Goodbye to all that

When Ryszard Kapuscinski was still a cub reporter in Poland, the assignment he hankered after was simply to cross the border. “To cross it and come right back – that I thought would be entirely sufficient.” I felt a shock of recognition reading this passage in Travels with Herodotus, Kapuscinski’s last book. Growing up in socialist India in the 1980s, foreign travel had seemed an entirely implausible adventure. Like many Indians of my generation, I travelled overseas for the first time when I received a scholarship to study at an American graduate school.

My journey from Calcutta eventually set me down amid the cornfields of the Midwest like Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz. When I landed in San Francisco en route, a customs official asked me if I had brought any food. I was baffled; I had arrived for a one-year course. “No,” I replied, entirely serious. “I thought you had plenty of it here.”

I try to affect a more worldly air nowadays but even at the end of a stint of half a dozen years as the FT’s travel, food and drink editor, I have not entirely lost that sense of wonder – and occasional befuddlement – when travelling. This is a providential gift in an era in which nearly everyone travels – and so many people travel nearly all the time. In Dakar a few years ago, I got goose-bumps listening to the high tenor notes of Youssou N’Dour’s opening song in an arena fashioned out of two basketball courts filled with youngsters drinking Fanta and Coke. The Senegalese star came on stage at 2am and sang till 5am.

Dakar, Beirut and Palermo aside, the places I want to return to have all been fixtures on the tourist trail for years. San Francisco seems to have found a way to retain the easy, relaxed ways of a small town amid the cosmopolitanism of a big city. I interviewed an idol of mine, Joan Didion, while she was on a book tour there for The Year of Magical Thinking, an account of her grief after her husband’s death. When I left for the airport, the cab driver spoke of listening to a talk by Didion and of his admiration for her.

From San Francisco to Shanghai, and Paris to Cairo, I have been lucky enough to stay with friends along the way, which gave me an insider’s view of these cities. I have learnt, however, that a travel editor is not deemed to be worth the chocolate on his pillow if he does not have a hotel recommendation or three.

The Four Seasons is not just a lesson in hospitality, but a Harvard Business School case study in good management – the hotel group’s philosophy is the subject of a good book by founder Isadore Sharp. In Hong Kong to write a story about the hotel group’s training process, days before the Four Seasons opened there in the summer of 2005, I witnessed a trial run of high tea. A waiter said he would check with the kitchen if they could make the sandwiches I wanted. The manager grimaced. The correct answer? “Yes, of course.”

The setting of the Amandari in Bali, so close to the paddy fields that I could have tasted the milky young rice on the stalks if I wanted to, makes it one of the most beautiful hotels I have visited.

My obsessions on flop-and-drop holidays are, paradoxically, exercise and eating. No one caters to this sort of traveller better than Como Resorts with their hotels in the Maldives, Turks and Caicos, London, Bali and Bhutan. Chefs Stana Johnson’s and David Thompson’s innovative twists on southern Indian and Thai food respectively were a revelation. At Como’s Parrot Cay in the Turks and Caicos islands, I had an hour-long Pilates consultation with Lynda Lippin, which prompted a trail of follow-up e-mails outlining exercises that I struggle to keep up with.

After editing countless travel articles, it is fitting perhaps that I have succumbed to wanderlust. I am taking a sabbatical to live in Beijing and make a start learning Mandarin. I find the prospect more than a little daunting but the world is a much easier place to navigate than when Kapuscinski started his journeys some 50 years ago. He arrived in the middle of the night in Delhi, speaking scarcely a word of English or Hindi and not knowing a soul. Now, that would be intimidating.

rahul.jacob@ft.com