The idea was simple. Bring people together from our networks who think differently about travel, who think outside the box, genuinely brilliant, and go deep on experiential design. Not the surface version.
Now I'm headed off to our first El Camino trip to Sri Lanka. I'll be home in July staying put, finally able to catch up — more insights and behind-the-scenes from both experiences coming soon.
In the meantime, here's what's been inspiring how I think about El Camino, our trips, and our travelers lately.
xx,
Katalina
The visual and sonic references currently informing how I'm thinking about travel.
1. Jñāna World App
I found it about six weeks ago and have been on it almost daily since, especially the sound meditations, which have become how I start and end a day on the road. It bills itself as the first platform built around Eastern wisdom — meditation, breathwork, yoga, philosophy, even martial arts — taught by India's leading practitioners rather than the wellness-app voices usually far removed from where these practices come from. I liked it enough to send ahead to our travelers heading to Kerala in November, where one meditation guides you through the backwaters — the network of palm-fringed canals and lagoons that lace the region — and another teaches Kalaripayattu, the local martial art we'll be practicing in person. Also a big fan of the sound meditations from Priyanjali Das and Pause Dxa.Their voices are heavenly.
2. Cascais shirt, The Frankie Shop
Picked up this canary yellow shirt for upcoming trips to Morocco and Sri Lanka this month. The deepness of the color is what got me first, but what I keep coming back to is the asymmetric wrap closure on the side that lets you drape the front, a small structural detail that changes the whole silhouette.
3. Thavma Cyclades
Caught a glimpse of these magically located accommodations on my friend Prashant's Instagram while he's in Milos. Thavma is a hospitality group in the Cyclades, and they're taking syrma — the traditional fishermen's boathouses that line the waterfronts of Milos and Kimolos, ground floor for the boat in winter, upper floor for the family — and refurbishing them into stays. With overfishing making fishing livelihoods on these islands unsustainable, Thavma either buys or leases the syrma from the fishermen and routes 25% of the proceeds back to them. The houses themselves are chic, which is probably why nearly every one of them is already booked for the 2026 summer season and Aime Leone Dore decided to shot a campaign there.
4. Manuela Navas
We're planning out the details of the design tour of our upcoming Brazil trip, and in conversation with a São Paulo gallerist, she turned me on to Manuela's work. Navas is a Brazilian artist working across painting, photography, and woodcut, with a practice centered on Black femininity, motherhood, and Afro-diasporic everyday life. Domestic interiors become spaces of stillness, and gatherings get recast as acts of resistance. What stays with me is the cinematic framing — scenes captured off-center, in the pause of a gesture, like still frames pulled from a film that continues beyond the edges.
5. Café Zaffri
Had dinner with a friend a few months ago here when I was up in New York. I'd been for lunch before, but this was my first time at dinner service, and the touch that stayed with me was the bar set up in the waiting area — you can grab a drink while waiting for your table, which I really haven't seen anywhere else. Even when I was choosing a glass of wine, the sommelier came out to walk me through a few options, before I'd been seated. These are the kind of small design and hospitality decisions I'm always looking out for that make a place memorable.
When friends saw I was in Japan on Instagram, two of them separately texted asking me to pick this up for them from a local pharmacy— both saying it was the best sunscreen they'd ever used. I can confirm they're right. Your skin radiates wonderfully.
Twelve hours of the music played at one of the most-talked-about new restaurants in New York. The NoMad outpost is from JKS, the London group behind two-Michelin-starred Gymkhana, and it opened days after the London original picked up its first Michelin star — a maximalist Punjabi spot inspired by the party mansions of Northern India that's already limiting guests to one reservation per month. Until you land a table, the playlist is the closest you'll get to the room.
The first-ever taqueria to receive a Michelin star is starting its US expansion, with José Andrés Hernández — grandson of the butcher who opened the Mexico City original in 1968 — leading the operating company. Worth a listen for anyone in hospitality watching how a hyper-local family business scales internationally without losing what made it singular, and for travelers, a nudge to seek out the original gaonera taco in CDMX before the global moment fully arrives.
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