Robert Bösch is not afraid of the intensity of the Engadin light and the grandiosity of the nearby mountains. Even as a young mountaineer, he was often in the Engadin and for years now has been spending a lot of time at his home in Maloja, from where he has roamed the area and climbed many mountain peaks.
We’re headed to Lech, a luxury resort at the heart of the Austrian Vorarlberg region. Lech has had a remarkable snow record over the years and is now part of Austria’s largest skiable area thanks to the Flexenbahn gondola.
Join us as we visit a host of resorts across Europe, Japan, the US and New Zealand. Jesse Van Rheenen meets up with Freeride World Tour champion Markus Eder to talk about The Ultimate Run and his partnership with Alpina.
In the Nagano prefecture, Hakuba is one of Japan’s top winter resorts stretching over the three municipalities of Omachi city, Hakuba Village and Otari village. With Olympic hosting heritage comes investment and footfall and so Hakuba comprises 10 ski resorts that run north to south entrenched in the foothills of the Hida Mountains.
Seaplane is one of the most spectacular ways to arrive at Hurawalhi. The de Havilland Twin Otter is unpressurised and a rite of passage for anyone travelling to the 1190-island archipelago of the Maldives. The journey to the Lhaviyani Atoll takes around 40 minutes – enough time to either power-nap or stare intently out of the window at the blueprint of the original 90s desktop background.
Deep in the Veneto valleys of Northern Italy sits The Queen of the Dolomites, Cortina d’Ampezzo. There’s no angle of approach to the region that won’t leave you overwhelmed by the colossal mountains fortifying this beautiful region.
Edinburgh has many fine and illustrious luxury hotels, but none with the heritage and timeless elegance of Fingal. So, when the conversation about a Scotland fly drive was raised by the assistant motoring editor, Aaron Edgeworth, my deck shoes were already packed.
I’ve managed to undertake a whole lot of travelling through the various lockdowns. The problem? Aside from a couple of brief working jaunts to the Baltic states, it’s happened almost entirely within my imagination.
Was it all a dream? Some sort of abstraction from consciousness? Had delirium set in? It seemed so real. The colours so incredibly vivid, the sealife so lustrous. I felt incredibly lucid sojourning under the luminous morning sun, deep in the heart of the Indian Ocean. The heat instantly envelopes you when you’re a mere 380 miles from the equator. It was a stark contrast from the ashen winter morning that now sat before me. I needed to find the red pill and somehow get back – back to the pure shores of Kudadoo.
When I started 2020, I was almost mountain fit. Not rock-climbing fit, you understand, but skiing down. I spent the last six months of 2019 working on a fitness routine to kick start myself into a 2020 season of incredible heli skiing in New Zealand, British Columbia and Japan.
I should start by talking about the provenance of the local area, of the coastal beauty of South Devon, and the steeped history that the Cary Arms and its outlands hold. I should regale you with grand tales of the gaff yawl “escape” and the vision as she rounds Long Quarry Point.
I get by with a little help from my friends. For me, it’s the Joe Cocker version that lands hardest. The immediacy in those opening bars, the strength of Jimmy Page’s guitar solos. It’s indicative of a sound from a different era. That’s what I needed: to escape to a different era. The nights had gotten long and daylight was fast becoming a distant memory to my work-embattled mind.
I was headed for check-in at the Boston Harbour Hotel, a recipient of both the Forbes Five-Star and AAA Five-Diamond awards. The hotel sits on Rowes Wharf, formerly a neighbourhood called South Battery. Created by early settlers during the seventeenth century, one of the city’s most prolific businessmen, John Rowe, purchased the land in 1764 and put up the original Rowes Wharf which was extended into Boston Harbour.
As we emerge from lockdown and get back to normality, our editor, Laith Al-Kaisy, has a lot of travelling to make up for. Here, he puts together his hit-list for the next year or two.
‘Nantucket: Classic American Style 30 Miles Out to Sea’ by authors Liza Gershman and Carrie Nieman Culpepper features natural photographic portraits and environmental stills so captivating, you can almost hear the waves crashing off the North Shore.
Iain Beaumont is the founder and Managing Director of Venues and Ventures. Since ditching the City, Iain has worked on some on England’s grandest country estates and leading luxury venues, refining his eye for spotting new opportunities and helping businesses realise their potential.
500 miles away, our country is at war. You wouldn’t imagine it here though, where despite warnings of terrorist attacks, the only immediate threat is running out of champagne. Antalya’s coastline is a tinny concentration of the photo albums you thumbed through as a child. There’s a sense of nostalgia and familiarity here, one that typifies the great British holiday: that hot-but-not-too-hot, different-but-not-too-different compromise to get on a plane and test our burdening Britishness against cultures that are generally friendlier, happier, less self-loathing, and not half as pretentious. But tourism has changed a lot recently, as has the world, and the simpering irony of sending a luxury-travel writer to this corner of…
The first Shangri-La I stayed at was in China, where the hotel looms on the upper floors of Beijing’s World Trade Centre complex. Not exactly subtle. The one in Paris – my favourite – is set in a Napoleonic family mansion, where you can wake up to an eyeful of the Eiffel.
“Come and enjoy the island for a couple of days,” read the invitation from Isla Sa Ferradura, Ibiza’s only private rock in the ocean, a property so exclusive that it eschews advertising for word-of-mouth and deters any other undesirables with its bum-clenching £200,000-a-week price tag.
It’d been a while since I’d stayed in London. Even longer since I’d travelled anywhere without the family in tow. But this hotel visit was excuse enough to forget about responsibilities and pandemics, hop on a train and head to the Big Smoke for a day of overdue excess. Navigating the post-lockdown hoi polloi is a proper schlep. But thankfully, stepping into the Kimpton Fitzroy is like being welcomed back to 2019, a time before mass hysteria, masks and 2-metre rules. And what a welcome. The Kimpton is a London hotel in the most traditional sense: a landmark building whose grand facade is punctuated by the statues of four British…