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.
As the sky turned indigo an hour later — twilight in reverse — I felt myself wandering alone through a Hiroshige print. In time, some locals began to emerge, to walk their dogs or to enjoy the early-morning freshness. Yet, to a startling degree, I was back in the same silent, pristine world that awaited me when I quit my 25th-floor office in Midtown Manhattan to live in a simple temple in this neighborhood 37 years ago. Kyoto has weathered every kind of change in its 1,230 years of history, and I’m often reminded that thousands can walk around Notre Dame every day and few come away disappointed.
Nonetheless, the paradox at the heart of sharing little-known “secrets” has grown exponentially more intense over the past two decades. When I first began writing about foreign wonders, I could extol the hidden jewel known as the Lotus Café in Ubud because few people would ever read my account and even fewer would dream, in 1988, of flying to Bali. Now a mention of a “secret” bar in Barcelona may reach 11 million readers in every corner of the planet, many of whom are on their way to Spain very soon — or at least know of others who will be.
Long lines form outside that Kyoto gyoza joint down the road, whose main claim to fame used to be that it was the haunt of locals. Now, those same locals can’t get into the place that has been their second home for decades. And quite a few of those 11 million readers complain that this “special tip” isn’t so special at all.
No reviewer of books or movies faces this predicament, and if an overlooked novel or documentary suddenly wins recognition, most of us rejoice. But destinations are fragile, on several fronts — many can’t bear the weight of thousands. While sailing around Antarctica, even as I marveled at its otherworldly beauty, I was selfishly glad that not many visitors are permitted there, so precarious is its environment.
Sometimes, therefore, I simply delight in the fact that my tastes are not the same as everybody else’s. After I wrote about that comfortable hotel on the beach in war-torn Yemen in 2001 — and that delectable pizza-restaurant I discovered in the arts center in Tehran in 2013 —I never heard from any reader who had been to either, let alone found them overcrowded. When I hold forth on the delights of wandering around Singapore at 3 a.m. and seeing that well-behaved city’s unofficial side — its subconscious, as it were — I’m reminded that not many fly across the globe in search of such arcane pleasures.
At other times, I feel that anyone who has the enterprise and stamina to get to one of my “secret” suggestions has earned the payoff. Last summer I bumped across 13 miles of barely paved road, inching at times along a narrow path above a four-story plunge, to arrive at the Christ in the Desert monastery near Abiquiu, in New Mexico. It’s a site that few visitors will forget, yet happily one that not many will ever get to, as rains render the roads impassable, and the end of the path discloses little more than a simple church, a cluster of small rooms and a desert silence.
Earlier this year, in fact, I published a book about another Benedictine monastery, in California, where I have been staying regularly since 1991. Friends worried that my descriptions might endanger the very air of seclusion and quiet that I was hymning. Yet I had few such fears. Over more than a hundred visits, I’ve seen the monks build new trailers, expand their facilities, bring many rooms up-to-date. Nothing seems to dent the silence or the radiance. There’s still room for only around 20 visitors at a time and I’m convinced that almost anyone who goes will find the peace she’s seeking, while also bringing happiness to the monks (who need to raise $3,000 a day just to keep their community alive).
The Sweetest Secrets
Here in Japan, my neighbors are of two minds about whether they want to have their secrets divulged or not. On the one hand, older citizens in Kyoto can no longer find space on the local bus because so many visitors are crowding in to visit that back street ramen place they’ve seen on Tik Tok. On the other, in a country whose economy has been struggling for 30 years, any revenue is welcome.
Maybe I should just advise readers where not to go (Frankfurt Airport, or the 405 freeway in Los Angeles between 7 a.m. and 10 p.m. on any day). Or urge them toward overlooked places that sadly seem likely to remain overlooked: Oman and Ethiopia and Pittsburgh, all of which have afforded me great joy, again and again.
Or maybe I should just stick to fiction. When I set a scene in a novel inside that enchanting woody inn in California where there are no locks on the doors, and the sound of a rushing creek sweetens your night, some readers will smile with recognition — they know the place — while others will simply try to find a similarly atmospheric location of their own. Life offers few greater pleasures than that of passing on your enthusiasms and secret discoveries. But the greatest pleasure of all may be to uncover something that no one else has mentioned.
Pico Iyer’s most recent book, “Aflame: Learning from Silence,” was published in January.
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