No reviewer of books or movies faces this predicament, and if an overlooked novel or documentary suddenly wins recognition, most of us rejoice. But destinations are fragile, on several fronts — many can’t bear the weight of thousands. While sailing around Antarctica, even as I marveled at its otherworldly beauty, I was selfishly glad that not many visitors are permitted there, so precarious is its environment.
Sometimes, therefore, I simply delight in the fact that my tastes are not the same as everybody else’s. After I wrote about that comfortable hotel on the beach in war-torn Yemen in 2001 — and that delectable pizza-restaurant I discovered in the arts center in Tehran in 2013 —I never heard from any reader who had been to either, let alone found them overcrowded. When I hold forth on the delights of wandering around Singapore at 3 a.m. and seeing that well-behaved city’s unofficial side — its subconscious, as it were — I’m reminded that not many fly across the globe in search of such arcane pleasures.
At other times, I feel that anyone who has the enterprise and stamina to get to one of my “secret” suggestions has earned the payoff. Last summer I bumped across 13 miles of barely paved road, inching at times along a narrow path above a four-story plunge, to arrive at the Christ in the Desert monastery near Abiquiu, in New Mexico. It’s a site that few visitors will forget, yet happily one that not many will ever get to, as rains render the roads impassable, and the end of the path discloses little more than a simple church, a cluster of small rooms and a desert silence.
Earlier this year, in fact, I published a book about another Benedictine monastery, in California, where I have been staying regularly since 1991. Friends worried that my descriptions might endanger the very air of seclusion and quiet that I was hymning. Yet I had few such fears. Over more than a hundred visits, I’ve seen the monks build new trailers, expand their facilities, bring many rooms up-to-date. Nothing seems to dent the silence or the radiance. There’s still room for only around 20 visitors at a time and I’m convinced that almost anyone who goes will find the peace she’s seeking, while also bringing happiness to the monks (who need to raise $3,000 a day just to keep their community alive).
The Sweetest Secrets
Here in Japan, my neighbors are of two minds about whether they want to have their secrets divulged or not. On the one hand, older citizens in Kyoto can no longer find space on the local bus because so many visitors are crowding in to visit that back street ramen place they’ve seen on Tik Tok. On the other, in a country whose economy has been struggling for 30 years, any revenue is welcome.