As soon as a secret gets widely distributed, it’s a secret no longer. That “hidden treasure” I’m so eager to tell you about becomes a lot less hidden, and less of a treasure, the moment I share it.
What’s a travel writer to do? The very premise of the job is to tell you about attractive possibilities that you might not otherwise know about. But as those little-known jewels become better known, readers grow understandably indignant (that quiet and reasonably priced cafe is suddenly unquiet and unreasonably priced), while locals wonder how much to curse the onslaught of visitors and how much to try to make the most of them.
I feel this conundrum ever more painfully because I have chosen to base myself for 37 years around the Japanese city of Kyoto. My first 30 years here, I grieved because nobody I knew ever wanted to visit. Now I mourn because everyone seems to be on their way here. Each month I receive dozens of messages — from friends, from readers, from complete strangers — asking me to tell them about out-of-the-way Japanese wonders that nobody else knows about. I understand the impulse. More than 75 million people visited Kyoto Prefecture in 2023 and most of them seemed to be walking along the narrow, once-noiseless paths that lead magically up to Kiyomizu temple at the same time.
Of course, a longtime travel writer knows how to come up with diversions. I’ll often recommend my second-favorite izakaya, in the same spirit as I tell friends who are thinking of Nepal that they may want to consider the less-developed Himalayan region of Ladakh, or those hurrying toward Kyoto to try quiet and cultured Kanazawa, two hours away, instead. I will share my favorite secret with a friend and offer a stranger something more generic. Besides, I know that a traveler’s real joy comes in discovering a hidden treasure for herself; at best my recommendation may send her along some adjacent path, to somewhere I’ve never heard about.
Traveling in Time
But the abiding hope of travel is that beauty is resilient. Last year I happened to spend three nights in Kyoto right after flying in from California. Every morning I got out of bed at 3:15 and slipped out the door five minutes later (11:20 a.m. in my Californian mind and stomach). The streets were deserted, save for a handful of Japanese kids reeling home after a long night out. I came to know the friendly South Asian men working at the convenience store where I stopped every morning to buy a bottle of hot milk tea and a doughnut. Best of all, I was able to walk up those heart-stopping pilgrims’ paths toward Kiyomizu and have them entirely to myself.