Page 33 - Seniorstoday August-2023 Issue

Travel

Unusual Places

to Stay

Lions Sands Private Game Reserve – Kruger National Park

Staying in Museums, Monasteries, Jungles, you fall into a different rhythm in
that quiet remoteness away from the noise and trappings of the new and the
modern and go deep within to touch the innermost you, writes
Vandana Kanoria

It is essential to that vision of otherness But if you wish to experience a deep and
that it must take a long time to reach some ancient Japanese aesthetic and simplicity,
places. you will find it as beautifully in Naoshima
You fall into a different rhythm when you and Koyasan as in any temple or Zen
get there, in that quiet remoteness away Garden.
from the noise and trappings of the new and These places, “take you back to the
the modern and go deep within to touch the principles of spareness, simplicity and
innermost you. concentration that graced the haiku, brush-
Remote and idyllic, with each mile gone and-ink paintings and Noh dramas of old.”
by, modernity seems to fade, and I feel Where technology makes you speed, be
closer to the old, the wild and the primal. up-to-the-minute and all-over-the-place,
Discovering and exploring something Naoshima and Koyasan calm and slow you
new, I begin to feel as if I had stepped out down and are perhaps the two most soul-
of the life I had always known into some expanding places in Japan.
unchartered territory of experience. Benesse House Museum, Naoshima
Japanese cool has, for decades now, been What is it like sleeping in a museum at
associated with everything fast, hi-tech, night?
and noisy - the TVs on taxi dashboards, the On my way to bed, I walk past an
control-panels on toilets, the underground Alberto Giacometti. No guard hovers over
buzzing worlds around major train stations. Richard Long and Keith Haring. The only

SENIORS TODAY | ISSUE #50 | AUGUST 2023 31