made it foolhardy to visit one of the most interesting and beautiful countries in the world.
The Empire podcast, which I present with Anita Anand, is currently looking at empires of Iran, and I’ve felt particularly acutely the impossibility of revisiting this wonderful and perennially fascinating country.
Nanjala Nyabola
Trømso, Norway
One of the most startling discoveries I’ve made about myself in recent years is that I quite like winter, when it’s done right. You can keep the indecision of slushy streets wavering between frozen and liquid but give me knee deep snow to trudge through under a bright blue sky any day. I learnt this keenly during the four days I spent in Trømso, Norway, chasing the Northern Lights.
Trømso is a frequent (and expensive) stop for visitors on Arctic cruises but it’s less common for people to venture into the wintry hinterland, where temperatures routinely drop to a bone-chilling -10C. I flew in via Oslo and, after two-nights in a hostel downtown, booked an overnight in a yurt — known here as a lavvu — with Trømso Lapland, a Sámi-owned tour company.
We drove about 50km outside Trømso, where city lights are less likely to interfere with views of the night sky. The sledding and reindeer feeding lasted about two hours because of the temperatures and the threat of frostbite. Understandably, the other people in the group went home after the complimentary hot cocoa brought us back to a decent temperature — I was the only overnight guest that night.
Deserts — Arctic or sand — are fantastic places to get in touch with who you are. In the silence of the night, listening to dogs howl at the Moon and the wind whistle through the valley, you are faced with one of the most fundamental existential questions there can be: are you the kind of person who gets up to use the bathroom at 4am when it’s -10C outside, or are you the kind of person spends the next three hours willing yourself to go back to sleep?
A night in a lavvu with Trømso Lapland (tromsolapland.no), including reindeer sledding and feeding, costs from NKr3,945 (£285); see also visittromso.no
Disappointment When I’ve flown to the US this year on Virgin, Delta and United Airlines, I found myself unable to check in online — a result, I was told later, of the fact I was travelling on a visa rather than using the ESTA system. That means that, no matter how early I arrived at the airport and despite my frequent flyer membership, I always found myself in whatever middle seat was left. If it’s a document check they need, they should at least let you hold the seat and complete the check in later.
Claire Wrathall
Akrotiri, Santorini
Like practically everyone who goes to Santorini, I knew it had been shaped by a massive volcanic eruption. What I hadn’t realised was that this cataclysmic event, more than 3,500 years ago, also buried a prosperous Minoan town, Akrotiri. And excavations, which began in the late 1960s, a decade after a devastating earthquake again drove most of the population to abandon the main island, have revealed a place not unlike Pompeii, only one destroyed a millennium and a half earlier and still uncrowded with tourists.
Akrotiri’s population must have had warning of the impending disaster because no evidence of bodies has been found. But there are streets, squares, the vestiges of houses of two or three storeys, their picture-window frames broadly intact. There was even indoor sanitation. “A lavatory,” reads one caption, “with a long downpipe, at the bottom of which was a kind of siphon, in order that waste could be drawn into an underground sewage system.”
These were people who prized beauty as well comfort and cleanliness because sophisticated decorative objects have been unearthed too: clay vessels delicately painted with flowers, fish and birds; an exquisite gold figurine of an ibex; and gloriously colourful frescoes showing ships, life-size human figures and animals, most surprisingly a wall of cavorting blue monkeys that have given their name to one of the thriving local microbreweries.
The finest of the finds are now in Athens at the National Archaeological Museum, but plenty of real interest is still on display in the excellent Museum of Prehistoric Thira in Santorini’s main town. But it’s the ruins of abandoned Akrotiri and its sense of lives lived that I found most affecting.
Joint tickets to Akrotiri and the Museum of Prehistoric Thira cost €15; archaeologicalmuseums.gr
Disappointment Of course, progress is unstoppable and it’s easy to be nostalgic about places one used to go when they were unspoilt, undeveloped and you could still see spider monkeys. Even so, it saddens me that this month marks the opening of an international airport at Tulum (annual capacity: 5mn passengers) and the first section of the high-speed Maya Train, both government projects to facilitate yet more tourism to Mexico’s Yucatán peninsula.
Their construction has led to the bulldozing of thousands of acres of rainforest, causing a devastating impact on indigenous communities and the area’s fragile ecosystems — which, along with its archaeological sites, were surely its appeal.
Oliver Smith
Packrafting, from Scotland to French Polynesia
Some time ago, I was picnicking by the Regent’s Canal in London, when I saw someone paddling by in a peculiar boat. It was an inflatable — similar to the sort used by children in holiday swimming pools — except smaller and tougher-looking. This was, the occupant explained, a “packraft” — a tiny vessel used by back-country hikers as a means of crossing rivers, or remote lakes.
What made it special was its portability — that (along with a collapsing paddle) it could be stuffed in a small backpack, inflated and deployed about as quickly as it took to boil a cup of tea. No one would guess you were carrying a boat about your person. It was, in some ways, a 21st-century coracle.
I bought one in January, and it has been a revelation. Mine weighs around 2kg, and when packed down has the dimensions of a large shoebox. Its maiden voyage was in February on a mirror-calm bay beside the Isle of Mull.
In late spring, I used it in the Lake District: paddling across Derwentwater to the uninhabited St Herbert’s Island, where the eponymous saint had his hermitage and where the island air was thick with the scent of wild garlic.
In summer the packraft sailed under castle battlements on the Menai Strait, and in October, I snuck it into my hold luggage for a trip to French Polynesia. Here, the little boat travelled the paradisiacal lagoons of Raiatea and Taha’a: I saw pods of dolphins leaping, and the fins of a curious reef shark beside my paddle.
It has proved a magnificent way of giving crowds the slip, offering the freedom of casting off on a whim. Its polyurethane hull has been speckled with sand from Hebridean beaches and Polynesian atolls — I doubt if any boat has ever sailed the same strange combination of waters!
An Itiwit one-person packraft like the one used by Oliver Smith costs £400 from decathlon.co.uk
Disappointment The news that the Centre for Alternative Technology near Machynlleth is to close to drop-in visitors. Established some 50 years ago in the forests of mid-Wales, this pioneering eco-attraction was a staple of my childhood summer holidays — the highlight being its water powered-funicular railway.
Cal Flyn
Chico Hot Springs, Montana
In Pray, Montana (pop. 800), Chico Hot Springs is something of a local institution. It’s a naturally heated pool, with restaurant and rooms, set within a dramatic Wild West landscape about 30 minutes’ drive from Yellowstone National Park’s northern entrance. There’s a choice of fine dining, saloon bar or a casual poolside café — ideal for unruly families — and space by the pool to sunbathe in somewhat retro style. The car park is always packed with pick-up trucks with local plates and engines powerful enough to pull five-horse trailers.
First established as a rough and ready boarding house for gold prospectors, it later evolved into a health spa thanks to its mineral pools. The place embodies a uniquely Montanan blend of gun-toting practicality and that early 20th-century idea of creature comfort. (Those seeking more contemporary luxury will find it at Sage Lodge — where an outdoor spa and triple-height windows offer stunning views of snow-dusted mountains — only a short drive away.)
Entry costs $14; chicohotsprings.com
Disappointment I don’t like to dwell on disappointments, but I must admit to not being entirely pleased with my new Garmin inReach Mini, a GPS and satellite communication device I carry in remote destinations. It does its job, recording location pips at intervals and enabling me to stay in somewhat stilted text dialogue with home when far from a phone signal.
But it’s glitchy and irritatingly slow. I’ll keep it for the SOS button — for now. But with phone and satellite technology improving so fast it’s a gadget that already feels nearly obsolete.
Maria Shollenbarger
Boccadasse, Italy
Technically a southern suburb of Genoa, Boccadasse will be familiar to fans of Andrea Camilleri’s Inspector Montalbano crime-fiction series as the home of the Sicilian detective’s long-distance love interest, Livia Burlando.
That she’s of the north, we’re seemingly meant to infer, is a defect mitigated by her particular north being this former fisherman’s village. Here, one of Italy’s largest ports begins to segue into one of its most subscribed tourist destinations, the Riviera Levante. It’s a place still reassuringly salty, despite being almost absurdly pretty.
But it’s one you pass through rather than a destination; you’d miss it entirely if you didn’t make the excellent decision to take the winding, two-lane Corso Italia out of Genoa in lieu of the faster, easier E80 autostrada. There’s a tiny inlet of pebbly beach facing south, enclosed at its western end by a promenade with views all the way to Camogli, and its eastern one by a promontory to which sorbet-coloured buildings have over the centuries accreted like crustaceans, a mandarin-lemon-guava confection against an improbably blue sky.
Aspirational local brides in bejewelled dresses pose on the promenade, kids scamper and dive and flirt along the rocks below; patrician villas hide in the pines and palms around it. You eat very well at Trattoria Osvaldo, on a shaded little square just in from the beach; but the far more scenic table is the one on a narrow private terrace that virtually hangs off Ristorante Capo Santa Chiara, at the very tip of the promontory, facing the fishing boats. A pass-through place that made me elaborate a whole alternate-life fantasy, which is what the best places do.
See visitgenoa.it and ristorantecaposantachiara.com
Disappointment Twenty-one kilometres down the coast from Boccadasse, and light years away, is Portofino. In July, a snarl of traffic blocked the provincial road on which I approached; a police officer was turning away anyone without a hotel or restaurant reservation. Too-young models paraded bizarre resort fashions across the Piazza Martiri; too-old, too-rich men of indeterminate provenance and portfolio puffed away on cigars, watching them.
And everywhere, influencers, Italy’s new seasonal pestilence. “Come back in November,” said — entreated — the poor locals. An utter victim of its own desirability, and a morality tale for “luxury” tourism.
Horatio Clare
Royal Decameron club caribbean, Runaway Bay, Jamaica
Our discovery of the year was a surprise because a package holiday in Jamaica could have been a hell of pinking flesh in a resort like a stranded cruise liner. The bus stopped at several along the island’s north coast, but then came ours, a simple, beautiful hotel at Runaway Bay.
Hexagonal whitewashed cabins along the shore date from the ’60s; the gardens flit with birds and butterflies and the hotel swims in a lovely feeling of peace (unless you seek reggae, which bathes the children’s pool). It was built by Richard Salm, who emigrated from Britain, married a Jamaican and became a citizen: the couple left this lovely place as part of their legacy.
The towering dawn skies, the brief and tremendous afternoon downpours which roll down from the hills, the sweetness of the gardens after rain, the night lightning and the bright oceans of stars over the sea towards Cuba are the stuff of absolute serenity.
But there is something else here, too. Britons of Jamaican descent and local people prize the hotel, so rather than a dining room composed of white people being waited on by black people, you are all just people, delighted in the same good fortune of being here. We learned to sail a catamaran, made friends, ate wonderfully well, swam, danced, had the tender conversations you hope for on holiday and pioneered a new form of outdoor chess, where you have to move any piece the garden cats rub against. Our son recruited a pride of them. It was comic Jamaican bliss.
A week for two people at the Royal Decameron Club Caribbean (decameron.com) costs from $1,486 all-inclusive
Disappointment Kind and attentive staff, the Michelin-starred Moss restaurant (deeply silly and tremendously delicious) and a private quadrant of Iceland’s most famous spa are supposed to justify the outrageous prices at the Retreat at Blue Lagoon (rooms start at £1,200 per night).
But the absolute charmlessness of the hotel is overpowering. To me, the atmosphere felt like Dignitas for billionaires, dominated by the dead hand of cash extraction and status-anxious bucket-list ticking. Avoid at no cost.
Pico Iyer
Soneva Fushi, The Maldives
When it comes to white-sand idylls, I’m a notorious killjoy. “My friends are going to the Maldives for their honeymoon!” my wife once exclaimed, to which I groaned, “Who’d want to go there? If you’re looking for a beach holiday, go somewhere with texture and culture — Cuba, even Oman! Or think about the environmental cost instead of just another postcard-worthy selfie!”
But when the Jaipur Literature Festival invited me to speak at its offshoot event in the Maldives, I knew I had to say yes, if only to earn points with my wife. Before long, we were on a seaplane pulling up on a sandbank in the middle of the Indian Ocean. Beside the private pool outside our private villa, a rabbit was waiting to say hello.
Sonu Shivdasani and Eva Malmstrom, founders of Six Senses Resorts, opened Soneva Fushi in 1995. They had to use four helicopters from the Bulgarian government to link their remote atoll to the international airport in Male, and electricity was scarce. Now, aware of the many reasons not to take such a trip, they are working overtime to encourage environmental consciousness everywhere. A 2 per cent levy on all stays goes towards carbon offsetting and other positive projects; initiatives range from coral rehabilitation to installing solar power, creating vegetable gardens and buying furnishings from responsible producers in rural Sri Lankan communities.
To spend a few days in a sanctuary that takes up a whole swatch of tropical jungle felt like being airlifted into somebody else’s life. We enjoyed champagne cruises with dolphins romping beside the boat and my wife snorkelled with turtles. We bicycled between restaurants that looked like tree-houses and enjoyed sushi for breakfast as delicate as the mousse-soft sand.
I could never have afforded such a trip on my own. And it did take me a while to locate sachets of sugar for my tea — hidden in a coconut shell — on the health-conscious atoll. But as we flew back to our rented two-room apartment in suburban Japan, we realised that living it up and acting with conscience need not be incompatible. There’s no branded mineral water at Soneva Fushi, but with the money raised from selling its own in glass bottles, Soneva has provided clean drinking water to more than 750,000 people worldwide.
Pico Iyer was a guest of Soneva Fushi (soneva.com; from about $2,200 per night for two people) and the Jaipur Literature Festival (jaipurliteraturefestival.org)
Disappointment Rain. Day after day — of course — in Vancouver and even Seattle. But also via 12 “atmospheric rivers” in Southern California that brought every last thing to a halt last spring. Never-ending downpours in a state long-suffering from drought: we seem simply to be constantly swerving these days from one extreme to the next.
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