Last Word: The Next New Place

“So where’s the next new place?” is undoubtedly the question that I am asked most often. And it is a surprisingly difficult one to answer. Thirty-eight years ago, when the first issue of the Hideaway Report appeared, the world was very different. Sometimes it’s hard to remember just how different. Large areas of the planet were off-limits. Leonid Brezhnev was still in charge of the Soviet Union, and although Mao Zedong had died three years before, China remained a blank on the map.

Back then, the idea that you might take a vacation in, say, Thailand, would have struck most Americans, even affluent ones, as highly improbable. We didn’t understand at the time, but thanks to large, reliable long-range jets like the Boeing 747, international travel was about to take off. For the next 20 years, there was always a new destination. A luxury resort would open in a previously obscure archipelago, and suddenly the Maldives, or Bora Bora, was the fashionable place to go. Pioneering travelers to southern Africa would report the existence of an extraordinary inland delta, teeming with wildlife, and moments later the Okavango was a bucket list favorite.

It was probably in the late 1990s when I realized that the world was running out of novelty. By then, almost nowhere was too remote. Trekking in Bhutan? No problem. A cruise in Antarctica? But of course. It was chiefly politics that restricted our movements. No one traveled to Iran, even though Isfahan and Shiraz were known to contain architectural wonders. And the same was true of Ethiopia, despite the country having sensational scenery, the source of the Blue Nile, prolific wildlife and many of the oldest Christian churches in the world. And of course, no one went to Cuba.

At the time of writing, it seems highly likely that Cuba will indeed be the new place for 2017. But then, Myanmar was the new place of 2016, and things aren’t working out quite as smoothly there as most people, myself included, had predicted. What is important, I have come to realize, is that although genuinely new places are in distinctly short supply, travel can be just as exciting as ever. I still spin the globe in my office and, when it stops, look down with mounting excitement. Madagascar! What a good idea. I’ve always wanted to see those lemurs.