Category: Travel

  • New Orleans: The City That Invented Itself

    New Orleans: The City That Invented Itself

    New Orleans in October, when the heat finally breaks and the most singular city in America remembers what it is Sometime in October — the exact date varies by year, but the Crescent City knows it when it arrives — the first cool front comes off the Gulf and the temperature drops ten degrees overnight…

  • Istanbul: The City That Contains Everything

    Istanbul: The City That Contains Everything

    Istanbul in the autumn and the case for one of the world’s great cities at its most completely itself There is a moment, arriving in Istanbul for the first time, when the scale of the city’s ambition becomes briefly visible all at once. It happens most reliably from the Bosphorus — from a ferry crossing…

  • Sacré-Cœur: Faith, Politics and a Night Above Paris

    Sacré-Cœur: Faith, Politics and a Night Above Paris

    Sacré-Cœur occupies an unusual place in the imagination of Paris. Its white domes are immediately recognisable, yet the familiarity of the silhouette can obscure the complexity of the building beneath it. Above Montmartre’s streets, the basilica brings together religious devotion, nineteenth-century political conflict and an architecture designed to make belief visible across a city. Its…

  • Affordable Style: Inns and Guesthouses of the Northern California Coast

    Affordable Style: Inns and Guesthouses of the Northern California Coast

    The stretch of coastline from Mendocino to Big Sur is one of America’s most dramatic landscapes: redwood forests plunging into the Pacific, wildflower meadows giving way to rocky cliffs, and small towns shaped by artists and bohemians. While boutique resorts command oceanfront views, there are still plenty of inns and guesthouses where character and charm…

  • Copenhagen Now – October to December 2026

    Copenhagen Now – October to December 2026

    Art, design, fashion, literature, film, music, food and hospitality as the city moves from autumn into winter. Copenhagen changes character when the evenings draw in. The harbour ceases to be the centre of everybody’s social life, dinner moves indoors, and the city’s museums, cinemas and theatres begin to feel less like occasional destinations than places…

  • Chiang Mai: A Sky Full of Wishes

    Chiang Mai: A Sky Full of Wishes

    Chiang Mai in November, the ancient city of the Lanna kingdom, and the night the sky catches fire Last week this column made the case for Bangkok — overwhelming, oceanic, inexhaustible. This week it makes the case for its opposite. Chiang Mai is everything Bangkok is not: human-scaled, mountain-ringed, quieter by several orders of magnitude,…

  • The City That Never Resolves

    The City That Never Resolves

    The Passenger is a weekly dispatch on travel — places, hotels, restaurants, the strange logistics of being elsewhere. It is written by Bergotte. Bangkok in November, and why the most complex city in Southeast Asia deserves more than a night before the ferry Bangkok defeats the traveller who arrives with a plan. It is too…

  • The City People Keep Missing

    The City People Keep Missing

    The Passenger is a weekly dispatch on travel — places, hotels, restaurants, the strange logistics of being elsewhere. It is written by Bergotte. Athens in September, and the case for treating it as a destination rather than a gateway The standard relationship between the serious traveller and Athens is one of transit. You fly in,…

  • The Place That Refuses to Try

    The Place That Refuses to Try

    The Passenger is a weekly dispatch on travel — places, hotels, restaurants, the strange logistics of being elsewhere. It is written by Bergotte. Comporta, Portugal, and the particular luxury of somewhere that has decided not to become anything other than itself There is a type of place that becomes fashionable precisely because it has not…

  • Copenhagen Now – September 2026

    Copenhagen Now – September 2026

    Music, Design, Fashion, Literature, Film, Hotels, Food, Art & the City The City Between Summer and Seriousness There is a particular moment in Copenhagen when summer has not quite disappeared, but the cultural year has unmistakably begun. The evenings can still be spent outside, Tivoli is still illuminated, bicycles continue to crowd the bridges and…