Whether by train, ship or continent-spanning trail, transit alternatives are poised to proliferate this year.
Midyear, the Brightline express train in South Florida is expected to open, linking Miami and West Palm Beach. When it’s finished in 2019, travelers can make the trip between Miami and Orlando in three hours, while driving takes four. The terminus at the new downtown MiamiCentral station will include a food hall known as Central Fare.
In Switzerland, the Gotthard Base Tunnel, the world’s longest and deepest railway passage, ceremonially opened last June, but officially opened last month. Eventually the 35-mile tunnel through the Alps will cut 45 minutes off the trip between Zurich and Lugano.
Photo: EPA
Offering more leisurely tours, the luxury sleeper train Belmond Andean Explorer will begin in May, linking Cusco, in the Peruvian Andes, to Lake Titicaca and Arequipa. The itinerary takes two nights, but the company, which also operates the high-end Belmond Hiram Bingham trains to Machu Picchu, will offer one-night trips between Cusco and Lake Titicaca.
Japan welcomed its newest high-speed train, Hokkaido Shinkansen, last March, traveling between Tokyo and the northern Hokkaido island in just over four hours. This spring, the 10-car Train Suite Shiki-Shima will offer 34-passenger luxury tours in sleeper cars that will travel from Tokyo to the Tohoku and Hokkaido regions.
CRUISE SHIPS
Among 2017 cruise ship launches in the mega class, the 4,500-capacity MSC Meraviglia from Europe’s MSC Cruises, coming in the summer to the Mediterranean, will be among the largest at sea, with a 315-foot dome featuring light shows in the central promenade, a full-size bowling alley and entertainment by Cirque du Soleil. In November, the line will introduce another large ship, the 4,140-capacity MSC Seaside, sailing year-round between Miami and the Caribbean.
In March, Celebrity Cruises plans to add two small ships to its fleet, both sailing in the Galapagos Islands. The 48-passenger Celebrity Xperience will offer trips lasting from seven to 13 nights, providing snorkeling gear, wet suits and binoculars to guests. A smaller craft, the Celebrity Xploration, will accommodate 16 guests.
Lindblad Expeditions will introduce its first newly built ship, the 100-guest National Geographic Quest, in June in the Inside Passage of Alaska, with kayaks, paddle boards and landing craft for ventures into the wild.
The square-rigged sailing ships of Star Clippers only look retro. The line’s newly built Flying Clipper, making its debut late in 2017, will be powered by 32 sails, and it can carry 300 passengers.
Canada aims to celebrate the 150th anniversary of its confederation by completing its transcontinental Great Trail, a 24,000km, or roughly 15,000-mile, multiuse recreational trail linking Newfoundland in the east to British Columbia in the west, with northern spurs to the Yukon and the Northwest Territories.
The canonical shot of an East Asian city is a night skyline studded with towering apartment and office buildings, bright with neon and plastic signage, a landscape of energy and modernity. Another classic image is the same city seen from above, in which identical apartment towers march across the city, spilling out over nearby geography, like stylized soldiers colonizing new territory in a board game. Densely populated dynamic conurbations of money, technological innovation and convenience, it is hard to see the cities of East Asia as what they truly are: necropolises. Why is this? The East Asian development model, with
Desperate dads meet in car parks to exchange packets; exhausted parents slip it into their kids’ drinks; families wait months for prescriptions buy it “off label.” But is it worth the risk? “The first time I gave him a gummy, I thought, ‘Oh my God, have I killed him?’ He just passed out in front of the TV. That never happens.” Jen remembers giving her son, David, six, melatonin to help him sleep. She got them from a friend, a pediatrician who gave them to her own child. “It was sort of hilarious. She had half a tub of gummies,
The wide-screen spectacle of Formula One gets a gleaming, rip-roaring workout in Joseph Kosinski’s F1, a fine-tuned machine of a movie that, in its most riveting racing scenes, approaches a kind of high-speed splendor. Kosinski, who last endeavored to put moviegoers in the seat of a fighter jet in Top Gun: Maverick, has moved to the open cockpits of Formula One with much the same affection, if not outright need, for speed. A lot of the same team is back. Jerry Bruckheimer produces. Ehren Kruger, a co-writer on Maverick, takes sole credit here. Hans Zimmer, a co-composer previously, supplies the thumping
No more elephant and monkey acts. No more death-defying motorbike stunts. No more singing or acting on stage. Several hundred spectators still clapped constantly when acrobats with Dongchoon Circus Troupe, South Korea’s last and 100-year-old circus, twirled on a long suspended fabric, juggled clubs on a large, rotating wheel and rode a unicycle on a tightrope under the big top. “As I recall the hardship that I’ve gone through, I think I’ve done something significant,” Park Sae-hwan, the head of the circus, said in a recent interview. “But I also feel heavy responsibility because if Dongchoon stops, our country’s circus, one genre
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