These 3 Classic Forms of Travel Will Dominate in 2024
Venice. Budapest. Nairobi.
The names set a hook: circles inked on a map, fingers tapped on a drawing room globe, stickers layered on a valise. We set off from here. We head there—to a great city, up a grand river, into the African wild. We plan and thrill at what’s to come. A journey that echoes of historic provenance and links us with travelers of the past but that seizes us by the collar amid the high-velocity hurly-burly of 21st-century life and says: Slow down. Regard. Savor.
These are grand journeys—these are the Great Journeys. But can something distinctly old resonate as powerfully today? Can we find the slow gear and inhabit the deeper beauty of such travel? With the murmurs of diarists and explorers in my ear, I set out on three Great Journeys to test the theory: Paris-bound aboard the Venice Simplon-Orient-Express (VSOE); cruising the snow-flecked Danube to Christmas markets in Hungary and Austria, Germany and Slovakia; and flying into the Kenyan bush for a week on safari. What did I discover? Where do I begin?
"How do you find your cabin?”
My steward, Melissa, flicks her glance warmly at me while never losing track of the Veuve Clicquot she’s pouring. I’m dumbstruck—by her crisp posture amid the gentle shudder of our train car as it lumbers across the watery landscape outside Venice but also by the wild under-statement of the question
Simply put: My cabin is gorgeous. All I can manage is to blurt in clumsy French that I want to live here forever—but we both know that in less than 24 hours I’m going to step onto the platform of the Gare de l’Est and my life on the Orient Express will be over.
But what a cabin to inhabit until then. A jewelry box to human scale, this triumph of restoration and imagination is one of eight Suites installed in a pair of circa 1920s and 1930s cars that joined the VSOE this summer. The Suites are a new category between the train’s Historic Cabins and their haute-opulent cousins, six Grand Suites with full or twin beds, sofas, dining tables, and full baths.
The new Suites lie literally between the categories. Each has a commodious banquette and table—a setup that converts to a double bed (or two twins) with crisp white sheets—and an en suite bath. Rachel Johnson of London’s Wimberly Interiorsconjured the four distinct designs, each inspired by the train’s Art Deco heritage and the landscape we traverse (mine is La Forêt, the forest) and rich in French marquetry, ArtNouveau–style textiles, hand-blown and-etched glass fixtures, brass hardware, and a marble bath that would charm an aristocrat.
It’s enough to pass an entire day in this intimate Arcadia, but three dining cars beckon with their ebullient patterns and palettes, ample velvet and tassels. It’s said one can never overdress for dinner on the Orient Express, and jolly travelers oblige, with some in fully formal attire, others in thoughtful semiformal dress. The service brandishes lots of Champagne, while the rhythm of cocktail shakers and standards at the grand piano in the famed Bar Car “3674” sing a post-prandial siren song.
And this—brilliantly—is the sum of life aboard the Orient Express. It’s a journey of jostled, colorful mini journeys from my cabin down hallways so narrow they require side-ways slides, smiles, and nods; luxuriating at meals; chatting and laughing in the bar; and repeating with the cadence of lunch, dinner, nightcap, midnight brunch, and breakfast in my cabin as Paris looms to the west.
My only duty, really, is to discover I can roll down my window to let the cool Alpine air refresh my cabin, then lean my head out and spy my train’s gorgeous curves as it rounds bends north through Italy and Austria, then turns west across Liechtenstein and Switzerland.
To count cows and chalets, to wonder at the world sliding past. To look down at a book, to feel the soothing conversation of old wheels with stalwart rails. And to pause at border stops to step down to the platform, examine the navy shine of our cars with the gold letters telling the world who we are, and catch the curiosity of passersby. We lucky overnighters.
Here's to you, Maria Theresa, I think, lifting my steaming mug of glühwein in tribute.
It’s the perfect place to toast the 18th-century empress: I stomp my boots against the frost-glazed forecourt facing Schönbrunn, Vienna’s Baroque masterpiece that was her favorite palace, and take in the glimmering goodwill of the market stalls that surround me.
With mulled wine in hand, I’ve spent an hour in besotted stroll among vendors offering the bounty we imagine the idealized European Christmas market would contain: gifts and decorations made from blown glass, carved wood, pottery, needlework, even dried fruit—where plastic or paper cups seem never to have existed (all glühwein comes in decorative ceramic mugs, to keep as souvenirs or return for a small refund).
Despite the December chill the market is rich with aroma—roasted nuts, waffles, and crepes, with top notes of cloves, cinnamon, and citrus. Crimson-cheeked schoolchildren roam in excited packs, queuing up for chocolates. Crystal lights wink overhead, and I swear I hear classical music. Perhaps from the palace, perhaps in my head. It doesn’t matter, because this journey—up Europe’s Danube River—occupies that gently liminal geography between history and dream.
The empress is with me for the entire week—not just this Viennese afternoon. My journey is aboard the SS Maria Theresa, a cruise ship designed to honor her historic empire along the river. (And reign she does, overlooking the lobby’s marble double staircase from a massive 18th-century portrait.)
Fittingly Uniworld’s interior designer Toni Tollman has created the closest thing to a Habsburg palace on the water: My stateroom’s walls are covered in fabric; my bed canopied; my bathroom lined in marble. Antiques and artwork from the period keep company with gilded reproductions; in the resplendent lounge and bar, five murals by decorative artists at London’s Croxford and Saunders wrap the scene in Austrian rurals.
It would already be a Great Journey to ply this historic artery through Europe as we do, linking centers of art, politics, and culture. From Budapest we sail overnight into Slovakia and Bratislava, which, although rich with Gothic, Baroque, and Art Deco architecture, feels like a new European discovery after its years hidden away under Soviet rule.
Gliding through Austria we tour the museums and walk the grand boulevards of Vienna, meander and marvel at the sky blue Baroque tower in the riverfront village of Dürnstein, and leave our ship for the day to drive up to cinematic Salzburg. Finally, we cross the German border and to Passau, another startling discovery of Baroque and Rococo architecture both church-like and civil. Each day we tread nimbly down our gang-plank into each world to feel the overlapping sunbeams—and shadows—of empire.
And of course, at this time of year, the journey takes on the additional patina of the Christmas markets, each speaking its own dialect of history, food, and crafts. From honey wine in Bratislava to spun sugar in Passau, I taste (and try to pronounce) something new every day. I collect a few glühwein mugs. And I thank, again, Maria Theresa for her imperial inspiration and for the water that ties this world together.
Today is a day for elephants.
We can feel them out there, roaming the Kenyan grasslands; it’s just a question of finding them. We joke that the only elephant we’ve seen so far has been on our bottle of Amarula, the creamy African liqueur that plays a sweet role in our sundown ritual. But today, my safari-mates and I assure one another, climbing into our Land Cruiser, is a day for elephants.
This is the optimism of the adventurer, and a safari of any length, anywhere, hands you the chance to occupy that exotic position. But it’s a double down to anchor that safari at Mahali Mzuri, the luxury tented camp created by Sir Richard Branson’sVirgin Limited Edition. For one, the camp leaps forward in design, leaving the traditional silhouettes (and colonial aftertaste) of pale canvas tents behind for swooping shelters inspired by the bows carried by Maasai hunters. Secondly, Branson chose land adjacent to Kenya’s famed Maasai Mara reserve (where so many safari operators go) and helped steer it, with other partners and Maasai people, into conservancy.
So we spend a week here in the Olare Motorogi Conservancy, sometimes in pursuit of spotting the fauna famed for this part of East Africa—lions, cheetahs, leopards, Cape buffalo, antelope, giraffes, warthogs, hyenas, jackals, and yes, elephants—but other times in conversations with Mahali Mzuri’s partners at a nearby school, with elders who work to manage cattle movement to ease the burden on the habitat, and with leaders of a handicraft collaborative offering financial independence to local women. After so many years of tourism taking from Kenya’s ecosystem and cultural currency, this approach to parity and partnership with people and animals and habitat feels like a new form of an adventurer’s optimism.
In other words, it might be enough to bounce merrily along river valleys and across ancient volcanic plains, seeking encounters with these astonishing members of the animal kingdom, pausing for bush picnics, and gathering after dark below the spread of a baobab for a campfire, songs, and dancing. But it’s far more to know that my Great Journey into the African bush treads lighter and joins a forward-looking relationship with this fragile global treasure.
And then, one brilliant late morning under the Kenyan sun, we find our elephants. It’s a threesome: a newly born calf, trotting gamely to keep up with its older sibling, then nuzzling the rear leg of its mother, who gracefully allows her baby back into the family’s rhythm.
I watch from the quiet of our SUV, as I had watched from my ship pulling into a historic port, as I’d watched from the cabin of my train, and think yet again: This is the gift of the Great Journey. An opportunity to be small, to observe, to be led. To be slow. To be taught. To draw memories close to the chest, and to dream of the next great chance. To spin the globe and let the globe spin us.
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Featured in the November/December issue of VERANDA.
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