Our new year will witness the calving of mass tourism like glaciers melting away from surrounding overheated seas. That, or a still worsening collapse of our already destabilized natural weather systems.

Still, I believe we can count on intelligence that we steadily acquire about our weather to trump denial. Worsening car traffic is a problem everywhere. So is climate change.

The 2024 NYT List of 52 Places to Go weighs in. The 52 stand apart in the way that great travel films also do. One thinks of Truman Capote’s screen adaptation for the farcical Beat the Devil, of Werner Herzog’s epic Fitzcarraldo, of the screenplay by Callie Khouri for Thelma and Louise.

It’s amazing that these places get recognized. One hopes that recognition doesn’t lead to overcrowding.

[A companion posting of mine about the 52 list at The “Good Tourism” Blog — A careful reading of The New York Times 52 Places To Go List for 2024 — has also appeared that I will post to this site February 8.]

Here is a sampling and a first analysius of what the list has in store.

• Yamaguchi, Japan with its five-story Rurikoji Temple is a national treasure impeccably fitted into its five-story tree-topped waterfront gardens.
• The Mingan Archipelago is a national park reserve on the Gulf of St. Lawrence, with its alien-invocative monolithic erosions sacred to the Innu First Nations group. (Beyond just this one particular site, Indigenous tourism everywhere is entering its heyday.)

Mingan Archipelago (credit, Parks Canada)

• Unlike at Indonesia’s more popular destination, Bali, most visitors to Lake Toba on the Tuk-Tuk peninsula hike among the Batak people who live there, passing “terraced rice paddies and churches with rusty sheet-metal roofs and then dive into the lake — into this cathartic space.”
• In 2021, the International Union for Conservation of Nature listed African savanna elephants for possible extinction. But in Kenya, conservationist-humanist David Western in the 1970’s had already shown Masai tribes how to benefit from the sometimes rampaging herds that have grown by 21 percent since 2014 alone to a population of 36,280.

Lodgings

These capture the Times’ attention chiefly when built into recycled structures, of historical character, boutique scaled, family run or otherwise fitted in except for the fewest architectural ego trips.

• At the Isles des Perroquets you can lodge atop the layered geology at the furthest edge of the Mingan Archipelago in the former lightkeeper’s house. You feel yourself a rescued castaway in the narrowest and most turbulent portion of the Jacques Cartier Strait.
• The Kenya Wildlife Trust manages six small eco-lodges, which provide local jobs and help its conservation work. The Times list reports that this year the trust will open a lodge next to the Ngulia Rhino Sanctuary.
• The third largest city in Sri Lanka, Negombo Beach, crossed by Dutch-era canals, has opened the luxurious Uga Riva Hotel in a manor house where Mohandas K. Gandhi stayed and that still today welcomes traveling diplomats.

Uga Riva Hotel (credit the hotel)

• Morocco’s Ourika Valley, an hour’s drive from Marrakesh, is framed by rocky red and green hillsides and the snow-capped Atlas Mountains that backdrop places to lodge from guesthouse simplicity to luxurious boutique properties that have reopened since last year’s calamitous earthquake.

Ourica Valley (credit, Morocco Travel)

It’s about trains and ferries

• A 17-day journey on three lines offered by Great Journeys is on offer by the tourism division of KiwiRail, New Zealand’s national rail operator. Typical at overnight stops, guests ferry across the Cook Strait for whale and dolphin sightings to the South Island for a ride through world-class vineyards, then stop for dinner at Christchurch Tramway Restaurant — a moving feast — before ending in Christchurch Lodge, one of 16 4- to-4.5 star hotels.
• In Wales, we’re reminded that a beloved national park, Bannau Brycheiniog that combines Indigenous culture and nature, is easily reached by the Explore Wales Pass for trains and buses.
• In Mexico, the Maya Train that began service in December will cross five states with nearly 1,000 miles of track that link popular destinations on the Yucatán Peninsula — including Cancún beaches, historical Mérida and the Maya ruins of Chichén Itzá — to formerly remote sites like Calakmul that show in detail how Mayans once lived, and to the archaeological park at Palenque in Chiapas State. The $20 billion train project will also connect directly with the new international airport in Tulum.

Along the route of the Maya Train (source not identified)

• A gleaming Metro takes you to Almaty’s Central State Museum where you can refresh your grammar school Genghis Khan, as well as ride the cable car to two-thirds-mile-high Kök-Töbe, where popular restaurants overlook Kazakhstan’s entire capital of two million.
• Quito’s new Metro — its MDQ — runs only 14 miles but its 15 stations include a UNESCO World Heritage site-honored Andean city of contrasts from its almost 800-year-old Spanish Colonial city-center and modern Floresta, home to a university and expat district. You can book a tour there that links flaunting avant-garde eyesore towers to the Equator with its own primitively inspired monuments.
• At its homepage, Iceland invites visitors to become responsible tourists, calculate their carbon footprint, and shows the way to climate action with a new electric ferry that connects its mainland to Heimaey in the Westman Islands, where from May to September Vestmannaeyjar becomes Iceland’s food capital.
• To divert the visitor pressure from Machu Picchu, Peru is investing $200 million to build a cable car and improve trails to reach Choquequirao, another Incan citadel that today still requires a three- to four-day trek to reach.
• Fleets of ferries connect Dominica in the Caribbean Windwards with nearby historically French speaking islands that agreeably disrupt clichés of only palm swept beaches between Martinique and St. Lucia. You find fewest common beachfront hotels at all.

Destinations

Also revealing in the 52 List for ’24 are the destinations that at least introduce visitors to experiencing their climate policy. I’ve already referenced Iceland.

• Visit Waterford, Ireland links to climate policy on its home page. Its “objective includes promoting sustainable initiatives from members, tourism bodies, local authorities and the wider Waterford community, with an aim to increase awareness of and engagement with sustainable practices.”
• The newly established Baaj Nwaavjo I’tah Kukveni, the Ancestral Footprints of the Grand Canyon National Monument, covers almost 100,000 acres in northern Arizona which ensures that “future generations can learn from and experience the unique and abundant historic and scientific objects” found among tribal lands.
• The Route of the Provisioners starts just south of Santiago, Chile, where the O’Higgins Region markets agritourism. Bucalemu centers “sustainable fishing practices, preventing the overexploitation of marine products, and protecting the ecosystem from sea to plate.”
• At one of the two sites for tourism to Spain’s third largest city, the Foundation for Visit Valencia shows in bold white across a panoramic green field, “Sustainability, a pillar of Valencia’s tourism strategy.”

Valencia (credit, Foundation for Visit Valencia)

• A search for Craters of the Moon National Park in Idaho takes you to the more precisely designated Craters of the Moon National Monument & Preserve. You find a scientific discussion of climate and climate change in layperson language for an “ocean of lava flows with scattered islands of cinder cones and sagebrush [where in] this ‘weird and scenic landscape’. . . yesterday’s volcanic events are likely to continue tomorrow.”
• Geneva has its own city section that shows in a search for Switzerland Tourism with its dropdown menu for Planning that celebrates “Swisstainability” also elsewhere called “the future of tourism.” Among broad cultural influences the site introduces visitors to its hiking, cycling, donkey treks, trains, and its distinctive folklore enclaved across its high and low Alpine topography.

There are other recognitions of climate awareness at destination websites. Look for yourself and for others coming; each a hopeful sign.