For many people a travel morning means an alarm, a buffet, a meeting time. We wanted to offer another version.
In the Maasai Mara, the butler sets coffee on the small table outside your tent twenty minutes before sunrise, and withdraws. As you sit wrapped in a blanket, the plains turn from grey-blue to gold, elephants passing in silhouette far away. Nothing is scheduled in those twenty minutes. Nothing needs to be.
In a Kyoto machiya, the morning ritual is a bowl of congee. The innkeeper insists it simmer for fifty minutes, so you have no choice but to slow down and wait, listening to the water in the courtyard. That bowl has taught many guests that doing nothing is also a discipline — one that takes practice.
We believe the morning sets the grain of the day. However full a route may be, the morning is always left blank. It is the first rule written into every itinerary — and the only one never open to negotiation.