When thinking of the spring travel issue this year, we took things in a slightly new direction, looking at emotional journeys rather than holidays. The people creating and featuring in these stories went in search of something: inspiration, reconciliation, reunion, restoration or some sort of closure with the past.

Fiona Golfar never imagined as a child that she would one day seek citizenship from the country that once despised her family. In her piece about gaining German nationality, she recounts a story that takes her from her great-grandfather’s chocolate factory in eastern Berlin in 1921 to London, and through an extraordinary set of happenstances that finds her standing outside the Berlin factory gates again. It was Fiona’s children who asked her to apply for a German passport following Brexit, because they wanted to be able to work in Europe. With this came the uneasy realisation that the country that once forced her family to flee might now be a source of opportunity. Despite being a very personal experience, Fiona’s story speaks to a much broader history that is especially relevant today.

Ben Markovits embarked on a cycling trip to the Yorkshire Dales earlier this year having completed his latest novel, The Rest of Our Lives, and to mark the two-year anniversary of his remission from cancer. The trek, with his teenage son, celebrated many triumphs, most of all the freedom to write a new chapter of his life. His piece is an honest examination of the highs and heartaches that accompany an ambitious journey. One hopes it will mark the beginning of a compendium of Markovits father-and‑son adventures around the Yorkshire hills. 

What makes a country feel good? The World Happiness Report recently nominated Finland as the happiest place on earth for the eighth time in as many years. We asked the Helsinki-based writer Carolina Forss to look at her countrymen, cafés and culture to find out quite why that might be. It may only be a question of interpretation: happiness means different things to different nations. Or maybe it’s the country’s sauna habit that sends the serotonin levels off the scale?  

I was fortunate enough to visit Patagonia last winter, a vast region straddling Chile and Argentina that has no specific boundary and is often described as being the loneliest place on Earth. I drove down a fraction of the Carretera Austral, a road completed in 2003 that bound remote communities across south Chile together for the first time. Yet despite this comparatively new connectedness, Patagonia still feels eerily remote. It’s both majestic and inspiring; I found it had an almost melancholy charm. No wonder travellers are compelled to explore its frontiers – it’s a wilderness that seems to have no end.

Elsewhere, film director Wim Wenders talks about why locations have been the starting point for all his films. Wenders’ films are evocative, emotional and inspirational – so much so that over the years I’ve followed in his footsteps around the world. I’ve marked off Berlin, Hangzhou and Tokyo from the Wenders check list but still dream of seeing Paris, Texas, and Pina Bausch’s Wuppertal. 

‌

‌

THREE MORE STORIES TO READ THIS WEEK

Pianist and composer Ludovico Einaudi talks taste – and toast The classical star on making music from mountains, Mick Jagger’s style and the perfect crust The evolution of the airline uniform — a cross check What do flight attendants say about our culture? A love letter to The Carlyle, by novelist Christopher Bollen The New York hotel is an institution for a reason, says the thriller writer

‌