Travel + Leisure October 2022

Thomas Chatterton Williams THE ETERNAL RIVER (P. 102) “It was like a floating five-star hotel,” says the Paris-based Atlantic contributor, who experienced the wonders of ancient Egypt and the Nile aboard Uniworld’s Sphinx river ship. Chatterton Williams is currently working on a nonfiction book about the summer of 2020, to be published by Knopf. Carmen Campos SÃO PAULO STEPS UP (P. 80) Campos explored her hometown to shoot the newest restaurants, museums, and hotels in Brazil’s largest city, relishing the cool, rainy days of winter. “I was able to find sunshine and beautiful light in between all the showers,” she says. Morgan Goldberg CRUSHING IT (P. 88) Goldberg traveled from Los Angeles to wineries around California to meet the women who are shaking up the industry. She is a former editor at T+L’s sister publication, Food & Wine. Nicola…

I DIDN’T REALLY GET Instagram Reels when it first launched—snippets of video that added up to what, exactly? If a single photo is worth a thousand words (or likes) in social media currency, how is a 15-second video set to Lizzo suddenly worth four thousand? Then I had a Reels moment of clarity after dining at the Restaurant & Bar at Zero George (zerogeorge.com; tasting menu $140), a boutique Charleston hotel and a Travel + Leisure World’s Best Awards winner. It was a multicourse, white-tablecloth affair that lasted well into the night, a celebration in a historic building shared by friends old and new. To start, an assortment of snacks was brought to the table with a flourish—the highlight being “frozen summer garden,” a corn dashi meringue on top of a shiso…

A GLOBETROTTER’S GUIDE TO THE LATEST IN TRAVEL IN 10,000 YEARS, it’s likely that there will be no trace of Hôtel des Horlogers (hoteldeshorlogers.com; doubles from $378). And if that’s the case, things will have gone exactly as planned. The 50-room hotel, which opened in May about an hour’s drive north of Geneva, was designed to one day decompose back into the landscape, and everything inside the terraced building is natural or biodegradable: wood from the surrounding fir forests, walls of local stone, cotton Literie Bonnet bed linens, even the carpet glue and writing instruments. (Guests are encouraged to take the pencils home and plant them; there are thyme seeds inside a specially designed capsule at the tip.) This attention to detail should come as no surprise. Hôtel des Horlogers (literally “the watchmakers’…

BOARDING A COLORFUL canal boat before dawn is not your typical way to start a Sunday in Mexico City. Yet there I was, watching as the mist dissipated and the surroundings revealed themselves: willows drooping to meet the mirrored water, herons perched on the banks. The Xochimilco canal system, 15 miles south of downtown, is best known for festive barges crowded with partygoers. But what makes these waterways so unique are actually the chinampas, artificial islands of packed mud where crops are grown; they were built more than a thousand years ago by the Nahua people. “This is an ecosystem and an archaeological site, as well as a food production site,” says Lucio Usobiaga, executive director of Arca Tierra (arcatierra.com), an organization working to preserve these at-risk chinampas. Urbanization, among other…

During my time aboard the 4,000-passenger Disney Wish, which launched in July, I noticed many of the playful touches that make Disney Cruise Line (disneycruise.com) so popular: appearances from Mickey and pals, fireworks, attentive service from every cast member. But the experience also felt elevated through a balance of whimsy and sophistication. The quintessentially Disney motif of “enchantment” informs the design, from the fairy-tale murals in the modern staterooms to the castle-like Grand Hall. And even adults traveling without children will find refined ways to experience their favorite franchises: just decks away from the action-packed kids’ clubs, including the Marvel Super Hero Academy and Fairytale Hall, there is adults-only fine dining (inspired by Beauty and the Beast) conceived by chef Arnaud Lallement of the Michelin three-starred L’Assiette Champenoise, in Tinqueux,…

WHEN I’VE TOLD non-Germans that I live in Berlin, the same question has come up more than once: “West or East?” Though the Wall fell in 1989, in some minds the division still stands. On walks in my neighborhood of Baumschulenweg, I confront a physical reminder of this whenever I cross a double row of cobblestones that marks where the Wall once stood. Though some visitors may not realize it, many popular attractions were in East German territory, including the Brandenburg Gate, Alexanderplatz, and Museum Island. But it’s also worth going farther into the less touristed neighborhoods of East Berlin, where creative projects and adaptive-reuse initiatives are transforming unused buildings—many with their own fraught history—into community spaces and incubators for the Berlin art world. In Plänterwald, a forest on the banks of…