Innehållsförteckning för August/September 2022 från Wanderlust

The USA wasn’t high on my list of priorities when I first started travelling independently in my late teens. In fact, it wasn’t until my mid-twenties that I got my first taste of Americana, having cut my teeth on more ‘exotic’ destinations, such as Micronesia (p214), Colombia (p52) and New Zealand (p42). But nothing could prepare me for the diversity and variety I would encounter in America, a nation that would fast become one of my favourites to visit. With 40 states under my belt to date, I still feel like I’ve barely scratched the surface of this vast land. From Alaska to Hawaii; Oregon to Georgia; Maine to Colorado (p60), the USA often feels like a continent all of its own, so how about a few tips to break…

1 KENTE CLOTH The Akan people of the Ashanti Region have been dying silk using ground bark or leaves since the 1600s. They weave the thread on looms into geometric designs to create kente cloth, the colours of which symbolise different things (blue, for example, means harmony). Once reserved for royalty – who wore it as a shawl draped over their left shoulder – Ghanaians typically now wear strips around their necks on special occasions. 2 BEADS Krobo mothers in the Southern Region give their daughters beads for their dipo, a coming-of-age ceremony. These are often worn around the waist and made from shell, bone or glass, which is fired in a kiln, then painted. Golden beads signify wealth, while some feature the ‘evil eye’ to protect the wearer from…

NEST TREE HOUSES, WAITAKI, SOUTH ISLAND Hidden among the branches of a hilltop forest overlooking the Hakataramea Valley lies a treehouse stay that feels more like a boutique escape. Floor-to-ceiling windows stare out across the valley, a cedar bathtub sits snugly on the outdoor deck and a private treetop sauna offers a dash of off-grid decadence at this adults-only retreat. There’s also plenty nearby to keep you busy, with farm and vineyard tours affording a taste of the area’s rural charms. And come nightfall, you can just lie back and contemplate your place in the universe – the site lies on the edge of Aoraki Mackenzie International Dark Sky Reserve. This summer also saw the owners open a second treehouse, so you’re now spoilt for choice. Treehouses from £251pn, including…

From the top of Trail Ridge Road – the highest continuously paved road in America (3,731m at its peak) – mountains rose like stone giants all around. The air was thin and dizzying, the tree line lying far below. Up here, in the tundra of Colorado’s high peaks, everything felt grander and lighter. I took in a view normally reserved for mountaineers and mountain goats, but in Rocky Mountain National Park even mere mortals like me could gaze upon it with ease. I had found, perhaps, the most spectacular stretch of tarmac in America. It was a fitting start to a wonder-filled road trip across the state. Colorado has long been my adopted home, after I swapped the streets of London for its mountains ten years ago. I’ve seen it…

Everything is bigger in America; even its wild spaces are ‘supersized’, with forests that seem to go on forever and vast tracts of desert, canyons and mountains that stretch all the way to the horizon. Skyscraping American cities have a hold on many people’s imaginations, but it’s these natural landscapes, including the national parks, refuges and national monuments, that have called me back time and again over the years. Today, around 12% of land in the USA is protected, alongside 26% of its oceans. Shortly after arriving in office, President Joe Biden committed to raising the percentage of conserved land and ocean to 30% by 2030. It’s a welcome idea. These wild places are home to a fascinating array of creatures, including more than 400 species of mammal, around 800…

Few peoples have been more over-romanticised in literature than the Bedouin, traditionally the nomads of the Arab world. English writer-adventurers of a certain stamp, such as TE Lawrence and Wilfred Thesiger, deliberately sought them out, believing that their tough lifestyles (the name Bedouin derives from the Arabic badawi, or ‘desert dweller’) would provide solace from the apparent corruption of modem life. In doing so, they helped fashion the cliché of the noble ascetic with a timeless culture that persists to this day. Like all tropes, this is an unhelpful reduction; the truth is far more interesting, as any visitor to Jordan will discover. Exact census information doesn’t exist, but an estimated 40% of Jordan’s 10 million-strong population claim Bedouin descent. Today, they are a people who live thoroughly contemporary lives,…

Río Lagartos, Yucatán, Mexico Photographer: Claudio Contreras One of the great wildlife spectacles of Mexico is Yucatán’s Río Lagartos Biosphere Reserve. Every year, some 30,000 Caribbean flamingos gather here for nesting season (Mar-Jun), settling on the estuary in great luminous pink clouds. Here they build sandcastle-like mounds to keep their eggs warm, stalking the shallow salty water for the brine shrimp that makes up the bulk of their diet. By September, the birds tend to have moved further down the estuary, but that just means longer, more scenic boat trips to find them as you chug deeper into the dense labyrinth of mangrove-entangled islands. When you do reach the colony, the first thing the strikes you is the colour. Newborn chicks emerge as grey balls of fluff; they only acquire…

Highlight: Miami shattered all my misconceptions. Sure, there are tans and six-packs, but there is culture, character and authenticity too, as well as great food – Zitz Sum, among others, has recently been recognised by Michelin. Whether strolling mural-splashed Little Havana as music blares from vintage cars, or taking a quiet moment at Miami Beach Botanic Garden, there’s more to this city than first meets the eye. Must see: Running in a pastel-hued line from 5th to 23rd street, Miami’s Art Deco Historic District is home to over 800 architecturally striking buildings under preservation. For a closer look, go on a tour with the Miami Design Preservation League, a not-for-profit organisation whose passionate volunteer guides can take you inside the buildings and explain, for example, why certain patterns on the…

There’s a lot of landscapes to soar over in this issue, with the latest releases aiming to make the most of your 4K resolution. America the Beautiful (Disney+) succeeds in doing just that, with a rousing six-part natural-history documentary series that spans the entire North American continent. For their part, the makers have gone that extra mile, even fixing cinema-grade cameras to fighter jets in order to capture the scope of America and Canada’s vast ecosystems. And while the oh-so-Disney narration from Michael B Jordan may grate on older viewers, the stories that each episode tells – of survival and peril – easily bridge the generation gap. Camera shots swooping across the land are similarly par for the course with Eden: Untamed Planet (BBC iPlayer), whose six Helena Bonham Carter-narrated…

Korea’s original take on royal dining might seem like a ballet of manners that occasionally breaks out into a meal, but it is a product of its setting. Royal cuisine reached its peak during the rule of the Joseon dynasty (1392-1910), when dining became enshrined in custom. Maids learnt strict protocol from a young age and prepared and passed down their recipes. Times may have changed but it is still a regal affair. Back then, special royal occasions called for complex meals. Preparations began months in advance and were meticulously recorded. During big events, servants piled rice cakes (tteok), sweets (hangwa) and fruit 60cm high on tables to signify the health and prosperity of the king, though this was solely for display and not for eating. Ordinarily, court maids served…

Having strapped my helmet on and set my Biggies googles firmly on my nose, I looked up at Felix, my guide from Insiders Experience, and yelled, “Let’s go!”.With a satisfying roar, the Second World War-era Russian motorbike took off to cheers from the assembled audience and with me sat snugly in the sidecar. As we zoomed past Marrakech’s National Theatre and up the wide French boulevards of the new town, the air scented with orange blossom and the roses for which the city is famous, I righted my helmet and clung on. I have lived in Morocco for eight years now and am always looking for new ways to experience it, as well as reliving old favourites. That is especially true of late. Morocco managed the Covid-19 pandemic well in…

Shearwaters screeched over onyx-black sea cliffs that soared triumphantly out of the surging white surf. At the same time, the wind whipped loose cinders off a grey hump ribbed with sharp ridges. From the top of the Capelinhos lighthouse, I gazed over Faial island’s wild west, reminding myself of a preposterous fact: this whole headland was barely older than I was. The lighthouse is now a museum showing photos and film footage from 1957, a time when colossal fountains of steam and mud burst out of the ocean in a chain of booming explosions. Mushroom clouds of black ash billowed into the atmosphere, and over the following months a new island, 100 metres high, rose out of the waves. Lava flows then formed an isthmus, bolting the new bluff to…

July marks 246 years since US independence, and you could argue that Europe still doesn’t quite get the United States. You can see it in the way we travel. New York. San Francisco. Los Angeles. Big cities, famous sights and Hollywood – that’s what we tend to focus on. But that isn’t really America; it’s just part of it. Some would argue the least authentic part. This is a huge country, and more often than not the places we fly over are invariably some of the most interesting: Mid-western industrial hubs reinventing themselves through art and culture; South-western border towns blending Spanish, Indigenous and Mexican heritage; New England enclaves where the aristocracy of the Gilded Age once thumbed their noses and flexed their wallets in glittering Italianate piles to rival…

Think of Switzerland and it’s the French and German-speaking regions that spring to mind first. However, the Italophone area of Ticino, bordering Italy to the south, is just as important a part of this diverse country, with a unique character, sunny disposition and Italian-influenced cuisine that is nevertheless innately Swiss. Sharing Lake Maggiore and Lake Lugano with Italy, Ticino has a Mediterranean feel, with palm tree-lined lakeshore promenades in the towns of Locarno, Lugano and Ascona, along with some of the best beaches and warmest water in the country – this is one of Switzerland’s sunniest cantons, after all. Locarno’s vast Piazza Grande, a cobbled square on a scale to rival those in Spain and Italy, testifies to the outdoor culture of Ticino. Every August, a huge open-air cinema is…

Learning from the past Reading the welcome letter by George Kipouros (issue 220) and looking at your photos of Ukraine made me think of all the once-thriving travel destinations lost to war and regime change. In October 2019, less then two years before it was claimed by the Taliban, I spent a week travelling Afghanistan’s Wakhan Corridor, an area now going through some of the hardest times in its history. I was recently distressed to read emails from my Afghan guide saying his wife can no longer teach English at school and he has to stay at home all the time. He won’t be guiding visitors any time soon and the budding tourism industry of Wakhan will cease. Above are a few photos of the people I met, and I…

Back in 2020, the independent climate research organisation Project Drawdown listed empowering women and girls in developing countries as the second of 76 solutions for curbing global warming. The project estimates that providing girls’ education and family planning could decrease carbon dioxide equivalent emissions by 68.9 gigatonnes by 2050. It makes perfect sense when you consider the ripple effect of access to education, family planning and birth control, as slower population growth relieves stress on ecosystems and reduces emissions. The report also found that women in rural areas are more likely to farm sustainably, cultivating a greater variety of crops that support biodiversity and are resilient to climate change, rather than planting monocrops purely for profit. Alessandra Alonso, managing director of Women in Travel, an organisation that both trains and…

I was surrounded by hundreds, maybe thousands of pieces of pre-Columbian gold artefacts. Gleaming shapes representing jaguars, snakes, condors and all manner of anthropomorphic figures stared blankly at me, fixed side by side on a huge circular display. It created an effect akin to being inside a gargantuan golden temple. This was what the El Dorado of my imagination looked like, echoing the fantasies of European visitors down the ages, who once flocked to the Americas in search of a mythical city of gold. Yet this was 2022 and I wasn’t lost in some far-flung jungle, but admiring one of the central halls of the Museo del Oro in Bogotá, Colombia’s renowned Museum of Gold. It holds an impressive collection of over 60,000 pieces, making it the largest cultural institution…

As a bristling polar wind shrieked off the bay, accelerating the velocity of three overflying skuas, I experienced an intense aura emanating from a headstone hewn from Edinburgh granite in Grytviken cemetery. Watched by a doe-eyed baby fur seal scratching against a tombstone, I felt a synthesis of everything I love about travelling: the power of a journey to transform your senses and the exultation of achieving a lifelong dream. In my reverie I fumbled in my jacket pocket, pulled out a silver hip flask of whiskey and, as custom dictates, raised a toast under South Georgia’s leaden skies: “To the Boss,” I mouthed. “To Sir Ernest Shackleton.” It’s been 100 years since the explorer died on South Georgia in 1922. He’d returned to this gritty sub-Antarctic island, 1,300km north…

As the frigid night wore on, the thin whine of a lone coyote howling in the distance competed with the sound of vacuous gusts of wind. I wiped the moisture from my bedroom window and peered outside, but there was zero visibility due to an unseasonable and unexpected storm. By morning, the trees bowed under the burden of a sparkling white blanket. The leaden sky indicated temperatures were still at freezing, but at least the roads had reopened after two days of closure. My introduction to the Wyoming side of Yellowstone National Park, a vast volcanic land that spills across two other states (Montana and Idaho), was proving that nature cares little for our plans. But, exactly 150 years ago, plans were what secured the future of this area and…

Several years ago, a TV history channel featured Micronesia’s obscure archaeological wonder, Nan Madol, in a series called Ancient Aliens. The show wheeled out a string of historians – more Indiana Jones than Lucy Worsley – who speculated how uncertainty surrounding the floating city’s origins in the western Pacific Ocean might suggest builders from another planet. It’s a tempting theory considering Nan Madol’s hard-to-reach location. This large and sophisticated ceremonial complex is constructed on a coral reef wrapping the tiny Temwen Island, which lies off the shores of Pohnpei, itself part of an archipelago in the Federated States of Micronesia that is surrounded by thousands of kilometres of ocean. That’s about as remote as any UNESCO World Heritage-listed site gets. Even the likeliest creators of this floating city, the Saudeleur…