A mayor really isn’t supposed to say something like this. “We don’t want tourists.” I waited for the punch line. None came. “We don’t want to be occupied by tourists,” he continued. Tourism, he explained, will deplete a city of its soul — and this city has a prehistoric soul. I was in Matera, an…
Rates Start at £299 pounds, or about $385, at current exchange rates. Basics After an extensive monthslong renovation led by SHH Architecture and Interior Design, the Trafalgar St. James, formerly known as the Trafalgar hotel, reopened in August 2017 as part of Hilton’s Curio Collection. The 131-room property has a storied past: it housed the…
Image Hotel workers strike in front of a Marriott hotel Thursday, Oct. 4, 2018, in San Francisco.CreditBen Margot/Associated Press The first thing that the wedding planner Lauren Carson noticed at the end of eight weeks of strikes against Marriott hotels in Hawaii was the quiet. The “incessant noise” from the picket lines was gone. “I…
Patti LuPone entered into the annals of Broadway history when she appeared in the 1979 production of the Andrew Lloyd Webber musical, “Evita,” playing Eva Perón and winning the Tony Award that season for best actress in a musical. (In 2018, she gave a mesmerizing performance of that show’s “Don’t Cry for Me Argentina,” at…
Nearly 300 years ago, an enlightened maharajah with a penchant for jewels and an eye for architecture built a planned city amid the arid hills of northwest India. Called Jaipur after the city’s founder, Jai Singh II, it arose on a grid of urban sectors not just for royal palaces, but for the workshops of…
Image This stretch of the Rhine passing through Cologne is among the parts of the river experiencing record low water levels.CreditPatrik Stollarz/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images A week into a two-week river cruise along the Danube River in August, Erin Needham, her husband, Scott, and her mother-in-law, Linda, found themselves in an odd position: their…
Our columnist, Jada Yuan, is visiting each destination on our 52 Places to Go in 2018 list. This dispatch brings her to Gansu, China, which took the No. 17 spot. It is the 47th stop on Jada’s itinerary. She spoke first, a series of words in Chinese that I couldn’t understand and then one that…
I was descending a Georgian mountain pass in a rented Renault Duster when, rounding a curve with six-foot snow drifts to either side, a dark and narrow tunnel came into view. Looking down the mountain, I could see the other end of it — and an apparently endless convoy of eighteen-wheelers making their way up,…
Supplementing the cooking classes, yoga sessions and naturalist briefings common on most cruise ships, a new wave of shipboard stimuli are focusing on more intellectual fare. Professorial lectures, book clubs and TED Talk screenings aim to add scholarly diversions to sailings on the high seas. Enrichment programs have long been a part of small ship…
There are long flights and there are long flights. Singapore Airlines has the longest haul currently, with nearly 19 hours from Newark to Singapore. But that’s bound to be eclipsed soon as airlines and aircraft manufacturers vie to be the first to pull off the last major nonstop air route: Sydney to London, estimated at…