1 Woman, 12 Months, 52 Places
'It was a dream job, visiting the globe’s most alluring destinations on assignment. Here’s what our 2018 Traveler learned in a year of almost nonstop travel.
The man on the train platform who spoke only Hindi looked at my ticket and chuckled. This had been one of those days when mistakes piled up faster than I could track them.
I had tarried too long in Chandigarh, India, and the four-hour taxi ride back to New Delhi now promised to be a six-hour slog in traffic. No problem, I could take a train instead, I thought, only to run out of money on my cellphone SIM card just as I was booking a last-minute ticket. I hopped in a tuk tuk and raced to the station, and got there five minutes after the last fast train had left for the night.
When I started this harebrained experiment in January, to visit and report on the Times’s entire 52 Places to Go in 2018 list, I thought that by stop 48, for sure, I’d be the Wonder Woman of travel: blocking mishaps with a flick of my wrist. Instead I was staring down a 2 a.m. arrival in New Delhi before having to force myself awake for a morning plane to Bhutan.
But there was the man on the platform — a waiter for the railway, whose job it is to pass out dinners — flashing a gesture that seemed to mean, “Don’t worry, I’ve got you.” I had bought an “unreserved” ticket, which I thought was for people who’d had trouble purchasing online, but which really meant I’d likely have to stand for five hours.
But when the train pulled in, the man talked to the conductor and ushered me into a sleeper car. English-speakers all around jumped in to interpret. Seven dollars in fines and upgrade fees later, I was sitting in a cluster of bunks with four boisterous 20-something women from New Delhi.
The words “dream job” come up whenever I tell people about the 52 Places project. Like the thousands of others who answered that fateful job listing — travel the world for The New York Times! — I had a vision of winning a journalism lottery, of getting to leave behind my routine to swim in waterfalls in Australia, paraglide off mountaintops in Switzerland and eat at Michelin-starred restaurants in France. And I got to do all of those things, for which I am incredibly grateful.'>>>
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/01/03/travel/52-places-to-go-recap.html?
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