Why swapping the desk for a backpack is the perfect middle-age escape
by Michelle Bowes · Australian Financial ReviewMichelle BowesDeputy wealth editor
Sep 14, 2026 – 5.00am
With the reverence of a priest and the precision of a surgeon, the waiter at Maido carves a glistening slab of tuna belly tableside to combine with sushi rice, sea urchin and soy-cured egg yolks. The restaurant, in Lima’s upscale Miraflores district, took the top spot on the 2025 World’s 50 Best Restaurants list serving chef Mitsuharu ‘Micha’ Tsumura’s 12-course reimagining of Nikkei cuisine – a style fusing Peruvian and Japanese traditions. (The 2026 list will be announced in November in Peru.)
Course after course, dishes land on our table: a reworked fish sandwich, a taco of roasted suckling pig wrapped in an Andean tuber tortilla, its rich fat and crackling offset by pickled onions and capers. We pay the $547-a-head bill and leave satisfied and exhausted – in stark contrast to the backpacking days of my late teens, when I washed hostel dishes in exchange for a meal.
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Michelle BowesDeputy wealth editorMichelle Bowes is deputy wealth editor at The Australian Financial Review. She has been a business journalist for 25 years and is the author of Money Queens: Rule your Money, an award-winning personal finance book for teenage girls. Email Michelle at michelle.bowes@afr.com
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