The New Golden Age of Travel

They say nostalgia isn’t what it used to be. And I say that’s probably just as well. Where travel is concerned, we’ve never had our nostalgia better. We’re fortunate to be alive at a time when we can enjoy all of the luscious trappings of the last Golden Age of Travel – roughly from the rise of the grand hotel, the train de luxe and the ocean-going liner in the late-1800s, to the heyday of the jet set in the middle of the 20th century – with far fewer of the inconveniences and niggles that would, if we were to remove our rose-tinted Persols for a moment and examine the details, have taken some of the glamorous edge off travel in those earlier times. (No AC? No lift? No running water? Honey!)

I can think of no better example of this highly agreeable having our nostalgia cake and eating it scenario than that of the Orient Express. Are there five other syllables so redolent of, so splendidly attired in, so richly perfumed with irresistible, old-fashioned, swag-curtained, silk-upholstered travel romance than those that comprise the words “Orient Express”? Though they are also, it must be said, five slightly confusing syllables these days, in that they now refer to two quite distinct things. There’s the Belmond Venice Simplon-Orient-Express, which is what most of us think of when we think of the Orient Express and which continues to ply the famous Paris-to-Istanbul route, as well as numerous others within Europe (the latest, launched this summer, runs between Venice and Portofino). But soon there’ll be the Accor Orient Express as well, which is due to begin operating several itineraries within Italy in early 2025, with other routes to follow in 2026.

Top: Exploring the Indonesian archipelago onboard Vela; Above: The glossy interiors of the Venice Simplon-Orient-Express

The reemergence of high-end rail travel isn’t hard to understand. It’s a glorious throwback to a mode of travel grown so unfamiliar as to have become novel once more – so old-fashioned it’s new-fashioned. We love the gilded look and velvety feel of it; we love the notion that it’s a more environmentally responsible and mindful way of seeing the world. And for the unique way in which it throws complete strangers together against ever-changing and generally highly picturesque landscapes, no other means of transportation can begin to compete with it.

Hoteliers, of course, understand only too well the potent magic of nostalgia, especially those whose hotels are in fact quite old. The best of them provide environments in which guests can feel enveloped by the past without losing touch with the present. When I very reluctantly clambered off the Eastern & Oriental Express, another Belmond train, earlier this year, my only consolation was that I was going directly to Raffles Singapore, one of a handful of hotels on earth that can compete with the kind of out-of-time experience I’d just had on the train.

Surely lovelier today than at any point in its long history, Raffles continues to evolve in ways that bear out Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa’s perception: “For things to remain the same, everything must change.” What matters, for a heritage hotel such as Raffles, or indeed for other comparably great hotels – Claridge’s in London, the Hotel du Cap-Eden-Roc in Antibes, the Baur au Lac in Zurich, The Peninsula Hong Kong, La Mamounia in Marrakech – is that guests don’t mind, or even really notice, the change.

Above: Stepping out at Raffles Singapore

Another nifty sleight of hand, related but different, is for a newly opened hotel to convey a convincing impression of having been there forever. “I believe in low lights and trick mirrors,” said Andy Warhol. So too, based on the visual evidence, do the proprietors of such instant-classic recent openings as the Fife Arms in the Scottish Highlands, Castello di Reschio in Umbria and The Fifth Avenue Hotel in New York. Nostalgia at the flick of a switch – or rather, at the gentle tug of the nickel-plated cord beneath a faux-vellum lampshade.

Above: The grand entrance of La Mamounia, Marrakech

Beyond the outward trappings of opulence and visual cues that deliver the nostalgia fix we crave lies something else. Something elusive and precious and hard to define. Perhaps because I spent a lot of time sailing as a kid, I have often found this precious something on water. These days I’m the first to admit that boats of various shapes and sizes – such as Vela, the 50m custom-built Phinisi yacht that’s perfect for exploring the Indonesian archipelago – are very much a part of our New Golden Age of Travel. I’m longing to see the Kimberley coast of northwestern Australia by boat, for example – Seabourn and Scenic are the latest operators to have launched itineraries in that beautiful and remote part of the world.

Among my happiest travel experiences of recent years is a trip I took on Aqua Expeditions’ Aria Amazon, upriver from Iquitos to the Pacaya Samiria National Reserve, which looks like nothing much on a map but is almost the same size as Belgium. Visiting this part of the world in anything like the comfort afforded by Aria Amazon simply wouldn’t have been possible in the last Golden Age of Travel.

One evening I took a ride in a skiff along a tributary with one of Aria Amazon’s crew, a local guide named Julio. At a certain point he cut the outboard motor and let the skiff drift on the current. By then it was getting late and the light was almost gone. We sat in silence for a while, until it became obvious that we weren’t sitting in silence. “This is the sound of my childhood,” Julio said. Ruddy pigeons and nun birds, calling to one another as if in competition. Nightjars. Parakeets. Frogs and crickets. Beneath it all, the ceaseless whisper of the river. I guessed that Julio had performed this engine-cutting trick many times before. It didn’t matter. It was a good trick. We kept drifting and listening. I remembered a line from the journals of the director Werner Herzog, who had come to the Peruvian Amazon to film his masterpiece Fitzcarraldo, describing a similarly quiet, contemplative moment on the water. “Such a sense of peace came over me that I felt I was discovering something that had been missing from my life.”

Above: The bar onboard Aria Amazon; the deck of Aria Amazon