Haider Toha  › Finds 

places & walks

by Haider Toha  ·

i think best when i'm walking. these are the places i go to clear my head or remember why i like being alive.

london

  • hyde park, late night - my default when i need to think, walking the path around the serpentine at 11pm when it's just you and the occasional runner. problems feel smaller out there.
  • hampstead heath - parliament hill for the skyline and the ponds in summer. this is where london stops being a city and starts being something older.
  • the south bank - the walk from tate modern to tower bridge, best at dusk when the lights come on and the thames looks cinematic.
  • the barbican conservatory - tropical plants tucked into brutalist concrete, free and quiet and a little strange and good for reading.
  • columbia road on sundays - flower market chaos where everyone's in a good mood and i rarely buy anything but i always leave happier.

new york

  • central park - the reservoir loop at dawn, watching the city wake up from inside a rectangle of green.
  • the high line - an elevated park built on old train tracks, best in the early morning before the tourists arrive.

seattle

  • jack block park - a public park wedged inside a working container terminal in west seattle, so you get the whole downtown skyline off the water with cranes in the frame and hardly anyone around. everyone else is queuing at kerry park for a worse angle.
  • schmitz preserve park - the only old-growth forest left inside the city limits, a ravine in west seattle with muddy unsigned trails and a creek at the bottom. the city is gone about four minutes in.
  • ballard locks - boats raised and lowered inside a concrete chamber and, underneath it, a twenty-one-step fish ladder with viewing windows at eye level. the sockeye come through in july and august. free, and i stayed two hours.
  • interlaken park - the capitol hill ravine, good in the rain, which in seattle is the only endorsement worth anything.

san francisco

  • lands end trail - the coastal path runs from the old sutro baths ruins out to a little cypress labyrinth above the surf and the golden gate keeps appearing through the trees until you forget you're in a city at all.
  • tank hill - the overlook locals climb instead of twin peaks, with the same wide view across the bay and none of the tour buses. best in the last of the evening light.
  • the 16th avenue tiled steps - a long, hand-laid mosaic staircase that climbs up to grand view park. it's a small sand-dune hilltop with one of the finest skyline views in the city and hardly anyone else on it.

los angeles

  • the secret stairs - silver lake and echo park are laced with hundreds of public staircases left over from the old trolley days and you can lose a whole afternoon climbing between gardens and bungalows if you start from the micheltorena steps.
  • fern dell, griffith park - a shaded creek path lined with ferns that feels like it was airlifted in from oregon. cool and quiet, while everyone else is sweating their way up to the observatory.
  • the bradbury building - a downtown office building you can wander into for free, with a sunlit victorian atrium of wrought iron railings and open cage lifts that you'll recognise the second you walk in from blade runner.
  • museum of jurassic technology - a dim and deliberately confusing little museum in culver city where you genuinely can't tell what's real and what's been invented, with a quiet russian tea room up on the roof when you need to recover.

dallas

  • the katy trail - three and a half miles of the old missouri-kansas-texas rail bed running through uptown and oak lawn. the stretch past reverchon park is the only part of dallas that was obviously built for someone on foot.
  • white rock lake - nine miles round the reservoir and flat the entire way. do it at dawn. any later in a dallas summer and you won't get round it.
  • kiest conservation area - seventy-nine acres of real dirt trail and unploughed prairie behind the tennis centre in oak cliff, three and a half miles from downtown. there's no sign for it and at seven in the morning there's nobody on it.
  • coombs creek trail - kessler park, following the creek under old oaks. it's a footpath through a wealthy neighbourhood more than a trail, and still the nicest walk in oak cliff.

miami

  • the venetian causeway - twelve short arched bridges hopping island to island from downtown across to miami beach, about two and a half miles with pavement the whole way, and a better walk than any beach in the city.
  • matheson hammock, west side - the trail on the forest side of old cutler road, through what's left of the ancient miami hammock, 500-year-old oaks and limestone pushing up through the path. cross the road afterwards and climb the banyans.
  • bear cut preserve - key biscayne, a mile down the trail then right at the pavilion, out to a sandbar with a fossilised reef and hermit crabs in the shallows. it only works at low tide, so read the table before you go.

paris

  • the marais - getting lost in the side streets among the falafel, the bookshops and the cobblestones. paris at walking pace.

munich

  • the flaucher - the gravel islands and shallow channels of the isar where münchners spend whole summer afternoons grilling and swimming, far wilder and emptier than the englischer garten if you walk a little upstream from thalkirchen.
  • glockenbachviertel - the most lived-in corner of the city, where people gather on the steps around gärtnerplatz with corner-shop beers on warm evenings and you can wander for hours without any plan at all.

kuala lumpur

  • kampung baru - a malay village of wooden stilt houses that's somehow held its ground seven hundred metres from the petronas towers, with food on every corner and the unhurried feel of an older city that refuses to leave.
  • bukit tunku - the greenest and quietest corner of kl, all winding roads under old trees and colonial houses. there's a lookout over the whole skyline at changkat tunku.
  • kl forest eco park - a canopy walkway strung through genuine old rainforest right beneath the kl tower, ten minutes from the shopping malls and almost completely overlooked.

penang

  • the moongate trail - the way locals actually climb penang hill, a shaded jungle path that winds up through an old moon-gate arch so you earn the view properly instead of riding the funicular.
  • balik pulau - the quiet other side of the island, all paddy fields and fruit orchards and sleepy kampungs, best taken slowly on a bike before the developers finally get to it.

singapore

  • the rail corridor - twenty-four kilometres of disused railway with the tracks lifted and the whole line left to the grass and if you walk the bukit timah stretch early enough it's just you and the green the entire way.
  • pulau ubin - a short bumboat from changi takes you to the last of kampong singapore, where you rent a rattling old bike and ride past granite quarries, mangroves and the strange little german girl shrine.
  • lazarus island - a near-empty crescent of white sand and clear water a short ferry from the city, the beach singaporeans quietly keep for themselves while everyone else is queueing for sentosa.

mongolia

  • bogd khan uul - the sacred mountain on the south side of ulaanbaatar, 2,261 metres, formally protected since 1778, which makes it about a century older than yellowstone. up through the larch from zaisan to dugui tsagaan. the main path is eroded to rubble from foot traffic and the better ones peel off to the left, and the deer are not remotely afraid of you.
  • chingeltei khairkhan - thirty minutes north of the centre and up past thirteen ovoos, the stone cairns you walk clockwise around. wild strawberries on the slope in summer and the ger districts laid out below.
  • altai tavan bogd - the far western corner where mongolia, russia and china meet. seven hours of bad road out of ölgii, then seven kilometres on foot to a camp under huiten peak at 4,374 metres with the potanin glacier running twenty kilometres down the valley. nothing i've walked since has been that quiet.

nature escapes

  • peak district - mam tor and the great ridge, proper hiking with the wind in your face and sheep everywhere.
  • the lake district - i did helvellyn in the rain and couldn't see a thing and it was still worth it.

gliding

  • lasham airfield - where i'm learning to fly. the silence when you release from the tow plane, with no engine and just wind, is an unreal feeling.

airports

an unpopular opinion, but i love airports and that in-between feeling of everyone going somewhere. some of my best thinking has happened in departure lounges.