January/February 2021

AFAR

AFAR magazine - Where Travel Can Take You

AFAR2 min read
Afar Travelers’ Awards
Where are you dreaming of going this year? AFAR readers cast more than 150,000 votes to honor their favorite hotels, cruises, airlines, trips, and destinations. We hope this comprehensive list of winners helps spark your wanderlust and inspire your n
AFAR2 min read
Afar
AFAR.COM @AFARMEDIA FOUNDERS GREG SULLIVAN & JOE DIAZ VP, EDITOR IN CHIEF Julia Cosgrove @juliacosgrove EXECUTIVE EDITOR Jeremy Saum @jsaum CREATIVE DIRECTOR Supriya Kalidas @supriyakalidas DIRECTOR OF DIGITAL CONTENT Laura Dannen Redman @laura_re
AFAR2 min read
Founder’s Note
THE COVID-19 PANDEMIC has caused so much pain and destruction. My heart goes out to everyone who has lost a loved one and to those who have suffered through sickness and confinement. And I feel such empathy for those who have had their livelihoods up
AFAR7 min read
The Traveler’s Manifesto
I will travel again. That much I know. The question is how. I don’t mean whether I’ll be wearing a mask or carrying hand sanitizer—I will be—but a bigger, more philosophical how, and its close cousin, why. These are questions I thought I had answered
AFAR3 min read
Where The Path Leads
The signs were everywhere, but I rarely saw them: slender green arrows mounted on metal posts, pointing out over fields, along rivers and canals, the white words painted on them, public footpath, getting not so much as a thank-you for their service.
AFAR5 min read
Anew Global Citizen
I guess if I had to put a label to it, I’d call myself a Global Citizen; you know, if push came to shove. Or si la poussée vient à pousser. See? I just dropped some French, and yet I’m primarily writing in English. How Global Citizen of me! IF I WAS
AFAR2 min read
Wyoming
Where to Go in 2021. It might be more appropriate to ask Should I Go in 2021? And if so, How Exactly Do I Go? Because 2021, while imbued with hope, is still an unknown. Lockdowns, border openings, and the vaccine (oh, the vaccine) remain in flux. In
AFAR2 min read
Ghana
“I CAN TAKE YOU TO YOUR PEOPLE.” The phrase was uttered by the elder who had taken my hand shortly after I arrived in a small Ghanaian village in 1997. And though the words were simple, they pointed to a diffcult fact: Black people displaced from the
AFAR2 min readCooking, Food & Wine
Seville
IN JACKSON HEIGHTS, New York—the neighborhood I call home, and one of the pandemic’s first epicenters—our early spring days were dark with trauma. Ambulances wailed outside my windows, the news was awash with scenes from overwhelmed Elmhurst Hospital
AFAR2 min read
Ilha Grande, Brazil
A DECADE AGO, I went with one of my besties, Anyeley, to Brazil. We travel well together, which is a coup for wildly different people—Anyeley is an African American practicing Christian and I’m a secular Iranian American Muslim. At the time, we were
AFAR2 min read
The Mani, Greece
THERE’S SOMETHING hallucinatory and steadying about Greece’s landscape, the elemental wind and dazzled light, its scoured crags and wine-dark sea (to use Homer’s phrase). My husband and I used to make regular pilgrimages to the Cyclades; then came th
AFAR2 min read
Vietnam
HOW DOES AN AMERICAN travel responsibly in Vietnam? It’s been on my mind this year, a year when many of us are thinking more deeply about the effect we have on the places we visit. I passed through Vietnam briefly almost 20 years ago, but I’ve always
AFAR2 min read
Mexico City
AT THE BEGINNING OF JULY, the streets of Mexico City were quiet. Restaurants had just been given the permission to offer indoor dining, and my friends and I walked through the Roma Norte neighborhood in search of seafood. We skipped across multilane
AFAR2 min read
Barbados
THE BUSSA EMANCIPATION STATUE is unmissable. Located in the middle of a busy roundabout, it depicts a man in tattered shorts, his hands outstretched, broken chains hanging from the shackles on his wrists, and his eyes looking up at the blue Caribbean
AFAR2 min read
Uzbekistan
MY FATHER, the unoffcial family historian, can trace our ancestry back 40 generations and across nine modern-day countries, including Saudi Arabia, Spain, Turkey, Uzbekistan, India, and the United States. I’ve lived in or traveled to many of those pl
AFAR2 min read
EuroVelo 6
A FEW YEARS AGO, on assignment in Austria, I found myself on two wheels, rolling through bicycling heaven. Sixty miles west of Vienna, on a bike path along the banks of the Danube, the sun shone through wispy clouds onto terraced vineyards that stret
AFAR2 min read
Tibet
DEAREST TIBET, For many years I have heard you, calling across the 9,000 miles that separate me from Lhasa and my ultimate Buddhist pilgrimage. I first heard your gongs in a gallery in Kingston, Jamaica, and in the traditional music wafting from a te
AFAR2 min readCooking, Food & Wine
New Orleans
THE STICKY HEAT that rises from the sidewalk has never deterred me from fulfilling my New Orleans cravings: For the last several years—until 2020—I’ve made an annual pilgrimage for the crispy fried chicken doused in Crystal hot sauce at Willie Mae’s
AFAR10 min read
Higher Ground
I WAS SITTING IN THE one-room hut of a Tibetan nomad, a wizened old man I’d met while hiking through the Baima Snow Mountain Nature Reserve, a protected wilderness in the far northwest of China’s Yunnan province. My lungs, already straining for breat
AFAR3 min read
Persist new York City
I WAS BORN in New York City at 3:18 a.m. on Christmas Day, in the midst of a whiteout blizzard. As my mom labored in a hospital lobby before being admitted, my dad and our dear family friend tried to distract her by calling Dial-a-Joke. Though Mom is
AFAR12 min read
Tuscany By The Book
OUTSIDE, THE SEPTEMBER SUN beat down on Lucca’s postcard streets with the ferocity of a boxer who knows his best days could be behind him. But inside—just a few months before the world went sideways—it was dark and cool and smelled of ink. Matteo Val

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