How the Travel Desk Chose 17 Walks Around the World

Times Insider explains who we are and what we do and delivers behind-the-scenes insights into how our journalism comes together.

Not every walk is a walk in the park.

One might decide to trek 1.6 miles through Singapore’s red-light district, for example, and stop along the way to sample local delicacies like mud crabs and frog porridge. Or take a 750-mile pilgrimage across 28 days and 88 temples on Shikoku, the smallest of Japan’s four main islands. Or even run through the rocky trails of the Dolomites, a mountain range in Italy.

But no matter how challenging or relaxing the journey, every one of the nearly two dozen long walks the Travel desk features in a new collection is designed to encourage people to slow down and contemplate their surroundings.

“One of the great things about walking is that your mind can roam, and you can contemplate a place and understand it at a slower speed than the way we usually travel,” said Amy Virshup, the Travel editor at The New York Times.

In a recent conversation, she shared how the Travel team selected the strolls to feature and her own favorite walking route in New York. These are edited excerpts.

How did the idea for this project come about?

We had been thinking about walking coming out of the pandemic, when people rediscovered it as a way to stay sane — I know I did. Then I got a pitch from a freelance writer who wanted to do something on all the new pilgrimage walks. I shared it with Suzanne MacNeille, another editor on the desk who spearheaded a lot of this, and I said something offhand to her like “2023 is the year of the long walk.” She said, “I love that title; we should do a whole issue with that idea in mind.” We started really planning it in February.

What factors did you consider when choosing the walks?

We wanted to make sure we covered a diverse geographic spread — we have a walk on every continent except Antarctica — and that we had a variety of urban, wild and rural locations. We also wanted to make sure we had a balance of narrative approaches. Some articles are very first-person, like the ones about Wales and Dolomites, while the Singapore piece is not first-person; it’s much more informative and atmospheric about what it’s like to be there.

Something we take seriously at The Times is that all different kinds of people travel. When we’re putting together a big package, we make sure that we’re including as many people as we can. For example, we have the guide to accessible hikes…