Over the past year, we’ve worked from home, stayed at home, distanced, isolated and generally closed ourselves off from the world and all its wonders. But there is hope that our horizons might soon expand once again. For us all, that means dreaming that we may one day return to favoured foreign boltholes, or tick off bucket-list destinations as we rediscover the joy of travel. MR PORTER spoke to seven globetrotters from the worlds of design, food, adventure, luxury, sustainability and beyond and asked the simple, tantalising question: where do you dream of travelling to in 2021?

Mr Dwayne Fields is a Jamaican-born adventurer and presenter who became the first black Briton to walk 400 miles to the magnetic North Pole, in 2010.

The hardest part of walking to the North Pole was telling my friends. It was so far outside what was expected of me or what they could understand. The first one who phoned me said, “Bruv, are you climbing the North Pole?”

When I was nine, a teacher told me the best I could hope for in life was a short prison sentence, but I always remember wanting to know what was round that corner or over that hill. Now I want to give kids the chance to experience that same feeling and opportunity. So, next year, I’m going to search the UK for 20 young people from disadvantaged backgrounds and take them on an expedition ship to Antarctica.

I want them to meet geologists, deep-sea biologists, oceanographers, meteorologists, all these people who can show them a different perspective. I want them to go to a place they’ve never believed they could go and take the message back to their peer groups.

Antarctica is also a place I’ve never been to, but have had in my sights for the past 10 years. When I first walked to the North Pole, I came back thinking it was amazing, but felt like I’d only done half the job. I want to see emperor penguins and ice shelves. It’s the kind of experience you dream about.

Mr Fields is raising funds for his project, #WeToo Expeditions, at teamwetwo.com

Mr Simone Zanoni is an Italian-born chef who has taken his culinary skills around the world. Since 2016, he has been chef of the Michelin-starred Le George at the Four Seasons George V hotel in Paris.

I normally travel for work a lot. If you’re not feeding your imagination and tasting other cuisines, you’re not interested in being a chef. But I’m trying to be more selective now. For me, travelling is like eating meat – we need to eat less and eat better.

Of course, recently, I’ve had no “meat” at all. I can’t wait to escape again and will go back to the last place I took my wife and children. A couple of years ago, we went to Santa Catarina in Brazil. There is a beautiful island on the coast between the sea and the mountains where the sun shines and the culture and food are amazing.

I remember sipping a margarita with cachaça at midday by the swimming pool. It’s hot, it’s sunny and you have these long beaches where you can go and meet people and eat beach food, lobsters and all kinds of simple food cooked with Latino love and passion. Right now, in cold Paris, it seems like a dream.

Mr Eric Whitacre is a jet-setting Grammy-award winning American classical composer and conductor who has worked with orchestras including the London Symphony Orchestra, as well as the film composer Mr Hans Zimmer.

I had about 30 international trips in the calendar when everything shut down last March. Instead, I haven’t even left Los Angeles to see my parents in Nevada. In some ways I’d be glad to never see an airport again, but I’m desperate to be travelling once more, to be seeing things and people. I have this odd mix of jobs. As a composer, I’m completely introverted, but when I’m conducting, it’s as extroverted as it can be and that’s the part of my life that’s now dormant – and I now realise that I need travel when I’m composing; it’s like taking blood out of a muscle.

Weeks after the shutdown, I was supposed to do some concerts in Belgium, a country that has become a second home. It’s where I met my wife, Laurence, who is a Belgian opera singer. In 2019, we had our wedding ceremony in her friend’s artists’ studio in Bruges. It was magical and we’d been thinking of buying a house there. It feels like a cliche to say you love Bruges now, but it’s just so delicate and sophisticated and elegant, where time feels like it has stopped. It’s the first place I’ll go back to when I can get out of LA.

Mr Justin Francis is chief executive of Responsible Travel, a sustainable travel operator.

I’ve really been feeling a sense of confinement this year and reading Bruce Chatwin’s famous book In Patagonia has fired my long-held dreams about going there. Patagonia has always been on my distant horizons at the frayed edges of my imagination and dreams, but I’ve never been and now crave its wide-open spaces.

I’ve always been fascinated by places with indigenous cultures and in Patagonia you have the Mapuche people as well as the gaucho way of life. I’d also want to see some of the enormous efforts being made to protect and rewild its grasslands, which are fantastic for sequestering carbon. Responsible tourism has a big role in supporting that work.

I’d hire a car to cover those distances and would want to fit in some kayaking as well. I’d stay in locally owned places of the sort Chatwin wrote about. And I’d also want to stay for a long time, perhaps four weeks, and make these my only flights of the year.

In Patagonia, I long to see the condor, which has wings like two barn doors. The thought of seeing a bird so big, looking like a small dot in an even vaster landscape, really excites me, especially now.

Mr André Fu is the well-travelled Hong Kong-based interior designer behind some of the world’s best hotels, including the penthouse suites at The Berkeley in London and the Waldorf Astoria in Bangkok.

I’m usually travelling between projects three times a month, tacking vacations on to work trips, but I haven’t left Hong Kong since February 2020. One of the places I try to go back to every year is Kyoto in Japan, usually in autumn to watch the foliage turn this deep red, setting whole mountainsides alight.

Another reason I want to go to Kyoto this year is that I’ve just completed a hotel there. Hotel The Mitsui Kyoto opened in early November and I wasn’t able to see it in person. All the final touches and finessing had to be done via Zoom. I’d love to see it for real.

I’d always wanted to do a project in Kyoto, and this one is very much about embracing a kind of Japanese beauty with a fresh retelling. In the entrance there’s a huge shoji lantern, five metres wide, and a view through to a large courtyard garden.

Some people generalise Japanese aesthetics, which have always inspired my work, as a kind of modern minimalism. But for me, it goes deeper. It’s about capturing the sensibility of a place and its cultural components. Kyoto is fascinating for that because it has the energy of a Japanese city yet also a strong feeling of authenticity and heritage.

Mr Adrian Ballinger is a mountaineer and guide. He founded his own company, Alpenglow Expeditions, in 2004 and has climbed various 8,000m peaks, including Everest eight times.

I started climbing outside of the US when I was 17. I’m 44 now and this is the longest I’ve gone without leaving the country or climbing any high-altitude mountain. I normally spend eight months of the year guiding or doing my own expeditions in Nepal, Tibet, Pakistan, Peru, Bolivia and Ecuador. I’ve been to Nepal every year for 20 years. It’s where my heart lies – not on Everest, but another mountain called Ama Dablam, a beautiful 7,000m peak of technical rock and ice that sits right above Phortse, a tiny town in the Khumbu Valley. I run a trip there every October and Phortse is where my entire Sherpa team, whom I’ve worked with for more than 20 years, comes from. They’re all brothers and cousins and Ama Dablam is their backyard, so every time I go it’s so much fun to drop back into town and have meals with the family. And that’s what I miss the most – the human, cultural side of expeditions.

Mr Piers Schmidt is an international luxury brand consultant and founder of Luxury Branding, which has worked with Belmond, Taj Hotels, Resorts and Palaces, One&Only Resorts and the Dorchester Collection.

I used to do too much unthinking travel and now there’s none at all. I think we’ll all reassess how much we do and my clients have used this downtime to take a pause. I have a luxury cruise client committed to a billion-dollar investment, for example. They can’t cancel it, so we have to figure out how to make it relevant in the new world.

One thing I’m hoping is that the staycation is here to stay. Covid has taught us there are delights on our doorstep and perhaps its legacy would be for us to remember that, rather than to think it was just something we had to do in 2020.

So, this year, I will drive all of two hours south from my home in the Cotswolds to Somerset to stay at The Newt near Bruton, the stunning country house hotel owned by the South African husband-and-wife team Koos Bekker and Karen Roos.

I haven’t been yet, but know that what they have done is truly world class. I think sometimes it takes a foreign eye to show us what we can take for granted. They’ve deployed so much money and good taste and soon will open the Farmyard, a separate house in an old dairy. I think I shall take the whole place and decamp with family and friends for a bucolic August.