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TRUTH IN TRAVEL

J U N E /J U LY 2 0 1 6

the summer

issue

Contents

06/07.2016

Hike through jagged untouched mountains and past plunging waterfalls on Kauai’s North Shore.

70 Noto Bene Condé Nast Traveler’s Pilar Guzmán explores Sicily’s timeless southeast corner. 82 Motorcycle Diary Photographer Renato D’Agostin hits the road, cruising from New York to Cali on his 1983 BMW bike.

86 True North Meredith Bryan returns to Kauai’s remote North Shore, where locals keep Old Hawaii alive. 94 Lisbon’s New Lines An up-and-coming group of architects and designers are modernizing Portugal’s capital.

C O N D É N A S T T R AV E L E R / J U N E / J U LY 2 0 1 6

P H O T O G R A P H BY A D R I A N G AU T

Contents

06/07.2016

@cntraveler

TALK TO US cntraveler.com Where are you going this year? E-mail your photos and tips to letters@ condenasttraveler.com.

Drink Outdoors For the top places to tipple alfresco this summer, head to cntraveler.com.

24 On Location What to pack for a trip to Martha’s Vineyard.

26 Plane Clothes Style inﬂuencer Garance Doré on ﬂying in all-white.

THE COVER

Bound for a morning surf along Maui’s Highway Piilani in a reproduction 1957 Porsche 356 Speedster, shot by Adrian Gaut. For more travel inspiration, see page 42.

James Franco

WRITER “Yosemite Is My Father,” in our national parks package, page 65 What’s the one place you’re embarrassed to say you’ve never been? “Portugal. Part of my family comes from Madeira, and I would love to visit my origins.” Favorite hotel? “Chateau Marmont on Sunset. It’s ﬁlled with ghosts and legends.” What dish would you travel for? “Spaghetti al pomodoro anywhere in Italy.” What would the airplane of your dreams have? “A masseuse.” When traveling, what do you miss most from home? “Friends.”

C O N D É N A S T T R AV E L E R / J U N E / J U LY 2 0 1 6

28 The Upgrade Mirrored aviators are this season’s eye candy.

30 Long Weekend Florence-based Álvaro González heads to Positano.

FIRST ROW: PHOTOGRAPHS © D. CORSON/CORBIS; CAPODILUPO/COURTESY HOTEL IL SAN PIETRO. SECOND ROW: PHOTOGRAPHS BY MATT HRANEK; CHRIS GORMAN; WESTON WELLS. THIRD ROW: PHOTOGRAPHS BY ANNA KOORIS; ADRIAN GAUT (2); CAR COURTESY MAUI ROADSTERS. FOURTH ROW: PHOTOGRAPH BY CAPODILUPO/COURTESY HOTEL IL SAN PIETRO

18 Editor’s Letter The enduring appeal of the great American landscape.

FIRST ROW: PHOTOGRAPHS BY CHRIS BURKARD/MASSIF; FELIX ODELL; © SERGE CHAPUIS. SECOND ROW: PHOTOGRAPHS BY GETTY IMAGES/WESTEND61; MATT HRANEK; JAPAN-GUIDE.COM. THIRD ROW: PHOTOGRAPHS BY VITTORIA GERARDI; DEWEY NICKS; MATTHEW WILLIAMS; PILAR GUZMÁN. FOURTH ROW: PHOTOGRAPHS BY ADAM GOLFER; NATHAN HARGER; STEPHEN LEWIS

Contents

06/07.2016

37 Discovered In rural Sweden, the most magical garden you’ve never heard of.

38 Checking In Provence and Jaipur hotels that feel like the best versions of home.

SUBSCRIBE Visit cntraveler.com/ subscribe, e-mail subscriptions@ condenasttraveler.com, or call 800-777-0700.

42 Summer 2016 The 26 trips you can still book this season.

48 Pass It On Everybody’s outside: alfresco dining in Rome; outdoor art in Japan.

46 The Hotel Breakfast At Biarritz’s Hôtel du Palais, even the eggs have a kick.

#travelertuesday

Renato D’Agostin

P H OTO G R A P H E R “Motorcycle Diary,” page 82 What’s the best hotel you’ve stayed in recently? “The tepees at El Cosmico in Marfa, Texas. They’re incredible on a dark, starry night.” What dish, served at which restaurant, would you travel for? “The antipasto misto of ﬁsh at Ristorante Menegaldo, near Venice.” What would the airplane of your dreams have? “Transparent walls.” What is the most memorable souvenir from your travels? “My photos. When I print them once back in N.Y.C., it’s like I’m reliving my journey.”

50 Black Book How to crack our nation’s capital with the whole family.

56 Groundbreaker Ace shows how a hotel can redeﬁne a destination.

Take Us There We want to see your holiday pics! Tag your Instagrams each week with #Travelertuesday.

65 Reconsidered Reﬂecting on our national parks as they turn 100.

100 Travel Intel Olympics add-ons, the new Tate, urban vacations, a Swedish hotline.

106 Souvenir The little things that stay with you after a big ﬁrst trip.

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Editor’s Letter

Call of the Wild I would look longingly in the lunchroom at other kids’ PB&J sandwiches on white bread and tiny cans of fruit cocktail, all snug in their Snoopy or Partridge Family lunch boxes. Rolling around the bottom of a reused shopping bag was my Italian grandmother’s interpretation of an American school lunch: a condiment-free roll with a single piece of mortadella or prosciutto hanging out like an untucked shirt, and three pieces of fruit. Later in life, I would come to recognize this sandwich in cafés and tabacchi during my numerous trips to Italy. But in Southern California in the late ’70s, the irreducible panino was sorely lacking in barter appeal. Our family’s foreignness extended to travel. While other families went to Disneyland and Hawaii, to lake houses and on camping trips together, we mainly vacationed—usually internationally—as an extension of my mother’s work as a singer. The concept of a long road trip or campfire was anathema to my parents, as was the notion of sleepaway camp or Girl Scouts. As a result, there was nothing more exotic to me than the idea of facing the wrong way in the waaaay back of a wood-paneled station wagon piled high with bikes and canoes en route to some campground in a state or national park. I still love the idea of the efficiency of the tent, the careful planning and minimalism of the gear and meals, the quintessential Americanness of the experience. On weekends, my dad would take us to flea markets where I would pore over shoe boxes filled with vintage postcards that said “Welcome to Yellowstone” or “Glacier Bay National Park.” I once picked up

AS T H E C H I L D O F FO R E I G N E R S ,

Stephen Shore, Merced River, Yosemite National Park, California, August 13, 1979. From Picturing America’s National Parks, published by Aperture and George Eastman Museum.

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an old photo album from the ’60s filled with freckle-faced kids and women in pedal pushers posing in front of gargantuan redwoods and park entrance signage. Just as I’d cherished the Little House series for its evocation of endless landscapes and lessons of creative subsistence, I fetishized the squeaky-clean innocence of roasting marshmallows over a fire. I’ll never forget my mother’s confusion as she took her first bite of a marshmallow—it was like watching a dog eat peanut butter. The wild frontier and all that it promises is the antithesis of “old country.” To see our beautiful open roads through the lens of Italian photographer Renato D’Agostin (“Motorcycle Diary,” page 82) is to understand the foreignness and majesty of the American landscape. “The coast-to-coast road trip is an American rite of passage,” says D’Agostin of his two-month cross-country motorcycle journey. “It’s hard to believe it is the same country from north to south, east to west. It keeps surprising you.” And as British author Geoff Dyer writes of seeing pictures of our national parks as a boy, in our feature marking their centennial (“Close Encounters,” page 65), it “set a standard for natural beauty that seemed unsurpassable.” Once I was old enough to drive, I took off on a road trip with a friend from Los Angeles to Eureka along Highway 1, camping and swimming in the Pacific. During college, friends taught me to rock climb in Yosemite, and later I drove to the Badlands and camped with a group of friends I barely knew, to prove to myself that I could. Immersion in the grandeur of these places no doubt fueled my youthful feelings of invincibility. But I was also making up for lost time, shedding my parents’ old-country suspicions. After all, breaking with tradition and creating one’s own is perhaps the greatest American tradition of them all.

Pilar Guzmán, Editor in Chief @pilar_guzman

PHOTOGRAPH © STEPHEN SHORE, COURTESY 303 GALLERY, NEW YORK; FROM PICTURING AMERICA’S NATIONAL PARKS, PUBLISHED BY APERTURE AND GEORGE EASTMAN MUSEUM

The inspiration behind this month’s issue . . .

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The things we can’t leave without

IT’S ALWAYS COCKTAIL HOUR SOMEWHERE

WATCH: CARTIER.US. CLUTCH: VALENTINO BOUTIQUES NATIONWIDE

Summer getaways should be an exercise in packing light. Which is why we say arm yourself with the kind of watch that doubles as jewelry, and tuck a structured clutch into your beach bag that can go from the pool to aperitifs.

Cartier Hypnose watch, $38,100; Valentino Garavani Enchanted Wonderland clutch, $5,175.

P H O T O G R A P H BY M AT T H R A N E K

J U N E / J U LY 2 0 1 6 / C O N D É N A S T T R AV E L E R

Martha’s Vineyard In a summer destination that’s ruled by vacation rentals, it’s always big news when a hotel opens its doors. This season, the designdriven Lark Hotels group rolls out two on the island: Summercamp in Oak Bluffs and The Christopher in Edgartown. Here, some packing inspiration for a classic New England getaway.

THE QUICK-FIRE GUIDE Aquinnah and Gay Head for the best beaches. The Beach Plum Inn & Restaurant, in Menemsha, for rosé at sunset (the town is dry, so it’s BYOB). Larsen’s Fish Market, in Menemsha, for crab cakes (eat them down the road on the public beach). Mad Martha’s, in Oak Bluﬀs, for two scoops of Lotsa Dough ice cream. State Road, in West Tisbury, for chopped lobster salad and a glass of Roederer Estate Brut. West Tisbury Farmers Market, on Wednesdays and Saturdays.

Hermès shirt and shorts, $1,300 and $3,775; Bally belt, $525; Rag & Bone Panama hat, $230; Salvatore Ferragamo sandals, $825; Van Cleef & Arpels Magic Alhambra earrings, $7,250; Bulgari Giardini Italiani sunglasses, $645; Tiffany & Co. Schlumberger Cones and Croisillon bracelets, $36,000 and $30,000; Dolce & Gabbana handbag, $3,695.

C O N D É N A S T T R AV E L E R / J U N E / J U LY 2 0 1 6

PHOTOGRAPH BY PEDEN & MUNK/TRUNK ARCHIVE. STILL LIFES BY CHRIS GORMAN (7). EARRINGS BY JOSEPHINE SCHIELE. SHIRT/SHORTS: HERMÈS STORES NATIONWIDE. BELT: BALLY.COM. HAT: RAG & BONE STORES NATIONWIDE. SANDALS: SALVATORE FERRAGAMO BOUTIQUES NATIONWIDE. EARRINGS: VANCLEEFARPELS.COM. SUNGLASSES: BULGARI BOUTIQUES NATIONWIDE. BRACELETS: TIFFANY.COM. HANDBAG: SELECT DG BOUTIQUES NATIONWIDE

Where+Wear On Location

Where+Wear Plane Clothes

Because I come from an island, I grew up feeling trapped, so now I travel every chance I get. But you have to ﬁnd a balance between leaving and staying. If you’re always between two planes, it’s hard to have a connection with the people around you.

How the style influencer and Corsica native Garance Doré pulls off all-white on airplanes—tray table mishaps be damned.

Skinny pants are too tight for traveling. These are from Citizens of Humanity. They’re comfortable and have a kind of vibe. I can do anything while wearing white—I just won’t drink red wine on the plane. But I don’t usually get too dirty, even on photo shoots when I’m sitting on the ﬂoor. I think my tank top is from H&M and my jacket is from a military surplus store. I always carry a bigger bag packed with magazines and my mess: a huge gray cashmere scarf that’s more like a blanket, Pomega5’s Daily Revitalizing Concentrate to keep my skin hydrated, earphones, and ear plugs—you have to have these. You never know if you’ll be in a noisy hotel. I like vacations to be a kind of philosophical moment when I think about life, so I’ll have notebooks with me from Anthropologie or Smythson. Sometimes I’ll bring a hat or a Uniqlo hoodie, anything that makes me feel protected, like I’m closing the door. AS TOLD TO MO L LY CR EEDEN

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P H O T O G R A P H BY W E S T O N W E L L S

ANYA HINDMARCH BESPOKE WALTON WEEKEND BAG (646-852-6233; $1,550); GUCCI PADLOCK GG SUPREME SHOULDER BAG (GUCCI.COM; $1,590). HAIR AND MAKEUP BY HIRO YONEMOTO FOR ATELIER MANAGEMENT USING DIORSKIN NUDE

“I don’t like traveling to a place for a day or two. I like to stay awhile.”

I’m the girl who always feels like she’s losing her ticket or passport. Having a tiny bag to easily access your wallet, boarding pass, and phone is the way to go. This one is from Gucci, and like everyone, I love what’s happening at that house right now.

Where+Wear The Upgrade

Eye Candy This summer, swap your all-black shades for these lightweight mirrored aviatorsâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;the brighter, the better.

CLOCKWISE FROM TOP: SUNGLASSHUT.COM; SAINTLAURENT.COM; CUTLERANDGROSS.COM; DIOR BOUTIQUES NATIONWIDE; WESTWARDLEANING.COM; SUNGLASSHUT.COM

Clockwise from top: Tiffany & Co., $390; Saint Laurent Classic 11 Surf, $375; Cutler and Gross, $500; Dior DiorSplit, $555; Westward Leaning Concorde 10, $205; Prada Linea Rossa, $280.

P H O T O G R A P H BY A D R I A N G AU T

Where+Wear Long Weekend

Vacation on Repeat

Above: González’s handwritten pre-trip to-do list. Below, from left: Room 9 at Il San Pietro; the view of Positano’s main beach.

CLOCKWISE FROM TOP LEFT: PHOTOGRAPHS COURTESY ÁLVARO GONZÁLEZ; JOSEPHINE SCHIELE; CAROL SACHS; CAPODILUPO/COURTESY HOTEL IL SAN PIETRO

Every July, Florence-based designer Álvaro González sets aside 72 hours for eating, drinking, and lounging under a beach umbrella in Positano.

“The journey to Positano is part of the adventure,” says accessories designer Álvaro González, who, every summer, rides a train three hours to Salerno, then catches a charter boat for the 40-minute sail right to the doorstep of his hotel, the small, family-owned Il San Pietro di Positano. “It’s so beautiful to arrive by sea,” he says. “You’re surrounded by cliffs, so it feels very isolated.” Because every minute counts on a weekend getaway, he and his husband, writer Nick Vinson, step off the boat, hand over their luggage to the hotel staff, and claim two loungers under striped umbrellas. Il San Pietro’s private beach has a bar that serves Il Chiostro, a great local beer, and a seaside restaurant called Il Carlino that makes a perfectly simple burrata dish with zucchini, mint, and garlic. They’ll do dinner at the hotel’s Michelin-starred restaurant, Zass. “Stay until after sunset,” González advises. “The people-watching is fantastic, and there’s a duo that plays traditional Neapolitan music with a mandolin and guitar.” The next night, González and Vinson may hop a five-minute water taxi to have dinner in town at Chez Black (“Make a reservation at least a week before,” he says), but they’ll do dessert—tiramisu and stracciatella gelato—back on the terrace at Il San Pietro. “And before checking out, we always book our weekend for the following year.” L E A H G I N S B E R G

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The things we can’t stop talking about

Not Your Garden-Variety Garden P H O T O G R A P H BY F E L I X O D E L L

J U N E / J U LY 2 0 1 6 / C O N D É N A S T T R AV E L E R

Word of Mouth Discovered

Clockwise from top: Tage Andersen; the artist’s sculpture Aorta giganteum; a room-size chess set designed by Andersen and ceramicist Anna R. Kinman on the ground ﬂoor of the house; a small glass pavilion in the woods behind the main house.

Welcome to Fairyland An enchanted garden that most Swedes have never heard of. Walk down one woodland path and you’ll see birch and aspen trees hung with acrylic paintings. Head down another and you’ll discover that what you thought was a huge tree is actually a sculpture “growing” from a block of concrete. So it goes at ethereal, sylvan Gunillaberg, the country estate of Dutch floral artist Tage Andersen in Sweden’s rural Småland region. Gunillaberg was not Andersen’s first botanically trippy venture— garden nuts have been queuing up to see his Narnia-like floral creations since he opened his Copenhagen store in 1987—but it is by far his most ambitious. Andersen and his husband, Monz, found the seventeenth-century house set on 42 acres in 2008 and transformed it into a summer retreat/quasi-public garden that’s open May through September. “The former owner was almost 100 when he died,” says Monz. “He’d all but ignored the property, which means the estate was a sort of Sleeping Beauty.” Andersen woke the place up, turning it into yet another cult pilgrimage for green thumbs. He painted the house yellow, planted thousands of lilies, and filled the property with pots of agapanthus and pomegranates as well as farm animals. Getting here isn’t easy (see sidebar). But the “middle of nowhere” location is part of the appeal. The city, the twenty-first century, and reality, for that matter, feel very, very far away. STEPHEN WHITLO CK

P H O T O G R A P H S BY F E L I X O D E L L

Getting There THE DRIVE It’s a four-hour drive from both Copenhagen and Stockholm. From Copenhagen, make it a straight shot (there isn’t much to stop for). From Stockholm, it’s a proper road trip, with places worth pulling over for and great views of Vättern, one of Europe’s largest lakes, for most of the drive.

ALONG THE WAY You’ll want to linger in the Ödeshög area, on the eastern shore of Vättern, halfway to Gunillaberg. Hop out at Omberg Ecopark and hike up the Hjässan promontory for an amazing view of the lake. Go for lunch at the Ombergs Turisthotell, and carve out time to tour the lakeside mansion of Swedish writer Ellen Key, a prominent suﬀragette and feminist.

THE BRING-BACK Continue south for 25 miles to the village of Gränna, where polkagris (red-and-whitestriped peppermint stick candy) was invented.

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Word of Mouth Checking In

Sometimes doing next to nothing in a good hotel is the best way to experience a place.

Provence hardly needs a sales pitch—from medieval Avignon to the port of Marseille, the countryside is a maze of hilltop villages, open-air markets, and lavender fields. Which is why it’s tempting to try to tick off every charming town, vineyard, and experience (cooking class, bike tour, both?) when you’re there. But to do so is to miss out on part of the region’s true appeal—its languid pace.

From top: Patio tables at La Cuisine d’Amélie, the Domaine’s bistrot; the pool and rose garden.

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Creating an escape where guests can slip into this lazy rhythm is exactly what inspired retail mogul Frédéric Biousse, founder and former CEO of Sandro Maje Claudie Pierlot (SMCP), and art dealer Guillaume Foucher to buy the Domaine de Fontenille, a wine-making estate in the southern Luberon, and turn it into a boutique hotel set away from Provence’s most touristy corners. In 2013, the couple started a multi-million-dollar, 18-month overhaul of the property, restoring its eighteenth-century manor house and reviving its wine production (the estate has been growing grapes since 1638) with new equipment and a modernized storeroom. They kept the sand-colored exterior and didn’t alter the footprint of the house, but did a full gut renovation of the interior, creating 17 rooms and suites, each with wide-plank oak floors, olive-green walls, Provençal

furniture upholstered in beige linen, and modern art—by artists like Todd Hido and Anne-Lise Broyer— from the pair’s private collection or Foucher’s Parisian gallery. Then there are the expansive views of the estate’s verdant grounds, with its stands of cedar and plane trees, rose and vegetable gardens, and 86-acre vineyard (which is undergoing organic conversion). The couple also turned the vaulted cellar into an art space where they host exhibitions in collaboration with international galleries like Galerie Claude Bernard. It’s the kind of place that gives you permission to stay put—where enjoying an alfresco lunch prepared by Michelin-starred chef Jérôme Faure, exploring the estate by bicycle, or sipping rosé in the vineyard’s tasting room is as culturally immersive as a day-trip to nearby Aix-en-Provence. As the French say: Point trop, n’en faut—less is indeed more. L I N D S E Y T R A M U TA

PHOTOGRAPHS © SERGE CHAPUIS/COURTESY DOMAINE DE FONTENILLE

No-Pressure Provence

Word of Mouth Checking In

For the Love of Munnu A new boutique hotel in Jaipur that’s (refreshingly) more like a home than a palace.

Hit List

From top: The living room–like lobby of 28 Kothi; the hotel’s farmfresh pea soup served gardenside.

Where Sid sends his friends when they’re in town.

furnishings boutique a quick cab ride from Gem Palace. He uses really cool fabrics in modern prints and colors.”

1135 AD “This restaurant serves excellent Rajasthani food atop the sixteenthcentury Amber Fort. You can look out over the whole city while you eat—you feel like you’re lost in another era.”

KASHMIR LOOM “This shop inside the Suján Rajmahal Palace hotel is the spot for the highest-quality scarves and shawls— many luxury fashion brands get their cashmere goods here.”

HAWA MAHAL BAZAAR “For a real Jaipur experience, every visitor should walk through the aisles of this market and try the kulfi, a sweet local ice cream– like dessert.”

LAXMI MISHTHAN BHANDAR “Everyone who works in the jewelry market goes here for samosas and yogurt dumplings.”

IDLI “French-born designer Thierry Journo opened this clothing and home

NIROS “It’s been a bustling streetside spot since 1949 and has great traditional Indian food— get the dried panir tikka.”

Nonstop to Paradise OAHU

KO O L I N A

HAWAII

Honolulu

C O N D É N A S T T R AV E L E R / J U N E / J U LY 2 0 1 6

When it comes to proper highend beach resorts in Hawaii like Maui’s Fairmont Kea Lani or Kauai’s St. Regis Princeville, Oahu has lagged behind the other islands (which is why it’s often a stopover on the way to idyllic retreats elsewhere). But you may want to ditch

the day-killing connecting flight now that the Four Seasons has opened in Ko Olina, on Oahu’s underexposed west coast—a beautiful stretch of shore known for its near-empty beaches. Unlike Oahu’s other luxury hotels, most of which are crammed together

in Waikiki, the Four Seasons feels surprisingly “outer island,” set on 15 lush acres and with its own beach and three pools. And it’s only a 30-minute drive from the Honolulu airport—unless, that is, you want to take the hotel’s yacht or helicopter. J O H N WO G A N

PHOTOGRAPHS BY AVI VASU. MAP BY MARK NERYS

For those familiar with India, the name Munnu Kasliwal is synonymous with Jaipur. When the jeweler and fifth-generation owner of the city’s famed Gem Palace died in 2012, his son Siddharth took over the business, and now Sid (as he’s known) has taken on another piece of his father’s legacy: the opening of 28 Kothi. The five-bedroom guesthouse, set in the quiet Civil Lines neighborhood, has a minimalist vibe—novel, but welcome in a region known for its ornate palace hotels. “Eventually, you want to be treated like family, not royalty,” Sid says of Kothi’s appeal. “That’s what I wanted to create.” That’s what Munnu wanted too. He’d hired an architect to design a house modeled on Jaipur’s mid-century Art Deco bungalows. The project paused after Munnu’s death, but a year later, Sid picked it back up, relying on trusted Gem Palace artisans and local craftspeople—carpenters and weavers among them—to add special touches like the handmade flat-weave dhurries and blockprinted upholstered headboards in the rooms, and on the artist who does Gem Palace’s miniature paintings and enamelwork for the painted palm trees on the walls. “It was all for the love of my father,” Sid explains. “Everyone came together, and Kothi came alive.” A N D R E W S E S S A

Word of Mouth Summer 2016

26 Ways to (Still) Go Big This Summer If you’re starting to resent your friends’ exotic vacation posts right about now (why did you book that Montauk rental again?!) or still playing airfare chicken on Kayak, you can stop your FOMO bellyaching. We’ve tracked new direct flights and mined our on-the-ground experts for the hotel openings, cultural happenings, lesser-known landscapes, and emerging food and wine spots worth traveling for—and which you just might, in some cases, have to yourself. What follows is a list of still-bookable trips to earn you serious bragging rights—from your own luxury tent on the Grand Canyon’s South Rim to a close-up with a leopard in Botswana. If we were in your shoes (and—okay, we might be), we’d get on it now! 42

C O N D É N A S T T R AV E L E R / J U N E / J U LY 2 0 1 6

1 See a Christo Installation Up Close in Italy’s Lake District

For just three weeks starting on June 18, the quixotic environmental artist Christo will weave 753,500 square feet of yellow fabric across pineshrouded Lake Iseo in Northern Italy to create The Floating Piers, which visitors can literally walk across. Shake oﬀ the crowds by booking L’Albereta, a Relais & Châteaux hotel set amid the region’s vineyards, where you’ll be less than 45 minutes by car from the lake.

2 Stay just about anywhere in

EUROPE where the euro is down

18 PERCENT against the dollar since 2014. A €500 room used to work out to $690. Now it’s yours for $575.

3 Take a Boat Safari in Botswana

The best months for seeing the country’s Okavango Delta are May through August, when water levels are at their highest and elephants, giraﬀes, leopards, and countless birds are most active. Camps like Duba Expedition arrange game “drives” by motorboat—and are all the more luxurious for being in the middle of nowhere. 4 Revisit the California Coast

Carmel still has those golden beaches, forest hiking trails,

T Y P E BY L A T I G R E

Word of Mouth Summer 2016

5 Spot Bengal

TIGERS

N E P A L in

Before this year, a visit to Chitwan National Park demanded roughing it. Now you can make the new Meghauli Serai, a Taj Safari Lodge, your indulgent base camp.

and proximity to pinot and chardonnay vineyards, but a new crop of inns like the Hotel Carmel and The Hideaway are providing welcome alternatives to the same old B&Bs.

the exhibition will be shown outside London’s Victoria and Albert Museum.

TOUR

8 Road-Trip the Old West—and Its New Places to Stay

We love Dunton Hot Springs resort in Colorado’s San Juan Mountains, which is why we’re expecting big things from its new Telluride spin-oﬀ, Dunton Town House. (And everyone knows ski towns are at their best in the summer.) The newly opened Smith Fork Ranch, from the creative team behind leather goods brand Ghurka, is 90 minutes by car from Grand Junction but feels more remote—and only takes 28 guests a week. Grand Canyon Under Canvas brings safaristyle tents to the hotel-starved high desert about an hour from the South Rim. Or stay mobile and book a week with Airstream 2 Go, which rents 23- and 28-foot

Chase SkyHigh Thrills in the Adirondacks 6

Wild Walk in Tupper Lake is like the High Line of the forest—and the next best thing to being an Ewok: It’s an elevated network of bridges and platforms that cuts through the treetops and connects to a four-story twig tree house and a kidsize spider’s web.

Catch Zaha Hadid’s Last Show 7

The Jameel Prize is one of the world’s most prestigious awards in Islamic art and design, and this year’s selection, on view at Istanbul’s Pera Museum, is the last picked under Zaha Hadid, the prize’s late patron. It’s also the ﬁrst time

9 Make first tracks in northern

ARGENTINA We’re pumped for

CA Z E N OV E & LOY D ’ S tour of the virtually unexplored, wildlife-filled

IBERA WETLANDS where the Rincón del Socorro guest estancia is the stuff of country-home fantasies.

IRELA

The west coast’s Wild Atlantic Way is the world’s longest coastal drive, rolling past surf breaks,

chrome trailers (and the SUVs to tow them) out of Las Vegas.

Live Your Greek Island Fantasy Without the Crowds

Folegandros has all the great beaches, the simple but delicious taverna food, and the epic sunsets over the sea that you expect from a Greek isle—without the disco vibe and megayachts. Even better, highspeed ferries from Piraeus now get you there in 3 hours instead of the 11 it used to take. 12 See the Arctic Before It Melts

You know it won’t be there forever, and so does Crystal Cruises, whose Serenity starts sailing the Northwest Passage in August. The ship travels from Anchorage to Arctic ﬁshing villages in Alaska, Canada, and Greenland before docking in New York. 13 Get to Colombia (Finally)

Now’s the time to go: In 2014, the dollarto-peso exchange rate was one to 1,995; today you get 2,850 pesos for a buck, an increase of 44 percent. Once you’re there, stay at the sleekly designed and newly opened

TA K E A N E V E R GETS- OLD I N S TA N T S U M M E R VA C AT I O N Camden, Maine, for lobster rolls and windjammers. Fort Bragg, California, for foggy mornings. Kiawah Island, South Carolina, for seaside golf links. Mackinaw City, Michigan, for old-school lakeside vacation vibes. Paso Robles, California, for great wines minus the Napa nonsense. St. Michaels, Maryland, for yachting and G&Ts. Sanibel Island, Florida, for beachcombing on kid-friendly beaches. Shelter Island, New York, for an alternative to the Hamptons. Victoria, British Columbia, for a postcardperfect international escape just three hours from Seattle.

Four Seasons Hotel Bogota or the recently renovated Four Seasons Hotel Casa Medina Bogotá, a colonial-style retreat. 15 Cycle the Spanish Pyrenees

The rugged mountains and seaside towns of Basque Country are best seen in summer. The weather’s perfect, and you can tool around on locally made Orbea bikes with a Bicycle Adventures guide who’ll show you the best spots for pintxos—the world’s most Instagrammable snacks! 16 Head to the Chicest Island in the Caribbean

Everyone forgets about St. Barts in summer, but that’s when ﬂights to the modish French isle run you about half as much as they would in winter. Two of the original resorts, Eden Rock and Le Guanahani, recently underwent major face-lifts— just get there before September, when the rainy season starts and hotels and restaurants close down. 17 Explore a Slice of Africa (Almost) Nobody Else Has

Want to truly impress your friends? A stay at the ﬁve-month-old

on a winding, sometimes white-knuckle

1,550-MILE road trip

timeless pubs, and seafood stands serving caught-that-hour fish.

18 Discover the antidote to Abu Dhabi’s skyscrapers or Dubai’s excess:

O M A N

The tranquil Arabian Peninsula country will see two new Anantara hotels open this summer:

AL JABAL AL AKHDAR RESORT near Grand Canyon–esque Jebel Shams

AL BALEED RESORT SALALAH on the Arabian Sea.

Limalimo Lodge in the Simein Mountains of Ethiopia ought to do it, particularly when you come back with stories of tracking colobus and vervet monkeys in the surrounding wilderness. It sounds like a long trip, but the brand-new Ethiopian Airlines nonstop between Newark and Addis Ababa helps cut travel time. 19 Discover the Most Underrated Food City in the U.S.

Serious eaters with a free weekend can be among the first to check Indianapolis off their list. The city has notable chefs building national profiles with innovative menus that aren’t ambitiously overpriced, but you’d be forgiven for missing the news with Chicago hogging the Midwestern food spotlight. When you fly in—and it’s easier than ever, with nonstops from 33 cities—head straight to Marrow (fried tandoori chicken; cucumber wakame salad) and Milktooth (killer breakfast dishes; locally roasted Tinker Coffee) for a quick orientation to the city’s best. Then pedal your way to more finds (Black Market; Rook), using Indy’s ever-expanding bike-sharing network.

20 Catch a Fashion Show in . . . Scotland?

an expert, like Tom Popper at InsightCuba or Adam Vaught at Zicasso, who can handle all the details—’cause that’s what they do.

Edinburgh’s National Museum will unveil a $21-million expansion of ten new exhibition halls on July 8, and among the items on display will be pieces from Alexander McQueen, Vivienne Westwood, and Yves Saint Laurent. Get there on Delta’s justlaunched nonstop from JFK to Edinburgh—or hop British Airways’ new ﬂight between London and the Highlands.

24 RETUNE MIND & B O DY I N

22 Taste CultFavorite Wines (Without Pretense)

CROATIA

Emerging regions are Europe’s next big things—and by going to the source, you can build both your cellar and your palate. The two-year-old Wine Route of Etna brings together vineyards along Sicily’s SS120 Highway, which skirts the northern side of the mountain. Among the growers here is Frank Cornelissen, godfather of the natural wine movement. Or head for Spain’s Canaries, where microclimates make for some seriously minerally wines. Our fave? The dry Malvasia whites from Lanzarote. (The island’s vineyards, with their rich black soil, look totally lunar.) Or seek out

21 Crack Cuba with a Pro’s Help

So you’ve decided to go—but you’re intimidated by everything planning your own trip will require: trolling Airbnb, refreshing airline websites, e-mailing transportation companies in Havana, and dialing on-the-ground cultural institutions and dance troupes to make sure your itinerary is legit. Skip the hassle and simply call

(at Yoga for Bad People’s retreat on Brač)

SOUTH AFRICA (at the new Leeu Estates)

& TURKEY (at Canyon Ranch’s new coastal resort).

Assyrtiko, our favorite white from the island of Santorini—it’s bright and very high in acid—with a salty tang since the vines basically grow in the ocean. Bonus: The wine ages well, so pick up a case when you visit Estate Argyros.

25 Hit the Hawaiian Island That Has It All

Maui’s got spectacular beaches, the state’s driest weather, topnotch surﬁng and hiking, one of the most jaw-dropping drives in the country (yes, that’s the Piilani Highway on our cover), and some of Hawaii’s best hotels. Now three of them— the Fairmont Kea Lani, Royal Lahaina Resort, and Travaasa Hana— are back after (muchneeded) renos. 26

Fly one of three new nonstops to

AUCKLAND [

Houston Air New Zealand

San Francisco United

Los Angeles American

Our summer is their winter, but it’ll be mild enough that you can

SKI MOUNT RUAPEHU IN A T-SHIRT.

]

Or Just Go Huge

Use every last vacation day on Abercrombie & Kent’s 23-day charter jet tour through Latin America, leaving Maui on September 6. The price? $99,500 per person. Find photos of our picks, plus more intel on making the most of your summer vacation, at cntraveler.com/ summer.

J U N E / J U LY 2 0 1 6 / C O N D É N A S T T R AV E L E R

Word of Mouth The Hotel Breakfast

Hôtel du Palais, Biarritz When creative director Yolanda Edwards came back from French Basque Country, she raved about the breakfast at the Du Palais—specifically the seasonal gem lettuces and piment d’espelette, that smoky pepper which makes everything, including the buffet’s perfectly soft scrambled eggs, taste better. Savor it, along with house-baked brioche, cured meats, and fruit tarts, in the dining room late into the morning— meaning you may just skip lunch. P H OTO G R A P H BY M AT T H R A N E K

Word of Mouth Pass It On

Been There, Done That Bloodline star Sissy Spacek on eating whatever’s put in front of you, being pale in Puerto Rico, and (almost) hanggliding wearing high heels. Yayoi Kusama’s permanent installation Pumpkin, on Naoshima.

Exhibition Isle Art fairs emphasizing local talent may evoke images of tents filled with bad seascape paintings. But Japan’s Setouchi Triennale, held on 14 remote islands in Japan’s Seto Inland Sea, eviscerates any bric-abrac associations and delivers blue-chip art in a serene natural setting that you won’t find at Basel or Frieze. Setouchi started in 2010 but garnered an immediate following with the international art crowd for its site-specific pieces that speak to the islands’ natural beauty and faded industrial heritage, like Tadao Ando’s labyrinth of cherry blossom trees, or Wang Wen Chih’s dome made from more than 4,000 pieces of native bamboo.

THE WHEN AND HOW Festival dates are July 18– September 4 and October 8– November 6. From Tokyo, it’s a four-hour train ride to Uno Port, then a 20-minute ferry to Naoshima. From there, ferry trips to the other islands are short (15 to 45 minutes) and departures frequent. A festival passport is about $46, and an all-access three-day ferry pass is $20. THE PIECES TO SEE This year’s festival includes international big-name artists like Pipilotti Rist and Olafur Eliasson, but it’s the lesser-known Japanese artists who are really worth getting to know: Yoshinori Niwa’s performance project uses psychics to summon the ghosts of 16 former Naoshima mayors; Haruyuki Uchida ﬁlled a titanium boat with seawater and hoisted it into the sky; and Sou Fujimoto’s geometric steel-mesh pavilion sits on Naoshima’s waterfront.

S E TO U C H I

JAPAN

Tokyo Osaka

WHERE TO STAY AND WHAT (ELSE) TO DO Book a room at the Tadao Ando–designed Benesse House Museum, a museum/hotel on Naoshima. The spacious rooms look out onto the Seto Inland Sea and are decorated with works of art by Christo and Thomas Ruﬀ. After you’re settled, take an end-of-day soak at the nearby I Love Yu onsen. Part art installation, part bathhouse (and maybe your only chance to view art in the buﬀ), it’s one in a trail of permanent installations across the three-mile island. ADAM G R AH AM

An Editor Recommends “Summer in Rome means dining outdoors. And while I’ve stuck out the hour wait for an alfresco meal on the Via del Portico d’Ottavia, a better plan is to follow the Romans 45 minutes south to hilltop Ariccia. Here, Italians ﬁll tables around the town’s square, sharing porchetta and wild boar ragout from the local taverns. Don’t worry about overdoing it on the jugs of local red—taxis stand by to get you safely back to the city.” ERIN FLORIO, Senior Associate Editor 48

C O N D É N A S T T R AV E L E R / J U N E / J U LY 2 0 1 6

FROM TOP: PHOTOGRAPHS BY JAPAN-GUIDE.COM; LYNNE BRUBAKER. ILLUSTRATIONS BY MARK NERYS

Your all-time-favorite vacation: I traveled to China in 1983 for a screening of Coal Miner’s Daughter, and they had an amazing dinner for us at the emperor’s palace in Beijing. I was reveling in this delicious soup when someone leaned over and said, “That’s camel’sfoot-tendon soup.” That sent a chill up my spine, but I just decided to go with it. All-time worst vacation: When I was a teenager, a girlfriend and I got cheap tickets to Puerto Rico. I was a strawberry blond at the beach with this tawny-skinned girl—I borrowed her baby oil and got burned so badly. She returned to New York for work and left me in a Puerto Rican hospital! Your ideal travel partner: My mother. She saved my life once. We climbed up this mountain in São Paulo in high heels—don’t ask me why—and there was a wooden platform that people were hang-gliding off of. I got so close to jumping off with this one glider, but my mother grabbed me by the throat and with clenched teeth said, “Not today, Sissy. Not on my watch.” The best thing about filming Bloodline in the Florida Keys: The seafood. I love the hogfish . . . though they really need to do something about that name. The last monument, landmark, or natural wonder you took a selfie in front of: The selfies I take are with fans. Does that make me the monument, landmark, or natural wonder? I choose natural wonder. DAVID WA LTE RS

Word of Mouth Black Book

DC WA S H I N GTO N , D.C.

FOR PARENTS, D.C. is the city of object

lessons—for better and worse. You come primed to help your kid decipher the signatures of the Founding Fathers on the Declaration of Independence, or to gaze together at Abraham Lincoln’s craggy profile as you piously recite the Gettysburg Address—along with seemingly every other family in America (who, you register in a panic, all seem to be lined up outside the National Air and Space Museum). But hey—with so, so many museums, monuments, parks, waterfronts, and other distractions to choose from, you can easily chart a crowd-free course. Just don’t

try to cram too much in: We found parents and kids were happiest with no more than two scheduled stops a day—and frequent pauses and distractions to decompress. Besides, there’s so much to do off the Mall since oncefringy neighborhoods (NoMA, H Street Corridor) are emerging as eating and shopping hubs. Take an Uber or taxi, not the Metro, to preserve legs and moods. If you miss something major (like the fall opening of the National Museum of African American History and Culture), no worries. You know you’ll be back. R E P O R T E D B Y A L E X P O S T M A N A N D PAU L B R A D Y

The Jefferson Memorial.

P H O T O G R A P H S BY D E W E Y N I C KS

Word of Mouth Black Book

The Sanity-Saving Hacks We Rely On How to make the most of your time on the go.

Look for Timed Entries

From left: The National Museum of the American Indian; the International Spy Museum.

Pretty much the only way into landmarks like the White House and the Washington Monument is to lock in a tour (weeks!) in advance. But lastminute bookers can nab line-skipping timed entries online to the National Archives Museum and the Capitol Rotunda just a few days out.

Decode the Smithsonian

Cracking the Mega-Museums Since nearly every D.C. museum is free, popping in and out is encouraged. Plan smartly and you’ll get to all the major kid draws without burning out.

International Spy Museum

WHERE THE CROWDS GO

National Air and Space Museum

It’s got big-deal artifacts, including the ﬂag that inspired “The Star-Spangled Banner,” George Washington’s battle sword, and Benjamin Franklin’s walking stick.

This is home to the 45.52-carat Hope Diamond, dinosaur fossils, a living coral reef, as well as an enormous African elephant guarding the entrance.

It has world-famous aircraft like the 1903 Wright Flyer, Lindbergh’s Spirit of St. Louis, and the back-fromspace Apollo 11 command module.

While it’s not part of the Smithsonian, this museum has original tools of the trade like an Enigma machine and miniature weapons, and every kid gets to adopt an alias.

SEE THIS FIRST INSTEAD

National Museum of Natural History

The gunboat Philadelphia, a Revolutionary War ship sunk by the British on Lake Champlain in 1776.

The O. Orkin Insect Zoo on the second ﬂoor, where the brave can handle hissing cockroaches and see tarantula feedings.

Often overlooked, NASA’s Stardust probe is the ﬁrst manmade object to intercept a comet and return to Earth.

The “Operation Spy” experience lets teens play at espionage with ﬁctional video surveillance and safe-cracking.

THE PRO TIP

National Museum of American History

Not every museum has them, so take advantage of the self-service lockers by the Constitution Avenue entrance to park your stuﬀ while exploring.

The galleries are open until 7:30 P.M . on most (but not all) summer nights, so have an early dinner and come back once crowds thin. (Conﬁrm hours at si.edu.)

If you’re planning to see an Imax show, buy advance tickets at home—and visit before 11 A . M . or after 4 P. M . to avoid the huge swarms of afternoon tourists.

One of D.C.’s few paid museums, it lets you book a timed entry up to six months ahead of time. Hop on those Operation Spy tickets early too.

Its new online Trip Planner, at si.edu/visit, helps visitors navigate hundreds of exhibits and 13 museums on and near the Mall. Punch in your interests (“Astronomy,” “Design”) to break down what to see and where.

Don’t Blow Oﬀ the Art Museums The Hirshhorn, the National Portrait Gallery, and the Phillips Collection—which offers a cool art scavenger hunt—are generally less kid-clogged.

Hire Your Own Guide Tour company Context can create custom family itineraries for many sights and museums (e.g., an Air and Space walk led by a NASA space camp alum), sparing you logistical legwork.

D.C. ESSENTIALS U N D E R R AT E D M U S E U M F R E D E R I C K D O U G L A S S N AT I O N A L H I S TO R I C S I T E ( R I G H T ) J U N E / J U LY 2 0 1 6 / C O N D É N A S T T R AV E L E R

Word of Mouth Black Book

It’s Not All About History The Mall bailout plan for kids who know what they’re into.

If They’re Obsessed with Airplanes Drive 40 minutes west of downtown to the Steven F. Udvar-Hazy Center in Chantilly, Virginia, near Dulles, where the Smithsonian keeps an outstanding collection of historic aircraft—including the Enola Gay, the space shuttle Discovery, and an SR-71.

If They Heart @Adorable_Animals on Insta

From left: A D.C. farmers’ market; the Steven F. Udvar-Hazy Center near Dulles International Airport.

The National Zoo’s baby panda, Bei Bei, will be approaching maximum cuteness this summer. The cub—and his parents— are most active in the morning, so be there when the gates open at 8 A.M. Many visitors trek uphill from the Woodley Park–

Zoo/Adams Morgan Metro station, but you can avoid the hike by having your Uber drop you off at the northwest gate.

If You’ve Got a Foodie-in-the-Making Cab it to Union Market, near the once-gritty NoMa nabe, for dozens of food stalls serving empanadas and ramen. An eight-minute ride south, Eastern Market, a bustling 143-year-old food hall, has street musicians and flea market tables outdoors on weekends.

If They’re Sneakerheads Take the new free streetcar from Union Station down H Street Northeast to Maketto, a concept store/

restaurant where you can browse limited-edition Adidas by Raf Simons Stan Smiths or Raised by Wolves hoodies before eating family-style Cambodian/Taiwanese street food (pork steamed bao, five-spice fried chicken). If there’s a wait for a table, play a round of indoor mini-golf at the quirky H Street Country Club (yes, there’s a bar) down the street.

If They’re Baseball Fans Head for the Washington Navy Yard, on the Anacostia River, where restaurants and splashdown fountains have popped up near Nationals Park. (Same-day game tickets are easy to snag.)

Hotels the Whole Family Can Agree On You’ll like the vibe and they won’t bounce off the walls. MASON & ROOK This new Kimpton has oversized rooms done in stylish grays, with 65-inch TVs perfect for movie nights. Suites have deep soaking tubs, too.

PARK HYATT WASHINGTON It’s got sleek Shakerinspired decor, a pool (so key!), and a top-rated restaurant, the Blue Duck Tavern, so you can send burgers upstairs while you dine à deux.

THE WATERGATE HOTEL Yes, that one (above). The mid-century modern icon with the juicy backstory is now worth a stay thanks to a $125 million refurb.

WILLARD INTERCONTINENTAL Steeped in history and a block from the White House, it’s the grande dame where Lincoln slept before his inauguration. ’Nuff said!

C O N D É N A S T T R AV E L E R / J U N E / J U LY 2 0 1 6

Recharging Stations Museum fatigue is a real thing. Here are a few ways to recover.

When You’re Ready to Say Yes to the Cone Skip the fro-yo trucks on the Mall and hit Pitango Gelato, on 7th Street Northwest. It’s got classic flavors (nocciola) and not-so (cardamom) plus outstanding Counter Culture coffee.

ILLUSTRATION BY AISTE STANCIKAITE

Sip a Dry Riesling While Your Kids Play

Above: The Tidal Basin from the Jeﬀerson Memorial.

The Art Nouveau–style Pavilion Café at the National Gallery of Art Sculpture Garden has nice wines, microbrews from Virginia’s Devils Backbone, a fountain for little ones to splash in, and it’s just across

the street from the Mall (consider bringing a soccer ball—seriously).

Get Off Your Feet It sounds lame, but hear us out: When your over-walked feet feel like stumps, Tidal Basin Paddle Boats is a lifesaver. For $16 you can catch a breeze out on the water and paddle (like, so slowly) for an up-close view of the Jefferson Memorial. If you need to snack up, there’s a decent, underused café at the Holocaust Memorial Museum (which should be seen in its own right).

Where You Can Seriously Beat the Heat On July 2, the National Building Museum will unveil “Icebergs,” transforming its great hall into an underwater world of glacial ice complete with “undersea” grottoes and snow cone snacks.

Find Your Lunch Tribe Right on the Mall, the National Museum of the American Indian’s Mitsitam Café serves up regional native fare like South American cherrybraised beef pupusas or Great Plains buffalo chili on fry bread.

LARA LOGAN 60 MINUTES CORRESPONDENT

“Our secret place to go was Bishop’s Garden, by the National Cathedral. My kids loved to run along the paths and stick their hands in the pond.”

B E ST FO R T E E N S T H E N E W S E U M / P H OTO O P T H E L A P O F T H E A L B E RT E I N ST E I N M E M O R I A L / P E AC E F U L T I M E- O U T KO G O D C O U RT YA R D, N AT I O N A L P O RT R A I T G A L L E RY

Word of Mouth Black Book

Parents’ Night Out It’s a suit-andtie town, but the dining scene here has never been more fun than it is right now.

ARCHIPELAGO U Street’s only tiki bar rivals any you’d find on the West Coast. Try to order drinks like the mezcal-and-rum Truck Bed Funeral or the tequila-heavy Retired Stripper with a straight face.

THE DABNEY One of the city’s best restaurants is in an alley near Logan Circle. Chef Jeremiah Langhorne grills local fish, meats, and veggies over open flames before garnishing most everything with a garden’s worth of microgreens and fresh herbs.

DEL CAMPO From left: Garrison; Toki Underground.

D.C. is notoriously plagued by mediocre

Spend the Afternoon in Georgetown

steakhouses, but this Argentine-style parilla in the Penn Quarter ain’t one of them. Look for playful riffs on local favorites—like the beef “half-smoke” hot dog topped with caviar.

SOUTHERN EFFICIENCY Near the famed 9:30 Club concert hall, in the rapidly developing Shaw neighborhood, this whiskey bar is heavy on locally crafted spirits like Virginia-made Catoctin Creek rye.

TOKI UNDERGROUND Despite the name, you’ll find this funky ramen-and-buns joint above The Pug, an H Street dive bar.

With stately row houses, Old Town shops, and leafy spots for cooling off, this is a D.C. you can (finally) relax in. JOSÉ ANDRÉS D . C .- B A S E D R E S TA U R AT E U R

“My daughters and I love getting lost in the Hillwood Estate, Museum & Gardens, which was once owned by Marjorie Merriweather Post.”

2 P.M. Roam the grounds of Dumbarton Oaks, a classic Georgetown mansion (now a museum with a top-notch Byzantine art collection, BTW) on 16 acres of terraced gardens.

3 P.M. Walk south on Wisconsin Avenue and stop for a cone at local institution Thomas Sweet, on the corner of P Street. Continue on Wisconsin and turn left onto N Street, a staggeringly pretty row of eighteenth-century brick homes (during JFK’s presidential campaign, he and Jackie lived at 3307 N St.). Turn right onto 31st Street (past the 1858 Post Oﬃce), then left on M Street. The Old Stone House is the oldest unchanged building in D.C.; you can pop into its lowceilinged colonial kitchen for free. 4 P.M. Cross M Street on Thomas

5 P.M. Got time to kill before dinner? Older kids can rent kayaks at the nearby Key Bridge Boathouse. Or go early bird at the locavore magnet Farmers Fishers Bakers (owned by the North Dakota Farmers Union), near the Georgetown Waterfront Park and its fountain.

B E S T C R O Q U E M A D A M E L E D I P L O M A T E / F A R M -T O -T A B L E B R U N C H G A R R I S O N / H I G H - E N D C O F F E E S H O P P I N E A P P L E A N D P E A R L S 54

ILLUSTRATION BY AISTE STANCIKAITE

Jefferson Street—if you can yank your teens back from M Street’s commercial seductions (Urban Outfitters, Nike)—and in a block you’ll be at Lock 4 on the C&O Canal. Completed in 1850, it’s now a 185-mile-long national park. Walk along the towpath or have a pebble-flinging contest. Just beyond is Baked & Wired, whose artisanal roasts lure lines of students from Georgetown U.

Word of Mouth Groundbreaker

The lobby of the Ace Hotel New Orleans, designed by Roman and Williams.

in January, Kelly Sawdon, chief brand officer for the Ace Hotel Group, and Brad Wilson, the company’s president, stood inside an old furniture store in New Orleans, watching a construction worker push a sander across the floor. In two months, if all went according to plan, the space would be filled with guests and curious locals. But for now, coils of wire lay on the floor, and the thick smell of paint hung in the air. Wilson, in a white construction hat, strode across the lobby, shouting over the din. “Unlike other properties we’ve worked on, this one wasn’t already a hotel, so there was a lot to be done upstairs,” he said. “But with the lobby, we’re hoping to preserve some of the original feel. The beautiful old moldings up there will stay.” He pointed. Here would be a Stumptown café, the first south of the Mason-Dixon Line; there, a stage for visiting musicians. The Ace New Orleans opened its doors this spring, the eighth entry from the Ace Hotel Group—which, if you haven’t noticed, has been on quite the tear lately. But of course you’ve noticed: These days, no one can ignore Ace, even those who don’t wish to sleep in its loftlike rooms or sip artisanally roasted espresso in its artfully weathered lobbies. The brand continues to expand at a rapid clip. In the near future, if you visit a major American city—or just live in one—you might not stay in an Ace Hotel, but you may wind up in a neighborhood that Ace put on the map. Co-founded in 1999 by Seattle club owner and entrepreneur Alex Calderwood, Ace has made a play of cheeky iconoclasm and a curatorial style that can border on precious (see the Portlandia sketch about the “Deuce Hotel” and its aggressively hip check-in staff). The look is familiar by now: bespoke art on the walls, guitars in the bedrooms, upbeat messages (“Everything Is Going to Be Alright”) emblazoned in the lobby. Love or loathe it, Ace’s house style has become so pervasive across the industry that new hotels are often

ON A STORMY DAY

Making a Scene Can a hotel rebrand a neighborhood? With clairvoyant location-scouting, Ace Hotels and other industry players are redrawing the map of cities we thought we knew. By Matthew Shaer 56

P H O T O G R A P H S BY M AT T H E W W I L L I A M S

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Word of Mouth Groundbreaker

‘You might not stay in an Ace Hotel, but you may wind up in a neighborhood that Ace put on the map.

Y E T AS I M I TATO R S A B O U N D, Ace has distinguished itself in another way: by taking an unorthodox approach to development, eschewing already-saturated locations for emerging ones. Opening a hotel is a multi-million-dollar gamble for any brand and its financial partners, so standard operating procedure is to choose locations based on the success of existing properties. But when the first Ace took root in an unremarkable patch of western Seattle, it was notable for having a club frequented by R.E.M.’s Peter Buck, and not much else. Belltown has been on the style map ever since. That first hotel, set in a former halfway house, felt more like a glorified hostel where a visiting band might crash after graduating from friends’ couches. Their friends probably lived in Belltown too. A similar metamorphosis occurred a decade later in the dead center of Manhattan (emphasis on dead). What we now call the NoMad district, south of Times Square, was until 2009 an in-between zone of wig wholesalers and sidewalk patchouli-hawkers—before Ace took over an abandoned hotel and, with its deep leather couches and communal workspaces, created the hottest lobby scene in town. (The upmarket NoMad Hotel, a block south, followed three years later.) In 2013, Ace opened its first European outpost, in East London’s gritty Shoreditch—an area overserved by vintage shops and bars but underserved by design-conscious hotels. Last December, an Ace

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Two fringe neighborhoods have thrived postAce—and a third could follow suit. Watch this space, Pittsburgh. . .

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arrived in Pittsburgh’s up-and-coming East Liberty district. The brand has repeated the trick often enough that industry watchers refer to the “Ace Effect,” or the explosion of a neighborhood after a cool hotel moves in (see the maps below). Identifying those areas is something Ace’s development team has been uncannily adept at: They’re the place whisperers, the neighborhood foragers, the location scouts for a film that you and your art-student nephew will both want a cameo in. “People ask if there’s a technique to choosing neighborhoods, and actually there is,” Ace’s Wilson says, “because it’s all in the relationships.” His colleague Sawdon notes that co-founder Calderwood’s greatest gift lay in making connections; he collected friends in creative circles, from visual artists to musicians to clothing designers, and delighted in mixing one group with another. He approached hotel development the same way—seeking introductions, asking questions, leaning hard on friends’ advice. And it’s how the brand has carried on in his absence. (Calderwood died of an apparent drug overdose in 2013.) Banding with so many creatives and entrepreneurs when opening its hotels, Ace is never short of networks to tap. That popularity translates to power, as Ace works with real-estate developers to attract like-minded retail brands, not only to the hotel but also to the surrounding streets. “We like to keep the people who inspire us close by,” Ace’s Sawdon says. “We’ve been lucky enough to anchor all of these disparate

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described as “Ace-like”—be they indie brands such as Freehand, The Hoxton, and Mama Shelter, or the millennial-ready offshoots of big-name chains, with their sassy “Go Away” doorknob signs and pour-over coffee bars. “That emphasis on ‘local, authentic’ travel has gone mainstream,” says Greg Oates, senior editor at travel industry site Skift. For instance: “The concierges at Marriott’s Renaissance brand are called ‘Navigators’ and provide local travel tips, and InterContinental focuses on ‘insider’ or ‘in the know travel.’ ”

retailers, record stores, and pop-ups, and that ultimately allows us to engage and collaborate with more interesting and daring people.” Wilson offers as an example the Ace Pittsburgh, which began in 2010 as a conversation between Matthew Ciccone, a local entrepreneur, and Eric Shiner, then curator of Pittsburgh’s Andy Warhol Museum. Ciccone had been active in an effort to revive East Liberty, a faded neighborhood not far from the Carnegie Mellon campus. “The great part about it was all these beautiful pieces of architecture that remained—churches, storefronts, an old YMCA,” Ciccone recalls. He was hoping to get a hotel into the area. Shiner suggested he speak to his friend Calderwood, who was curious but hesitant: London was in the works, as was a hotel in downtown L.A. But Ciccone kept in touch, and in 2014, his firm teamed with the Ace principals to develop a hotel—which wound up occupying that former YMCA. (The Ace Pittsburgh won a spot on Condé Nast Traveler’s Hot List last month.) Investing in a fringe locale is a cultural choice as much as an economical one: a show of faith in a neighborhood’s potential, balanced with a hunch that it won’t transform itself too much. East Liberty, Pittsburgh, is well removed from downtown and from anywhere your mother might want to be, yet its mix of old-man bars and edgy art spaces jibes well with the Ace ethos. And that stately Presbyterian church across the street? Now the congregants, many of them dressed to the nines, flock to the Ace hotel’s restaurant for Sunday brunch. “Our feeling—and this was something Alex was particularly good at—is that you don’t want to just drop into a place and throw open the doors,” Sawdon says. “You want to become part of the community.” That notion has made the hotels gathering points in neighborhoods that didn’t have them. Walk into any Ace outpost and you’ll typically see locals meeting for drinks alongside overnight guests. Their success has encouraged other hospitality brands to take a similar tack, putting hotels in places that might scare off mainstream developers. What Ace has done for low-profile neighborhoods, the Louisville, Kentucky–based 21c group has done for lower-profile cities, opening art-driven “museum hotels” in places like Louisville and Cincinnati. Four more hotels are now in the works, including one that just opened in a derelict Model T factory in Oklahoma City. Craig Greenberg, president of 21c, won’t discount the possibility of going into established sections of major cities. “But it’s a unique and extremely exciting and satisfying experience to open a hotel in a place like an old factory,” he says. Working on the fringes has its challenges, Greenberg stresses. “If you’re going to an established area, it’s easier to get the required funding.” With an emerging location, investors can be cagey: Is there enough cultural infrastructure to support a hotel? One solution, which 21c employed in Cincinnati, is the private/ public partnership—the city teams with the brand and its investors to co-fund a hotel in order to reinvigorate an area. Greenberg points to increased foot traffic in neighborhoods where 21c has opened hotels, and to rising commercial rents, as indicators of the model’s success.

The Stumptown Coﬀee Roasters café at the Ace Hotel New Orleans.

B U T A S T H E market grows crowded with uniquely decorated hotels in transitioning neighborhoods, how long can the hipster-hotel bubble last? “Instead of being the eleventh Hilton-type brand downtown, you look to the fringe,” says Lauro Ferroni, senior vice president at real estate adviser JLL’s Hotels & Hospitality Group. “But one limitation is there are only so many interesting sub-markets.” For now, Ace is showing it can keep adapting. In New Orleans, the Warehouse District had been farther along than East Liberty or NoMad—already home to the National WW II Museum and five of Donald Link’s acclaimed restaurants. A New Orleans–based architecture firm was brought in, while Roman and Williams, who’d worked on the Ace New York, collaborated on the interior design. Still, its industrial patina bestows a frontier cachet. Head up to the Ace’s rooftop pool and you can gaze over the aging brick buildings that give the area its name. Beyond are the towers of the Central Business District, and beyond that— unseen and unheard from the Ace—the neon throb of the French Quarter. “To us, this location was the best of all worlds,” Sawdon says. “It’ll take you 15 minutes to walk to the Quarter. But you’re in a part of New Orleans you might not have explored, in a neighborhood we really love, and that’s loved by the people we love.” Sure, it’s a bit off the beaten path. But that’s the point, isn’t it? X

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Word of Mouth In the Know

Scents in the City When the celebrated French nose Francis Kurkdjian created Mr. Burberry, the newest male fragrance from the British luxury brand, he drew inspiration from the great barbershops of London. “The scent is about that freshness and cleanness,” says Kurkdjian. Go under the razor at any of these favorite Old Smoke establishments to catch a whiﬀ for yourself.

Drink Wine, Eat Jamón, See No One Think of Spain’s Extremadura—a bucolic farming region backed up against Portugal—as Cortona pre Under the Tuscan Sun. It’s the home of jamón Íberico, produces much of the world’s best sheep’s milk cheese, and is responsible for the kind of crisp whites that are worth the threehour drive from Madrid. Here’s how we’re planning our next laid-back— meaning, doing as little sightseeing as possible while eating the best food possible—European getaway.

HOME BASE Hospedería Convento de La Parra, a former Clarist convent that’s now a 21-room hotel with a small swimming pool surrounded by daybeds. Its minimalist decor—whitewashed walls, gauzy floorto-ceiling curtains, and sheepskin rugs on terra-cotta floors—is a welcome counterpoint to the dry, rugged landscape. GETTING AROUND You’ll definitely need a car, but to really get close to the area’s groves of ancient olive trees and crumbling Roman ruins, get yourself on a horse. Jerebeque Trails, in the town of Trujillo, keeps a stable of Andalusian purebreds. WHERE TO TASTE Cerro la Barca, outside Mérida, is one of the few vineyards rescuing the nearly forgotten Eva de los Santos, a slow-maturing grape that grows well in Extremadura’s dry, hot weather.

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Don’t miss their Vegas Altas Blanco, an excellent un-oaked organic white. WHERE TO EAT LIKE YOU LIVE THERE In the town of Zafra, stop by La Marquesa, housed in a centuries-old olive oil mill, for grilled meats, cheeses, and plates of beautifully marbled, acorn-fed jamón. Be sure to order the risotto with Idiazabal cheese first thing—it sells out early. THE RESERVATION TO MAKE IN ADVANCE At the two-Michelin-starred Atrio, chef Juan Antonio Pérez relies heavily on local ingredients in his daily tasting menu, which includes dishes like frog’s leg–stuffed tomatoes and truffle pâté en croûte. And then there’s the wine cellar stocked with the world’s best bottles— Haut-Brion, Lafite Rothschild, Latour. E D NA I SHAY I K

Nomad Barber LDN Miguel Gutierrez researched grooming trends across 30 countries before opening his East End shop in 2014. Ruffians At this hipster-esque Covent Garden outﬁt, you’ll be handed a stiﬀ drink before you even make it to the retro barber’s chair. JON ROTH

CLOCKWISE FROM TOP LEFT: PHOTOGRAPHS COURTESY HOSPEDERÍA CONVENTO DE LA PARRA; © DOV MAKABAW/ALAMY STOCK PHOTO; COURTESY BURBERRY

Geo. F. Trumper Ian Fleming favored the private, velvet-curtained booths at this over 100year-old Mayfair institution whenever he needed a shave and a trim.

Word of Mouth Reconsidered

NATIONAL PARKS

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PHOTOGRAPH BY CHRIS BURKARD/MASSIF

YEAR ANNIVERSARY

Close Encounters Youâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;ve probably car-camped in one with your family, contemplated rock formations with friends in another while high as a kite, or hiked through their ancient trees and desolate peaks. Our national parks are turning 100, and today this vast network of rugged landscapes, biblical weather swings, and roving wildlife represents some of the last places where we can still come face-to-face with a vision of America as it once was. Here, a few vocal partisans (some of them from our archives) testify to the parksâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; continued power to shock and awe.

Half Dome at Yosemite National Park, California.

Word of Mouth Reconsidered

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PASS IT DOWN Most of us pretty much know one version or another of how the national parks began, as if with the story of an old uncle (in this case the twenty-sixth president of the United States, Theodore Roosevelt), about whom family lore shifts slightly with each year’s retelling. We’ve heard of how the Robust One, doing his manly things on a hunting trip out west, happened upon the caldera of Yellowstone and fell in love with it, and supported the idea—unique at the time—of making it a national park. Never mind that the story is apocryphal. (Although Teddy created five national parks, Yellowstone pre-dated him, and it was Woodrow Wilson who signed the act creating the National Park Service in 1916.) The system now includes some 400 parks and historic sites, encompassing over 84 million acres. Some are small (Hot Springs, Arkansas); others, like my favorite, Glacier National Park in Montana, straddle two countries. I took my oldest daughter on a daylong hike on the Granite Park Chalet trail in Glacier when she was six months old, toting 66

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swamp-plants, and the grand: none more famous than the iconic bison and grizzly bears of Yellowstone, both of which wander that park with freedom but which are now at risk of being hunted if they stray beyond the park’s boundaries. Today, we risk failing our legacy in other ways. We built roads and infrastructure into the parks’ interiors, encouraging people to visit them—the parks, in that manner, serving as a kind of cultural currency to be transferred, in story and memory, from grandparents to parents to children, and uniting strangers in the uncommon experience of wonder. But now these systems are defunded and crumbling, as if we’ve forgotten them. Conservation biology holds that the larger and rounder an ecosystem is, the more resilient it is against the external forces that would weaken it. Yet we are not protecting the parks’ flanks, the

S E PT E M B E R 1 9 9 4

Russell Banks on Everglades National Park, Fla. “Out on the Anhinga Trail, the only sounds you hear are the wind riffling through the saw grass and the plash of fish feeding on insects and one another and the great long-necked anhingas diving or emerging from the mahogany waters of a sluggish, seawardmoving slough. You hear a hundred frogs cheeping and croaking

and the sweet wet whistle of a red-winged blackbird. A primeval six-foot-long alligator passes silently through the deep slough to the opposite side, coasts to a stop in the shallows, and lurks, a corrugated log with eyes. An anhinga rises from the water and flies like a pterodactyl to a cluster of nearby mangrove roots and cumbrously spreads and turns its enormous wings like glistening black kites silhouetted against the noontime sun. It’s mid-May, yes— but what century?”

59 Number of national parks in the National Parks System.

Great Smoky Mountains National Park is the most visited.

Rick Bass Author of For a Little While: New and Selected Stories

her in the front pack. At the chalet, I sipped tea—the larch in the valleys far below blazing gold, the blue haze of the smoke from a far-off wildfire softening the mountains, the namesake mountaintop glaciers smaller than in the black-and-white photos from a generation earlier. She doesn’t remember it, of course, and yet I believe also there is a deeper part of her that will always know the shape of that land underfoot as she bobbed in her sling, measuring in that manner each contour and the sound of the wind up high. In the beginning, our parks— or the idea behind them—was pretty much solely to serve our hungers, whether recreational (Yellowstone visitors in the late nineteenth century would supposedly wander out to Old Faithful, shove their laundry down into its sulfurous maw, then wait the 65 minutes for their steamcleaned if malodorous clothing to be ejected into the sky) or spiritual. (I’m reminded of the great naturalist John Muir in Yosemite: “by far the grandest of all the special temples of Nature I was ever permitted to enter.”) They were our parks, and we celebrated them almost as an object of wealth. Through subsequent generations, however, we have come to see that there is additional value beyond our original impulse to enclose these places, for they now serve as islands, gardens of refugia for our cleanest air, clearest water, and for a biological diversity which far exceeds that of public or private lands lacking such protection. Our parks house the minute, such as endangered butterflies and delicate, carnivorous

100,000,000

Grand Prismatic Spring in Yellowstone National Park, Montana.

Pounds of garbage hauled out of the national parks each year.

PHOTOGRAPH BY MILES & MILES. ILLUSTRATION BY MARK NERYS.

APRIL 2012

TERRY TEMPEST WILLIAMS O N G R A N D CA N YO N , Z I O N , CA N YO N L A N D S, AND ARCHES NATIONAL PARKS

“In the end, it may be solitude that the future will thank us for—the kind of solitude our ancestors knew; solitude that inspired in their imaginations the creative acts which made our survival as a species possible.”

S E PT E M B E R 2 0 0 9

Mesa Verde National Park in Colorado, has over 600 ancient Pueblo cliﬀ dwellings.

134 Highest temperature recorded in North America, in California’s Death Valley.

Sue Halpern on Yellowstone National Park, Mont. “A few years ago, my daughter and I hiked up Mount Washburn. It was a glorious summer day, and although we had planned to climb no more than halfway, the top of the mountain beckoned. Standing at the summit, we had a tremendous sense of accomplishment— and if the adventure had ended there, it would have been sublime.

country at their edges, through which the wildlife and entire ecological processes flow. Gold mines, roads, clear-cuts, and livestock gnaw their way right up against the dashed-line boundaries of these sanctuaries. What will the future of the parks hold? It is worth noting that the two words economical and ecological share the same Greek root. Beyond the benefits the parks offer us, there awaits a more mature perspective: the idea that beauty can exist beyond our pronouncements of what is or isn’t beautiful. And in that realization, a greater wisdom might be made available to us. It is in the parks, and in their nearby wilderness, where we can still catch the scent and sight and sound of an older world that was beautiful back before we saw it and called it so, and which will— if we steward them carefully—remain so long after we each close our eyes at last. X

But mountains and mountain weather have a way of changing the story, and almost as soon as we started down, dark clouds sizzling with lightning charged across the valley like an advancing army. The rain arrived ﬁrst, sheets of it, and then the wind picked up, sending those sheets sideways. We joined hands and ran down the trail, counting the seconds between a ﬂash of lightning and the sound of it, until they were the same thing. We were well above tree line, completely exposed,

running for our lives and feeling hunted—the most primal fear. We made it, obviously, but just barely. As soon as we reached the parking lot and dashed into the car, a bolt of lightning shot by overhead, entered the ground, ran up the roots of a nearby pine, and exploded out of the earth like a missile. And so, instead of leaving the mountain triumphant, we left it feeling grateful and stupid and humble and rightfully small in the face of the powerful, wild, spectacular indiﬀerence of the natural world.”

Word of Mouth Reconsidered

100

Actor and filmmaker

YOSEMITE I S M Y FATH E R I grew up in Palo Alto, California, next to Silicon Valley. My parents had met in a painting class at Stanford in the 1960s, though eventually my dad gave up painting and went to Harvard Business School. When my brother and I were born, in the late seventies, my father was recovering from several substance addictions. He was completely clean by the time I was five, and though I was too young to recall him drunk, I do remember some of his recovery strategies. These included weekend trips to Yosemite. The four-hour drive was always hell for my brother and me because we had to sit in the backseat. The last leg was especially difficult since it wound through the mountains and made us carsick, and it was scary to think about the steep drop just beyond the small fence on the right as we climbed the mountain in the dark. We always stayed at the Ahwahnee, the old stone hotel that had inspired the designs of Kubrick’s fictional Overlook Hotel in The Shining. There was

As a child I appreciated these trips, but not fully. They felt more like a matter of course, something our family just did. Still, I couldn’t help but be impressed by how grand everything was, the mountains bigger than anything in my normal world, with their unfathomable height and size foreboding death, things I could never contend with. I thought about the climbers who had conquered them and it made me dizzy with fear. Eventually the pull of my burgeoning social life grew stronger than the lure of hiking with my father and my brother.

APRIL 2010

G U Y M ART I N O N J O S H U A T R E E N AT I O N A L PAR K , CALI F.

“Through the netting, we can see the Milky Way stretching in a symphonic arc east into high, bright space, a staggering view of the cosmos, but as we see it, fighting to sleep in God’s own aerodynamic test tunnel, the cosmos is a huge joke of which we are the butt.”

20,310 Height in feet of Denali (formerly Mount McKinley), in Alaska’s Denali National Park, the highest point in the United States.

1,943 Depth in feet of Crater Lake, Oregon, equivalent to more than 6 Statues of Liberty.

301 Number of endangered species living in the national parks.

Polychrome Mountain, in Denali National Park.

PHOTOGRAPH BY NOAH SAHADY. ILLUSTRATIONS BY MARK NERYS

James Franco

an enormous dining room with a huge fireplace where we’d have breakfast before our long days of hiking. I always got waffles or pancakes. My dad said it was crucial fuel for our adventures. My dad led us down trails. We went to caves; we went to the base of El Capitan, the boxy brown mountain; we went to Yosemite Falls, high and fantastical, like something out of The Lord of the Rings. There was very little talking on these walks. It was meditative. I imagined that I was an elf or a warrior, with Orcs behind every tree and dragons high on the mountains.

When I was older I wrote a short story called “Yosemite” in which I tried to paint the park as an Edenic paradise. The boy narrator is growing up, and on his final trip there he finds that the facade of Eden, and his understanding of his father, are starting to crack. In the story, the two boys and their father come across candles in a cave that have been arranged in a ritualistic circle, and later, on the side of the road, a skeleton that looks human (things we actually found). The character based on me gets jealous of the attention the father gives to the younger

AUGUST 1993

Francine Prose on Great Smoky Mountains National Park, Tenn. “To enjoy the park in summer requires submission to the idea that one’s fellow humans are also part of nature. You learn to seize your quiet moments. Now the Grotto Falls trail was ours alone, and I was walking briskly, partly out of concern that my solitude might prove short-lived. “Just then I heard my husband hurrying to catch up, breathing considerably harder than the steep trail should have warranted. He said, ‘Keep walking.’ He was deliberately jangling his keys. He said he’d seen a small black bear ambling with her two cubs beside the trail. A little later we headed back down and there she was, the bear, coming up the path with her cubs. This was not the benign teddy my husband had described. This bear was enormous. We walked— very calmly—back to the falls. The bear kept coming. Until at last we ran into a large group of hikers babbling with excitement: They’d just seen a bear and had startled it off the trail. How my heart went out to them now, how dear they suddenly looked—my noisy fellow humans.”

son, and recedes emotionally. Later, the father gives his sons the facts-of-life talk, initiating them into the sins of experience. I gave the story to one of my classmates at NYU, Gabrielle Demeestere, and she adapted it into a film by the same name. She asked me to play the father character, so in December 2013 I went back to Yosemite. When we started filming, not only did I experience a perspectival reversal by playing my dad opposite my younger self, but Gabby had selected the very locations to film where my father had taken us: the Ahwahnee Hotel, Yosemite Falls, El Capitan. In the dining hall scene, I tried to drum enthusiasm into the kids, who were dreading another hike. At the waterfall scene, I had to reprimand the older boy (based on me) for picking on his brother, just as my father had done. Back at the Ahwahnee, I told the boys about the birds and the bees, and they squirmed with discomfort on the bed. Through the eyes of the father character, I saw how much my own father had done for my brother and me. The time and energy he took to take us on those trips. The love and attention he’d offered us on our hikes. But I also realized that he was healing himself. When I think of Yosemite now, I think of my father. Walking in nature, being silent, staring in awe at the sublimity of the mountains were gifts he has given to me. When I need to retreat from the loud, hectic urban world that I live in most of the time, I can lose myself in those peaceful sanctuaries that my father revealed to me. X

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ELI ZAB ET H R OY T E O N G L AC I E R B AY N AT I O N A L PA R K , A L A S K A

“This far north in the bay, the land is a mere infant, a bare, till-covered tabula rasa uncovered by glaciers less than 20 years ago.”

G e o f f D ye r Author of White Sands: Experiences from the Outside World

SIZE DOES M AT TE R The best way to convey what the American national parks mean to someone from my little island—Britain—is to see one of our own parks from the point of view of a visitor from North America. Finding herself in England, a character in a story by Canadian writer Kate Pullinger notices that “there are a few lakes, somewhere, but they are all kept in the Lake District, as if one can’t allow lakes just anywhere.” This makes it sound like the natural equivalent of some zoned “entertainment district”— especially since so much of its allure (Wordsworth, the Romantics) is marinated in that special British preserve, “history.” The American national parks offer an escape from limiting ideas of district and history.

It’s not that they are timeless. Rather, you enter a realm of time on a vast scale. You witness non-human or geological time at work as measured by the implacably slow, often incomprehensible processes by which these marvels have been created. It’s as if your watch recalibrates itself and starts measuring time in millennia instead of minutes. I’ll never forget seeing the brochures sent back to me in England—I was about ten—from an aunt who was touring the Petrified Forest and the Painted Desert of Arizona. Those images of otherworldly landscapes and prehistoric light set a standard for natural beauty that seemed unsurpassable. I finally got to see these places for myself in my early thirties and experienced what has since become familiar: the ease with which the unsurpassable surpasses itself, even in the course of a single visit. The fact that the mind has been blown at Angels Landing in Zion on Tuesday does not stop it from being re-blown at Observation Point on Wednesday. Every time I go to Death Valley I find myself repeating the words of photographer Edward Weston when he came in 1937: “My God! It can’t be!” But it can. We must make sure that it always will. X

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arrived in Noto, by chance, at the magic hour. On that cloudless summer day, the limestone capital of Sicilian Baroque architecture had begun to smolder with the setting sun. Just then, as if on cue, a pair of older men in tweedy flat caps and of nearly identical diminutive stature huddled in a brief—and likely well-rehearsed—argument. In a flash, southeastern Sicily had revealed itself: the literally blinding beauty of a town square in full solar meltdown while ancient grudges played out in emphatic hand gestures and deep sighs under the long shadows of a church facade. Earlier that day, my husband and I, along with our two young sons, decided to cut short our trip to the northeastern town of Taormina in favor of somewhere a little less raucous and touristy. From everything we’d heard, the southeastern tip of Sicily, between Syracuse and Noto in the east and Ragusa and Modica to the west—with its concentration of sleepy hilltop towns, accessible Greek ruins, and unspoiled beaches all within a 17-mile radius—sounded like the right mix of high culture and much-needed Smashball time. A quick Internet search for a decent hotel with a pool in the countryside yielded a couple of prospects. The first promised to be a tasteful conversion of a seventeenthcentury monastery, but when we got there it looked instead like a parched 1980s-era golf resort somewhere near Phoenix. After pulling up to the second hotel, a sprawling seaside complex with faux-gilded minarets and a colonnade of crimson flags touting the resort’s partnership with an upscale car brand, we never even cut the engine. Both properties typify the region’s fledgling high-end hospitality market, which has emerged around two categories of traveler: the European (and especially northern Italian) creative set, for whom this part of Sicily, with its caught-in-time humility, represents a kind of last frontier; and Sicilian Americans on their genealogical bucket-list trips, who often arrive to find that the island’s battered beauty doesn’t square with their Godfather-inspired old-country fantasies. In a rush to play

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Previous page: The Baroque Church of San Francisco in Noto, made of local tufo limestone. Right: Sicilian raw shrimp at Taverna La Cialoma in Marzamemi.

catch-up with more established summer playgrounds like the Amalfi and Ligurian coasts, Sicily has done what so many newly anointed destinations do—overcompensate with easy signifiers of modern luxury. Luckily, I remembered that a friend had mentioned a newish hotel called Seven Rooms Villadorata in the heart of Noto, a UNESCO-protected, eighteenth-century Baroque masterpiece of town planning just 30 minutes southwest of Syracuse. I had enough cell reception to pull up some images as we wended our way over the dusty switchbacks off the A-18 that had taken us through hilly vineyards and arid scrubland, but not enough to get anyone on the phone. “I have a feeling about this place,” I told my husband, so we drove on. When we arrived, I rang the bell at the stone archway outside the grand Palazzo Nicolaci di Villadorata, three floors of which house the hotel. We crossed a wide, sloping courtyard better suited to a horse-drawn carriage than to our dusty teal sedan, and were met by Cristina Summa, a stylish designer and hotelier who grew up in Turin and spent childhood summers with her grandmother in Noto. For Summa, the acquisition in 2007 of the palazzo’s private apartment, and the restoration of its seven rooms, had been a lifelong dream. “We wanted to re-create the

idea of the Grand Tour that the rich young people of the European aristocracy took,” she later told me, of her inspiration for the hotel. “Sicily was one of the stopovers where they were hosted in the noble houses to study history and art.” Staying at Seven Rooms, which is neither a rustic agriturismo property nor a slick resort, is like spending time at the family estate of old friends. Built in 1731, near Noto’s highest point, the place feels in its formality much more French than Italian (as it turns out, the original owner had modeled it on a château in Montpelier); Summa’s chic and pristine restoration of the 20-foot-ceilinged guest rooms, at once grand and understated in a World of Interiors sort of way, reflects the building’s architectural influences and Noto’s history as a cultural and intellectual hub. With a mix of antique French and Italian furnishings and linens, and a unifying palette of gray, chalk, buff, and oatmeal, Seven Rooms seamlessly blends old and new—a crisp foil to the island’s ancient, earthy grit. As is the case across so much of the region, the original town was home in turn to Ancient Greeks, Romans, Normans, and Arabs before falling to the Christians in A.D. 1091. When the medieval village was leveled by an earthquake in 1693 and relocated nine miles away on a hill, it was rebuilt from the ground up by the celebrated Sicilian architects Paolo Labisi, Vincenzo Sinatra, and Rosario Gagliardi. 74

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Presiding as if with open arms and overlooking the distant Ionian Sea five miles away, the Stone Garden, as Noto is called, is where these urban planners first standardized the use of tufo, a honey-colored local limestone, to catch the light across the town’s three levels (nobility up top, clergy in the middle, and everyone else at the base). Today, you can see the full expression of their Baroque design ideals throughout Noto—an optimistic pacing of gardens, squares, churches, and staircases with a fanciful mix of convex and concave facades and all manner of putti, griffins, and grotesque masks. It’s easy to cover the town on foot in a single afternoon along its two main arteries, the Corso Vittorio Emanuele and the Via Cavour, which run east to west. Or if you use Noto as your base for exploring the region, as we did, you can walk the streets at a languorous gelato-eating pace at the end of each day, as if you lived there. As we entered

Clockwise from far left: At Caﬀè Sicilia in Noto, where you can get the freshest cannoli with your espresso; almonds growing in the hills around Noto; in the Vendicari Nature Reserve, the ruins of

an eighteenth-century pier once used by tuna ﬁshermen; La Cialoma in Marzamemi; the pool at the Country House Villadorata, a converted eighteenth-century residence in the Noto countryside.

town through the Porta Reale on the Corso Vittorio Emanuele, the imposing facade of San Francesco all’Immacolata Church appeared to rise from the top of an equally imposing set of steps, followed immediately by the Church of Santa Chiara (be sure to check out its oval interior). Outside the San Nicolo Cathedral, with its elaborate two-tiered facade and bell towers, a group of teenage girls eating icecream cones convulsed in exaggerated laughter while pretending not to notice the voluble boys in skinny jeans behind them. Meanwhile, a weathered, middle-aged accordionist played a sentimental tune, while his accomplice, a yellow parakeet, stood sentry on an upturned basket. It’s both melancholic and wry, destitute yet full of beauty. You get the sense that this scene—figures in silhouette, backlit at the day’s end like in an overexposed Kodachrome movie—would have played out much the same even a century ago. X

From left: Spiaggia Marianelli, a secluded beach with lagoons and empty dunes in the Vendicari Nature Reserve; a suite at Seven Rooms in the Palazzo Nicolaci di Villadorata.

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The Baroque refinement of Noto is always surprising against the surrounding rugged landscape.

Notes on Noto: An Insider’s Guide In contrast to big European cities during the summer, this region of southern Italy has all the history of Rome along with the smalltown breezy seaside charm of the Cinque Terre. (As many of us can attest, luring an eight-year-old through the Papal Apartments in Vatican City during an infernal August afternoon can make you never want to get on a plane with a child again.) Until you are in Noto, though, it’s hard to imagine just how close neighboring historic towns like Modica and Ragusa—and any number of Ancient Greek ruins and unspoiled beaches—are to the town center and to each other. This allows families to achieve the summer vacation trifecta of high culture, great food, and truly relaxing beach time—and makes sightseeing, especially with little ones, feel serendipitous rather than onerous.

Getting to Noto— and Beyond It It’s easiest if you can get a ﬂight into Catania, just over an hour from Noto, though many international ﬂights land in Palermo (three hours away). You will need to rent a car, which is easy enough to do at either airport. Fortunately, the main highways—like the A18, which connects Catania to Syracuse and Noto— are smoothly paved. Be sure to request a car with GPS since reception can be spotty if you’re reliant on Google Maps (especially with a limited data plan).

Must-Stop Roadside Meal

If you’re looking for a fantastic lunch on your way from Catania to Noto, I Rizzari, near Agusta in Brucoli, is a worthwhile seafood pilgrimage. The dark interior of this tiny family-run

bar and trattoria opens onto an unwittingly shabby-chic, sun-dappled deck by the sea. Try the sweet local shrimp, mixed seafood pasta with fresh tomatoes, and grilled octopus served on a wooden board.

Eating in Noto Like Summa, a number of Italian mainlander transplants aren’t just spending summers in Sicily, they’re taking up residence here, lured by nostalgia for some back-to-theland Italian ideal. As a result, a handful of charming restaurants have cropped up to serve a reﬁned crowd.

Standout Gelato

In the town center, a visit to the outwardly unassuming 124-year-old Caffè Sicilia, whose fourth-generation co-owner, Corrado Assenza, serves almond-milk granita and cappuccino ghiacciato (iced coffee with almond milk granita), is a must. The Ferran Adrià of pastry, Assenza is constantly evolving his confections, which might include hazelnut sponge cake with pumpkin puree or peach marmalade with a dusting of dark chocolate. Dessert, like the town’s architectural mix and local dialect, defies easy cultural classification, reflecting the French, Greek, Roman, Arab, and North African influences that distinguish Sicily from the rest of Italy. Our server directed us toward a lesser-known specialty: fresh buffalo mozzarella “broken open with your hands, never with a fork,” and topped with citrusy bergamot jam.

Updated Sicilian Classics

Like the intimate space itself— a whitewashed canteen with barrelvaulted ceilings—Marco Baglieri’s dishes at Ristorante Crociﬁsso are a refreshing riﬀ on Sicilian stalwarts. The unusually bright casarecce alla palermitana (pasta with sardines, fennel, and pine nuts) or fresh grilled

octopus and spaghetti with lightly sautéed shrimp and pesto—washed down with a bottle of crisp Etna Bianco—is the kind of dish you can eat every day.

Freshest Catch

The lightly breaded baked swordﬁsh with cherry tomatoes at Ristorante Il Cantuccio turned me into a swordﬁsh lover—at least while I was in Sicily. Our boys devoured the homemade gnocchi with creamy pesto, which was topped with a dramatic heap of ricotta salata shavings.

A Minimalist Approach

At Ristorante Manna Noto, in the Palazzo Nicolaci di Villadorata, the pared-back presentation of dishes like pan-seared octopus with artichokes showcases the chef’s reverence for local ingredients, as well

as a degree of Japanese restraint (the chef’s wife is Japanese). With a mix of mid-century decor and whimsical vintage neon signage, the restaurant presents an informal counterpoint to the hotel’s elegant design.

The Beach Situation Within 5 to 12 miles of central Noto are some of the most secluded sandy beaches not just in Sicily but in all of Italy. The ones closest to town, Eloro-Pizzuta and Eloro, run right into the ruins of the seventh-century B.C. Greek city Eloro. A little farther south are San Lorenzo Beach and Calamosche in the Vendicari Nature Reserve, a protected haven where ﬂamingos, herons, and storks

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Noto before sunset, when the streets come to life with locals on their passeggiata or doing their shopping.

Located steps from the Duomo di San Giorgio in Ragusa Ibla (the lower town), the two-Michelin-star Duomo skews a little formal. Here, chef Ciccio Sultano represents Sicily’s new culinary guard—a native son who pays homage to his mother’s traditional cooking with ambitious dishes like maialino nero (black pork) di Nebrodi.

Local Flavors

are more populous than humans and the pale aqua waters are calm and clean. One great option is to rent lounge chairs and umbrellas at the Agua Beach Resort, in San Lorenzo Noto, for just $12 a day; stay for a light lunch, like a plate of ﬂavorful Pachino tomatoes with mozzarella.

Sun-Dappled Lunch

Just a ten-minute drive south of Agua Beach, you can have a proper sit-down meal in Marzamemi at the seaside Taverna La Cialoma. Order the carpaccio gamberi (raw local shrimp) or the zucchini with shrimp and any simply grilled ﬁsh.

Where Else to Stay Seven Rooms Villadorata is the place to book so you can explore Noto’s historic center like a local, but for a whole diﬀerent take, you might consider spending time in campagna as well.

Rural Escape

Seven Rooms recently opened the Country House Villadorata, ten minutes outside town. It’s an equally luxe property with sleek modern furnishings and a gorgeous zeroentry pool. Rooms with terraces surrounded by citrus, olive, and almond trees are great for decompressing at the end of the day.

Playing House

If you’re traveling with family or friends, consider renting the dreamy yet perfectly understated Villa Zisola for $10,200 a week. The six-bedroom estate sits amid olive, chestnut, and citrus trees and overlooks 125 acres of the Mazzei family’s vineyard, known for its Nero d’Avola. The property, with an idyllic swimming pool, is ten minutes from Noto and ﬁve minutes from Eloro Beach.

Side-Trip One: Ragusa and Modica RAGUSA

An hour northwest of Noto, the town of Ragusa was also decimated by the earthquake in 1693 and rebuilt in the Baroque style. But if Noto is all horizontal breadth, Ragusa spirals improbably atop a hill like something out of Dr. Seuss. The restored Donnafugata Castle exempliﬁes nineteenth-century eclecticism—neoVenetian Gothic and neoclassical elements on a seventeenth-century structure. The trefoil arches in the loggia, man-made caves and mazes, and exotic landscaping are a wonderful folly. It’s impossible to miss the Piazza Duomo, an open, palm tree–ﬁlled reprieve from the town’s narrow alleys. Reward yourself for the climb up with lunch or a gelato.

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Head to La Locandina for the kind of simple homemade seafood pastas that most restaurants tend to overcomplicate, like the fresh taglionini with vongole (clams) and cherry tomatoes. Caravanserraglio, known for its pizza, also has a great seasonal menu of roasted vegetables and ﬁsh cooked in its wood-burning oven.

More Standout Gelato

Gelati DiVini does a memorable take on the ice-cream sandwich—three scoops of ice cream in a brioche bun. It’s also known for inventive ﬂavors like Planeta Rosé (made with wine from a Sicilian vintner), Moscato Fantasia di Limone, and Fica Carube.

MODICA

Just 25 minutes south of Ragusa, Modica is another shining example of Sicilian Baroque architecture, but the layers of Greek, Roman, Arab, and Norman civilization are more evident here. Modica is also the capital of high-end chocolate production, which dates to the 1500s. The methods—as well as those used to make traditional Arab and Spanish cakes—remain the same to this day at the famous Antica Dolceria Bonajuto, run by Pierpaolo Ruta. There is one chic hotel, Casa Talía, if you want to spend the night, and great restaurants.

Culinary Time Travel

As the names suggests, Osteria dei Sapori Perduti (“Osteria of Lost Flavors”) is known for distinctly southern Sicilian cooking—think humbly delicious dishes like pasta con il macco, a brothy tagliolini with fava beans, fennel, and sage, or a classic bollito.

Take Home a Bottle

Enoteca Rappa is a tiny shop that specializes in Sicilian wines, craft beers, honey, jams, meats, and cheeses.

Side-Trip Two: Syracuse and Ortigia If you squint, you can conjure this once-mighty city of 300,000 that at its height defeated an Athenian armada in 413 B.C. Cicero called Syracuse “the greatest Greek city and the most beautiful of them all.” Today, it has one of the best collections of ancient ruins dating back to the eighth century B.C., including a Greek theater and a Roman amphitheater. Spend half a day at the site and the other half wandering the glorious bright-white island of Ortigia, where the Greeks, Romans, and Normans left their collective mark and where a restrained Baroque architectural style prevails. The sun-drenched, café-strewn Piazza del Duomo feels strikingly modern in its openness. Within a small radius is the sixthcentury Temple of Apollo, still largely intact, and the Piazza Archimede, an homage to the native son and mathematician.

Lunch on the Go

From a small shop with an outdoor stall, Caseificio Borderi turns out gigantic sandwiches (for less than $6) made from house-made mozzarella and a choice of artisanal hams and salamis with chopped herbs, oil, and lemon juice. Wash them down with a local beer or Sicilian wine.

Feast of the Senses

Ortigia has a fabulous outdoor food market near the Talete parking area, open every morning but Sunday. Here, tables are piled high with the ripest tomatoes and peaches, fresh swordﬁsh and sea urchins, and you can watch Sicilian vendors do what they do best: shout, gesticulate with big carving knives, and make sure you don’t go home without something memorably delicious.

MAP BY PETER OUMANSKI

The Refined Table

No American road trip looms larger in our collective consciousness than the one bound west. Last summer, Italian-born photographer Renato Dâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;Agostin followed in the footsteps of Bob Dylan and Jack Kerouac, traveling 7,439 miles on his 1983 BMW motorcycle from New York to Los Angeles, developing film in hotel sinks along the way.

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“Everything changes,” D’Agostin says. “It’s hard to believe it is the same country from north to south, east to west. The landscape keeps surprising you.”

Previous page, left: Death Valley, California, at high noon. ”I think Mars is more hospitable,” says D’Agostin. Right: The Grand Canyon. This page, clockwise from top left: Holding a sun-warmed lizard; flora in southern New Mexico; soldiers from a nearby base walk some of White Sands National Monument’s 275 square miles of desert and dunes, made of rare, blindingly bright gypsum; the iconic meander in the Colorado River called Horseshoe Bend; a working farm not far from Malibu; to D’Agostin, the headlight of his motorcycle mimicked the full moon; tourists queue at Niagara Falls; heading toward Birmingham, Alabama, on a small highway leaving the Smoky Mountains.

n rth true

he drive from Princeville down to Hanalei, on the North Shore of Kauai, is one of the better ways on this planet to spend ten minutes. Just past a sleepy one-engine fire station, Kuhio Highway— the island’s only thoroughfare, which snakes along its rounded coast—veers left and descends down a bluff from Princeville’s manicured condo developments into a lush agricultural valley of bright-emerald taro fields set against mountains so deeply, hauntingly green they’re practically blue. (It’s no wonder Kauai stood in for Vietnam in 2008’s Tropic Thunder.) At the base of the hill, amid skinny palm trees, you’ll find a one-lane steel-trussed bridge originally built in 1912. Cross it in the early evening, as the sun drops behind shadowy, cloudcapped peaks, and the mountains texturize, separating into lush layers of dense overgrowth, a verdant orgy of jades, limes, and chartreuse aglow in Hawaii’s famously soft light.

S O M E T H I N G M AG I CA L happens on this drive. At the very least, you look up from your iPhone, and everyone in the car falls silent. People say they are “called” to Kauai—here’s where that begins to sound less Bible-thumpy. My father-in-law discovered it in 1982, when a long layover in Honolulu prompted him to ask an airline employee what other island he should visit. At the airport in Lihue, on Kauai’s South Shore, he rented a car and started driving. A year later, he’d bought a condo in Princeville, the North Shore’s most developed area, where there’s a St. Regis and an 18hole golf course—but no stoplights. For the next two decades, he would fly his three children to Kauai from Washington, D.C., for the summer. My husband and I still come every

other year, if we’re lucky, staying in the house his parents purchased from novelist Haruki Murakami. Each time we drive to Hanalei— usually to grab burritos at Pat’s Taqueria, a reliably delicious taco truck, before hitting one of the near-empty beaches outside town—we revive a long-running fantasy of ours. It’s the one where we pack up our belongings and ditch our hamster-wheel life in New York for a more contemplative existence out here on the most remote of the major Hawaiian islands, just a stone’s throw from the date line, at the last stop before tomorrow. The details inevitably bring us back to earth, but the drive has lost none of its power. Jim Moffat, a celebrated chef from San Francisco, actually did pull the escape hatch.

“I came here on a whim and instantly fell in love with it,” he recalls, grabbing a cold-brewed Maui-grown coffee at the counter of his new artisanal bakery in Hanalei. “I asked my girl if she wanted to raise kids on the beach, and she said yes.” The couple moved here in 2004; he opened Bar Acuda, a perpetually packed tapas restaurant, in 2005; earned a James Beard nod in 2012; and, last year, took over the town’s underwhelming coffee shop and replaced it with the Hanalei Bread Company, which sells insanely delicious $8 chai spice and coconut java drinks alongside homemade millet sandwich bread. Take a seat on the bakery’s wraparound porch for some fantastic peoplewatching—this is the de facto town square, where tattooed surfers, attractive young tourist couples, oddly healthy wild chickens, and, depending on the day, Pierce Brosnan (who has a house here) all pass by. Other than Moffat’s establishments, a new influx of food trucks, and a slight increase in rush-hour traffic, Hanalei has changed little in recent years. There are still no national chain stores, or buildings taller than a coconut tree (this is an actual law on Kauai), and no man who lives here

Previous page, from left: A sunset surf at Hanalei, Kauai’s largest bay, with two miles of beach; Wailua Falls tumbles 80 feet near the island’s eastern shore. This page, from left: Goat’s milk products from Kauai Kunana Dairy are sold at markets around the island; the waters oﬀ the Na Pali Coast, the site of a famous 11mile hike; the Moeller family of Naikela Botanicals, part of Kauai’s growing sustainable farming movement; walking the secluded Secret Beach.

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Like 97 percent of Kauai, the Na Pali Coast is inaccessible by road, meaning you have to hike or kayak in to enjoy its dramatic cliﬀ faces and quiet coves.

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Hanalei, especially, often feels like some secret Hawaii, a last bastion of undiscovered authenticity where it’s still possible to live like a local.

seems to wear a shirt, ever. As night falls, the ring of exquisite beaches framing Hanalei Bay fades to near-black, lit not by high-rises but by the porch lights of a few bungalows on stilts set back in the trees (they appear unassuming but fetch millions). “Sometimes it’s like living on an island in the middle of the ocean!” snorts Moffat with a shrug when an employee finds him on the porch to inform him that his restaurant and bakery have both lost power. Delicious though his food may be, Moffat knows that no one comes to the North Shore of Kauai for a meal. There’s no better way to describe what one does here than the wellworn phrase commune with nature. “It’s a heavy place,” says author and former pro volleyball player Gabby Reece, who spends half the year on Kauai with her husband, big-wave surfer Laird Hamilton, and hosts free morning workouts when she’s in town. “There’s not a lot of white noise or distraction, so you kind of have to deal with yourself.” This is a place where the surf is big, the rain plentiful, and the hiking legendary (many trails end at waterfalls or pristine beaches, like Hanakapi‘ai, the hidden slip of sand two miles into the Na Pali Coast’s famous Kalalau Trail). The North Shore is the last word in beaches, really—a mic drop of sand-meets-sea around every bend in the road—and has been immortalized in films from South Pacific (1958) to The Descendants (2011), making the island an open secret in Hollywood. (Ben Stiller and Bette Midler own homes here, and Mark Zuckerberg recently bought about 700 acres near Kilauea, a former sugar plantation.) While big-name resorts have proliferated on the sunnier South Shore, the North has retained a sort of outlaw anti-glamour, resisting so much as a boutique hotel. Residents have successfully blocked state plans to expand and elevate the bridge into Hanalei, which floods when it rains and bottlenecks traffic at other times, because the plans would have eased the way for tour buses and construction vehicles. As a result, Hanalei, especially, often feels like some secret Hawaii, a last bastion of undiscovered authenticity where it’s still possible to live like a local. Here you can watch Hamilton, who grew up on Kauai, catch perfectly peeling waves at the point break a few hundred yards out from the St. Regis. Or rent a board from the Hanalei Surf Company and ride some yourself at Pine Trees, the narrow beach on Hanalei Bay where local legends Andy and Bruce Irons learned to surf. Back in Princeville, you can walk down an unassuming path and find yourself swimming at

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Queen’s Bath, a gleaming tidal pool carved by lava, amid fish crashed in by the waves, or waiting for a sea turtle to swim by before jumping off low cliffs into the ocean. (Don’t even consider doing this unless it’s summer and the surf is calm; plenty of people have been swept out to sea here.) Later, you’ll want to blow off your dinner reservation and pick up fresh ono at the fish market behind the kitschy Dolphin Restaurant, then make a picnic of it on the beach. Kauai rewards the casual and spontaneous. “So many of the best experiences here are about getting lost,” says Aaron Moeller, 35, a Kauai-raised organic farmer and founder of Naikela Botanicals, a line of locally grown herbal teas and health powders. “Instead of having a destination, just put the wind in your hair. Check the waves at different spots, see what’s happening today.” To understand how the North Shore has retained its end-of-the-earth vibe, never succumbing to a Tulum-like fate, you have to know its past. As people who live here like to tell you, Kauai is the only Hawaiian island that has never been conquered, separated from the others by a wide, ornery channel that thwarted King Kamehameha I, who united the other islands by force in the early nineteenth century (Kauai joined the kingdom by treaty in 1810). Its geographic remoteness has cultivated a sense of separateness, with ancient inhabitants speaking a distinct dialect of Hawaiian. This history informs locals’ identity. “Kauai is kind of the last bastion of fighters,” says Sheila Donnelly Theroux, a luxury publicist on Oahu (and wife of writer Paul Theroux) whose family has lived in Hawaii for four generations and who calls Kauai her favorite island. “The people who live in Hanalei are the reason it’s so retro. I can’t think of another place in Hawaii that’s so preserved in time.”

here were also the hurricanes. Iwa crashed through in 1982, and, a decade later, Iniki, a Category 4, devastated Kauai. The storm, etched in the minds of locals, took years to rebuild from. “We haven’t changed as quickly as we might have if we’d had a vibrant economy for the last 30 years,” says Jan TenBruggencate, a local communications consultant and newspaper reporter. Because Kauai lacks Maui and Oahu’s tourist infrastructure, it occasionally creaks under the weight of the modest crowds that come to admire it. Ke‘e Beach, at the trailhead leading to the Na Pali Coast, has suffered for its famed beauty, with cars clogging the parking lots at the end of the road. It’s one of the few genuinely crowded places on the island, which is why locals tend to avoid it in favor of beaches like Lumahai, where you can pull a car right up to the sand near a stand of ironwood pines. This is where I meet Koral McCarthy, a tanned, blue-eyed thirtysomething swimming with

her four-year-old daughter in the cold, clear river at the beach’s western edge (the ocean here is too rough for swimming). McCarthy grew up a surfer girl in Wainiha, a slip of a town just past Hanalei with a large population of native Hawaiians, one of whom is her husband. She recently opened the Ohana Shop, a stylish anti-souvenir boutique that preserves traditional Hawaiian craftsmanship by selling design-minded objects like hand-carved bowls and miniature surfboards made by one of Kauai’s top board shapers, Bobby Allen. She represents a growing class of young North Shore entrepreneurs who believe Kauai is special, almost mystical, and that its culture and tight community can be preserved with conscious

From left: Hanalei Pier at sunset; a rooster wanders the northeast town of Kilauea; with Kauai’s ideal growing conditions, farmers are harvesting an increasing diversity of crops on the North Shore.

MAP BY PETER OUMANSKI

small business. “There’s always going to be progress,” she says. “But this island has a way of taking care of herself. I don’t think she’ll ever be overrun by anything.”

M O E L L E R I S A LS O a young business owner who’s interested in redefining what it means to make a living here. Today, he’s walking us through his “garden,” a wild, unkempt expanse of herbs and flowers with exotic names like Thai Red Roselle, Panama berry, and Mexican mint marigold, all of which are twice the size of any herbs you’d find at a Whole Foods. “You’ve never tasted fresh stevia before?” he asks me, tearing off a brightgreen leaf. The island still imports roughly 85 percent of its food, but Moeller and other young organic farmers are working to change that, stocking restaurant kitchens across the island with local fruit, vegetables, and meat. He got his real start on the Big Island, at a sustainable operation owned by a tech billionaire, before returning home to Kauai with his wife and young daughters. Here, he connected with Eric and Lyn Taylor, philanthropists from South Africa who had bought 130 acres of undeveloped land on which they planned to run camps for disadvantaged youth. Moeller now farms his massive herbs on two lush, rolling acres that look like paradise—or at least Jurassic Park, parts of which were filmed on land owned by the Taylors’ neighbors. “Kauai has the most idyllic growing conditions in the world,” Moeller says. That’s apparent at Hanalei’s

Kauai Vitals TOUCHING DOWN You can ﬂy nonstop to Kauai’s Lihue Airport from nine U.S. cities, including Denver, Los Angeles, and San Francisco.

GETTING AROUND The best way to navigate is by car. Both Dollar Rent a Car and Avis at Lihue Airport have a solid selection of allterrain vehicles.

HOME BASE Rentals are the way to go on the North Shore, and villa specialist Anne Pawsat-Dressler at Hawaii Hideaways has options ranging from two- to ten-bedroom (mostly beachfront) estates. For a shorter stay, consider the St. Regis on Hanalei Bay.

DON’T HIKE IT ALONE “Travelers don’t realize how wild our landscape is,” says Sue Kanoho of the Kauai Visitors Bureau. “They shouldn’t navigate on their own.” Guides from Outﬁtters Kauai can tell you where and how to explore safely.

Saturday farmers’ market, which is rapturously attended by almost everyone on the North Shore and overflows with locally grown chard, bananas, juicy papayas, cacao, and coconuts with straws in them. But few communal events are as pleasurable as drinking ginger margaritas around sunset at the St. Regis in Princeville. The hotel’s grand marble floors and dark wood paneling are delightfully out of step with the food trucks and barefoot culture of this place, and its bar terrace overlooks the east side of Hanalei Bay, giving everyone here—tourists and locals alike—a straight shot of the mountains and the electric-tangerine sun descending over the water. Tonight, Lyndie Irons, widow of pro surfer Andy (who passed away several years ago at age 32), her brother-in-law, Bruce Irons, and their respective children are at a table on the porch, glamorous surf royalty holding court up here in the sky as a smattering of locals paddle out to the break to catch the day’s last waves down below. “It never gets old,” Lyndie Irons had told me earlier in the week. “The beauty here, we never take it for granted—and I’ve traveled the world.” X J U N E / J U LY 2 0 1 6 / C O N D É N A S T T R AV E L E R

As a new generation of architects and designers take charge, Portugal’s ancient capital is emerging from a long deep freeze.

lisbon’s new lines 94

JULIA COOKE P H O T O G R A P H S B Y MATTHIEU SALVAING BY

a recent Saturday afternoon, the broad Ribeira das Naus esplanade overflowed with Lisboans. At one end of the waterfront park, a kiosk did a brisk business in Super Bock beer and fried croquettes. Couples sat on a terraced limestone “beach” abutting the Tagus River, while joggers trailed dogs on a walkway above the water. Soaring wire sculptures towered over hulking stone benches, and stalky trees grew out of curious plastic planters. On landscaped lawns pitched toward the river, towels and blankets formed a mosaic of sunbathers; behind them, blinding-white houses and terra-cotta roofs dominoed up the hillsides. Later that evening, farther inland, a smartly dressed crowd filed into the Teatro Thalia for a violin concert, past four sphinxes guarding a neoclassical entrance of pale Lisbon limestone. The theater rose beyond it, a tawny concrete box wrapped on the ground level in black mirrored glass. Inside, the auditorium itself was enveloped by the

Previous page, from left: Terra-cotta roofs near Lisbon’s harbor; the promenade in Almada, across the Tagus River from Lisbon. This page, clockwise from above: Conceptual artist Leonel Moura designed these planters, which double as seats, for Praça do Comércio Square; Manuel Henriques at the Lisbon Architecture Triennale’s headquarters in Sinel de Cordes Palace; a dusty rose–colored government building in the capital.

‘

We are interested in breaking with the visual cliché of traditional Portuguese architecture.”

ruins of an older structure: an irregular tumble of brick arches that surrounded the stage and the audience, like a crown held in place by reinforcing concrete. Five years ago, none of this existed. Teatro Thalia’s columns fronted the overgrown shell of the Count of Farrobo’s private opera theater, inaugurated in 1843 and left to molder after a fire destroyed the building 20 years later. Along the riverfront, trash littered the rocky coastline. Such scenes of rot and ruin were hardly unique: The city council estimates that 12,000 of Lisbon’s buildings—roughly 20 percent—sit in varying stages of decay. Not for long, it would seem. In the next few years, the city will welcome a major art, architecture, and technology museum, dozens of restored and landscaped public squares, several high-rises, a sprawling new cruise terminal, and countless additional shops, studios, and cultural spaces. The 2008 global economic crisis left Portugal’s unemployment rate among college graduates at nearly 40 percent—a potentially devastating blow for Lisbon’s burgeoning art and architecture scenes, and for a city then being touted as Europe’s next design hub. But initiatives launched in the wake of the crisis and aimed at retaining and empowering local talent have begun to bear fruit. Once-stalled building projects and renovations are nearing completion. Local firms are subverting expectations with inventive, energetic results. Lisbon’s foretold boom may have turned out differently than expected, but it’s a boom nonetheless. “We are interested in breaking with the visual cliché of traditional Portuguese architecture,” Diogo Lopes told me in 2014. Warm and thoughtful, the Lisbon-born architect was a partner at Barbas Lopes Arquitectos, one of two firms behind the restoration of Teatro Thalia. He was appointed chief curator of this year’s Lisbon Architecture Triennale before his recent death, at age 43, from cancer. “Portuguese architecture can be described cartoonishly as ‘white architecture,’ deliberately plain, relying on craftsmanship and heavy materials,” Lopes said. He credited the persistence of these traits to their inherent quality, utility, and ease of use. Lopes’s prescription for innovation, therefore, was to combine historic references with material experimentation, unorthodox thinking, persistence, and pragmatism. He had no interest in just changing the facades of otherwise traditional structures. “We’ve had to reclaim the right and the need to build this city, to intervene in the city on all its scales, not just with lightweight interventions,” he said. And Lopes was not alone. For the last decade, a loose collective of local architects, along with a few foreigners, has been pushing the ancient city into the future.

AT P R E S E N T, the skyline seems to hold as many cranes as cathedral spires. Much of the development is focused on two areas: the Tagus waterfront, in downtown Lisbon, and the suburb of Belém, which has become a culture hub. While many of these emerging structures make sly reference to the Portuguese vernacular, none of them will be remotely traditional, or deliberately plain. One has already arrived: The new National Coach Museum, which opened in Belém last year, was designed by the Pritzker Prize–winning Brazilian architect Paulo Mendes da Rocha. Two galleries, set inside a massive white box, sit atop thick concrete columns and cubes of glass and steel. Da Rocha’s spare architecture contrasts cheekily with the museum’s centuries-old contents—velvet-and-silk carriages painted with cherubs and angels, their Baroque lines set against thin slashes of windows. Like so much of what’s rising in Lisbon these days, the J U N E / J U LY 2 0 1 6 / C O N D É N A S T T R AV E L E R

museum slings Old Portugal aggressively into the twenty-first century. Across the road, the final touches are being added to the Museum for Art, Architecture, and Technology (MAAT), a soon-to-open cultural center funded by EDP, Portugal’s electric company, and designed by English architect Amanda Levete’s firm, AL_A. Levete has sheathed the museum in shimmery, fish-like ceramic scales, a clever reference to the tiles cladding so many of Lisbon’s buildings and a visual corrective to the hulking brick turn-of-last-century power station next door. Low and curvaceous, MAAT’s form calls to mind the back of a whale, or an especially voluptuous serpent emerging from the riverbank. Back in Lisbon, up in the hills, the Palácio Sinel de Cordes similarly slams old and new together. The eighteenth-century palazzo—with its double-height ceilings, grand staircase, and faded murals—served as a primary school before it was abandoned in 2006. Six years later, the city lent it to the Lisbon Architecture Triennale, which, in partnership with a local design firm, has been renovating the space to provide offices for an architecture magazine, a design collective, and five other startups. A second phase of renovations will install a restaurant and bookshop in time for this year’s Triennale in October.

hat all this is happening just a few years after the economic crisis is perhaps surprising—and much of the architectural energy rippling through Lisbon today can be credited to a remarkably progressive and design-savvy city council. Architect Manuel Salgado, who along with Vittorio Gregotti conceived the Belém Cultural Center, one of Portugal’s prized institutions, has served as deputy mayor and head of urban planning for about nine years. Under his leadership, the city has introduced tax breaks for building renovations, sponsored community-oriented design projects, and offered leasing grants for small businesses. These and other policies were intended in part to keep unemployed young architects and designers from fleeing for Brazil, northern Europe, or Dubai in search of jobs— and indeed, even as the bigger firms downsized, younger firms took the bait and stayed in town. The new generation is more open to creative integrations of disciplines—architecture and art, architecture and food, architecture and advocacy, architecture and performance—according to Triennale deputy director Manuel Henriques. “When you go into a field and there’s no jobs in what you were trained for, you adapt,” he told me. “The context forces you to make connections between different subjects.” Today, Lisbon is blooming with collaborations and cross-pollinations. Local architecture firm Artéria teamed up with a group of activists in Mouraria, one of the city’s poorest yet most historic neighborhoods, to renovate and restore a decrepit building. The resulting cultural space, Mouradia—all polished concrete and bright-blue paint—hosts free DJ classes for teens and draws the neighborhood’s young artists for wine and Saturday-night concerts on the plaza outside. Meanwhile, a team of engineers and a designer founded Fruta Feia, a cooperative that’s significantly cut down on food waste in Lisbon. And the shop Cortiço & Netos, run by four brothers who inherited the business from their grandfather, offers a line of design goods composed of vintage tiles from demolished buildings and defunct manufacturers.

‘

The new generation is more open to creative integrations of disciplines: Lisbon is blooming with collaborations and cross-pollinations.

Counterclockwise from above: The Subvert Studio architecture and design ﬁrm’s multidisciplinary team at a pavilion created for the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation; Teatro Thalia’s performance space; at the Mercado da Ribeira, which was renovated in 2014.

Upriver from Belém’s museums, ambitious projects on downtown Lisbon’s waterfront are again moving forward after a recessioninduced hiatus. A pair of mixed-use towers by the award-winning local firm Aires Mateus opened last year, and work continues on the new cruise terminal and a surrounding park. Last year, a citysponsored competition put the winners in charge of renovating 31 plazas around Lisbon. And the heady list of design projects—be they grass-roots or starchitect-driven—goes on. There’s even a new walkway up to the iconic Castelo de São Jorge, making the hilltop castle wheelchair-accessible for the first time. And yet the change is measured enough that Lisbon still looks like itself. Current architects are worldly, modern, and inventive, but Portuguese craftsmanship, materials, and history all remain central to their projects. Product lines like Cortiço & Netos’s recontextualize traditional materials; new buildings nod to old. “We have a generation of architects who’ve studied and worked abroad, yes,” Henriques said. “But we still use a lot of traditional Portuguese materials and techniques—and we use them really, really well.” X J U N E / J U LY 2 0 1 6 / C O N D É N A S T T R AV E L E R

Tips, tricks, and miscellany: Our editors’ guide to navigating the world. GOOD NEWS JetBlue will add its popular business-class-style Mint seats to more than 70 transcontinental and Caribbean daily ﬂights in early 2017. Bring on the fully ﬂat seats, legit food (heirloom tomato salad, lobster risotto), and Birchbox beauty goodies.

BAD NEWS Virgin America—one of our Readers’ Choice Awards mainstays—is no more. Alaska Airlines is buying the carrier for $2.6 billion (plus $1.4 billion in debt), which means the beloved brand, and its mood-lit planes, will cease to exist in 2018.

U N B E L I E VA B L E N E W S With the goal of showing “real Sweden” to the world, the tourism board for the Nordic nation launched the Swedish Number. Dial 46-771793-336 and be connected to a random Swede to chat about, well, whatever you’d like.

THE M U LTI G EN ER AT I O N A L SAG AS TH AT E V ERYO N E W I LL B E TA L K I N G A B O UT T H I S S U M M ER

The Nearly Indestructible Camera

Not exactly beach reading, these books will be fodder for your own family reunion.

The $279 Olympus TG-870 is waterproof, drop-proof, crushproof, and sand-proof. In other words, it’s built to withstand most summer vacations. Plus, its 16 MP camera sensor is better than your smartphone’s, and thanks to built-in Wi-Fi, you can easily share your photos on Instagram the second you take ’em. Unless you’re underwater (getolympus.com).

$177 Average cost of a fivestar hotel room last year in Panama City, which, according to Hotels.com, is home to the world’s most affordable luxury hotels. The most popular five-star property in the city is the Trump Ocean Club International Hotel and Tower Panama.

100

Brooklyn’s Coney Island.

The Case for Visiting the Big City Right Now “With everyone heading to the coast, great hotels like the St. Regis in New York have more empty rooms in summer, which translates to deals for travelers,” says Century Travel’s Laura Epstein. “You’re more likely, for example, to get a free third night during a long weekend break. And city hotel room rates are about 20 percent lower than in the peak seasons (Fashion Week, the December holidays). Be flexible with dates, if you can. If a hotel has holes, they’re more inclined to offer you great savings for a room on those nights, so talk to them when inquiring and see what you can get.”

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Homegoing, Yaa Gyasi (Knopf) This buzzed-about debut from a young Ghanaian writer tells the fate of the descendants of two half sisters in eighteenth-century Ghana, one raised wealthy and the other enslaved and shipped oﬀ to America.

I L L U S T R AT I O N S BY DA N I LO AG U T O L I

PHOTOGRAPH BY NATHAN HARGER

Barkskins, Annie Proulx (Scribner) In her ﬁrst novel in over a decade, Proulx follows the families of two French immigrants in 1600s Quebec through a 736-page, 300-year-spanning epic about colonization and deforestation.

You’re already fl flying all the way to Rio de Janeiro, so why not add another stop or two? Here, 12 South American destinations that are easily reached by plane, car, or helicopter from the Games.

4 hours to Manaus

The adventure begins in Manaus, where you’ll hop aboard the 12-passenger Gadean, a 140-foot yacht, for a weeklong charter cruising one of the world’s longest rivers. You’ll see pink dolphins, barbecue on sandbars, and ﬁsh for piranhas along the way.

1. Tackle the Amazon.

Don’t Go Home After the Olympics

Travel Intel Rio 2016

I L L U S T R AT I O N BY P E T E R O U M A N S K I

The upper-class enclave of Búzios caught Americans’ attention in 1964 when Brigitte Bardot famously stole away to the town with her Brazilian boyfriend Bob Zagury. Since then, celebrities from

4. Summer like a celeb.

The country’s capital, Brasília, is ﬁlled with Oscar Niemeyer’s monumental, freeﬂowing buildings, including the National Congress and the Metropolitan Cathedral. 1¾ hours

3. Make an architectural pilgrimage.

Brazil isn’t known for nautical exploration, but there’s no better way to do Angra dos Reis, the gateway to roughly 350 small islands, than by sea. Hop a ferry or charter a sailboat and crew with the help of a local travel specialist (see “How to Make It Happen”) to hit the beach at ruggedly beautiful Ilha Grande—where you can stay at the secluded, shorefront Asalem hotel— and other unspoiled isles. 35 minutes or 3 hours

2. Sail through actual paradise.

Stay in Brazil

Book a room at Belmond Hotel das Cataratas—it’s inside Iguaçu National Park, so you’ll have the breathtaking views and trails all to yourself in the mornings and evenings, when other visitors aren’t allowed. 2¼ hours

5. Do South America’s mammoth falls.

Madonna to Mick have dipped their toes in these blue-green waters. If you have days to spare, rent a villa; for shorter stays, use Casas Brancas Boutique Hotel & Spa, which is close to the beaches, as your home base. 35 minutes or 3 hours

Everyone loves the gorgeous low-slung sixteenth-century town of Paraty, known for its small hotels in renovated mansions (at Casa Turquesa, every guest gets a pair of Havaianas on arrival). There’s not much to do but hit the palm-backed sandy beaches,

8. Be charmed by Brazil’s prettiest colonial town.

With nearly 600 square miles of pristine white sand dunes, rivers, and freshwater ponds, Lençóis Maranhenses National Park makes for a surreal adventure. Whether you explore by four-wheeldrive or kitesurf board, the otherworldly landscape rivals anything on the continent (including the Bolivian salt ﬂats). Getting around takes time, so budget at least a week. Lodges and cabins are basic, but some tour companies (like Matueté) provide their own upgrades. 3¼ hours + 4 hours

7. Trek a mind-blowing sandscape.

The indoor/outdoor contemporary art museum Inhotim is surprising—not just for its size (buildings and installations are scattered across 2,500 lushly landscaped acres) but also for its oﬀ-the-beaten-path location in the Brazilian countryside. The collection, owned by mining magnate Bernardo de Mello Paz, has art-world cred, with works by Olafur Eliasson and Anish Kapoor. 70 minutes + 2 hours

6. See a mining baron’s impressive art collection.

Average cost of a ﬂight from the U.S. to Rio this August, according to Kayak. For September trips, it drops to $754.

DOLLARS

1,001

“Most travelers say that a visit to Paraty is the highlight of their entire stay in Brazil,” says travel specialist Jill Siegel. “Rain forest– covered mountains frame turquoise waters, and the village seems to have stopped in time.”

In the walkable seaside capital of Montevideo, you’ll ﬁnd pastel colonial-era buildings and restaurants like Jacinto, where chef Lucía Soria serves light, vegetable-centric dishes such as a leek and pumpkin tart. Stay at the 15-room Alma Histórica Boutique Hotel, overlooking downtown’s Zabala Square. 3 hours

11. Tick Uruguay oﬀ your list.

Book a Park Suite at the Palacio Duhau–Park Hyatt in leafy Recoleta, have a woodgrilled rib eye at Miranda in Palermo, then drink Fernet and Coca-Cola at the Faena until well past midnight. 3½ hours

10. Party in Buenos Aires.

Or Go Beyond

Fashion types and lapsed hippies have turned the remote ﬁshing village of Trancoso into an idyllic, stylish escape on the Atlantic. Stay at the 11-bungalow Uxua Casa Hotel & Spa, opened in 2009 by former Diesel creative director Wilbert Das, who ﬁlled it with vintage furnishings and colorful art. 1½ hours + 1½ hours

9. Relax on the beach with the beautiful people.

but after ﬁghting crowds in Rio, that may be exactly what you’re looking for. 45 minutes or 4 hours

If the idea of driving Brazil’s famously chaotic highways doesn’t sound like a vacation, call on Brazil travel experts Paul Irvine of Dehouche, Jill Siegel of South American Escapes, or Martin Frankenberg of Matueté, who can coordinate drivers, guides, and logistics. Find them at cntraveler.com/ travel-specialists.

How to Make It Happen

With great hotels (The Singular), restaurants (Boragó), and wine bars (Bocanáriz), Chile’s capital is one of South America’s best food cities. 4¾ hours

12. Eat and drink your way through Santiago.

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Travel Intel OMBUDSMAN

Checked Please Last summer, I flew to Bologna, Italy, on British Airways for a cycling vacation. I checked my bike and gear, and when they didn’t arrive on time, the airline said that it would reimburse me for a temporary bike rental and the purchase of new cycling shoes and clothes while it tracked down my things. But when I filed my receipts for a total of $759.87, my refund request stalled. Can you help? Tom H., Squamish, B.C.

Reader Tom H. contacted British Airways multiple times about his refund, but it wasn’t until Ombudsman called that he got his money back. If you’d rather avoid the hassle, consider cutting your airline out of the equation entirely by using a private shipper. Luggage Forward, for example, guarantees on-time delivery of bags and is particularly handy when sending bulky items such as golf clubs, surfboards, and—yep—bikes.

Need help solving a travel problem? Ombudsman offers advice and mediation: E-mail ombudsman@cntraveler.com.

M O R E A R T TO LOV E London’s Tate Modern will open a new Herzog & de Meuron–designed wing called the Switch House on June 17, increasing the size of the museum by a massive 60 percent. Here are three tips on making the most of a visit, from members of the Tate team.

16,000 Miles Logged Last Year

Architect Andres Soliz Paz, of the firm Escobedo Soliz, whose Weaving the Courtyard installation takes over N.Y.C.’s MoMA PS1 this summer, on the importance of airport design and a long playlist.

On a flight, I always

My favorite airport is

2. Don’t Miss This Piece Solemn Process, an abstract, room-size, multimedia installation by Romania’s Ana Lupaş.

The first thing I do

in a hotel room is

3. BYO Guide The new Tate app has rich annotations on every piece in the collection and helpful maps for navigating the museum complex.

The next city I want to visit is

1. Get There Early The wing’s ﬁrst exhibition— of twentieth-century photography collected by Sir Elton John—will draw crowds, so be there by 10 A.M., when the doors open. Weekdays are typically less traﬃcked than weekends.

7 CONDÉ NAST TRAVELER IS A REGISTERED TRADEMARK OF ADVANCE MAGAZINE PUBLISHERS INC. COPYRIGHT © 2016 CONDÉ NAST. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. PRINTED IN THE U.S.A. VOLUME 51, NO. 6, CONDÉ NAST TRAVELER (ISSN 0893-9683) is published monthly (except for a combined issue in June/July) by Condé Nast, which is a division of Advance Magazine Publishers Inc. PRINCIPAL OFFICE: Condé Nast, One World Trade Center, New York, NY 10007. S.I. Newhouse, Jr., Chairman Emeritus; Charles H. Townsend, Chairman; Robert A. Sauerberg, Jr., President & Chief Executive Officer; David E. Geithner, Chief Financial Officer; Jill Bright, Chief Administrative Officer. Periodicals postage paid at New York, New York, and at additional mailing offices. Canadian Goods and Services Tax Registration No. 123242885-RT0001. POSTMASTER: SEND ALL UAA TO CFS. (SEE DMM 507.1.5.2.); NON-POSTAL AND MILITARY FACILITIES: SEND ADDRESS CORRECTIONS TO CONDÉ NAST TRAVELER, Box 37629, Boone, Iowa 50037-0629. FOR SUBSCRIPTIONS, ADDRESS CHANGES, ADJUSTMENTS, OR

Number of weeks in advance you should book your Labor Day airfare for the best deal, according to the ﬂight-search site Hipmunk. This year, that means buy on July 18.

BACK ISSUE INQUIRIES: Please write to CONDÉ NAST TRAVELER, Box 37629, Boone, Iowa 50037-0629, call 800-777-0700, or e-mail subscriptions@conde nast traveler.com. Amoco Torch Club members write to Amoco Torch Club, Box 9014, Des Moines, Iowa 50306. Please give both new and old address as printed on most recent label. Subscribers: If the Post Office alerts us that your magazine is undeliverable, we have no further obligation unless we receive a corrected address within one year. If, during your subscription term or up to one year after, the magazine becomes undeliverable, or you are ever dissatisfied with your subscription, let us know. You will receive a full refund on all unmailed issues. First copy of new subscription will be mailed within four weeks after receipt of order. Address all editorial, business, and production correspondence to CONDÉ NAST TRAVELER, One World Trade Center, New York, NY 10007. For reprints, please e-mail reprints @ conde nast .com or call Wright’s Media 877652-5295. For reuse permissions, please e-mail contentlicensing @ conde nast .com or call 800897-8666. Visit us online at cn traveler.com. To subscribe to other Condé Nast magazines

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Souvenir

When my dad was 15 years old, he was a paperboy in Staten Island, New York, and entered the Young Columbus contest sponsored by the newspaper and Parade magazine. His essay won him an all-expense-paid trip to Portugal and Spain alongside 92 other paperboys from around the country. On April 15, 1965, my grandparents dropped off their son, who’d never been farther than Washington, D.C., at JFK’s then newish TWA Terminal by Eero Saarinen. “It’s fascinating that my parents were fine with handing me off to strangers for two weeks,” my dad recalls. “All they asked was when they had to pick me up.” On Easter Sunday he saw a bullfight in Lisbon, then he and the group were off to the beaches of Gibraltar and the Alhambra in Granada. In Madrid, the last stop, my dad snuck out after curfew. “I remember walking around the city alone. I felt so free.” He doesn’t remember exactly where he picked up this castanet—“maybe at a flamenco club?”— but he bought it, along with a silk scarf and an ashtray, for my grandmother. “Though I did bring home a souvenir for myself,” he says. “It was a Beatles record I found in Madrid titled Dinero.” L AU R E N D E C A R L O , A R T I C L E S E D I T O R 106

C O N D É N A S T T R AV E L E R / J U N E / J U LY 2 0 1 6

P H O T O G R A P H BY S T E P H E N L E W I S

PROP STYLING BY ELIZABETH PRESS

His Longest Route