Innholdsfortegnelse for January/February 2021 i AFAR

The signs were everywhere, but I rarely saw them: slender green arrows mounted on metal posts, pointing out over fields, along rivers and canals, the white words painted on them, public footpath, getting not so much as a thank-you for their service. GREAT BRITAIN, MY NATIVE LANDSCAPE, is overridden with these footpaths—roughly 150,000 miles of trails known as public rights of way. The land they cross is often private, but public rights of way—which allow anyone to traverse that land on foot, bicycle, or horse—have been part of the country’s history since the Dark Ages, enshrined in law for centuries. We all found our own ways of coping with lockdown. Some people turned to fitness videos, some to baking. I escaped to the footpaths. My parents’ cottage in Buckinghamshire, 40…

“I CAN TAKE YOU TO YOUR PEOPLE.” The phrase was uttered by the elder who had taken my hand shortly after I arrived in a small Ghanaian village in 1997. And though the words were simple, they pointed to a diffcult fact: Black people displaced from their homeland by slavery had been severed from their ancestral roots. Now that we were back to visit, those who’d never left the continent could see in us connections we still couldn’t see in ourselves. My role on this trip was as a reporter. I was sent by my newspaper to accompany a group of Black teenagers who had won the trip, and I’d heard this phrase spoken to others many times. Those who heeded the call were introduced to someone who looked just…

THERE’S SOMETHING hallucinatory and steadying about Greece’s landscape, the elemental wind and dazzled light, its scoured crags and wine-dark sea (to use Homer’s phrase). My husband and I used to make regular pilgrimages to the Cyclades; then came the joyous upheaval of children, followed by years of unmooring—the passing of parents, half a dozen relocations, a devastating house fire, the uncertainties of midlife and marital strain. And now the unsettledness into which we’ve all been thrown. I suppose it’s no surprise that I find myself fantasizing again about Greece, where the simplest things can seem so profound. Just to sit for a plate of horiatiki (salad) at a seaside taverna is to participate in a ritual seemingly untarnished by the passing of time. In particular, I’ve been thinking of the…

If 2020 has taught me anything, it’s that the next flight is no longer something to take for granted—and once it’s safe to venture out again, this long-overdue holiday is something I won’t put off any longer. MY FATHER, the unoffcial family historian, can trace our ancestry back 40 generations and across nine modern-day countries, including Saudi Arabia, Spain, Turkey, Uzbekistan, India, and the United States. I’ve lived in or traveled to many of those places: I grew up in Saudi Arabia, I’ve been to Spain and Turkey, and I return to India every year. But one thread of my heritage has always felt enigmatic: What, I wonder, were the lives of my ancestors like in 16th-and 17th-century Uzbekistan? I had lofty goals of tracing the footsteps of that branch,…

THE STICKY HEAT that rises from the sidewalk has never deterred me from fulfilling my New Orleans cravings: For the last several years—until 2020—I’ve made an annual pilgrimage for the crispy fried chicken doused in Crystal hot sauce at Willie Mae’s Scotch House, charbroiled oysters bubbling with Parmesan and butter at Drago’s, steaming po’boys with fried catfish at Parkway or Adams Street Grocery, a muffuletta that I can barely fit into my mouth (still, I make it work) at Verti Marte. My love for New Orleans is a sensory addiction that began with taste—those bayou flavors were first introduced to me in Los Angeles by my grandmother Gwendolyn, who learned from her mother Emily, born in New Orleans. No matter what kitchen I am in, the stirring of roux to…

To us, the future of travel is one in which local businesses and residents welcome visitors who seek to give, not just take, when they experience a destination. THE COVID-19 PANDEMIC has caused so much pain and destruction. My heart goes out to everyone who has lost a loved one and to those who have suffered through sickness and confinement. And I feel such empathy for those who have had their livelihoods upended and dealt with financial hardship. Our industry, the travel industry, has been crushed, and the consequences have affected so many of our friends and colleagues. It is heartbreaking. AFAR has not been immune. While we greatly expanded our digital content in 2020, this is the first print issue we have published since last spring. We are fully…

HOW DOES AN AMERICAN travel responsibly in Vietnam? It’s been on my mind this year, a year when many of us are thinking more deeply about the effect we have on the places we visit. I passed through Vietnam briefly almost 20 years ago, but I’ve always wanted to spend a month in the country, savoring spring rolls while skipping about between historic temples and palaces. But if I aspire to be an American with a conscience, should Vietnam even be on my vacation radar? How can I do the relaxing, vacationy things and, simultaneously, reckon with such a complex, often brutal history—one that my own nation helped create? To avoid Vietnam—to avoid the discomfort of history—feels problematic, too. So in 2021, once the country has reopened to visitors, I’d…

A FEW YEARS AGO, on assignment in Austria, I found myself on two wheels, rolling through bicycling heaven. Sixty miles west of Vienna, on a bike path along the banks of the Danube, the sun shone through wispy clouds onto terraced vineyards that stretched up the hills. I took a bite of an apricot, just picked from a small mound left outside a farm for passing cyclists. A sign indicated the route I was traveling: EuroVelo 6. I wrote it down—and promptly forgot about it. Like so many others searching for ways to get out into the world safely, I fell more deeply in love with cycling in 2020. By summer, I was leaving my apartment in New York City for days at a time, panniers packed and my phone…

DEAREST TIBET, For many years I have heard you, calling across the 9,000 miles that separate me from Lhasa and my ultimate Buddhist pilgrimage. I first heard your gongs in a gallery in Kingston, Jamaica, and in the traditional music wafting from a teahouse in Port-of-Spain. I have felt your presence at New York’s Rubin Museum of Art, where candlelight bounces off the brass skin of bodhisattvas on display. Still, it is not enough. I want to journey for 33 hours to feel your full embrace. I am a man snagged on the hands of a corporate clock even while working from home. One day, travel will again be my escape from the samsaric wheel of Zoom meetings, phone calls, and quarterly board reports. I long to be in Tibet,…

I WAS BORN in New York City at 3:18 a.m. on Christmas Day, in the midst of a whiteout blizzard. As my mom labored in a hospital lobby before being admitted, my dad and our dear family friend tried to distract her by calling Dial-a-Joke. Though Mom is a proud agnostic, the soundtrack to her contractions was the Pope’s Christmas mass, beamed through the TV from the Vatican. Seven long hours after my mom’s water broke, I arrived in the city that never sleeps, brought forth with the very persistence and perseverance that define the place. show 35 years later. As a child and young adult, I lived in Brooklyn, Staten Island, and Manhattan. The story of my family is empty without the city as a leading character, saying to…

I will travel again. That much I know. The question is how. I don’t mean whether I’ll be wearing a mask or carrying hand sanitizer—I will be—but a bigger, more philosophical how, and its close cousin, why. These are questions I thought I had answered. I’ve spent a lifetime traveling and thinking and thinking about traveling. Along the way, I cobbled together my own “philosophy of travel.” Go solo, do no harm, see as much as possible. It was a good philosophy, I thought, one that enabled me to travel ethically while still enjoying myself. But a backlash was brewing, as the scourge of overtourism came into sharp relief. Crowds of eager travelers were sullying the environment and fraying the social fabric of overrun destinations. Friends, meanwhile, questioned my outsize…

Where to Go in 2021. It might be more appropriate to ask Should I Go in 2021? And if so, How Exactly Do I Go? Because 2021, while imbued with hope, is still an unknown. Lockdowns, border openings, and the vaccine (oh, the vaccine) remain in flux. In a time when so much remains uncertain, there are some things we know to be true. The pandemic revealed a world without travel. We learned what we took for granted and what we missed the most. And we know we will go when the time is right. On the following pages, you’ll read about 12 places we’re dreaming of now: A journalist longing to return to Ghana; a novelist’s dream of following, slowly, in the footsteps of her favorite adventurer in Greece;…

A DECADE AGO, I went with one of my besties, Anyeley, to Brazil. We travel well together, which is a coup for wildly different people—Anyeley is an African American practicing Christian and I’m a secular Iranian American Muslim. At the time, we were single gals in grad school. Despite having none of the luxuries of travel, we managed to have the time of our lives. So when we’ve talked about our first postpandemic trip, it’s to Ilha Grande, an island off the coast of Rio. The island is small and walkable with unbelievably pristine beaches. It’s not a party island, though there is partying; it’s not a sleepy island, though there are plenty of ways to relax; it’s not an island propped up by festivals or by the wealth of…

THE BUSSA EMANCIPATION STATUE is unmissable. Located in the middle of a busy roundabout, it depicts a man in tattered shorts, his hands outstretched, broken chains hanging from the shackles on his wrists, and his eyes looking up at the blue Caribbean sky. Barbadian sculptor Karl Broodhagen created the piece in 1985 to commemorate the abolition of slavery in Barbados in 1834. When I first saw it from the window of a taxi in 2016, I was taken aback by its unflinching depiction of the brutal enslavement of a people. But it wasn’t melancholy—it was prideful. I wondered if Bajans, as Barbadians are also known, thought about that history as they zoomed by in their cars. A locale shows its ethos in the details. During that trip, I saw how…

AT THE BEGINNING OF JULY, the streets of Mexico City were quiet. Restaurants had just been given the permission to offer indoor dining, and my friends and I walked through the Roma Norte neighborhood in search of seafood. We skipped across multilane thoroughfares where just four or five cars were stopped at traffic lights, as we talked loudly in English and Spanish, our voices echoing in the empty streets. Mexico City wasn’t the crackling megacity I’d fallen for on my first trip back in 2004. Then, the city’s arteries flowed with greenand-white VW Beetle taxis, the traffc a constant roar. As I explored the Bosque de Chapultepec, the Museo Frida Kahlo, the ancient pyramids outside the city, I made new friends: Mexican teachers, Guatemalan políticos (in one case, a política),…

I WAS SITTING IN THE one-room hut of a Tibetan nomad, a wizened old man I’d met while hiking through the Baima Snow Mountain Nature Reserve, a protected wilderness in the far northwest of China’s Yunnan province. My lungs, already straining for breath at an altitude of nearly 12,000 feet, were choked by the smoky fire at the center of the room, and I was trying not to think about the five-mile climb back to the trailhead. The man gestured toward his two butter churns. He showed me a wood cabinet filled with rounds of yak butter that he made and sold to monasteries, where monks plunge their fingers into ice water before carving the blocks into elaborate lotus blossoms, chrysanthemums, images of Buddha. He offered me a cup of…