Conde Nast Traveler

the editor’s letter

Northern California. Hungary. South Korea. Those destinations have been my go-to answer to the question I’ve been getting for months now, which is, Where are you going when all this is over? These places are obviously amazing in their own right, but for me they’re all about family. In the Bay Area, the redwoods and restaurants call, but more than anything I want to hug my dad, whom I haven’t seen outside of FaceTime in, literally, years, along with a bunch of old friends whose kids are growing up fast, just like mine are. In Budapest, I want to be on the Danube again with my mom and my brother and his family, watching the moon rise over the Parliament building. When my wife and I last visited her family…

africa is calling

I was born in South Africa and raised in the United States, after my father was forced to leave the country for resisting the apartheid regime. My connection to my birth country and the rest of the continent has shaped my life and career. I have a unique position within the diaspora: Unlike me, many Black Americans will never be able to trace their ancestry to a specific place the way I can. For them, heritage travel is about exploring the land that has shaped our people and culture. It’s about finding connections and traces of the familiar. Travel to Africa has historically been seen through a Western lens and has been dominated by the idea of going on safari. This is changing: I have been excited to see African culture…

safari shake-up

The Okavango Delta smells of wild sage and damp earth. Cottonwool clouds hang low in the sky, and thunder rumbles softly, like elephants trumpeting in the distance. From the air, the blue-green tapestry of water channels and islands spreads out like a giant hand. Three years in the making, Xigera Safari Lodge is located at the very center of this alluvial fan, on the western edge of the Moremi Game Reserve. Even during the last gasp of sultry Botswana summer, before the flood surge from Angola, 650 miles away, it is still possible to take a mokoro canoe trip through the lily-dotted shallows. Eventually, the waters disappear into the sands of the Kalahari Desert, producing hundreds of seasonal pans and lagoons that are an inland paradise for birds. Predators and…

community spirit

The sun-bleached Douglas fir floors at the Panama Hotel and Tea House may be 111 years old, but they still support the customers who sit at tables sipping steaming mugs of nutty genmaicha. Below, in the property’s basement, is a long-shuttered but marvelously preserved public bath. Its neat rows of wooden lockers and deep marble tubs made it indispensable during the early 20th century when few people had private baths. But it also served as an important gathering place where the day’s news flowed freely among residents of Seattle’s Nihonmachi, or Japantown, an area just east of Pioneer Square. During the neighborhood’s glory days, between the two world wars, it was the nation’s second-mostpopulous Japanese district, and its streets buzzed with restaurants and shops. The year after Japan’s attack on Pearl…

resorting to change

Spanning some 1,200 islands across the Indian Ocean, the Maldives is among the world’s most popular tropical destinations. Because it is also one of the nations most reliant on tourism—the sector comprises two thirds of the country’s GDP, according to the World Bank—COVID-19 has been devastating to its economy, and its workforce has acutely felt the repercussions of the virus. When the Maldives closed its borders last March, many of its resorts paused operations, sending workers who lived part-time on property back home. Yasir Hussain, one of Soneva Jani’s Barefoot Butlers (the brand’s one-on-one service, available in every villa), returned to Malé, the nation’s capital. Ibrahim Nazeer, the dive and recreation manager at the Four Seasons Resort Maldives at Kuda Huraa—who has been an employee there for more than 20 years—was…

it takes a village

Cut off from the rest of Romania by the arc of the Carpathian Mountains, Transylvania still embodies a certain rural self-sufficiency. There are few better examples than the picturesque village of Cri?, from which Count Miklós Bethlen fled in 1948 during the rise of the Soviet Union. But even after settling in Austria, he never abandoned the place his ancestors founded some 800 years prior: “When he returned in 1967, he found his ancestral home in ruins and the community all but forgotten,” says his son Nikolaus Bethlen. “From then on it became his life’s ambition to raise funds to restore the family’s castle and support the local people.” Since the count’s death in 2001, Nikolaus and his mother, Gladys, have continued this work, slowly acquiring village buildings and renovating them…