Mountaineers have long climbed atop Mount Everest, and scientists in submersibles have descended into the Antarctic Ocean. In recent decades, travelers with deep pockets and little expertise have joined these explorers or even ventured further, paying to visit the bottom of the ocean or the edge of space, touching the literal bounds of Earth. But…
Hamish Harding, an aviation tycoon and ardent explorer, made it his quest to probe the heavens as well as the depths, landing him a place in Guinness World Records and ultimately leading him to a fateful plunge to the wreckage of the Titanic some two and a half miles below the surface of the North…
Three weeks into my trek, as I ascended a steep path toward Yokomine-ji, the 60th of 88 temples along the Shikoku pilgrimage, I found myself enveloped by an unforgiving fog. In an instant, the colorful forest around me — mostly red cedar trees and fern bushes — faded, leaving me in a world of muted…
Before the restoration, the Lefferts house catered mostly to families; children could plant potatoes, harvest flax, play with reproduced artifacts and see how linen was woven. Although, more than 20 years ago, the museum began to acknowledge that the Leffertses owned slaves, it did not identify who, for instance, might have stitched the fine linen…
Nine hundred years ago, the Lord Rhys, ruler of the ancient Deheubarth kingdom, established a great seat of religious learning in the heart of mid-Wales. The abbey was called Ystrad Fflur (Strata Florida in the Latin spoken by the Cistercian monks who ran it). It means Vale of the Flowers in English. Today, much of…
In the 19 years since my book “The Island at the Center of the World,” about the Dutch settlement that preceded New York, came out, I’ve changed the way I think about the history and geography of New Amsterdam, which occupied the southern tip of Manhattan Island in the 1600s. In recent years, as the…
Geylang Road in central Singapore is synonymous with the night, when a dizzying number of neon street signs power on and large groups crowd tables that spill out onto the sidewalk. It’s a tasty spot for a nocturnal stroll, to discover vespertine feasts of local specialties, like crab doused in a bracing white-pepper sauce or…
Jump to: Visitors enjoying the afternoon sun in the Jardin de Luxembourg.Credit…Joann Pai for The New York Times This floral-focused stroll in Paris is the favorite of Sandra Sigman, the celebrated florist and author of the book “French Blooms,” about the distinctive French style of flower arrangement. Just short of three miles, it weaves through…
Many of us are desperate to travel this summer after a pandemic stifled our plans for years. But travelers — and I’m sorry to be a killjoy — should beware: Those seemingly cheap plane tickets or hotel rooms advertised online may be a trap to make you spend more than anticipated. That’s because hotels and…
What books and authors should I take with me? One grand feature of border culture is the lure of a bargain. For decades, the clarion call of cheap muffler (“mofle”) shops drew tourists south; now, it’s cheap dentures and Viagra. So let us offer a one-stop classic, the anthology “Puro Border: Dispatches, Snapshots and Graffiti…