The turquoise water lapping against Okinawa’s pebbled beach is so clear that you can see an occasional parrotfish streaking by. Just behind it, the Hoshinoya Okinawa’s low-slung modernist villas blend into a landscape of gnarled fukugi trees and hibiscus.
Somewhere between the unexpectedly comfortable economy class seat on a discount Korean airline flight and the silence of an early morning in Christchurch’s Riccarton neighborhood, it hit me: The revenge travel crowds have finally dispersed. Travel is back to normal.
To see Kokomo’s Christmas trees, you have to dive into the South Pacific.
These trees aren’t decorated with tinsel or lights. They’re rebar skeletons suspended in the gentle currents of the Great Astrolabe Reef, covered in fragments of living coral.
The Langham’s dinner buffet in Hong Kong is a showcase of Chinese cuisine. You can find an extensive selection of dim sum, wonton dumplings, barbecue, and tofu pudding for dessert. But the luxury hotel’s spread is also at the forefront of the city’s sustainability efforts.
A visit to Luang Prabang in Laos feels like stepping back in time. French colonial buildings line streets next to the slow-moving Mekong River. Buddhist monks in their saffron robes collect alms at dawn. The famous night market, with its street food vendors, beckons you with traditional Lao dishes like Khao Niaw, a sticky rice, or steamed fish.
In an oversized, wood-paneled boardroom with a view of Tokyo’s Imperial Palace, Tsubasa Yokote is trying to explain the city’s approach to sustainable tourism. And it’s not easy.
Kota Kinabalu is the kind of place that seems straight out of your imagination. Not far from the capital of the Malaysian state of Sabah, you can find proboscis monkeys swinging through ancient rainforests and giant clams the size of coffee tables lurking beneath turquoise waters.
The aroma in Trudy’s Tan’s kitchen in Kuching, Malaysia, is intoxicating. It’s a blend of the familiar and the utterly new: garlic and pepper with Terung Iban, the sour eggplant found in Borneo. It’s Gula Apong, also known as Nipah palm sugar, caramelized with fried potato wedges
Just after sunset on a ranch outside Alice Springs, Australia, the inky blackness of the night sky drapes across the Outback.
Margret Campbell stands at the edge of Sydney’s Harbor foreshore, her hand brushing the leaves of a seasonal wattle tree.
