Relive the golden age of travel at these hotels

Botswana

There are some places where you don’t even need to close your eyes to be transported back in time; places or journeys that conjure up such a weirdly vivid intimacy, it’s as though you had been here before. Quad-biking or horse-riding to Kubu Island (or, as it’s affectionately known, ‘the island of lost baobab trees’) in Botswana, with Natural Selection, has this effect. The landscape here is so vast and pure, it’s as close as you can get to the world as it was made – undisturbed, unpolluted and flooded with a prehistoric silence. To stay at San Camp as your base is a ‘trip’ in itself; it’s as remote as it is romantic, and the sense of freedom is exhilarating. Without electricity, the camp comes into its own at nightfall, when hundreds of oil lamps are lit and everyone congregates with their guides for dinner. But safari guides Super Sande and Ralph Bousfield are much more than safari specialists – a quixotic mix of time-travellers and historians, who whisk you back millennia, showing you pieces of neolithic pottery, rock drawings, animal skeletons and petrified fossils along the way. There’s also something satisfyingly primaeval about stopping to walk on the salt pan, where the crust feels like ice cracking. And when you do eventually reach the island, another special quality of these guides is that they make you feel as if you, personally, have discovered it all for the first time. It’s best to visit when a full moon beams off the salt crystals, but whatever the lunar cycle, you sleep beneath stars so close, you feel you could touch them.

River Nile

For sunrises, nowhere is more spectacular at dawn than the River Nile as the sun emerges rose-pink from its glassy waters. Gustave Flaubert would have loved Set Nefru, a recently restored dahabiya boat that feels like entering a romantic time portal. It was once owned by the Egyptian royal family and is now under the care of the illustrious Hotel Al Moudira in Luxor. And what a party you could have on board; the boat sleeps up to 10 people, and its five cabins (and the rest of the vessel) have been meticulously restored. So too the interiors, with the softest Malaika Cairo bedding, and antique Limoges tableware on which are served fabulous meals of zingy salads, soups, grilled river fish and the best bread – delivered daily from Al Moudira. Days drift by as you pass biblical landscapes and wide fields of bananas and date trees, gliding up to the riverbanks of El Kab, best admired while sitting on cushions around low copper tables, sipping hibiscus tea. On-board guide Ahmed is an exceptional Egyptologist, bringing to life the Ptolemaic temple of Kom Omobo, where the double altar is dedicated to crocodile god Sobek and sky god Haroeris, or the temple of Esna, home to the most ornate floral capitals and beautiful zodiac ceiling in the world. Come nightfall, back on the boat, it’s the kind of place that makes you want to dress up and slink around in bias-cut satin dresses and dinner jackets, languorously enjoying Martinis by moonlight.

The Mani Peninsula

Another place where you feel something close to nostalgia from the moment you arrive is the cultural retreat of Patrick and Joan Leigh Fermorhttps://patrickleighfermorhouse.reserve-online.net/aboutthe cultural retreat of Patrick and Joan Leigh Fermor. To stay in their house in the Mani Peninsula is to embrace an enclave of the Peloponnese that’s redolent of Byzantine glamour. Patrick, an adventurer and travel writer, chose a plot on the outskirts of the town of Kardamyli, with its castellated fort and mountains that plunge into the sea. He later wrote that it was ‘Byzantium Restored’, as local lore has it that the descendants of the Byzantine emperors fled here as the Ottomans conquered the rest of Greece. Leigh Fermor bequeathed his home to the Benaki Museum to be run as a cultural site and writers’ retreat, but for three months a year it transforms into a small hotel, where guests can luxuriate in this authorly paradise complete with steps to a secluded beach. The buildings, furniture and vast book collection still bear the couple’s high-bohemian mark, from the main three-bedroomed house to the two neighbouring guest houses (one of which was formerly Leigh Fermor’s writing studio).

A large part of the magic here is when, softened up for dinner by sundowners on the spectacular terrace, you feel a frisson of the ghosts of guests past: you can imagine the soirées the Leigh Fermors gave when Evelyn Waugh or Bruce Chatwin visited (Chatwin’s ashes are buried in the mountains above Kardamyli). It’s a place that intoxicates with rhythm and magic, as Leigh Fermor wrote in Mani: Travels in the Southern Peloponnese: ‘There is hardly a rock or a stream without a battle or a myth.’ You feel that magic in the shade of the fig-scented patios and secret gardens, garlanded with cypress trees, olive trees, white oleanders and wild flowers, that roll down to the sea. It is a calm, almost spiritual place, where you still feel you could be staying in the private summer redoubt of a friend – and, with any luck, it will stay that way.