In a Year of Abrupt Transitions, a Trip to Tahiti. And Calgary.

next stop : New Caledonia !

Calgary or Edmonton? Advice please.

There are some wonderful cultural gems in Calgary: Alberta Ballet under the leadership of Jean Grand-MaÎtre - check out the Portrait Series, the Calgary Philharmonic and Opera, the concerts at the Banff Centre, the esteemed Honens Piano Competition, the film fests in Banff and Calgary, Heritage Park, and show-jumping at Spruce Meadows. The opportunities for climbing, fly-fishing and western/ trail riding in and around the city are world-class.

Thank you Sebastian for recognizing the impact a public library can have on a city, in your last dispatch from Calgary. This can be duplicated in cities and small towns all over the world. The amazing library system in Calgary was led by a truly visionary director, Bill Ptacek, who passed away this past year. He played a huge role in the construction of this library and the role the library system plays in the community. He was a fine mentor and colleague to many in the public library world and I am thrilled that you felt the impact he intended for the library system to have in his community. I hope it encourages others to seek out public libraries on their travels around the world. They are often sources of unexpected information about their local communities.

I feel as if I have made a new friend in Sebastian this past year. As i followed along with him on his miraculous travels, via tweets, photos, and articles, I was often reminded of a bicycle trip I made with my sons' father for five months along narrow back roads of Europe, all the way back in 1983. The world was a much less frenetic place at that time, but Sebastian made the same effort to step sideways off of the worn and beaten path, in order to experience places, people and things - moods, tastes, weather, silence, scents - that would otherwise have gone without notice. Thank you, Sebastian, for your beautiful and insightful words that shared with the rest of us the journey of a lifetime - a phenomenal experience that few will ever have the time or the means to explore. Welcome home. All good things, Nina Bagley

What a great series... what a great glimpse of the world. While it is easy to envy the author his adventure I can only imagine how glad he is to be home!

This was a great series and Mr. Modak did a great job in making you easily imagine actually being there, wanting to be there, or realizing why you'd never want to be there, no matter how interesting a place might seem. My question is: after all that traveling, what would one want to do for the next month or two?

Thank you Sebastian for your informative and personal insights at all of your destinations this year. I didn’t get a comment in on time on your last one in Los Angeles. It awakened in me a desire to live there but I’m a retired 83-year old female and not sure if I could afford it. This is a surprise ending to your travels: Tahiti and Calgary combined. I agree with one of the comments about the lake at Banff, it has a name, the stunning Lake Louise. But, ahh, Tahiti, those waters, those fabric colors, magnifique. Thank you NYT for choosing Sebastián as your 2019 Traveler. I look forward to getting to travel anew with your next pick. Sent from my iPad

Just came from Bora Bora a week ago. Sad to hear you didn’t visit. Met wonderful people - families, couples, girl trippers. No honeymooners. Your loss but perhaps you can go back sometime. Stunningly beautiful place (true of much of FP) and then... there are the wonderful hospitable local people.

Great intrepid finds on the Calgary food and drink scene and a few cultural gems too. Thanks for the great tips.

I really like this series but while the first traveler was all about complaining, the second one, Mr. Modak, was in my opinion, all about disdain for tourists and nice hotels. Interestingly enough, he would end up always in some posh hotel complaining about the “challenges” of a terrific opportunity to travel and record amazing places. Don’t care much about the messenger but love the places and already planning to travel to few of these destinations on 2020. Hat off to the NYT for the series and look forward to a new perspective from another traveler.

Thanks, Sebastian, for delivering a year of stimulating armchair travel. You took me places I’d always wanted to explore and showed me sights I never knew existed. Mostly, I appreciated your curiosity and optimism. And your sense of wonder.

Well done, Mr. Modak. Your adventures have provided wonderful reading. Many thanks.

Thank you for all the wonderful commentary in so many interesting places. I will definitely miss your travelogue.

Thank you for your positive article about my home town, Calgary, Alberta, Canada. So glad you decided to walk around rather than drive. I hope folks are curious enough to come and check our corner of the world out. You must return someday and come south to the communities on the outskirts. Southern Alberta is full of surprises!

Thank you Sebastian for your great insights and excellent writing this year! Your articles about Puglia and Cádiz really contributed to a wonderful vacation my partner and I had there. Unfortunately I missed your stay in Munich and I would have loved to get in touch with you and show you around my favourite places.

Sebastian, I have so enjoyed your travel stories. Your curiosity, openness, and imagination give your writing a special glow, much like Patrick Leigh Fermor's accounts of his travels decades ago. You have a gift and I suspect we have not seen the last of your writing. So happy trails home to New York City, where more adventures with less jet lag await you. Thank you for a great year!

We will miss you, Seb! It's been a delight to get to know you this year and see the world through your eyes. Thank you for your insight, humor, and perseverance.

When I first visited Tahiti in June of 1970 it was still relatively undeveloped and the market in Papeete was small and slow local produce and fish. When we rode the bus back to our hotel the person sitting across from me was holding a tuna on a string! When I visited again in January of 2016 Papeete was a city! And the colorful fabrics sold in the "market" are all printed in India as is the case on other Pacific Islands as well. Calgary is a beautiful city and the skiing in Banff is great even when snow is lacking in the States. But one of my favorite experiences was visiting Spruce Meadows for the international horse shows regularly held there. Olympic level competition and an amazing facility. And for those who like rodeos, the Calgary Stampede is famous.

Thanks for bringing my thoughts back to French Polynesia. I traveled to the islands twice by boat from the Americas several years ago. The far flung islands were everything I expected. Warm inviting people, new foods like the Poisson Crus you mentioned, wonderful music, and unforgettable diving and snorkeling with so many magnificent creatures have left an indelible and beautiful memory. From the Marquesses and Tuomotus to the Society Islands it did seem like paradise. Happy Travels.

There is a way to live cheaply in French Polynesia: stay a year. We lived in Moorea during the school year 91/92, renting a house from a friend's friend. We put the kids ( 7 and 5 year old) in the local school at Pao Pao, and took trips around different islands during the school holidays. Tetiaroa, Marlon Brando's private motu, was then the location of fairly ramshackle hotel, with intermittent supply of water and brusque staff, but the snorkeling, swimming and fishing were wonderful. We liked it much more than Rangiroa. Visits to Papeete were limited to the minimum: seeing the Gauguin museum, buying a game of monopoly or picking up visitors. Too noisy and busy after the peaceful beauty of Moorea. Nearly 30 years later, we are still in touch with the people we met there and perhaps we'll go back: after all, we often ate uru ( breadfruit) for dinner, and that means we must go back sometime!

It's great to read an outsider's impression of the city that I have lived in most of my life. There's a lot more to this city than the oil industry but unfortunately many people who have not been here think of petroleum first. While it is an important and significant economic driver for Calgary the last few years have provided a taste of a new industrial revolution that is shaking up all that has seemed constant and reliable into the future. What is constant is that Calgary and Calgarians have weathered booms and busts since the city was founded. We have always ended up back on our feet. I love living here and have tried cities in Canada that are bigger draws - Toronto and Vancouver for instance. Nice cities but they are not Calgary. Give me the snow, cold, prairies, and mountains any day!

With all due respect, I have to completely disagree with the description of Canmore as "charming." This is essentially a town of large condo complexes that sprung up to serve the 1988 Olympics. There is no "downtown" and the condos and pricey hotels are stretched out along a busy, and noisy, central drag. Granted, it's the only affordable option in the Banff area during the summer.

My wife and I have been to Tahiti twice, the second time was to Rangiroa. We spent part of our time (2 nights) at the Kia Ora Sauvage, a collection of bungalows on a motu on the far side of the atoll. No electricity, but the staff came around at night to light lanterns for the guests. We passed a guitar around, played and sang songs in the bar with the bartender--aside from the staff, we were the only ones there. Freshly speared fish for dinner at a table on the sand. Absolute magic.

If you ever go back, Calgary has an immense system of year round trails that generally follow and connect to the rivers. You can bike 60 miles or more without ever leaving the city or seeing the same area twice. Much of the river trail system reveals an almost primordial landscape in the mddle of the city it's easy to imagine dinosaurs roaming around.

I've enjoyed Sebastian's synthesis of the personal with the global. He made the telling of his travels relatable and down to earth; I could easily imagine being there.

Tahiti is beautiful indeed, but the capital, Papeete, is not one of its finer example. Moorea is beautiful and less commercial than the main island. If you are going to travel 10,000+ mile I would suggest avoiding the western-style, over-water hotels and look for more traditional places. One on Moorea was Linareva Moorea Beach Resort. Very simple but accommodating. The food is better on the main island, but the traffic is much worse, and I would recommend renting a car to drive to the southern part of the main island, which is more scenic and relaxed. Same for Moorea; a car is almost essential. Otherwise you stuck at your hotel and reliant on expensive taxis.

In this era of needing to reduce our footprint on the planet I find it very jarring to see this "series" , which seems to celebrate the gross overconsumption of travelling. I would prefer to see this series relegated to the dustbin.

Have enjoyed following your travels this year! All the best in the new year.

I've read all of Sebastian's posts, and all of Jada's, last year. Wonderful. I'm waiting for reports of the 2020 Traveler. Jeff

I felt deep sympathy for you when I read you had to visit Calgary. I was trapped in Alberta for 30 years and recently made my escape to warmer climes in British Columbia. I often referred to Calgary as the God-forsaken cultural wasteland. With its unbending and lemming-like love of right wing politics, absurd reliance on the oil and gas industry, and general lack of interest in anything with the hint of culture, I have had a great sense of schadenfreude over the fall of the oil industry and those workers who raped and pillaged the land all for the love of the almighty dollar. And yet, after its well deserved fall from its dizzying heights of corporate greed, Calgary is finally starting to take baby steps toward being what I always thought it could be - a gem in the foothills of Alberta, with a diverse population and economy, open to new ideas and ways of thought, and a love of the arts. Thank you for highlighting the potential for Calgary. I might even break my vow of never returning to Alberta and check it out for myself.

That “icy lake near Calgary” is Lake Louise. It’s world famous. Certainly as famous as some palm-fringed lagoon in French Polynesia.

This is a wonderful series that I hope will continue in 2019. I'd like to suggest Medellin, Colombia and the Antioquia region for a stop. The city is reborn, has won countless awards for inovation and is in the middle of many natural wonders. Unsafe? No, not if you use your head, blend in and stay out of areas that are of no interest anyway. Again, thanks for this series.

You did well to avoid Bora Bora. When I visited the island while spending a summer in Tahiti in 1973, there were three hotels on the island and lot of chickens on the road. Now there are jet skis roaring through the lagoon (sacrilege) far too many hotels, and the chickens are all in pots. Think Miami Beach with prettier water. Sad. And I miss the original Papeete market, which was torn down to build the new one. But then, I missed Quinn's by a year or so. It's all relative. Glad you made it out to Rangiroa.

No wonder the NYTimes is such an interesting read. The editors invent a dream job, sending a young reporter around the planet for a year to write up and share his weekly adventures. And at the end, tired from travel, he finally makes landfall in the Tahitian islands and says, « it’s hard to leave. » True, so true, of those long voyages and the resulting attachments. Thank you for this series of valuable insights.

Thank you, Sebastian for a very entertaining year. All the best for your continuing journey of life

Like Mr. Modak, I knew virtually nothing about Calgary when I moved here from Prince George, British Columbia in April 1974 to take a job as staff writer with the Calgary Herald. I had spent a week in Calgary the previous summer and thought it had none of the beauty or complexity that Mr. Modak discovered during his recent visit here. I soon began to feel differently, however. Within a few months, I stopped viewing Calgary as a whistle stop along the road to Toronto, where I really wanted to make my career. I saw it as a city of unlimited promise where I could happily set down roots. The late Canadian writer Mordecai Richler once tetchily observed that Calgary would become "a helluva city once they get it uncrated." Well, we've got it uncrated now and I'm proud to still call it home. Even in the dead of winter.

Great job Sebastian. It was brilliant reading your dispatches. I hope that you stay put at home and relax in 2020. Cheers!

Thank you again Sebastian. Bon voyage! Have a wonderful 2020!

With the increased awareness of travel on climate change, hasn't the 52 Places series become a regressive, not to mention destructive, feature? How about adding up the emissions your correspondent racked up in his year of travel.

Can there be better proof than the Islands of Tahiti that the world is a wonderful thing? Dolphins wanting their bellies rubbed, my God..

Next time include the Okanagan Valley in your travels, our best kept secret in British Columbia. A beautiful place all year around. Excellent wineries and restaurants, world class sky hills and two beautiful lakes changing colours from turquoise blue to emerald green depending on the time of day. During our very hot summers our lakes have nothing to envy to the Mediterranean coasts: sandy beaches, secluded camping areas, and fresh warm water...and a recently completed biking road connecting different towns around the lakes, from our old railroad.

An excellent article yet again, and a great way to end the series. I enjoyed seeing Mr. Modak mention that he has taken on the habit of walking around to orient himself when he first arrives at a new destination; it's something I learned as well over my years of traveling to various locations, often with little spare time. Upon dropping my luggage off at my room, I'd immediately head out, sometimes with a fairly good idea of where I wanted to go but often just "out". Of course, one positive advantage of cellphones is knowing where I started and being able to find my way back; but then, I've been "pleasantly lost" in large cities such as London, and discovered little out-of-the-way places I never would have found in a guidebook. Mr. Modak seems to have been quite taken by Calgary; whether because he knew his arduous travels were almost over or not, I could sense his enjoyment of simple pleasures there. Hats off to the city of Calgary for the gorgeous library! Even the one photo almost took my breath away in its beauty! So refreshing to see a city invest so well in its citizens, although I'm certain they know that they are always on a rollercoaster from an energy financial position. And it's easy to be in awe of the grandeur of Tahiti, but not of the prices. I will continue to think of it as my utopia-in-mind...where my mind will go to reside when I pass on from the physical life. Thank you again very sincerely, Mr. Modak - your articles have all been far above the norm.