18 essays tagged “mountains”.
Reine, Norway
Lofoten is a string of granite peaks rising directly from the Norwegian Sea, north of the Arctic Circle. The small fishing villages on the coast, the cod-drying racks, the midnight sun in summer, the northern lights in winter — Lofoten is one of the most photographed landscapes on earth and remains, somehow, undertraveled.
June 8, 2024
Hallstatt, Austria
Hallstatt has 700 residents and, last I checked, 11,000 visitors a day in high season. The math doesn't work. The two windows that do work — first light, and after 6 p.m. — give you the alpine village that made it famous in the first place.
February 22, 2024
Chiang Mai, Thailand
Chiang Mai is what Bangkok was, possibly, before the expressways. A small grid of moated streets, three hundred temples within walking distance, the smell of charcoal and lemongrass in the evenings. It also has the best curry noodles in Thailand.
January 30, 2024
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
Yerevan, Armenia
Yerevan is, in some lights, simply a small Soviet-modernist capital in the South Caucasus. In other lights, it is the cultural heart of one of the world's oldest continuous Christian civilisations and a country still working through the unresolved memory of 1915.
May 30, 2023
Queenstown, New Zealand
Queenstown sits on the shore of Lake Wakatipu under the jagged Remarkables peaks. It is the most adventure-sport-marketed town in the world — bungy, jet boats, paragliding, skydiving. The mountains and the lakes, however, are the actual reason to come.
December 4, 2022
El Chaltén, Argentina / Chile
Patagonia is, at its heart, the experience of being very small in a very large landscape. The wind shapes everything. The granite spires rise on a planetary scale. The travel logistics are demanding. The reward is one of the last genuinely big-empty regions left on earth.
November 19, 2022
Banff, Canada
Banff, Jasper, and the Icefields Parkway form one of the great mountain landscapes of North America. In July and August, the parking lots fill at 6 a.m. In May or late September, the crowds thin to a manageable level and the mountains are themselves.
September 12, 2022
Tbilisi, Georgia
Tbilisi is the rare capital that feels genuinely undiscovered for its quality. The old town has the sulphur baths and the wooden balconies; the wine culture is one of the oldest on earth; the country beyond the city is dramatic and almost empty.
July 28, 2022
Aguas Calientes, Peru
Machu Picchu is a place that survives its reputation almost entirely. The site is genuinely astonishing — a complete Inca city built on a vertical Andean ridge at 2,400 m, abandoned to the cloud forest for centuries, rediscovered in 1911. The trick is choosing how to arrive.
June 12, 2022
Cusco, Peru
Cusco is where the Spanish built their colonial churches and palaces directly on top of Inca stone foundations — sometimes literally using the same walls. The city at 3400 m is the gateway to Machu Picchu and the Sacred Valley, but it deserves three or four days on its own merits.
June 8, 2022
Paro, Bhutan
Bhutan is the only country I have visited that requires a daily Sustainable Development Fee (now US$100/day) and a state-licensed itinerary. The cost is the point. The kingdom uses tourism to fund its national health and education systems, and to keep the country from being overrun. It works.
May 28, 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
Kathmandu, Nepal
Kathmandu is two cities — the dusty, traffic-choked, modern capital, and the medieval Newari city of pagoda temples, hidden courtyards, and 1500-year-old shrines. The second city is the one to come for.
March 12, 2022
Rio de Janeiro, Brazil
Rio is one of the most dramatically sited cities on earth — granite peaks rising from the sea, beaches that stretch across the city's southern edge, forest-clad hills that run almost to the centre. The city's energy is famous and real; the trick is to find the slower-walking version of it.
February 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
Lalibela, Ethiopia
Lalibela's churches are not built. They are carved, downward, out of solid volcanic rock — eleven monolithic structures connected by underground tunnels, hewn over a century beginning in the 12th. They are also still in active liturgical use, 800 years on.
June 30, 2021
Chefchaouen, Morocco
Chefchaouen — universally and a little reductively known as 'the Blue City' — is a small mountain town in northern Morocco where the medina is washed in shades of cobalt, sky blue, and indigo. The blue is the postcard. The slower, kif-scented mountain life is the longer reward.
April 4, 2021