Remote island near the Trobriands, Papua New Guinea. Photograph by David Kirkland. Courtesy Papua New Guinea Tourism.
Aman Canal Grande’s Piano Nobile dining room. Courtesy Aman Canal Grande Library.
74
WAGMAG.COM
JUNE 2015
Midwest and the place where I was lucky enough to get married; Charleston; and the Carolinas. These are the places I have loved and always long to revisit. Because no matter how many new places I promise myself I will try and see, it’s the golden oldies that are ever calling me back. And then I remember my first-ever day in America, a lifetime ago now, landing in New York and being driven through the sunny streets of Manhattan (and already having my bearings, because only those brilliant early New Yorkers could have thought of planning their city on a grid). To the World Trade Center we went, and then up, up into the clouds, to Windows on the World, for cocktails — imagine that, so high up and so grown-up. And that is somewhere, alas, none of us can nev-
er revisit, except in the mind. So where to next? I hear Micronesia is swell, ditto Peru. I do have a yearning, I must admit, to get to Papua New Guinea, where cannibalism was only banned in 1960 (“but where we all know it still goes on,” as my precocious, travel bug-bitten 11-year-old informed me recently). And Myanmar is a must-see. I also fancy Aleppo in Syria and Isfahan in Iran, though probably not any time soon, and I must get to Ulan Bator, Mongolia, which I missed the first time around, 20 years ago, after misreading a train timetable and ending up in Vladivostok instead. You need to be passionate about travel — of course you do — but you also need a good pair of reading glasses.