Don’t revisit the places you loved, go somewhere else

“I went back to Barcelona last year and it was so disappointing, it just wasn’t like it was in 1991.” How often have you heard that?

If not Barcelona then Bali, London’s Notting Hill or that gorgeous little Thai guesthouse on the beach in Phuket that did an awesome chilli crab.

We all suffer the pangs of nostalgia, but the world doesn’t stay still. Whether it was 40, 20 or five years ago, the place you remember with rosy memories won’t be the same when you revisit. I saw the Mona Lisa one bitter December day in Paris in 1976 and, apart from my girlfriend and I, there were probably six other people in the room. Go today and you’re in a jostling crowd waving their phones in the air.

Same goes for sunset from Oia on Greece’s Santorini, the villages of the Cinque Terre in Italy and Mont Saint-Michel on the Normandy coast, so relentless has travellers’ box-ticking pursuit of the bucket-list wonders become. Bali, Phuket, Naples and the Croatian coast have changed beyond all recognition in the past two decades. Our presence has done that, and transformed some lives. Where would Venice’s gondoliers be without the millions of tourists who land there each year?

The stilt fishermen along Sri Lanka’s coast no longer expect to catch fish, they cling to their fragile bamboo poles anchored in the sea angling for the tourists who will come along and snap a photo, and tip them for it. The elaborately tasselled water carriers in Marrakesh’s Djemaa el Fna now make their living from Instagrammers, their brass pots might as well be dry. If you want to be surprised and invigorated, go somewhere different.

There are Greek islands where only the locals sit in the tavernas in the evening, galleries in Paris dedicated to Renaissance painters you’ve never heard of, villages in the interior of Bali when you will be the solitary foreigner at the evening Ramayana dance performance. Right on our doorstep, Papua New Guinea is an unplumbed wonder. Or go in winter, when Venice is shawled in mist and the Northern Lights flame the Nordic night sky.