10 essays tagged “coast”.
Tórshavn, Faroe Islands (Denmark)
The Faroe Islands are eighteen volcanic rocks rising sharply from the North Atlantic between Scotland, Iceland, and Norway. The total population is 54,000; the puffin colonies number in the hundreds of thousands. The light is unbelievable. The weather is unbelievable in a different sense.
July 4, 2024
Sydney, Australia
Sydney is one of the most photogenically sited cities on earth — the harbour, the opera house, the bridge, the beaches at Manly and Bondi. The city becomes legible through its coastal walks, which connect the urban grid to the Pacific in a way few capitals can match.
November 4, 2023
Cairns, Australia
The Great Barrier Reef is the largest living structure on earth. It is also one of the most visibly distressed marine ecosystems on the planet, with successive bleaching events over the past decade. The visit is worth making, more carefully than the brochures suggest.
September 20, 2023
Vancouver, Canada
Vancouver is a small, wet, west-coast Canadian city with a serious mountain range starting two kilometres north of downtown. The city's gift is the immediate access — you can be in old-growth rainforest within twenty minutes of a downtown apartment.
August 8, 2023
Cartagena, Colombia
Cartagena's old walled city is one of the most architecturally complete colonial-era Spanish ports in the Americas. The Caribbean climate, the food, and the post-conflict tourism boom have made it a Latin American travel staple.
June 4, 2023
San Francisco, United States
San Francisco is geographically tiny — 7 miles by 7 miles — and topographically intense. The city's gift is that almost every walk involves climbing a hill, and almost every hill ends at a view.
April 20, 2023
Vernazza, Italy
The five villages of the Cinque Terre — Monterosso, Vernazza, Corniglia, Manarola, Riomaggiore — are now famous past the point of comfort. The trails between them, however, are largely empty after 10 a.m. when day-trippers cluster in the villages. Walk between them.
June 15, 2022
Muscat, Oman
Oman has chosen, deliberately, a different path from its glittering Gulf neighbours. The buildings are low-rise. The architecture is regulated to traditional Omani style. The tourism numbers are smaller. The country is, in every meaningful sense, the antidote to Dubai.
April 26, 2022
Cape Town, South Africa
Cape Town has a Table Mountain at one end and an ocean at the other. The city in between has the most varied food, wine, and walking on the African continent — and a daily set of contradictions you cannot honestly ignore.
December 12, 2021
Kochi, India
Kerala is the antidote to the intensity of northern India. The state is greener, slower, and structurally different — Hindu-Muslim-Christian-Jewish historic religious mix, a 100% literate population, a houseboat culture that lets you sleep on a rice barge in the canals.
February 28, 2021