There are places we leave but they never leave us. Travel writers share their best recollections.
Editor: Maggie Wicks
Design: Paul Slater
Simon Wilson, senior writer
We had a rule. To cut down the risk of bad meals, if we found a good restaurant we would go back to it for as long as we were in town.
In a little backstreet in Madrid, we walked into a fish taberna, plaster walls, family photos, a long bar and just a few wooden tables. We said to them, you’re in the middle of the country, where do your fish come from? Aha, they said, our fish come from the coast. Well, yes, we said. On a train, they said, speeding through the night. Every night.
We ate sardines, a revelation. We went back. We ate cuttlefish and baby clams in a piquant sauce, fried codfish, octopus legs steeped in garlic, white-fleshed fillets that flaked from the bone and seemed to float on the fork, and sopa de mariscos, a seafood soup made with saffron, chillis and more varieties of seafood than you ever thought could exist.
I’d never find it again, in truth I doubt I remember any of it accurately. I don’t remember the name. But I do remember the deep pleasure of the food and our special, secret knowledge of it. It was ours.
Later on in that city, we got robbed at knifepoint, in broad daylight, an arm around my throat and the flash of a dirty blade, but you can’t have everything.
Thomas Bywater, travel writer
The Lyke Wake Walk across the North Yorkshire moors is an odd choice of family holiday.
It’s 65km across from Osmotherley to Ravenscar, along the coffin routes to the coast. In the Middle Ages it was walked by Catholic townships carrying their dead for burial in Whitby. Traditionally done in 24 hours, coffins are optional.
It’s a bogey man of a walk. The sort of walk you frighten young kids with for not eating their greens, putting cricket balls through windows — or whatever else we’d got up to that holiday.
Every summer, Mum would threaten to march us to Whitby; setting off, we’d begin the route, only to find the car parked around the corner.
But one year we started walking and we kept walking.
Knapsacks on backs, pockets full of crisps and scotch eggs — we shared handfuls of food with the dogs on leads. Aged 18, 16 and 13, my brothers and I had not planned on rationing. We half expected to find a lift waiting over the brow of every hill.
As dusk arrived — but no car — we kept on going. There would be no lift back to Osmotherly.
The scrubland stretched out, in front and behind. With nothing growing over a scratchy ankle-height brush, you could see for miles. Barbed wire and sheep marked out the contours like a topographic map.
Catching a couple of hours’ sleep on coats in clumps of heather, the dogs waited for us to carry on. Which we did. Arriving the next day in Ravenscar, we sat down at last — dogs, brothers, family, all — and watched the sea from Robin Hood’s bay.
I don’t think the rhythm of walking ever really stopped, but I’d start it again today for a packed lunch and the time it took to do it.
From Brig o’ Dread when thou may’st pass,
—Every nighte and alle,
To Whinny-muir thou com’st at last;
And Christe receive thy saule.
Lines from The Lyke Wake Dirge, a Middle Ages lament describing the final journey after life across the moors (1616)
Kim Knight, senior writer
Japan burned my tongue. If I’m honest, it burned my brain. Bright lights, molten octopus.
We went for Christmas and took the train from the airport straight to Shinjuku Station where every day more than 3 million people pass through, which is the same number of people who used to live in New Zealand for an entire year when I was growing up.
We ate sashimi and slurped ramen, and then we went to Kyoto and got engaged and on to Osaka to take selfies by the overexposed Glico Running Man.
We stood in a queue, streetside in Dotonburi, waiting for takoyaki, watching the chopstick flick of batter and baby octupus; the metamorphosis from hot to very, very hot. There was a river of people and we bathed in the brightness of humanity writ large and happy.
Stephanie Holmes, Travel Editor
I didn’t know it then, but my trip last year to The Berkeley River Lodge in north Western Australia’s Kimberley taught me lessons that are proving invaluable as I face the reality of temporarily grounded travel plans.
It’s a beachfront resort that’s far from anywhere, accessible only by boat, helicopter or light plane. If you were to swim due north from its shore, the next piece of land you’d touch would be Timor Leste. Don’t, though — the water is home to bull sharks, saltwater crocodiles and deadly jellyfish.
My chalet was as far from the main lodge as you could get, a secluded little spot allowing many moments of self-isolation. No Wi-Fi and I forgot to pack a book, so my time was spent in enforced mindfulness. I rose each day with the sun, watching peacefully as the inky sky became orange then gold, casting soft-filtered light across the rolling surf. The views are indelibly etched on my memory.
Further down the pristine beach, a jumble of sandstone rocks dating back more than a billion years provided perfect props for golden-hour photo posing opportunities.
Now, looking back on those photos, I glean comfort in the rocks’ longevity. Tides have come and gone, storms have raged, the sand dunes around them have shifted, but they stand strong.
Though my feet are itching, what’s the harm in being still for a while and remembering travels past?
The world might look a little different when we come out the other side, but it will still be full of possibilities and lessons yet to be learned.
Steve Braunias, senior writer
We took a family holiday to Samoa a few years ago and met another family, from Wellington, and our kids got on so great that we’ve all stayed in touch and the girls travel to stay with each other in the school holidays.
Their friendship is so strong that it’s possible they’ll always know each other. It’s just the sweetest thing to see and it was all due to the coincidence of staying at the same resort, Return to Paradise, at the exact same time.
We met each other on the second day. The girls were inseparable. We all took a long drive one day across the island. It rained but it didn’t matter. Samoa was beautiful. The food was terrible. But there was always alcohol, and sunshine, and each other – and some of the other guests were very entertaining, like The Pool Couple, a young and overweight couple who spent all day at one end of the pool, in T-shirts, without talking. There was something really romantic about them. I hope they’re doing okay. I bet they’re still really happy.
Greg Bruce, senior writer
We must have discussed alternative honeymoon destinations but, in retrospect, the prospect of having gone anywhere else seems ludicrous and probably damaging to our relationship. The city has become so bound up in our story of ourselves as a couple.
We have talked several times in the extreme abstract about moving there, the being poor and creative and all the ridiculous romance that can only be derived from something like that in fantasy or retrospect. We would create and be surrounded by others who create and in 50 years we would look back on the scene and laugh about the cockroaches.
Our honeymoon, snow-covered and perfect, in the aftermath of the city’s biggest storm in modern history, much of the city still not functioning, us not caring, us standing in the freezing cold in Times Square on the night Barack Obama was re-elected, at a time of ongoing hope and change in a world recovering from many bad things and not yet aware of the approach of many more.
Our hotel room was a square box, but we didn’t care. We made of it what we wanted, which was the beginning of the construction of a life of our own, away from, but forever influenced by, this place.
Maggie Wicks, Deputy Travel Editor
There’s a campground, deep in a valley, deep in a forest, deep in the south of France, where you can order fresh bread the night before to collect, barefoot, in the morning.
As the sun rises over the Sud Ardeche valley, voila! A fresh baguette, perhaps some croissants, oh sure why not, we’ll try the mouchoirs aux amandes and a brioche au sucre, merci. All to be carried back to your campsite, and scoffed with your bum in the tent and your feet in the bark outside.
Four years ago, I went on a perfect family holiday.
Logistically, heading to another country to camp might seem difficult. But not if it’s France you’re heading to.
We packed almost nothing and caught a train from London. We picked up a hire car in Avignon and navigated our way through towns, then villages, then the lush steep-sided Ardeche Gorge.
We found everything we needed waiting for us. A tent already erected, with wooden flooring, a double mattress, soft bedding, gas lanterns, a plancha grill, mosquito repellent, a corkscrew and wine glasses. We were surrounded by trees, with no people or tents in sight, and yet a 10-minute walk away was a pool and a pizza restaurant, full of French families dining in their swimsuits.
In the evening we would cook on our barbecue in the forest. Lamb chops and grilled courgettes, or a rotisserie chicken and tinned bean salads we’d buy in the local village store.
And each morning, the bread. All of the bread.
For years I’ve promised my son that one day we’ll go back. One day, we will go back.
Juliette Sivertsen, travel writer
We’d met only twice before. Kindred spirits, some might say.
I’d grown up hearing about Norway from my father, who used to show me postcards and share second-hand tales from his late father, who was from Bergen.
I was 14 the first time I visited, on a family-finding mission with my parents. It was the start of a bond between two families on opposite sides of the world. My next visit I was 25, in 2012, and after reconnecting with my relatives, I vowed to come back.
It took five years for me to return. I cruised along Bergen’s majestic fjords, my cousin took me on scenic drives through valleys and mountains and I wandered along the old Byrggen wharf, still every bit in love with the scene as I was on my first visit as a teenager.
But it was an evening with my cousin Gunnar and his family that is forever with me. We ate a traditional Norwegian meal of cured meats, moose, reindeer and whale salami, and eight different cheeses. We FaceTimed relatives who couldn’t join us, then played a game called Ryktet Gar. It’s like a Norwegian Pictionary-meets-Chinese Whispers and my stomach ached from the laughter as we descended into questionable translations and comical interpretations of each other’s attempts at drawing.
Gunnar reminded me so much of my older brother. Bonded by great-great-grandparents, it was strange to feel so in tune with someone I’d only met twice before in my life. It was like discovering another sibling. The connection filled my heart with joy, until sadness took over as we said goodbye, unsure of the next time we would meet again.
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