T Travel Spring 2010

The New York Times Style Magazine

hot spots

TRAVEL SPRING 2010 Hawaii Volcanoes National Park

PR E SE N T I NG

WALDORF=ASTORIA NEW YORK | NEW YORK, NY WALDORF ASTORIA ORLANDO | ORLANDO, FL WALDORF ASTORIA PARK CITY | PARK CITY, UT ARIZONA BILTMORE | PHOENIX, AZ THE BENTLEY HOTEL | LONDON, UK BOCA BEACH CLUB | BOCA R ATON, FL BOCA R ATON RESORT | BOCA R ATON, FL THE BOULDERS RESORT & GOLDEN DOOR SPA | SCOTTSDALE, AZ CASA MARINA RESORT | KEY WEST, FL EDGEWATER BEACH HOTEL | NAPLES, FL EL CONQUISTADOR RESORT | FAJARDO, PUERTO RICO EL SAN JUAN HOTEL & CASINO | SAN JUAN, PUERTO RICO GR AND WAILEA | MAUI, HI LA QUINTA RESORT & CLUB | LA QUINTA, CA LAS CASITAS RESORT | FAJARDO, PUERTO RICO NAPLES GR ANDE BEACH RESORT | NAPLES, FL QASR AL SHARQ | JEDDAH, SAUDI AR ABIA THE REACH RESORT | KEY WEST, FL ROME CAVALIERI | ROME, ITALY THE ROOSEVELT

| NEW ORLEANS, LA

TRIANON PALACE | VERSAILLES, FR ANCE WALDORF ASTORIA SHANGHAI | SHANGHAI, CHINA (Opening 2010) THE BEACH HOUSE | MANAFARU ISLAND, MALDIVES (Opening 2010) SYON PARK HOTEL | LONDON, UK (Opening 2010) WALDORF ASTORIA BERLIN | BERLIN, GERMANY (Opening 2011) WALDORF ASTORIA JERUSALEM

| JERUSALEM, ISR AEL (Opening 2011)

WALDORF ASTORIA BEIJING | BEIJING, CHINA (Opening 2012) WALDORF ASTORIA BEVERLY HILLS | BEVERLY HILLS, CA (Opening 2013) WALDORF ASTORIA MONTREAL | MONTREAL, CANADA (Opening 2013)

©2010 Hilton Worldwide

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M ACY’S

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CONTENTS Travel Spring 2010

T 8 CONTRIBUTORS 11 REMIX

It’s all about . . . going back to the land, Bordeaux’s boom, art in Africa, the Chopin museum, battle of the Williamsburgs, hotel nostalgia, Madrid style and Beirut’s new groove.

43 TALK 44 How a glamorous resort is stirring up a quiet corner of the American West. By Andrea Bennett. 50 Epicenters. By Stephen Metcalf.

52 At a Utah tennis camp, a novice comes out swinging.

By Gerald Marzorati. 56 The art of making schnapps is thriving in the

Austrian Alps. By John Wray.

71 AGENDA: ECO-TRIPPING Hotels, restaurants and even entire cities are jumping on the biofueled bandwagon — without giving up the glamour. By Alexandra Zissu

83 BUZZ OFF Artwork by Jorge Pardo

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84 THE VANISHING POINT The spectacular terrain of Australia’s Top End belies a harsh landscape where the native wildlife population is on the verge of collapse. By Verlyn Klinkenborg. Photographs by Olaf Otto Becker.

90 PROFILE IN STYLE The eco-crusader David de Rothschild is an old-school explorer in a brave new world. Next stop: Trash Island. By Alix Browne

92 NAUGHTY BY NATURE On the Big Island of Hawaii, Mother Earth gets all hot and bothered.

By Maura Egan. Photographs by Raymond Meier.

98 PALERMO PRIVATA An intimate city full of art and ruins reveals quiet wonders around every piazza. By Jim Lewis. Photographs by Domingo Milella.

110 TIMELESS The Barneys fashion director Julie Gilhart goes for clothes with a conscience. By Sandra Ballentine

Copyright © 2010 The New York Times

CONTRIBUTORS EDITOR IN CHIEF

JORGE PARDO For a trippy take on our trademark ‘‘T’’ (‘‘Buzz Off,’’ Page 83), we called on the Cuban-born artist Jorge Pardo. Pardo has been known to make art that works — as in clocks, chairs, lamps and even a sailboat (far right). His hilltop house in Los Angeles was first conceived as an exhibit for the Museum of Contemporary Art. He travels widely for work, recently visiting London, Madrid and Mérida, on Mexico’s Yucatán peninsula. A virtual exhibition of Pardo’s genre-bending oeuvre — sculptures and paintings rendered in photomural wallpaper — continues through May at the Irish Museum of Modern Art in Dublin, and another Pardo show opens May 6 at the Friedrich Petzel Gallery in New York.

EXECUTIVE EDITOR MANAGING EDITOR ONL INE DIRECTOR EDITOR AT L A RG E

Stefano Tonchi Andy Port George Gene Gustines Horacio Silva Lynn Hirschberg

TRAVEL T RAVEL EDITOR DEPUTY T RAVEL EDITOR

Maura Egan Jeffries Blackerby

FASHION FA S H I O N DIRECTOR / WO M E N FASHION DIRECTOR / M EN FE A T U RE S DIRECTOR BE AUTY / STYLE DIRECTOR SENIOR MARKET / FA S H I O N EDITOR ASSOCIATE FA S H I O N EDITOR FASHION ASSIST ANTS

Anne Christensen Bruce Pask Armand Limnander Sandra Ballentine Melissa Ventosa Martin Bifen Xu Lindsey Gathright, Jason Rider

ART CRE AT IVE DIRECTOR SENIOR AR T DIRECTOR SENIOR DE SIGNER DE SIGNERS PHOTOGRAPHY DIRECTOR SENIOR PHOTOGRAPHY EDITOR PHOTOGRAPHY EDITOR CONTRIBUTING PHOTO EDITOR ASSOCIATE PHOTOGRAPHY EDITOR

DESIGN DE SIGN EDITOR DEPUTY DE SIGN EDITOR MARKET EDITOR

FEATURES C O PY EDITORS

RE S E A RC H EDITORS

FE A T U RE S ASSOCIATE S

ALEXANDRA ZISSU ‘‘I am a green goddess,’’ proclaims Alexandra Zissu, who penned this issue’s guide to eco-tripping (‘‘The Little Green Book,’’ Page 71) and writes books on green living. (Her latest is ‘‘The Conscious Kitchen.’’) Zissu moonlights as a ‘‘greenproofer,’’ which means she’ll scour your home ‘‘from carpets . . . to face cream’’ and find safer/greener alternatives. ‘‘I grew up in the West Village, and it’s very crucial to me that urbanites know they can still be green,’’ she says. ‘‘Everyone thinks I live in a field in Maine.’’ Zissu is now writing a ‘‘sustainable meat manifesto’’ with the zealous upstate butchers at Fleisher’s. ‘‘I’m trying to convince people that they want to make proscuitto at home,’’ she says.

Pilar Viladas Alix Browne Andreas Kokkino

Ethan Hauser, Anita Gates, Eric Grode Joy Dietrich, John Cochran, Andrew Gensler, Andrew Gillings, Alessia Pirolo Adam Kepler, Stephen Heyman

PRODUCTION PRODUCTION MANAGER PRODUCTION EDITORS

Alison Colby Trina Robinson, Julia Röhl

ONLINE DEPUTY ONL INE DIRECTOR PRODUCERS

PHOTO P RO D U C E R WE B DE SIGNER

Christine Muhlke Joseph Plambeck, Sylvia Rupani-Smith Dangi Chu Francesco Bertelli

MAGAZINE.COM Go to nytimes.com/tmagazine for the online T experience, including daily posts, more images and exclusive columns, videos and interactive features, all spanning our universe of fashion, design, style, travel, culture and food.

DOMINGO MILELLA A ‘‘clash of archaic and contemporary cultures’’ underlies Domingo Milella’s photographs, whether they’re taken amid a heap of garbage in Mexico City or in a crumbling courtyard in the Sicilian capital (‘‘Palermo Privata,’’ Page 98). ‘‘Palermo has a facade of glory that hides a recent past of failure — it’s a good metaphor for all of southern Italy,’’ he says. Accordingly, Palermo wasn’t a far cry from his hometown, Bari (far left), at the heel of Italy’s boot. ‘‘Southern Italy is still so provincial,’’ says Milella, 28, who studied at the School of Visual Arts in New York. ‘‘They still think photography is just for weddings and calendars.’’ STEPHEN HEYMAN

WEB EXCLUSIVE • STYLE MAPS Travel around the globe with our interactive Style Maps. Plan where to visit and what to see, eat and buy while you’re there.

On the cover: Hawaii Volcanoes National Park. Photograph by Raymond Meier. Louis Vuitton bag, $3,440. Go to louisvuitton.com.

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FROM TOP, FROM LEFT: JODY ASANO; FROM JORGE PARDO; FROM VERLYN KLINKENBORG (2); NINA ROBERTS; FROM ALEXANDRA ZISSU; DOMINGO MILELLA (2).

VERLYN KLINKENBORG A member of the New York Times editorial board, Verlyn Klinkenborg began his career in letters as an English professor (with a Ph.D. from Princeton) but bolted after finding academic prose ‘‘unreadable and useless.’’ His Times pieces betray a bucolic streak (he often writes ‘‘Rural Life’’ essays), and his last book, ‘‘Timothy; Or, Notes of an Abject Reptile,’’ was told from the perspective of a tortoise living in the 18th century. In ‘‘The Vanishing Point’’ (Page 84), Klinkenborg discovers Australia’s Top End, the site of some troubling environmental quirks, like a glut of poisonous frogs. He lives (and farms) in rural New York and is teaching writing this spring at Pomona College.

David Sebbah Christopher Martinez Natalie Do Nicole Huganir, Julie Mattei-Benn Kathy Ryan Judith Puckett-Rinella Scott Hall Natasha Lunn Rory Walsh

Which Emirates’ destination is this?

It’s perched on the banks of the majestic Swan River.

Cairo Birmingham Karachi SĂŁo Paulo Tripoli San Francisco Rome Peshawar Kuwait City Ahmedabad Islamabad Bangkok Accra Paris New York Mumbai London Guangzhou Tunis Johannesburg Vienna Newcastle Toronto Entebbe

Singapore Jeddah Doha Thiruvananthapuram Moscow Luanda Lahore Beijing Brisbane Chennai Sydney Khartoum Dhaka Zurich Jakarta Dubai Hamburg Perth Munich Shanghai Lagos Sana’a Delhi Tokyo

Athens Seoul Cape Town Nairobi Malta Hyderabad Venice Istanbul Beirut Durban Osaka Melbourne Damascus Bangalore Los Angeles Frankfurt MalĂŠ Christchurch Bahrain Casablanca Manila Nice Dusseldorf Kuala Lumpur

Amman Colombo Tehran Manchester Seychelles Hong Kong Auckland Addis Ababa Kochi Houston Dammam Kozhikode Milan Muscat Abidjan Cochin Riyadh Larnaca Glasgow Kolkata Mauritius Dar es Salaam

Enter to win two roundtrip tickets to anywhere we fly at emirates.com/destinationquiz Fly Emirates. Keep Discovering.

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EMMA HARDY

IT S ALL ABOUT...

Back to the Land . . . Bordeaux’s Boom . . . Art in Africa . . . The Beirut Scene . . . Hotel Nostalgia.

This season, stylish travelers are indulging their pastoral fantasies.

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THE GREAT OUTDOORS

Greener Pastures Today’s travelers are joining the farm league.

J

ust as bushy beards and Hunter boots have captured the pastoral fantasies of the urban fashion tribe, a taste for field and stream is driving the travel avant-garde.

Nowadays, rural pleasures — whether it’s picking your own asparagus or indulging your inner ranger — have given rise to a new breed of back-to-the-land destinations.

Membership in Worldwide Opportunities on Organic Farms (wwoofusa.org), an organization that matches ‘‘wwoofers’’ with farms where they’re expected to work for room and board, rose last year by almost 10,000. And they’re not just college kids. Jane Eckert, founder of the national agritourism registry Ruralbounty.com, says that in the last few years there’s been a dramatic surge in people seeking a ‘‘simpler life.’’ Whether in reaction to economic uncertainty or as a desire to go back to their roots, Eckert says, ‘‘they are coming to the countryside and wanting to live the life they can’t have in the city.’’

Along with the agritourist has risen a new kind of country squire. James Manley, a banker, always dreamed of owning a ranch; this spring, he’ll open the Ranch at Rock Creek in Montana on 6,600 acres of pristine countryside. And John Pritzker, who started as a teenager in his family’s Hyatt hotel business, is diving back into hospitality, not with what he calls an ‘‘urban box’’ but with 500 acres in the fruit basket of California. When his redo of the Carmel Valley Ranch opens this summer, guests can learn everything from organic gardening to beekeeping. ‘‘It’s summer camp without the discipline,’’ he says.

Considering that half of American travelers say they’re looking for ‘‘cultural authenticity,’’ according to the research firm PhoCusWright, it’s not hard to see how fetching eggs from the coop seems thrillingly real, even revelatory. As Luite Moraal, the founder of the farm-stay group Feather Down Farms, says, ‘‘People grow up thinking milk is cold.’’ CHRISTIAN L . WRIGHT

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Summer Camp for Adults Out west, there’s a mini-explosion of places where travelers can rough it (within reason). The Ranch at Rock Creek (theranchatrockcreek.com) incorporates luxury cabins into its back-in-time atmosphere.

Opening this summer, Carmel Valley Ranch (carmelvalleyranch.com) will let guests make s’mores over a campfire. And in Montana, the Resort at Paws Up (above; pawsup.com) is adding tents with wood floors and fireplaces.

Stay for the Food Building a weekend around one great meal is a familiar concept in Europe that’s slowly taking hold here. Riverstead (above) in Chilhowie, Va., is the guesthouse component of the Town House restaurant (townhouseva.com), where the chef John B. Shields came directly from the Chicago gastro-temple Alinea. At the Inn at Serenbe in Georgia (serenbeinn.com), guests can cook alongside visiting star chefs.

CLOCKWISE FROM TOP LEFT: WILLIAM ABRANOWICZ/ART + COMMERCE; FROM FEATHER DOWN FARMS; FROM THE RANCH AT ROCK CREEK; LESLIE BREWER.

Country Living Agritourism is gaining ground coast to coast. At Feather Down Farms (above; featherdown.com), a company that started in Holland and recently came stateside, guests can help stock the hayloft and go bird-watching.

The Amee Farm in Vermont (ameefarm.com), a renovated farmhouse on a homestead that dates back to 1793, includes an organic vegetable garden and an old general store.

A fr ica A lask a Asia & Pacific Austr alia New Zea land Canada New England Car ibbean Ber muda Europe Hawaii M exico Pana m a Canal South A mer ica Wor ld Voyage

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We invite you to feast. To captivate not only your palate, but your eyes as well.

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ONE OF FRANCE’S MOST TRADITIONAL CITIES, BORDEAUX IS LOOSENING UP, WITH AN INFRASTRUCTURAL FACE-LIFT AND EXPERIMENTAL NEW RESTAURANTS AND BOUTIQUES.

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MUST-HAVES • HARVEST GOLD 1. Luz Camino bracelet, $36,700.

Go to bergdorfgoodman.com. 2. Dior Fine Jewelry necklace, $198,000. Go to diorjoaillerie.com.

3. Solange Azagury-Partridge earrings, $8,600.

Go to solangeazagurypartridge.com.

4. Cartier bracelet, $15,500. Go to cartier.com.

SHOW AND SELL The city’s recent rash of boutiques includes La Cour de Joséphine (26, rue des Remparts; 01133-5-56-44-16-77), which sells 18thcentury-inspired frocks by local designers like Gianna et Moi; Florence Kooijman (13, rue des Remparts; 011-335-56-48-20-95), where you can manage your bespoke shoe purchase down to the toe shape; and Tsim.Tsum (15, place Fernand Lafargue, 011-33-6-61-5572-97), where the owner sells her boho frocks alongside local jewelry. On the sweet side, M. le Macaron (38, rue des Remparts; 011-33-9-64-23-64-65; mlemacaron.fr) reinvents the delicacy with flavors like foie gras chocolat.

And at Maison Larnicol (1, cours de l’Intendance; 011-33-5-56-58-78-29; larnicol.com), Georges Larnicol creates chocolate masterpieces while upstairs at Hôtel Lulu Mode & Chocolat (011-33-2-98-06-18-51), his wife, Lulu, sells vintage clothing arranged by white, milk and dark.

HANGOUTS Culture vultures head to Cour Mably and Salle Capitulaire (3, rue Mably; 011-33-5-56-44-01-58) — an indoor-outdoor gallery in a 17th-century Dominican convent — as well as to

THE 2.0 REPORT

Williamsburg Is the New Williamsburg Should you find yourself wandering the streets of Williamsburg, Brooklyn, these days, you might be reminded of another Williamsburg, the restored historic village in Virginia.

With shops like the Brooklyn Kitchen, where you can learn how to pickle vegetables and butcher your own pig, and Rye, where you can sip an old-fashioned at the 100-yearold oak bar, the neighborhood hasn’t quite returned to colonial times — but chances are your server will have facial hair and woolens that would do an 18th-century blacksmith proud. There are glass blowers (Michael Anchin Glass Company), perfume makers (CB I Hate Perfume) and illegal urban beekeepers who’ve set up shop in East Williamsburg with that same can-do spirit that got us to the New World in the first place. While you might not hear the resounding fife and drums of our founding fathers, the bars on Bedford Avenue are jammed with Bunyan-bearded hipsters who look as if they moonlight in a fiddle band. And the spirit of Patrick Henry lives on in these Brooklynites, whose call to arms is ‘‘Give me bike lanes or give me death!’’ KATHLEEN EGAN 14

S T I L L L I F E BY I L A N RU BI N

CAPC (7, rue Ferrère; 011-33-5-56-0081-50; rosab.net), a modern art museum with a sunny rooftop cafe. The city’s new youth infusion has brought with it a swarm of locavores; find them grazing on boeuf de Bazas at La Brasserie Bordelaise (50, rue Saint-Remi; 01133-5-57-87-11-91) and sipping the 30 Bordeaux wines by the glass at Bar à Vin (above; 3, cours du 30 Juillet; 011-33-5-56-00-43-47). Hipsters head to Utopia (5, place Camille Jullian; 01133-5-56-79-39-25; cinemas-utopia.org), an art-house cinema and cafe in an old church, and to Le Seeko’o Bar (54, quai de Bacalan; 011-33-5-56-3907-07; seekoo-hotel.com), the popular watering hole in the Seeko’o Hotel overlooking the Garonne River. After sundown, a crowd gathers at the Miroir d’Eau (Place de la Bourse), part fountain and part art installation that reflects the lovely lit-up facades of the adjacent palace. CAROLINE TIGER

SET STYLING BY BRENDA BARR. BORDEAUX: PHILIPPE ROY; WILLIAMSBURG: WILLY SOMMA; JOE SOHM/THE IMAGE WORKS.

WHY IT’S HOT A young generation of winemakers, restaurateurs and fashion designers, along with British expats and Parisian transplants seeking a slower pace, has given Bordeaux an unstuffy new profile. Mayor Alain Juppé sandblasted the city’s sooty facades and installed 27 miles of tramway with an all-underground power supply.

N Y T I M E S.C O M / T M AG A Z I N E • M A R C H 2 8, 2 0 1 0

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HISTORY CLUB For years, hotel designers used traditional motifs mainly for contrast — by mixing Louis XIV and Le Corbusier, they seduced trend-seeking travelers with eye-catching compostions.

But period promiscuity may be giving way to a new faithfulness. These days, arch has gone back to being a noun, as hoteliers go for real historicism, creating (or recreating) grande dame properties that serve their nostalgia straight up. FRED A. BERNSTEIN

To help bring in a younger crowd to Marrakesh’s La Mamounia, built in 1923, the Paris designer Jacques Garcia decided (paradoxically) to make the place look older, using mashrabiyas (elaborately carved wood screens) and tadelakt (a lime and egg yolk plaster) to evoke the past.

At one point, there were 1,500 craftsmen working to get the hotel ready for its grand opening last November.

The Ocean House, a sprawling hotel on the bluffs of Watch Hill, R.I., was demolished in 2005 after nearly 140 years of catering to WASP society. Now a new, fantasy version of the Ocean House is rising, with the same yellow clapboard and rambling porches, and salvaged original fixtures.

The Savoy in London was built in 1889, by Richard D’Oyly Carte, but ‘‘beautified’’ in the 1930s with Art Deco interiors. So for the hotel’s recent redo, Pierre-Yves Rochon was asked to evoke the glamour of both periods — a double dip of nostalgia. Luckily, Rochon had about $200 million to spend. That buys a lot of accouterments, including two sets of Wedgwood china, one in the Edwardian style for inroom dining and another in Deco for the riverfront restaurant.

AHOY, MATEY • LET’S GET NAUTICAL A new group of yachts is catering to the boating crowd’s appetite for adventure and design. The 105-foot Necker Belle catamaran (virginlimitededition.com; $88,000 a week), refurbished last year by Sir Richard Branson, has a wine cellar, an outdoor movie theater and a three-person submersible for exploring reefs and wrecks.

Reflecting the new emphasis on exploring remote waters, Cape Race (right; mvcape race.com; $2,000 to $3,000 per person per week) is a converted fishing trawler — outfitted with six generous cabins and a mahogany-paneled saloon — that can cross the Atlantic twice without refueling. And the Panthalassa (camperandnicholsons.com; $200,000 a week), a 184-foot ketch with off-white interiors by Foster & Partners, has an oval stairway that brings sunlight to the lower level, where staterooms are paneled in leather and bathrooms tiled in black marble. MICHAEL CANNELL 16

The Peace Hotel in Shanghai, built in 1929 by Victor Sassoon in the style of a Chicago skyscraper, was never very Chinese. But that’s part of what makes Shanghai the East’s most Western city. It will reopen this summer as the Fairmont Peace Hotel, with gray-veined marble and burl-grained walnut in its public spaces, and suites in the styles of nine nations, à la Sassoon’s originals.

TOP, CLOCKWISE FROM LEFT: ANSON SMART; UNDERWOOD & UNDERWOOD/CORBIS; READ MCKENDREE; IMAGINECHINA/AP IMAGES; FROM FAIRMONT HOTELS AND RESORTS.

New York City’s landmarks commission required Sant Chatwal to preserve elements of the Lambs Club as he converted the Stanford White building into the 88-room Chatwal New York. The architect Thierry Despont incorporated the existing features into full-on Deco interiors that would make Fred Astaire (a Lambs Club member) swoon.

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1. LeFreakOlé Anabela Lubisse’s colorful clothes made from vintage fabrics nearly burst out of this tiny boutique. A native of Mozambique, Lubisse evokes an African-dance-hall style with fringed knit tops, paperbag pants and pins fashioned from tiny Whitney Houston album covers. Argensola 20; 011-34-91-319-5310.

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2. Elisa Bracci This black mirrored space is a fitting backdrop for Bracci’s take on evening-wear drama: floor-length, candy-colored chiffon confections line the walls like debutantes at a ball.

Bracci has plans for a Paris shop, too. Bárbara de Braganza 2; 011-34-91-435-0305.

3. Suus Don’t let the trance music and stone-faced young shop clerk dissuade you.

These are the kinds of shoes that stylish hombres are wearing — rough-hewn leather boots and bluchers with scuffed finishes and handworked details. The cult Belgian brand N.D.C. dominates the shelves, and there’s a collection of vintage-looking belts and wallets. Argensola 4; 011-34-91-702-4750.

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DISEÑO WITHIN REACH STYLE MAP • MADRID If Salamanca is the city’s Upper East Side, then Las Salesas is its West Village. A breeding ground for independent and avant-garde designers, the neighborhood is being infiltrated by international brands hoping to catch some of the low-wattage cool. (Enter Marc Jacobs.) But the narrow streets around the Plaza de las Salesas aren’t paved with all the big-name labels just yet.

The area still has a healthy regard for homegrown design. JEFFRIES BLACKERBY 4. Oak The six-month-old Oak conveys an America-meets-Europe aesthetic with plaid, plaid and more plaid from labels like Trovata (of California), Bellerose (Belgium) and Dunderdon (Gothenburg, Sweden). Belén 7; 011-34-91-702-1401.

5. Luxenter The popular Spanish jeweler does baubles in a subtly modern style that look like money. Malachite and jasper are popular stones, set in chunky silver or mixed with sculptural wood.

Almirante 8; 011-34-91-521-5876.

6. Próxima Parada After 20 years in the area, this Madrid institution recently moved to its gracious new boutique cum salon. Young swans from the pages of ¡Hola! regularly breeze through for Spanish fashion by the likes of Miriam Ocariz and D-due — a saleslady will happily show you the scrapbook.

Conde de Xiquena 9; 011-34-91-523-1929.

7. Lurdes Bergada The mother-and-son design team of Lurdes Bergada and Syngman Cucala bring their Barcelona brand of slouchy asymmetry to this multilevel space. Look for wrap-front jackets for men and grunge-denim bubble skirts for women.

Conde de Xiquena 8; 011-34-91-531-9958.

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P H O T O G R A P H S BY A NA NA N C E

8. Benny Room This two-year-old shop is all over the fashion map, adeptly mixing and matching looks from frilly vintage to laser-cut minimalism. You’ll find some of the most interesting European labels on the racks, with designer standbys like Sonia Rykiel hanging next to emerging names like Beatríz Nicolas and Madame á Paris. Conde de Xiquena 17; 011-34-91-702-2529.

Š 2010 Rodney Strong Vineyards, Healdsburg, CA

FROM OUR PLACE TO YOURS.

PLACE MATTERS.

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AFRICAN ASSEMBLY Johannesburg’s Arts on Main complex, with its stylish mix of tenants, has quickly become a culture hub since it opened last summer, bringing life back into the heart of a neglected central business district. The project, the brainchild of the 27-year-old developer Jonathan Liebmann (who’s currently converting a nearby factory into a hotel in time for this summer’s World Cup), occupies five redone warehouses around a central courtyard (below right) on the corner of Main and Berea Streets. The complex’s anchor is the studio of the celebrated South African artist William Kentridge, whose presence has helped draw an elite group of chefs, designers and gallery owners.

Canteen Locals and tourists alike flock to this cafe (above left) for gastropub-meetsgame-reserve fare (think ploughman’s platters and springbok carpaccio) courtesy of the British chef Richard Rust. The walls display work by the complex’s residents, and a rooftop bar holds film screenings. 011-2783-399-9740; entrees $6 to $12.

Black Coffee/Love Jozi Jacques van der Watt and Danica Lepen, the duo behind the Black Coffee label, keep an atelier in the back of this sunny clothing boutique, which carries hand-dyed silk pieces alongside their best-selling capsule collection called Everyone Can Be a Designer, a series of multifunctional jersey garments. Love Jozi, a line of graphic tees designed by van der Watt’s partner, Bradley Kirschenbaum, shares the space. 011-27-11-482-9148; blackcoffee.co.za and lovejozi.co.za.

Niroxprojects This workshop is the urban outpost of Nirox, a three-year-old artists’ residence and sculpture park set on 40 acres in a nature reserve outside the city.

The Arts on Main location shows visiting and local artists like Willem Boshoff, a South African conceptual artist who this summer will present the installation ‘‘Big Druid in His Cubicle,’’ a hit at last year’s Art Basel.

Niroxarts.com.

Goodman Gallery The noted South African gallery, whose photography star Mikhael Subotzky keeps a studio in the complex, claims its second Johannesburg location with an upstairs space that shows mostly young, emerging talent like the Zimbabweborn painter Kudzanai Chiurai. 011-27-11301-5706; goodman-gallery.com.

David Krut Projects This art-book publisher and print workshop, with locations in Cape Town and New York, sells design and art books as well as limited-edition prints and etchings by Kentridge and other artists, like Paul Stopforth. In the back, etchings are done on a custom-made press; up front, the shop fixtures include tables fashioned from the complex’s old fire doors. 011-27-11-3341209; davidkrutpublishing.com. JILL SINGER

SHELF LIFE • HOUSE PROUD UD The unlovely term ‘‘vernacular architecture’’ describes some me of the most unusual buildings ever created, from Mongolian an yurts to Irish sod houses. Many (like a treehouse 148 feet eet above the West Papuan rain forest) lie at the frontiers of the he imagination, while others (like a shanty in Manila held together er with urban waste) we’d prefer to forget. The forthcoming book ok ‘‘Buildings Without Architects’’ (Rizzoli, $23) presents them all as works of grass-roots ingenuity, pegging modish key words like ke ‘‘sustainable’’ to ancient buildings, most of which were made of stuff that’s been around since prehistoric times. STEPHEN HEYMAN MAN 20

Attention, Chopin fans: On March 1, the 200th anniversary of the Polish composer’s birth, a new permanent exhibition opened at the Chopin Muzeum in Warsaw. Designed by the Milan firm Migliore + Servetto Associated Architects, the installation displays some 500 items, from musical manuscripts to the composer’s cuff links.

In contrast to the setting, the 16thcentury Ostrogski Castle, the exhibition design (which won a 2008 competition) is the last word in high tech, offering what the architects called a ‘‘system of emotional landscapes and soundscapes’’ that appeals to all the senses. Ico Migliore, a partner in the firm (which won awards for its communication design for the 2006 Olympics in Turin and for an exhibition in Milan for T, among others), explained that each of the thematically organized galleries embodies a different visual and technological approach.

For example, when you approach a music score in one gallery, a reconstruction of the drawing room that belonged to Mikolaj Chopin, the composer’s father, appears, complete with moving shadows and music playing. Since the museum holds only about 150 visitors at a time, tickets must be reserved in advance. Go to en.chopin.nifc.pl/museum. PILAR VILADAS

CLOCKWISE FROM TOP LEFT: FRANCES JANISCH (2); FROM MIGLIORE + SERVETTO ASSOCIATED ARCHITECTS; TONY CENICOLA.

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the SCENE

BEIRUT Lebanon’s cosmopolitan capital is finally getting its groove back.

Though it was once known as the Paris of the Middle East, ‘‘Beirut never truly lost its sheen,’’ says Gordon Campbell Gray, the British hotelier who finally opened Le Gray last November, having forged ahead even through the 2006 Israel-Hezbollah war. The Lebanese capital surely has a touch of Parisian glamour, but it also has a dash of Berlin (bullet-pocked buildings after a civil war that lasted from 1975 to 1990) and Miami (flashy night-life zones choked with Ferraris and S.U.V.’s). There’s a burgeoning gallery scene, world-class shopping — from avant-garde boutiques like IF to big-ticket designers like Marc Jacobs and Dior — and five-star hotels like the new Four Seasons and Le Gray. ‘‘The Lebanese have a spirit for living for the day, and it permeates every aspect of their life,’’ Campbell Gray says. ‘‘You really understand this when you head back to a Western city.’’ MAURA EGAN

TAWLET Kamal Mouzawak is Lebanon’s answer to Alice Waters. He’s hosted a macrobiotic TV show, taught local schoolchildren about organic food and spent two years touring his homeland learning about the country’s culinary traditions. In 2004 he started Souk el-Tayeb, the city’s farmers’ market. More recently he opened the popular Tawlet (‘‘table’’ in Arabic), a canteen where regional cooks prepare daily meals. Book ahead. Naher Street, 12; 011-961-1-448-129; tawlet.com.

LE GRAY

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

B 018 The provocative, Harvard-trained architect Bernard Khoury designed this nightclub back in 1998, but it’s still the city’s favorite after-hours spot. Built on the site of a former refugee camp where many were killed during the civil war, the club is a continual source of controversy as well as an example of Koury’s brutalist architecture style, with its location in an underground parking lot and its steel retractable roof. Lot 317, Karantina; 011-961-3-800-018.

ILLUSTRATION BY NICK HIGGINS

Located just yards from the Mohammed al-Amin mosque, Le Gray stands out like a modernist beacon. It took five years for Gordon Campbell Gray to realize his high-design vision — infinity pool, art-filled rooms and a bar with 360degree views — in his favorite new city. ‘‘Beirut was not a hard sell for me. The reputation, the infrastructure, the history was all there. All it needed was peace.’’

Weekending Europeans and young Saudi princesses alike are convinced. Martyrs’ Square; 011-961-1-971-111; legray.com.

BOKJA ‘‘We see our store as a salon for book launches and parties where young creatives can meet,’’ says Maria Hibri, who started a whimsical furniture collection in 1999 with her partner Huda Baroudi. Their haute bohemian wares — vintage pieces upholstered in embroidered textiles from Central Asia and beyond — are sold at ABC Carpet and Liberty of London. Despite their international success, the ladies keep it local by working with Lebanese craftswomen, including some in prison.

Building 332, Moukhalassiya Street; 011-961-1-975-576.

SFEIR-SEMLER GALLERY Andrée Sfeir-Semler was born in Beirut but left for Germany in the 1970s, where she has had a gallery in Hamburg since 1998. In 2005, she established a Lebanese outpost that features many acclaimed Middle Eastern artists, including Marwan Rechmaoui and Walid Raad of the Atlas Group, who deal with the country’s geopolitical, economic, social and military conflicts in their work.

Tannous Building; Street 56, Jisr Sector 77, Karantina; 011-961-1-566-550; sfeir-semler.com.

the SCENE

MUSIC HALL

TO SEE A SLIDE SHOW OF MORE IMAGES FROM BEIRUT, GO TO NYTIMES . COM / TMAGAZINE .

The cabaret held in this former movie theater doesn’t really get started most weekends until 11 p.m., but that doesn’t deter the many elderly guests who join the pretty young things on the banquettes. Its founder, Michel Elefteriades, curates an eclectic program — Armenian rockers, Eastern European Gypsy performers, even girls singing ABBA songs — that, along with the bottles of whiskey and Champagne, keeps the crowd on their dancing feet until early morning. ‘‘It’s got this sexy, seedy feeling like those dance halls in Havana in the ’50s,’’ explains one guest. Starco Center, Omar Daouk Street; 011-961-3-807-555.

THE BEIRUT SOUKS ‘‘Lebanese love to shop. It’s in their DNA,’’ says the local Omar Eid. The old souks here in downtown were destroyed during the civil war and became a no man’s land.

After decades of planning and building with the help of international architects like Zaha Hadid and Rafael Moneo, the development looks like a high-end Los Angeles shopping mall (if it was built on Roman ruins.) There are trendy cafes and name-brand boutiques like Calvin Klein and Chloé, and a cineplex is in the works. Rue Weygand and Rue Allenby.

MILIA M Milia Maroun was the first Arab designer to show in Milan, which makes sense since this Paris-trained talent cuts with a European sensibility — fluid jersey tops suggest Rick Owens, while her diaphanous dresses are very Lanvin. Maroun recently opened her first stand-alone shop in the Saifi Village, a newly refurbished retail area where neighbors include Johnny Farah’s (he of IF boutique fame) leather store and Bokja. Saifi Village des Arts, 1051 Block D; 011-961-199-0336; miliam.com.

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A S P E C I A L A D V E R T I S I N G S U P P L E M E N T T O T : T H E N E W YO R K T I M E S S T Y L E M A G A Z I N E , M A R C H 2 8 , 2 0 1 0

FL

RIDA Under the Radar WATER, WATER EVERYWHERE UNIQUE EXPERIENCES ROOM AND NEVER BORED EAT LIKE A LOCAL FRESH-AIR FESTIVALS

Spanish conquistador Juan Ponce de León might have been the first to “discover” Florida, but he certainly wasn’t the last. Today’s visitors are moved by the same spirit of exploration to seek out those uncommon activities, local secrets and unique experiences far from the beaten path.

Fort De Soto Beach, St. Petersburg/Clearwater. Photo:Visit St. Pete/Clearwater

This special advertising feature is sponsored by participating advertisers. The material was written by Andrew Bill, and did not involve the reporting or editing staff of The New York Times. ©2010 The New York Times

A DV E R T I S E M E N T

WATER, WATER EVERYWHERE

When Ponce de León ran his longboat up the beach near present-day St. Augustine in 1513, he claimed La Florida for the throne of Spain and, as an added bonus, also claimed to have discovered the Fountain of Youth, a natural spring that, according to ancient legend, washed away the years. In a way, he was right.

Water is Florida’s magic ingredient, its greatest asset and its lifeblood, with a power of rejuvenation obvious to anyone who has walked Florida’s beaches, canoed its backwaters, fished its coastal waters and hopped around its islands.

Even the dry geographical data points to a boatload of water-based fun. More than 7 percent of Florida is water. It has more than 11,000 miles of rivers, streams and waterways (pretty impressive for a state with a top elevation of just 345 feet). It has 27 springs and 7,700 lakes, including Lake Okeechobee, which, at 700 square miles, is the second-largest freshwater lake in the U.S. And don’t forget the 2,276-mile-long coast — astonishingly beautiful, scalloped by 663 miles of beaches and dotted with 4,500 islands (more than in any state but Alaska).

There are few better examples of how this water saturates the visitor experience than Lee County (FortMyersSanibel.com) surrounding Fort Myers on the southwest coast, where more than 100 islands lie within easy reach, amid the calm, warm waters of the Gulf of Mexico. And the best way to experience these islands and their get-away-from-it-all beauty is to go island-hopping, with stops for biking, boating, shelling, dining and the great, glorious sunsets that finish each day.

Sanibel Island and Captiva might be the biggest and best known, but if you want to get under the radar, there are plenty of other island options. Lovers Key State Park, just south of Fort Myers Beach, is one of the most beautiful parks in Florida.

You can hike its boardwalk, which leads over tidal lagoons to a white-sand beach dotted with sea oats, or rent a kayak and paddle off into the surrounding estuaries.

For real off-the-electric-grid timeless26

Photo: Lee County VCB/ Fort Myers Sanibel.com

Island-hopping, gondola tours, paddling trails and nature cruises

Island-hopping around the islands of Lee County

ness, rent a boat or take the regularly scheduled ferry service to one of the more remote islands, such as Cayo Costa, a state park known for its snorkeling and fishing opportunities. Stay overnight at one of the 12 small cabins or the campsite (total capacity: 18 tents) then get up at dawn to get first dibs on shelling at the south end of the island. Just as amazing is Cabbage Key, a 100-acre barrier island that’s accessible only by private boat or water-taxi. It’s worth the trip just to have lunch at the Dollar Bill Bar in the inn built in 1938 by playwright and mystery author Mary Roberts Rinehart. Its cheeseburgers are the stuff of legend.

An even easier way to hop around these and other islands is to go with a local operator such as Adventures in Paradise, offering daily cruises from Port Sanibel Marina and Sanibel Harbour Marriott Resort & Spa in Fort Myers; Captiva Cruises, whose boats leave from McCarthy’s Marina on Captiva Island to explore the outer islands including Useppa Island, a private island club; or Tropic Star of Pine Island, which offers regularly scheduled boat service from Pine Island to Cayo Costa State Park.

If you are hankering for solitude, the first choice for island-hopping has to be

the Great Calusa Blueway, the 190-mile marked paddling trail that has been recognized as one of the best kayaking destinations in North America. Operators will rent you a kayak or canoe, take you to a selected put-in site, then leave you to go with the flow, floating through back bays, aquatic preserves, wildlife refuges, creeks, bayous, rivers and mangrove forests.

Another destination synonymous with its islands is, of course, the Florida Keys (fla-keys.com), the string of 800 coral atolls that trail off the end of the peninsula like a boat rope in the current.

Here the place for exceptional kayaking opportunities is the so-called backcountry of the Lower Keys, where sea and sky, shallows, mangroves and flats merge in a water world teeming with wildlife. Kayak tours combine the sociability of a group with the local knowledge of a professional guide. Lasting between two hours and a full day (or even longer), guided trips run by operators such as Bill Keogh of Big Pine Kayak on Big Pine Key lead you through the tangles of mangrove roots in search of roseate spoonbills, great white herons, barracudas, lobsters and schools of juvenile fish among the turtle grass.

The clear waters surrounding the Keys are equally suited for diving and snorkel-

Photo: Bob Krist/Florida Keys News Bureau

A DV E R T I S E M E N T

Sunset in Key Largo, Florida Keys

ing. Running alongside the 120-mile-long island chain is the only living coral barrier reef in the continental U.S., so remarkable that the entire Florida Keys and its surrounding ocean have been designated a national marine sanctuary covering 2,600 square nautical miles of ocean. Dive sites range from natural reefs to wrecks such as the Benwood, a World War II casualty, and the 510-foot Spiegel Grove, purposefully sunk off Key Largo in 2002. The former missile-tracking ship, USNS Gen. Hoyt S. Vandenberg, marks the southernmost addition to the Florida Keys Shipwreck Trail. If you want to explore the Keys’ underwater kingdom yet don’t have diving certification, check out the Snuba option available in Marathon and Key West.

The beach is only the beginning

When most people think about Fort Lauderdale (sunny.org), the first thing that comes to mind is the destination’s 23 miles of beach — so pristine they have earned the Blue Wave designation from the nonprofit Clean Beaches Council. But beaches are just the beginning of an incredible list of water-based options. Looking to try something new?

Then hook up with local operator Surf World and try the latest “it” sport: paddle-boarding. Claiming such high-profile enthusiasts as Jennifer Aniston and Matthew McConaughey, the sport involves paddling a long, buoyant board from a standing position. Lessons are available

Photo: Greater Fort Lauderdale Convention & Visitors Bureau

Surfing in Fort Lauderdale

Miami to the south of us. Fort Lauderdale to the north of us. Not a single destination above us.

Experience shopping like never before at the fashion-forward Bal Harbour Shops, just a stroll away from our beachfront hotels.

Nourish the mind, body and soul with exclusive beachside workouts, and Kids Club programs designed by the Miami Children’s Museum.

Stir the senses with the cultural offerings of the New World Symphony and culinary originals at one of several taste-tempting Bal Harbour restaurants.

Bal Harbour, where life meets style.

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www.BalHarbourFlorida.com

and equipment rentals cost just $20 per hour or $50 for a full day. Or what about traditional surfing? Operators such as Island Water Sports have all the equipment and patience necessary to help you catch your own perfect wave.

You don’t have to go to Italy for a gondola ride. Here in the Venice of America, Las Olas Gondola offers private tours through the city’s canal system in handcarved wooden boats crafted by Italian gondola makers. For a more speedy boat ride, sign up with Billie Swamp Safari on the Big Cypress Reservation and travel by airboat through the wetlands and hardwood hammocks of the Everglades in search of alligator, bison, wild hog, hawk and the elusive panther. A night spent in one of the company’s bare-bones Chickee huts, listening to ancient stories, is one you will remember for the rest of your life.

Perhaps the most surprising of the watery adventures available in the Fort Lauderdale area is the outstanding diving, which includes some of the top wreck diving in the world. The destination has 69 miles of live coral reef, 100 buoyed dive sites and 80 wrecks including the Copenhagen, a 325-foot steel hull that is a State Marine Archaeological Preserve, and Hog Heaven, an upside-down barge that is busy with marine life.

Over on Florida’s west coast, St. Petersburg/Clearwater (VisitStPeteClearwater.com) is also known for its exceptional beaches. The list starts with the one that runs along the shore of Caladesi Island State Park, considered one of the finest beaches in the country thanks to its white sand and blue-green, crystal-clear waters, ideal for swimming, sunbathing and beachcombing. Saltwater anglers can fish from their boats or throw a line out into the surf, hikers can take the three-mile nature trail that snakes through the island’s interior and kayakers can paddle the three-mile kayak trail through the mangroves and bay. Alternatively, if you like your beach to have a historic theme, then aim instead for the North Beach in Fort De Soto Park. In addition to seven miles of beautiful sand, the 1,100-acre county park has a Spanish-American War fort and a history museum in a recreated quartermaster’s house. Look for the fort tours every Saturday and nature tours through different areas of the park on Saturdays and Sundays.

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Photo: Visit St. Pete/Clearwater

A DV E R T I S E M E N T

Fishing off the coast of St. Petersburg/Clearwater

Then there are the dozens of local operators ready to dip you in St. Pete/ Clearwater’s watery wonders. Captain Dan of Dolphin Landings will take you on a two- or four-hour sailing cruise in search of dolphins and endangered nesting birds. In Tarpon Springs, the town on the Pinellas peninsula known as the sponge-diving capital of the world, you can take a boat ride through the historic sponge docks, learning about the trade started by divers from the Greek islands in the early years of the 20th century. On the approach to the pier in downtown St. Petersburg, you can rent a “Z” electric boat from the Electric Marina Boat Rentals. Every Saturday and Sunday the company offers free 10-minute rides from 1 to 5 p.m., so you can try out the boats.

ROOM AND NEVER BORED

Florida’s finest hotels are now selling experiences Forget the passé notion that hotels and resorts are merely places to sleep and eat.

In addition to extraordinary facilities such as championship courses, tennis centers and indulgent spas, Florida’s leading properties are getting creative, competing with an ever-expanding range of guest experiences from healthy cooking classes

and yoga on the beach to animal encounters and Segway safaris.

Consider Bal Harbour (balharbour.com), the luxury destination with two hotels — the new five-star ONE Bal Harbour Resort & Spa and the historic Sea View Hotel — at the northern tip of Miami Beach, just minutes from the action of South Beach and downtown. Sure, it’s extremely tempting to settle back in the destination’s deep lap of luxury, starting with the Olympic-size pool and cabanas at Sea View, and the famous Bal Harbour Shops, the highest concentration of designer boutiques in the country. But there are other opportunities that are simply too valuable or interesting to miss.

Exercise enthusiasts have to experience the Wellness Series laid on by ONE Bal Harbour. Started last December, these complimentary workout classes take place right on the beach, feet from the waves, and range from Walk/Run Club and Beach View Yoga to a cardio boot camp called Drenched that is held three times per week. The Wellness Series includes regularly scheduled lectures and healthy cooking classes, so you can set your own course toward a better lifestyle. Open to the Bal Harbour community, the classes are also a great opportunity to meet the locals and get the skinny on what to do in the area while visiting.

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Live healthy, be happy

In the world of wellness, few names command as much respect as Canyon Ranch.

Since 1979, the company has built a solid reputation around its two destination spas (in Tucson, AZ, and Lenox, MA) that offer a unique, personalized blend of health therapies and pure indulgence. So the world paid attention when, in late 2008, Canyon Ranch opened the country’s first boutique hotel dedicated to wellness — Canyon Ranch Hotel & Spa in Miami Beach (canyonranchmiamibeach.com).

The historic Carillon Hotel in Miami Beach, beautifully restored to its former glory, is now the centerpiece of a six-acre property with 150 luxurious one- and twobedroom suites and a full range of à la carte services. It has two outdoor pools and three restaurants serving nourishing spa cuisine, led by the innovative and award-winning Canyon Ranch Grill.

But the foremost feature is the 70,000-square-foot Wellness Spa, the largest in South Florida, with 54 treatment rooms and an extensive menu of services integrating nutrition, fitness, lifestyle, preventive care and spiritual growth.

32

The beautiful beach in Bal Harbour.hoto: Bal Harbour, Florida.

Its fitness center is fully equipped with the latest exercise machines and a twostory indoor rock-climbing wall. The professional staff, which includes physicians, therapists, Chinese medicine practitioners, exercise physiologists and nutritionists, provides the warm personal attention that Canyon Ranch is famous for. Work with an exercise physiologist to determine your body composition, or get a complete physical with a physician.

It’s hard to know what to do first. The daily calendar is crammed with more than 30 complimentary indoor and outdoor fitness and movement classes, all led by

certified instructors. Choices range from “Beach Conditioning,” a workout right on the sand, to “Kinesis,” a practice that restores the balance between mind and body. “Soothing” meets “invigorating” in the Aquavana thermal suite, an array of healing waters, thermal cabins and soaking tubs unique to Canyon Ranch (think of it as a Roman bath updated for the 21st century).

Hotel guests have unlimited free access to the Wellness Spa and fitness center, as well as to yoga and exercise classes for the whole family, and other activities tailored for kids as young as eight. To help

The championship Miller Course at Fairmont Turnberry Isle

Photo: Fairmont Turnberry Isle

Harbour Shops include a Books & Books, part of the highly respected chain of booksellers, with its broad range of titles, experienced staff, autographed editions and author events. In February alone, the store held early-evening readings by authors such as Angella Nazarian, Gabrielle Bernstein and Ally Carter.

And the destination hasn’t forgotten its younger guests. The Bal Harbour Village Kids Camp, launched just this January down at the Sea View Hotel, offers daily themed workshops in cooperation with the Miami Children’s Museum. Guests from 5 to 15 years of age can stretch their imaginations and build skills in programs such as Nutrition Mission and Cultural Connections; Eco-Explorers teaches about recycling and conservation; Little Masters helps budding artists create their own masterpieces in the style of Monet, Rodin and Warhol; The Entire World’s a Stage covers all the aspects of staging a play, from set design and costume-creation to the actual performance. Proceeds raised from the cost of these remarkable programs ($25 per child, per day, for three hours) goes to support the Museum.

Photo: Bal Harbour, Florida

A DV E R T I S E M E N T

Greater For t Lauderdale in the palm of your hand.

Download the FREE iVisitLauderdale app to your iPhone and stay in-the-know on Greater Fort Lauderdale’s hotels, restaurants, water culture, happenings and more. Or start planning your sunny getaway now at sunny.org

A DV E R T I S E M E N T

34

✺ UNIQUE EXPERIENCES

An insider perspective FLORIDA CAVERNS (Marianna, North Florida) In this pine forest in North Florida, there are walkable underground caverns that were discovered after a hurricane in the 1930s. The surrounding area is perfect for picnicking.

CHALET SUZANNE (Lake Wales, Central Florida) This Victorian inn and restaurant combines great food (3 Mobil Stars) and Old Florida graciousness with modern twists, such as its own airfield.

FORT BARRANCAS (Pensacola) In this 19th-century fort, held by three countries at different times, the first shots of the Civil War were fired on January 6, 1861.

Come for the military history and stay for the stunning views over Pensacola Bay. STEPHEN FOSTER CULTURE CENTER (White Springs, North-Central Florida) Tucked away in a pristine Old Florida landscape, the center treasures and teaches American folk music. You can learn to play

Autoharp, dulcimer, banjo or fiddle, or attend one of several music festivals held here each year.

vast array of travel-related graphics, and posters and samples of 20th-century political propaganda.

BIG CYPRESS GALLERY (Ochopee, Southwest Florida) The beauty of the Everglades is brought into sharp focus in the stunning, large-format photographs of Clyde Butcher.

HISTORIC PUB CRAWL ON AMELIA ISLAND How many museums organize pub crawls? Worth a visit in its own right, the Amelia Island Museum takes groups of adults over 21 on Thursday evening tours of the local bars, explaining local history and telling ghost stories along the way.

FLORIDA HOLOCAUST MUSEUM (St. Petersburg) Moving without being morbid, this collection of Holocaust materials and artifacts is one of the largest in the U.S. It’s home to one of the few infamous railroad boxcars to exist outside of Poland.

THE WOLFSONIAN MUSEUM OF MODERN ART & DESIGN (Miami Beach) This eclectic collection shows how the ordinary becomes extraordinary, and vice versa, and how important design and marketing are to the modern world. The permanent collections include the British Arts and Crafts movement, Dutch Art Nouveau, American Industrial Design, a

ELLIOTT HOUSE MUSEUM AND HOUSE OF REFUGE (Martin County, north of Palm Beach) This interesting salt-soaked museum is housed in the last remaining shipwreck station commissioned by the U.S. Lifesaving Service (built in 1887). Just offshore lies the wreck of a three-masted Italian brigantine that sank in 1904.

For more information on off-the-beaten-path attractions, go to www.visitflorida.com and click on the “Florida Insider” link authored by local expert Hilda S. Mitrani.

Overlooking the pools and beach at Trump International Beach Resort Photo: Trump International Beach Resort

you take some of the wellness experience with you, daily presentations on topics ranging from nutrition to health, beauty and fitness are led by the multidisciplinary team, together with guest presentations by prominent specialists.

Just as relaxing in its own way, Fairmont Turnberry Isle (fairmont.com/ turnberryisle) has wonderful places to sit back and indulge yourself, starting with the beautifully landscaped Laguna Pool and the seductive Willow Stream Spa. But this beautiful 392-room property in Aventura (30 and 20 minutes from Miami and Fort Lauderdale international airports, respectively) also has plenty of activities for those who want to get up and go.

At the spa you can take advantage of Willow Stream’s revolutionary fitness program, or choose from more than 20 group classes including Dance Design, Bar-lates and Yoga. You will then feel perfectly justified in having one of the 75 indulgent spa treatments. If wraps and massages are going to be a big part of your vacation, look out for the spa’s value-filled packages and ongoing specials.

Meanwhile, golfers can sharpen their game on the resort’s two championship Raymond Floyd–designed golf courses, with their sculpted fairways, cascading waterfalls, doglegs and undulating greens.

The pros run group clinics every morning at 9 a.m. ($45 per person) and private lessons can be scheduled throughout the day. Tennis players can reserve a court at the Tennis Center or attend the group sessions held every morning at 9 a.m. ($40) to work on their strategy and stroke development. If you still have energy left over, you can jog around the threemile scenic trail that circles the resort and its golf courses.

In addition to lying by the Laguna Pool, guests can zip down its 180-foot-long waterslide, ride the lazy river or swim laps in the enormous zero-entry pool, splashed by cascading waterfalls. And if you are hankering for some beach time, take the complimentary shuttle to the resort’s private Ocean Club.

For foodies there is a complimentary guided tour of the chef’s herb and fruittree garden (daily at 4 p.m.) and coffee demonstrations in the Lobby Lounge (held every Saturday at 4 p.m.) that demonstrate the art behind the perfect cup

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of Cuban java. Celebrity Chef Michael Mina’s restaurant, Bourbon Steak, has a regular program of special events such as Bourbon & Blues, with live music every Wednesday between 7:30 and 10:30 p.m.

On Manic Mondays, the restaurant serves up half-priced bottles of wine and, every night from Tuesday to Friday at 6 p.m., it stages wine-appreciation events such as Wine Travels With Our Sommelier.

Monday through Friday there is Raise Your Spirits, the popular social hour with half-priced drinks.

The nearby Trump International Beach Resort (trumpmiami.com) in Sunny Isles Beach (also midway between Miami and Fort Lauderdale International Airports) is another resort that prides itself on customizing the guest experience. Depending on your needs, it can be a romantic retreat for couples, a playground for families or a pampering paradise for the older guest. It also has plenty of activities for those Type A guests who can pull themselves away from the grotto-style pool area with its two pools, hot tubs and a bar and grill.

Making full use of the ocean, there are deep-sea fishing charters, Jet Ski and kayak rentals, Intracoastal Waterway sightseeing cruises and snorkeling/diving excursions. For a fun way to experience the region, sign up for the ‘See the City from the Sea’ option, a private boat tour that stops at exciting coastal hotspots such as the Miami Sea Aquarium, Monty’s (a bay-front seafood restaurant on South Beach) and downtown Fort Lauderdale. In tune with the resort’s highly personalized service, each tour is based on your special interests and therefore prices vary.

For guests aged 5 to 12, the resort’s complimentary children’s program, Planet Kids, offers fun and educational activities that explore the local marine ecosystem and subtropical environment. Themes such as Art, Music and Movement, Fun and Fitness, Water Play, and Sports all have an eco-friendly spin. Globie, a giant earth-shaped mascot who doubles as the resort’s green-initiative ambassador, often makes an appearance to share his green knowledge and teach the little ones about marine life, keeping the earth clean and protecting the environment. Each Saturday there is a special evening program and dinner available for just $60.

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Photo: Seth Browarnik

A DV E R T I S E M E N T

The sweeping façade of the Fontainebleau Miami Beach

So cool, it’s hot

These days the Fontainebleau (fontainebleau.com), ideally located on Collins Avenue in Miami Beach, looms large among south Florida’s most-talked-about hotels. Yes, it’s partly the glamour-soaked history of a 56-year-old architectural landmark designed by theatrical modernist architect Morris Lapidus, with a guest book bulging with bold-face names such as Elvis Presley, Bob Hope, Lucille Ball and Judy Garland. For nearly 25 years, the hotel was so well-known that no sign was necessary to identify it. And yes, there was the Fontainebleau’s dramatic re-entry into the top tier, when it reopened in the fall of 2008 following a top-to-bottom $1 billion expansion and renovation. But what keeps the resort’s name on everyone’s lips is its reputation for being the “it” property, and a list of facilities so extraordinary that many of its guests never leave the 22 oceanfront-acre property for the duration of their stay.

The atmosphere is the experience.

The facilities begin with 1,504 guest rooms and suites, in two new luxury all-suite towers as well as the original buildings. There are 11 restaurants and lounges, a 40,000-square-foot spa and dramatic oceanfront “poolscape” with 10 pools, private cabanas and walls of water.

James Bond played here in the 1964 film Goldfinger and, now modernized, the pool has an even more edgy allure today.

Then there are the resort’s small touches such as iMacs in every room that allow guests to customize their vacation, share their experiences, even read

The New York Times without stirring a muscle. As for the eating experience, the Fontainebleau has opened signature restaurants under the banner of some of the world’s finest chefs such as Alfred Portale, chef and owner of the Gotham Bar and Grill, and Alan Yau of London’s Hakkasan, the only Chinese restaurant in England with a Michelin rating. And, when dinner is over, there is the high-energy nightlife scene: the LIV nightclub, the Bleau Bar in the hotel lobby and Glow, a casual yet sophisticated pool bar with the intimate ambiance of a private pool club.

If you want to up the experience still further, there is the resort’s twolevel Lapis spa. Its more than 40,000 square feet of facilities include 30 private treatment rooms, a fully equipped 5,800-square-foot gym, a 35-foot rain corridor and two Spa Suites with Vichy shower, luxurious tub, and a private shower and relaxation area.

Raw nature meets man-made sophistication

Another historic property, Amelia Island Plantation (aipfl.com) has been known for its mix of wild nature and outstanding facilities ever since it opened in 1973.

Just 29 miles northeast of Jacksonville International Airport, the resort sits on a 1,350-acre property on a natural island with a 3.5-mile-long beach and the Atlantic Ocean on one side and the Amelia River on the other. On the manmade side, it has 600 accommodations, 72 holes of golf, a shopping village, a full-service holistic spa, 23 tennis courts,

A DV E R T I S E M E N T

20 pools and nine restaurants. So it’s not exactly a place where boredom is a factor.

On the natural side are outstanding nature programs that underscore the resort’s commitment to conservation and make full use of its unique location. AIP’s Nature Center offers a broad range of intriguing and inspiring tours including Beach Bounty, which teaches when and where to find the best shells and how the trees, dunes, wildlife and marine animals complement their natural habitat. You can learn about the local flora on the Edible Plants and Wildflower Ramble and about the Birds of Amelia such as the red-shouldered hawk, eastern screech owl and red-bellied woodpecker. The Nature Photography tour passes on the secrets of professional photographers.

The Nature Bike Hike pedals off along seldom-traveled paths then turns into an easy six-mile hike on paved paths.

The Naturalist Kayak tour takes you on a leisurely two-hour paddle through the marsh to search for birds, fish and other unique animals that flourish in this complex ecosystem. This two-hour naturalist-led trip is geared towards all skill levels and includes an introductory paddle lesson. Other programs offered by the Nature Center include Woodland Walks, the Owl Prowl, Fishing, Back Porch Birding, Critter Talks, Sunset with the Birds, and Stargazing. For an entirely new experience, take a Segway Safari.

Learning about nature at Amelia Island Plantation

✺ FRESH-AIR FESTIVALS

Catch ’em if you can SUNTRUST SUNDAY JAZZ BRUNCHES Fort Lauderdale April 4, May 2, June 6, July 4, August 1, September 5 On the first Sunday of every summer month, 11 AM to 2 PM, free jazz concerts are performed on four different outdoor stages along the brick-lined Riverwalk in downtown Fort Lauderdale. Bring a blanket and a picnic.

CREATIVE COAST WEEKEND Pine Island (near Ft. Myers) April 9 to 10 This fishing village and art enclave comes alive with all things art. Special events, gallery openings, classes and entertainment welcome the entire family.

TAMPA BAY BLUES FESTIVAL St. Petersburg April 9 to 11 Staged at scenic Vinoy Waterfront Park in downtown St. Petersburg, the festival is one of the country’s preeminent blues-music events, having presented more than 250 of the world’s greatest blues performers.

SHAKESPEARE ON THE BEACH Bal Harbour April 15 Bring a TK and settle down for Bard on the beach — “Hamlet” performed

by Florida International University.

WANEE MUSIC FESTIVAL Live Oak (halfway between Jacksonville and Tallahasee in North Florida) April 16 and 17 A truly special event for rock lovers, this event has been a fixture on the music

Photo: Amelia Island Plantation 38

calendar since the Allman Brothers Band started it in 2005. Yes, the big draw is the music and the bigname roots musicians, but the natural setting gives it a flavor you just can’t get in an indoor concert venue (waneefestival.com).

15TH ANNUAL TASTE OF KEY WEST April 19 Scores of area restaurants present mouthwatering samples of their menus to benefit AIDS Help Inc. The culinary celebration takes place at the Truman Waterfront overlooking Key West Harbor.

AIR LAUDERDALE & BEACH FEST April 24 to 25 The state’s largest spectator event (attendance estimates are in the millions), this two-day air show features top military and civilian flying demonstrations along four miles of Fort Lauderdale beach.

JACKSONVILLE JAZZ FESTIVAL May 27 to 30 Ranked among the country’s top jazz festivals, this free three-day event takes over the streets of downtown Jacksonville. Other festivities have been timed to the same Memorial Day weekend including the Wine Down tasting event and the juried art show, Art in the Heart (coj.net).

MANGOMANIA TROPICAL FRUIT FAIR Cape Coral/Pine Island (near Ft. Myers) July 10 to 11 Pine Island honors its best known crop — succulent mangoes — for two actionpacked days that include locally grown delicacies, live music, kids’ activities and rides (mangomaniafl.

com).

HEMINGWAY DAYS KEY WEST July 20 to 25 The 30th annual celebration of the legendary author’s work and lifestyle features literary readings, a short story competition, fishing tournament and a Sloppy Joe’s Look-Alike Contest.

HENRY FORD’S BIRTHDAY CELEBRATION The Edison & Ford Winter Estates, Fort Myers July 30 The Edison & Ford Winter Estates (the winter homes of Thomas Edison and Henry Ford, respectively) will celebrate the 146th birthday of Henry Ford and the completion of the restoration of the Ford Estates at The Mangoes. Festivities include a birthday ceremony and cake, tours and a car show. Admission is free (efwefla.org).

GECKOFEST Gulfport (near St. Petersburg) September 4 Artsy Gulfport’s annual salute to the gecko is part family-oriented Mardi Gras, part Renaissance faire and part British Loony Party.

FLORIDA KEYS BIRDING & WILDLIFE FESTIVAL Sept. 22 to 26 Marathon and Lower Keys A celebration of the natural wonders of Florida wildlife takes place at the peak of the fall birding season.

The event includes presentations and field trips focusing on education and conservation.

Start the day with something more stimulating.

Outrace a dolphin on a catamaran. Kayak through lush mangroves. Not surprisingly, when you start the day differently, life looks different. Visit fortmyers-sanibel.com or call 888.231.6938 for a free traveler’s guide.

PLAN YOUR VACATION GETAWAY IN PARADISE TODAY. PINK SHELL BEACH RESORT & SPA 216 beachfront suites and condos overlooking the calm Gulf waters and 1/4 mile of sugar-white sands.

Enjoy a breathtaking beachfront view and free breakfast for two daily. The only thing we overlook is the beach.

877-876-8586 www.pinkshell.com

SANDALFOOT CONDOMINIUMS A beachfront vacation paradise with Gulf views from every room. Fully equipped one and two bedroom apartments help make your stay restful and rejuvenating.

SANIBEL MOORINGS CONDOMINIUM RESORT The perfect beachfront vacation experience with two pools, new boat docks, flower gardens and more resort amenities than anywhere else. Choose from 1, 2 or 3 bedroom condo suites.

SHALIMAR RESORT Gulf front Floridian style cottages, efficiencies & motel rooms, blending with the natural beauty of the islands and offers many features without spoiling the natural atmosphere.

WEST WIND INN Award winning Sanibel Island beachfront resort.

Guestrooms and kitchenettes.

Large heated pool/poolbar.

On-site restaurant.

Voted “Best of the Islands 2008”.

Package and weekly rates.

877-472-2575 www.sandalfootcondo.com/vcb

800-237-5144 www.sanibelmoorings.com

800-995-1242 www.shalimar.com

800-824-0476 www.westwindinn.com

A DV E R T I S E M E N T

Another of Florida’s favorite historic resorts, the Ponte Vedra Inn & Club (pontevedra.com), has perfected that same careful balance of nature and sophisticated charm. Opened in 1928, this AAA Five Diamond resort sits on 300 acres of Atlantic shoreline in the tony seaside village of Ponte Vedra Beach, just 30 miles southeast of Jacksonville in northeast Florida. Graceful palms and rolling dunes act as the dramatic backdrop to 250 rooms and suites.

There are plenty of world-class pursuits to tempt active guests away from the Playing a round at the Ponte Vedra Inn & Club Ritz Carlton

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pool recliners. Beachcombers can kick off their sandals and stroll down one of the most beautiful beaches in the state in search of take-home prizes such as Atlantic Augers, Baby’s Ears, Purse Crab, Coquina and other shells. Golfers can tee off on the Ocean and the Lagoon, two aptly named 18-hole courses, while tennis players seeking to better their game can take advantage of the resort’s Racquet Club, one of the top tennis resorts on the East Coast. The Club has 15 HarTru clay courts and a daily schedule of instructional clinics. Its 8,000-square-foot

oceanfront gym is fully equipped with 75 exercise stations and personal trainers on staff. Biking, fishing, sailing and horseback riding are also on hand year-round. For shoppers, there are several stores and boutiques.

Want to treat yourself? A good place to start is Ponte Vedra’s signature restaurant, the Seahorse Grille, which serves up an imaginative menu of New American Fusion cuisine. Or perhaps a massage?

The luxurious spa, the region’s largest, has an impressive selection of more than one hundred treatments and beauty services including such favorites as the Omorovicza Mud Wrap and the Red Carpet Facial. Spa goers can ease back into reality, soaking in the soothing, therapeutic waters of the spa’s outdoor pool and grottoes.

The AAA Five Diamond Ritz-Carlton, Naples (ritzcarlton.com) — located on 20 beachfront acres, just 45 minutes from Southwest Florida International Airport — is another property that recognizes, and makes use of, the extraordinary value of its natural surroundings. Guests can take advantage of the resort’s interactive and educational program, Nature’s Wonders.

Aimed at all ages and supervised by onstaff Master Naturalists, these fascinating programs involve nature walks, boat rides, guest speakers and field trips that introduce the local wildlife (sea turtles, alligators, dolphins), the mangroves and beaches. Tailored specifically for budding marine biologists, Marine Encounter explains the living world of the beach, sieving and seining for fish, crabs and other creatures. Suitable for the whole family, the two-hour weekend “Dolphin Watch” program takes small groups out into the Gulf aboard a private motorboat in search of the Atlantic bottlenose dolphin.

For those who like a little more indulgence in their vacation day, The RitzCarlton, Naples even carries this environmental consciousness into its luxurious 51,000-square-foot spa with its focus on eco-savvy experiences. Drawing from the natural world, its wellness treatments include salt and sugar scrubs, a scalp mud experience and applications of warm shea butter infusions.

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+++++

EAT LIKE A LOCAL

Dockside crab shacks, scenic dives and hideaway restaurants Sometimes it takes a friend who lives in the area. Or careful research and a long walk or drive down the back streets following complicated directions. And sometimes, if you’re really lucky, you stumble upon the hidden-away restaurant, dive-bar or beach shack purely by accident. However you accomplish it, one thing is certain: the best way of getting to really know your destination, to taste its day-to-day flavor, is to eat and drink with the locals.

Most people know about the Keys’ famous regional delicacy, stone crab claws, and some even know the right way to break the shell (smack it with the back of a spoon). But only the locals know the best places to order the chunky orange-red, paleyellow and black claws — such as Keys Fisheries, a laid-back, no frills eatery rights on the docks, hidden away in an industrial zone just off the Overseas Highway in Marathon, or the Crab Shack, on the docks on Fishery Row in Summerland Key. Then there are the two events honoring the claws — the Key Largo Stone Crab & Seafood Festival (late January) and the Original Marathon Seafood Festival (middle of March) that has grown in fame over three decades to become the second-largest calendar event in the Keys.

As you make your way south down the island chain, set aside some time to uncover the ultimate locals’ hangout, the No Name Pub. Directions are sketchy (turn off U.S. Highway 1 at mile marker 30.5 bayside, then follow the meandering road) but it’s worth the effort. A one-time bait store and brothel, it evolved into a restaurant in the ’30s. Women are no longer on the menu, having been replaced by a delicious pizza (try the one with Keys shrimp), but the pub has retained its quirky dÊcor and weather-beaten style.

Even amid the busy tourist-hum of Key West, there are restaurants and bars to the side of the mainstream. For a great place to toast the end of a full day, try the Schooner Wharf on William Street, where the town’s rich collection of characters assemble for hot live bands and cold beer. A more sophisticated, though no less worthy, drinking experience can be found across the island at Louie’s Backyard, a gourmet restaurant with a deck overlooking the Atlantic.

It’s no secret that Fort Lauderdale has plenty of dining establishments, each one claiming supremacy in a certain ethnic

Picture-Perfect Family Vacation from $329 Like the man whose name is on the door, our guests tell it like it is.

They expect an outstanding experience and it is our pleasure to oblige.

Photo: Ritz-Carlton Naples

Sailing off The Ritz-Carlton, Naples

Visit www.trumpmiami.com/nyt or call 1-877-287-1645.

Own a part of Trump Grande Ocean Resort & Residences

Valid April 1 - June 30, 2010.

N Y T I M E S.C O M / T M AG A Z I N E • M A R C H 2 8, 2 0 1 0

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A DV E R T I S E M E N T

cuisine, theme or food style. But ask a local where to go and they will point you toward a handful of favorites. Calypso in Pompano Beach might be far from the beach, but it is the place for Caribbean fare such as scorched conch, Jamaican fish cakes and jerked shrimp. If it’s Mediterranean food that makes your taste buds twitch, head for Greek Islands Taverna on N. Ocean Boulevard in Fort Lauderdale, with its authentic taverna interior and outdoor tables. The seafood is fresh and tasty at the laid-back, waterfront Southport Raw Bar (Cordova Road, Fort Lauderdale), which has been serving up live music and TV coverage of local sports teams with its specialty, oysters and clams, since 1973. Even older (circa 1955), the kid-friendly Rustic Inn Crab House on Anglers Avenue, near the International Game Fish Museum, cooks its seafood to order and serves it right on the dock. The specialty: garlic crabs served with wooden pallets on newspaper tablecloths.

If you’re in the St. Pete/Clearwater region and you’re looking for delicious, authentic, no-frills ribs, then sit down at Eli’s Barbeque on Skinner Avenue in Dunedin. Right by the Pinellas Trail — the 37-mile long, 15-foot-wide hiking/biking/jogging trail — this locals’ hangoutcum-smokehouse is nothing fancy (Eli’s picnic tables are set up under the shade trees) and is only open two days per week (Friday and Saturday from 11 a.m. to 6 p.m.). But be prepared to line up at the walk-up window for your order of smoked pork, chicken, beef, sausage or turkey. Another great smoker, Ted Peters Famous Smoked Fish on Pasadena Avenue in South Pasadena, hasn’t changed much over the last half decade.

Open from 11:30 a.m. to 7:30 p.m. every day except Tuesday, it’s the type of place where anglers bring their catches still wet from the Gulf to be cooked in the red-oak smoker. If you don’t have your own fish, the establishment has its own supply (don’t miss the smoked mullet). And if beer is your beverage, then the place to order a pint while you are in Dunedin is the aptly named Dunedin Brewery that handcrafts a variety of its own beer including Piper’s Pale Ale. Its Snug Pub, open Tuesday through Saturday, adds delicious pub food and live music every night.

•

ECO-ISTE

/ (ē´ kō ēst) /n. / A neologism combining ‘‘ecologist’’ and ‘‘egoiste’’ to indicate a person devoted to her own green agenda, irrespective of the downside. Often used to describe a style-conscious individual who wears her do-gooding heart on her Balmain sleeve, e.g.,

‘‘She’s such an eco-iste. She thinks that recycling her grandmother’s vintage Vuitton luggage somehow cancels out her carbon footprınt from chartering that private jet to Brazil.’’

FERAL

/ (fer´ el) / adj. / Of or like a wild animal; savage.

Can describe animals, as in, ‘‘Australia’s Kakadu National Park is teeming with feral beasts like horses and buffalo that threaten the natural habitat,’’ as well as humans, e.g.,

‘‘He’s gone totally feral since he returned from that farm stay in Costa Rica.

He’s grown a Zach Galifianakis beard and is no longer heatıng his loft.’’

DISCREET

/ (di skrēt´) / adj. / Lacking pretension or ostentation; modest. A word having a recession-era revival for travelers who want to go somewhere with less flash — Lake Powell, Ariz., over Las Vegas, say, or Palermo over Rome:

‘‘We love Palermo because it’s discreet and not overtly chic, but you’ll find extraordinary beauty and culture behind every church door.’’

J E F F R I E S B L AC K E R BY A N D M AU R A EGA N

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Raising Arizona How the arrival of a glamorous resort is stirring up a quiet corner of the American West. By Andrea Bennett

P

age, Ariz., has always looked to me as if it might just slip quietly over the edge into the Colorado River or else pick up and drive away. Heading for town over the Glen Canyon Dam — trying not to look to the left, down to Lake Powell, and certainly not to the right, down the 700-foot chasm into the river — I could see that Page was more or less the same as it was when I was a child: a sprinkling of mobile homes and derelict shopping plazas in a landscape formed over 180 million years into a topography of fractured mountain ranges.

Page wasn’t planned to last. It started as a construction camp built to serve the Glen Canyon hydroelectric facility, part of the Colorado River Storage Project of 1956. And the town’s very existence was controversial from the start. Hundreds of sites with American Indian artifacts were discovered in the excavations that preceded the flooding of Glen Canyon — only a tenth of what is estimated to lie underwater. It was one of the nation’s great cases of collateral damage: lose precious history to gain critical water storage. The byproduct was Lake Powell, a red-cliff-enclosed oasis that now seems created especially for the houseboats that cruise its 96 main canyons.

Page is anchored by Church Row, 11 side-by-side houses of worship built on governmentdonated land. Beyond that, ’60s-style ranch houses wind in patterns along the edge of the mesa.

Only a few recent changes are obvious, including new houses that look like Barbie’s Dream Southwestern Alcazar sprinkled around a preternaturally emerald green golf course. If Page slid down the hill, the new Wal-Mart Supercenter would break its fall.

I hadn’t been here since the late 1990s. I returned because it is 25 minutes away from, and the nearest sizable town to, the new Amangiri resort. It’s the Aman group’s second American property after Jackson Hole (the company is better known for bringing minimalist perfection to Desert oasis The new Amangiri resort brings a new level of sophistication to the area of Lake Powell.

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P H O T O G R A P H BY J E S S E C H E H A K

rarefied locales in the Far East), and it was seven years in the planning. As a result, it has taken on mythic status among the locals. Few have seen it, sheltered on its 600 acres over the Utah border near Big Water (population 417), though some Page residents hiked up to Skylight Arch to spy on its progress. What they do know is that it’s luxurious and expensive; that Aman is famous for its magnetic sway over the wealthy; that when it anoints places, they become desirable: Laos. Bhutan. Big Water.

Arriving at Amangiri is something like being given special dispensation to visit Area 51. An unpaved road leads to an iron farm gate and a call box; at the end of a five-mile descent, past a lone cabin and into a shallow rock bowl, you come to what seems like an alley behind a solid concrete block. At the end of the alley, a sheet of water fronts a low concrete pavilion, which leads into a naturally lighted great room sitting on the canyon floor. Glass walls look to looming rock formations on one side and a pool built around a (nearly) untouched monolith on the other. It makes as minimal an impact as a concrete building can on a millennia-old rock formation, and looks even less unnatural than you can imagine. The concrete of the walls was mixed to resemble local sandstone; over time, they will take on a desert varnish similar to the dark patina in which ancient tribes would chip their petroglyphs.

I spent two days hiking with the local

Rock star One of the many slot canyons that lure visitors to the Utah-Arizona border.

center devoted to explaining their past. And the year-old View Hotel, the first of its kind in the Monument Valley Tribal Park, was built and operates on earth-friendly principles — Navajos believe they are born from the land itself. It also upholds the reservation’s noalcohol policy. Over a mountain of green chile pork stew in the restaurant, I watched a good-natured server try to come to terms with a table of Italian tourists, who now and forever will not understand why Fre can be labeled wine if it contains no alcohol.

Heading southwest, I visited the Navajo code talkers exhibit, which is inside a Burger King in Kayenta, then reached what I remembered to be a dirt road leading to Lake Powell. For the children in my family, boating on the lake in the 1970s and ’80s represented freedom and junk food. We camped on the banks of hidden tributary canyons, scrambled into the cliff dwellings of the ancestral Pueblo Indians in Forgotten Canyon and floated under the very Rainbow Bridge that took Teddy Roosevelt weeks to reach by mule in 1913.

These days, spectacular houseboats — rented out regularly to folks like Barbra Streisand — line the docks of the new $35 million Antelope Point Marina. I spent part of the day on a 75-foot boat with coffered

ESSENTIALS • LAKE POWELL GETTING THERE Scheduled flights from Phoenix to Page, Ariz., are available via Great Lakes Airlines; (800) 554-5111; flygreatlakes.com.

HOTELS Amangiri 1 Kayenta Road, Canyon Point, Utah; (877) 695-3999; amanresorts.com; suites from $950. The View Hotel Monument Valley Tribal Park, Utah; (435) 727-5555; monumentvalleyview.com; doubles from $195. Lake Powell Resort 100 Lakeshore Drive, Page, Ariz.; (888) 896-3829; lakepowell.com; doubles from $189.

HOUSEBOAT STAYS Forever Resorts Antelope Point Marina; (800) 255-5561; foreverhouseboats.com; boats from $1,142 per night (sleeps 10).

RESTAURANTS Blue Buddha Sushi Lounge 644 North Navajo Drive, Page; (928) 645-0007; entrees $10 to $28.

Dam Bar and Grille 644 North Navajo Drive, Page; (928) 645-2161; entrees $8 to $27.

ACTIVITIES John Wesley Powell Memorial Museum 6 North Lake Powell Boulevard, Page; (928) 645-9496; powellmuseum.org. Slot Canyon Hummer Adventures 12 North Lake Powell Boulevard, Page; (928) 645-2266; hummeradventures.net; from $79 per person.

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ceilings and a roof with a bar on top, reading the diary of John Wesley Powell, the onearmed Civil War veteran who ran the Colorado and scaled the ‘‘carved walls, royal arches, glens, alcove gulches, mounds and monuments’’ of which I had a spectacular view from the houseboat’s hot tub. I felt like a sellout, so I turned up the bubbles.

As nostalgic as I am for the Lake Powell of my youth, the reality is that this place is in far better shape than it was when I camped its shores. During the 1990s, parts of the lake were closed temporarily due to E. coli contamination. Today the National Park Service coordinates volunteers who pick up an average of 50,000 pounds of garbage every year. Nearby, Lake Powell Resort is renovating, turning recycled glass into bathroom countertops and used plastic into deck topping.

The best clue to what all this means to the people who live here came to me from Page’s tourism coordinator, Dwayne Cassidy. He said the city council was cleaning up the town park, building new city gates and adopting a program to train hospitality workers in customer service.

But he also reminded me that since Page didn’t incorporate until 1975, it has barely had time to develop a sense of itself, let alone react to the scrutiny it now faces. Roy Boughton, the director of the Powell Museum — in many ways the conscience of the area — put it succinctly: ‘‘We think it’s a big change when the streets get cleaned.’’

Twist Thompson, who co-owns the Blue Buddha Sushi Lounge across the street from the museum, said Page had the potential to be the ‘‘next Moab,’’ if its town elders would allow newcomers to ‘‘sexy up’’ Main Street.

Though it shares a kitchen with the Dam Bar and Grille next door, the Blue Buddha represents what many elders regard as the work of a pushy new generation. ‘‘We still have real cowboy and Indian fights here,’’ Thompson said. ‘‘I wonder if that’s how people think we want them to see us.’’

The problem, Cassidy later told me, is that even though Page wants the recognition that comes with being the gateway to Canyon Country — and to the West’s most exclusive new resort — most of the town leaders ‘‘worry that if we change anything, all the bad in the world will be dumped on our doorstep.’’

Zecha had remarked to me that he thought of Page as ‘‘a kindly old grandmother who takes care of us.’’ But a part of me wonders if Granny will wind up Amanized in the bargain.

Amangiri has gotten everything right, but there’s a special authenticity that comes with not getting it too right. The gateway to Canyon Country is a place where river rats, cowboys and Indians eat volcano rolls in the local sushi den. I hope it doesn’t slip over the edge. ■

PHOTOGRAPH BY JESSE CHEHAK

naturalists that Aman had hired to lead guests through the landscape. One hike led to the shallow cave in which a German artist named Ulrike Arnold ground pigments from rocks to paint many of the massive canvases that hang in the resort. Vance Swartz, who grew up on the reservation nearby, led another trek to one of the delicate, translucent slot canyons on Navajo Nation property, which he has exclusive access to tour with small groups.

Perhaps the most precarious part of opening a place like this, on the border of the country’s largest American Indian reservation, is ‘‘melding in,’’ as Adrian Zecha, the founder of Amanresorts, told me. ‘‘The elders expected we were building a Las Vegas-style hotel. They were relieved when they realized we are sympathetic to the land.’’ Incorporating Navajo tradition is a key element of the property. The solemn confines of the spa, for example, hold a sage-burning fireplace; its square skylights evoke a Navajo hogan. Glenda Bennett, a young Navajo spa therapist, sought the blessing of the elders as she helped design some of the treatments. (About one-tenth of the resort’s staff go home to the reservation each night.)

She explained all this as we sat by the fire and she scooped some smoking ashes into a shell, signaling the beginning of ‘‘serious talk.’’

I knew I was seeing a carefully orchestrated view of Utah — the one you pay Amangiri a lot of money to show you. But it worked on me.

A glass wall was the only thing that separated my soaking tub from the landscape of my childhood, and I was 8 years old, camping on the desert floor under a million stars.

Amangiri is among a handful of new hotels along the Utah-Arizona border aimed at attracting tourists. For the people of this desolate area, who can no longer rely on the uranium-rich lands that supported them during the atomic age, the next most profitable enterprise is history: selling stories told about the West since the 19th century.

Across U.S. 160 from the Navajo Nation town of Tuba City is Moenkopi, where the Hopi people are opening a hotel and convention

THE FIRST TASTE OF SPRING IS ALWAYS The New Hampshire maple industry produces 90,000 gallons of syrup annually.

THE SWEETEST.

Chester, New Hampshire

For New Englanders, the coming of spring isn’t marked by the calendar. It’s marked by plumes of steam coming from sugar houses in full swing.

That’s the signal to shed a layer and shake off cabin fever. For generations, making syrup has been more than a tradition — it’s been a rite of passage from winter to spring. Come take part in the tradition and you’ll have a much tastier way to mark the change of seasons.

vacation itineraries / planning tools / spring deals

Call for your free Visitors Guide 1-800-386-4664

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American architecture’s genetic code is to be found in Andrea Palladio (1508-1580) the most influential architect of all times.

Most of Palladio’s masterpieces were built in Vicenza, Italy. Vicenza is a magical place: it overflows with Palladian villas and buildings.

So why not discover the eternal beauty of his architecture by journeying into history and into the future? Vicenza is the birthplace of Renaissance culture: Vicenza, Palladio’s city.

The home of Thomas Jefferson, Monticello,Virginia, U.S.A.

Text by John L. Smith

If you take a look at a fifty cent piece what do you see?

Monticello, the house that Thomas Jefferson (1743-1826), the third president of the United States, built for himself in Virginia. The president, an architect as well as great traveler, was imbued with ideas of democracy and beauty which he found incarnated in Palladio’s Villa La Rotonda.

He said, “Palladio is my Bible”.

And so Monticello (which in Italian means “little mountain”) had an extraordinary influence on a particular aspect of the

American identity: just think of the White House or the University of Virginia…

But where did this great Palladian revolution start?

In Vicenza, in the north east of Italy, the place where the most important architect of the western hemisphere created the greatest number of buildings and changed the city and its landscape for ever. In fact, Vicenza is incomparable for its Basilica, the Teatro Olimpico and its many mansions and buildings. “The city has had the greatest influence on both the architecture and

the town-planning of the major countries of Europe as well as in the rest of the world”.

This was the motivation of UNESCO when it placed the city on the World Heritage List.

Loved by great writers and artists, the city and its province – situated in the heart of the Veneto region between Verona, Padua, and Venice – offers an amazing network of incredibly beautiful buildings and villas constructed in this sweet land, characterized by soft rolling hills.

It has inspired so many great creators: Tiepolo, for example,

was just one.

But, of course, Vicenza is not just the home of Renaissance culture: it is the centre of the world’s most creative industries too, with an amazing density of businesses.

So to come here also means undertaking a unique and surprising journey to a place described by one historian as “A location blessed by heaven, one of those nests nature created for the birth of Italian art which, right from the start of the Renaissance, continued to bloom here”.

Discover Vicenza and Palladio.

Palazzo Chiericati,Vicenza. Italy

Loggia del Capitaniato,Vicenza. Italy 1571

SOME OF PALLADIO’S VILLAS AND BUILDINGS IN VICENZA

Basilica Palladiana,Vicenza. Italy

1549

Teatro Olimpico,Vicenza. Italy

1580

1550

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FASHION & DESIGN When walking through the streets of New York, and often without realizing it, you find yourself face to face with Vicenza: along Madison Avenue, wandering around the streets of SoHo, or sauntering up to Central Park along Fifth Avenue.

The heirs of this genius of architecture have, in fact, now become the new initiators of the most creative industrial area in the world.

Vicenza is the centre of Bisazza’s luxuriousness or of Diesel’s denim. Vicenza is there when you make your grand entrance in a soiree with an envied Bottega Veneta handbag, a dress

by Giuliani Teso, or a jewel by Roberto Coin. Such important brand names as Marzotto, Dainese, or Pal Zileri mean Vicenza: the international heart of fashion and design. A close network of firms which has been developed in the fruitful shadow of Palladio’s innovation.

YOUR STAY Your stay in Vicenza will, there’s no doubt about it, seduce you.

You will fall in love with the city center as much as with the rolling hills surrounding it. You will be enchanted by its typical foods and wines: Baccalà, a delicious traditional dish based on cod; asparagus as you have never tasted; and of course our risottos.

Such ancient traditions are still to be found in our many restaurants and trattorias: you will, of course, find them mentioned in all the international “best food guides”.

But here you simply come across them without searching, and immersed in surroundings that reveal incredible ancient buildings, villas nestling in forests, and secret, hidden wine producers.

You really must discover our unique landscape: a landscape of rolling green hills and, of course, delicious food and wine.

THE EXHIBITION A PERFECT STYLE Andrea Palladio is acknowledged today as the most important architect the western world has ever had. Over the last years, the decline of the modernist movement in architecture has aroused a renewed interest for the classical style and for Palladio’s works.

Spread all over the Vicenza and the Veneto area are dozens of magnificent villas and sumptuous buildings as the everlasting heritage of his architectural genius.

“I arrived but a few hours ago, but I already took a glance at the town, and I saw the Teatro Olimpico and Palladio’s buildings... It is only with these monuments before our eyes that we can comprehend their great value. With their bulk and their impressiveness they must, so to say, fill our eyes, whereas the beautiful harmony of their dimensions, not only in the abstract design, but in the whole of their perspective, both what protrudes and what recedes, pleases the spirit” Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749 – 1832)

VICENZA ITALY

PALLADIO AND HIS LEGACY: A TRANSATLANTIC JOURNEY Palladio and His Legacy: A Transatlantic Journey features thirty-one original Palladio drawings from the Royal Institute of British Architects. They are being presented with rare architectural texts to illustrate the journey from Italy to North America of Palladio’s design principles of proportion, harmony, and beauty. Palladio’s work has significantly impacted American architecture from colonial times to the present day. Focusing on the artist’s original drawings and following the trajectory of his ideas, the show also traces the story of American Palladianism.

The drawings are supported by numerous architectural models.

Three large examples—the Pantheon, Villa Rotunda, and Jefferson’s unrealized design for the White House— programmatically illustrate the journey from Rome to America.

Smaller models along with rare architectural texts and pattern books, through which Palladio’s ideas were primarily transmitted, reinforce the themes of the exhibition.

The exhibition is organized by the Royal Institute of British Architects Trust, London, in association with the Centro Internazionale di Studi di Architettura Andrea Palladio, Vicenza, and The Morgan Library & Museum, New York. Models by Timothy Richards.

Villa Capra Valmarana “La Rotonda”, Vicenza, Italy

SOME PALLADIAN BUILDINGS IN THE U.S.A.

APRIL 2 · AUGUST 1, 2010 The Morgan Library & Museum 225 Madison Avenue New York, NY

White House, Washington. USA

1792

Thomas Jefferson, Virginia USA

1808

University of Virginia,Virginia. USA 1817

www.discoverpalladio.org

EPICENTERS: STEPHEN METCALF

Pushcart Prize

In Berkeley, the lure of Indian street food has turned one shop into a culinary sensation.

T

his is the story of competing notions of the Indian-American dream. Place the accent on American, and you imagine the seedbed of modest beginnings flowering into modest, even immodest, empires. Place the accent on Indian, and you imagine rigid confinement within what is considered, even today in India, a low-class occupation — a chaat walla, preparing snacks from a vendor’s cart, buzzed by flies. It all begins with that deceptively simple word: ‘‘chaat.’’

The O.E.D. says ‘‘chaat’’ may be Hindi, for ‘‘delicacy,’’ or possibly Pakrit, for ‘‘devouring with relish,’’ and common currency often has it as ‘‘to lick.’’ (Though on some Internet ‘‘chaat’’ boards, this is regarded as rank blasphemy. ) In any case, chaat is pushcart food that very likely originated in Northern India. It is known for its intensive sweetsavory-spicy medley of flavors and the teeming chaos in which it is made, served and consumed on the streets of Mumbai or Delhi.

When Vinod Chopra moved to California in the early ’80s, chaat was virtually unheard of in America. There was what Americans call Indian food and Indians call Punjabi food — gooey sauces and garlic naan.

So Chopra opened an Indian grocery stocked with baby okras, eggplants, saffron and dosa batters. Soon Chopra’s corner store evolved into Vik’s Chaat Corner, one of the first such operations in America. This did not sit well with his wife, Indira Chopra. In India, where Vinod had been a distribution manager for a large pharmaceutical company, the Chopras were unmistakably white collar and well-to-do. In the United States, Vinod started as a specialty importer of Indian beers. ‘‘She was already driving around San Francisco unloading boxes of beer onto dollies,’’ says her son, Amod. ‘‘ ‘And now you’re talking about pushcart food! I must draw the line somewhere!’ ’’ And so Indira returned to India.

Little did she realize that what she regarded as evidence of a galling comedown in station, American foodie pilgrims regard as a kind of checklist. Urban no man’s land? Check.

Cinder-block warehouse? Check. No sign out front, inscrutable menu and, of course, the holy grail: Am I the only white person in here?

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P H O T O G R A P H BY AYA BR AC K E T T

Westward expansion Vik’s Chaat Corner is a Berkeley, Calif., institution.

(Check, check, check!) Indira was sweettalked back from India, and today Vik’s is an institution. It is still in a low-slung light industrial neighborhood in West Berkeley, but its origins, as a bodega, have been transcended many times over. In the late ’80s, Vik’s began serving food, cafeteria-style. At first Berkeley professors of Indian background would come; then they would bring their Anglo colleagues; and then the word was out. Vik’s now serves 2,000 meals on a typical Saturday. ‘‘I’m in such a Type A mode,’’ says Amod, who radiates the buzzy fluorescence of a man running on no sleep. ‘‘The existing place went through five or six expansions. It was like 200 square feet, and if you hit $50 on the register, you were like, ‘Yesss.’ ’’ This last is a punch line, the setup for which is Amod’s splendid new toy — a massive, light-filled emporium that is Vik’s new location. Amod took me through every cranny, from the dragonlike industrial range top, custom designed by Chinese engineers to properly inflate bhatura — hot balloons of Indian puffy bread — to the changing station in the men’s room. (‘‘I have a baby in my life.

You don’t get away with sending your wife to change the baby!’’) Along with having all the enlightened Berkeley requirements — flatware

is compostable, cooking oil is repurposed as bio-diesel fuel, and all wood surfaces are ‘‘forest certified’’ — the place is so new that it makes Amod slightly self-conscious. ‘‘Right now it looks a little shiny to me,’’ he says.

But once people start to flow through it. . . .’’

The old place was anything but shiny. The insipid green walls and bottles of Thums Up, the cola drink of India, screamed out with an anti-ambience, but that, of course, was its charm. Where the old menu was inscrutable, the new one is part travelogue, part Proustian reverie. ‘‘I still remember making the trek to the pushcart at Elko Arcade in Mumbai . . .’’ reads the entry for Dahi Batata Puri. ‘‘My grandma would have us help her grind lentils that were then made into dumplings . . .’’ describes Dahi Pakori.

Nonetheless, I still order the traditional Vik’s way — by pointing at someone else’s plate — and out come steaming dishes. The math is simple: it is twice as good, for half as much. Everything — the yogurt, the batters, the brightly colored sweets — is made fresh and in-house. ‘‘Both my sis and I, we went to Berkeley,’’ Amod says. ‘‘I worked one day on the weekend. She worked the other. We complained the whole time. Mom, myself, sis, grinding lentils to make chaat.’’ He shakes his head. ‘‘I’m nearing 40, when you make peace with your parents. I asked my father, ‘Why, Dad?’ And he said, ‘Who else would take that kind of pride in the customer, freshly made, ground by us, stand there and make combo plates — who else?’ ’’ By noon, Vik’s is packed with everyone from Indian professionals to dudes with tentacular dreadlocks. ‘‘We wouldn’t have been this successful if we’d been anywhere else. The ‘other side of Fourth Street’ established our identity,’’ Amod says. ‘‘We had no write-ups until the early ’90s. Now, I go to Chez Pannisse and recognize half the chefs as our customers!’’

As if remembering the essence of chaat, Amod quickly adds: ‘‘Everyone’s the same here. Electrician, plumber, handyman, brain surgeon. We don’t want to know. Just come in and enjoy our food.’’ ■ Vik’s Chaat Corner, 2390 Fourth Street, Berkeley, Calif.; (510) 644-4432.

TO SEE A SLIDE SHOW OF THE CHARACTERS WHO EAT AT VIK’S CHAAT CORNER, GO TO NYTIMES.COM/TMAGAZINE.

The People’s Court At a Utah tennis camp, a novice comes out swinging. By Gerald Marzorati

‘I

t requires body control, hand-eye coordination, quickness, flat-out speed, endurance and that strange mix of caution and abandon we call courage,’’ David Foster Wallace was contending, making the case for tennis being our most demanding sport, as if I needed reminding. I was rereading an article called ‘‘Tennis Player Michael Joyce’s Professional Artistry as a Paradigm of Certain Stuff About Choice, Freedom, Discipline, Joy, Grotesquerie and Human Completeness,’’ which Wallace (who in his too-short life came to observe tennis more ingeniously than anyone ever had) had written for Esquire back in the ’90s — rereading it because I was trying to take my mind off the fact that the small commuter plane I was on was getting harshly wind-batted above the Wasatch Range, not far south of Salt Lake City, but also because I was heading to tennis camp. I was heading to tennis camp because three years ago, at the age of 54 (not that I think about that much), with my sons no longer requiring my weekend time (hell, they were barely home) and with more of my professional life behind me than in front of me (not that I think about that much, either), I was visited by the peculiarly middle-age desire to find something I’d never really done and get good, or good enough, at it. I took up tennis (which I’d long loved the idea of ) and, immediately, it took hold of me. I recommend it to anyone looking for something to provide newfound aches and an ever-tidy venue for that lonely, bewildering argument with yourself that is life.

The Green Valley Spa, a modest compound of Santa Fe-style adobe buildings and single-story guest rooms arrayed around garden courtyards with swimming pools, is situated on the western edge of

St. George, Utah, not far from both the Arizona and Nevada borders, and the camp there, or Tennis College, as it is called, is one of three (the others are in Arizona and Hawaii) based on the philosophy and principals of Vic Braden, now in his 80s and a legendary instructor who has sought for decades to bring physics and technology to bear on the improvement of tennis strokes. Improvement, not mastery: To be great or even a near great — like Michael Joyce, No. 79 on the men’s tour when Wallace (who’d been a serious junior player) profiled him in 1996 — is to have had a racket in your hand by third grade and a psyche to endure fierce competition and endless heartbreak and, at some point around puberty, to have committed to summers or even years of hard labor at a place like the Bollettieri Academy in Florida. Programs like the one at Green Valley are for taking away two or three things that will make you better around the club — to, say, take your 3.5 game (or some aspects of it) to 4.0, in the parlance of the United States Tennis Association. That’s what I had in mind when I signed up for three full days of tennis and nothing else. I could see from the plane the red-rock buttes and desert valleys where I was told John Ford filmed ‘‘Stagecoach,’’ and that was enough: I would do none of the hiking that is the region’s better-known lure. Nor was I interested in the yoga classes or wellness lectures or radical weight-loss regimens the spa offered — though I did need and obtain, at the end of each day, a deep-tissue massage.

After arriving on a Sunday evening, unpacking and then strolling to the dining room under a high, star-blanketed canopy, I ate dinner alone — terrific and healthful and, like all the meals I’d eat at Green

Match point From right: one of the hard courts at the Vic Braden Tennis College in St George, Utah; an instructor at the camp; the lap pool at the spa.

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

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Valley, as locavore as the spa’s executive chef, Francesca van der Stappen, can pull off in the southwestern corner of Utah — and was asleep in my cheery room, Wallace’s essay collection collapsed on my chest, by 9:30.

DAY 1, WHICH WAS DEVOTED TO THE

WE HIT AND HIT FOREHANDS,

with Dave gently barking at us to bend our knees, turn our shoulders and ‘kiss the guns!’

forehand, began not outside on one of the resort’s 14 hard courts (with views, beyond St. George’s myriad subdivisions and retirement developments, of dun hills and azure sky) but in a small classroom, where Dave Nostrant, who directs this particular Braden college, gave me and my classmates, a late-30-something couple from Seattle, a brief geometry lesson. (Classes at the camp tend to be small, and smaller just now as a result of the Great Recession). Dave, a onetime ballplayer who came to tennis late and has, as I would come to see, the patience of a Cubs fan, began by explaining (with the help of triangles drawn on a white board and an instructional film) one of Braden’s key tenets: that the court is small, very small — that, on a singles court, the difference between hitting a forehand down the line or cross-court to the far corner entails moving the direction of your follow-through only 19.1 degrees. The point of knowing this — in understanding that on most shots, as Dave put it, you are, or should be, trying to hit a ball down a long, narrow sidewalk — is to concentrate on extending your racket farther out toward your target. He also talked, convincingly, about how the net is higher than you think (more white-board geometrics) and about how hitting is as much a matter of verticality (lift) as horizontality (drive). If he was trying to gently reinforce my sense that tennis was built to vanquish those who approached it (Wallace: ‘‘Just one single shot in one exchange in one point . . . is a nightmare of mechanical variables’’), he was doing an excellent job.

Then, after stretching and some casual hitting around outside (my Seattle classmates, I was relieved to learn, were not going to be working things out with overhead smashes, like the couple in ‘‘The Squid and the Whale’’), Dave digitally filmed our forehands with video analysis software called Dartfish. It turns out (why should this have come as a surprise?) that you have no real sense of your body’s form in motion until you actually see it, even if your poor club coach has been trying to tell you — no real sense that, in my case, I was waiting too long to take my racket back, not turning my shoulder fully toward the ball, not keeping my wrist firm or ending high on my follow-through. (And, you know, my forehand is my shot.) The Dartfish system also allows for the insertion — right there, on the computer monitor, in a shed behind the courts — of a film clip of a tennis star doing what you have been doing, only correctly. Suddenly, there was Tommy Haas and his forehand and me and my forehand, in sync. Instructive, in that way tennis can be.

From the shed we walked to a complex of machines like nothing I had seen before — not standard ball machines but batting cages for tennis, six of them arrayed in a horseshoe. For the next 45 minutes we hit and hit forehands, with Dave gently barking at us to bend our knees and turn our shoulders and ‘‘kiss the guns!’’ — that is, finish our swings high enough that our biceps were in our faces. Before heading 54

to the courts for a few more hours of practicing our forehands in various drills, we took a lunch break, and walking there I learned that my Seattle classmates (he has a big job at Microsoft, she’s home with their young children) had taken other vacations together like this one, most recently a full-family one built around ski instruction. I have to say I didn’t get it: Wasn’t the whole point of something like this that, under the guise of rigorous self-improvement, you get to be utterly, guiltlessly, self-indulgent?

THE DAYS BLURRED TOGETHER , BLISSFULLY, THE WAY THEY

must for kids who actually enjoy summer camp. Day 2 was serves and backhands, Day 3 was overheads and volleys. The sun shone, Dave explained in morning class about the body’s kinetic chain, the digital camera rolled, the machines fired balls at me, my glutes tightened. My classmates kept threatening to skip a session and take a hike, but no chance: they were every bit as hooked as I was. We could see how one another’s shots were actually, demonstrably getting better — not consistently, not even half the time, but once in a while, which is to say enough of the time. And I could hear that I was doing things correctly now and then: the whoosh at my ear when, while serving, I kept my elbow out in front of my hand and then pronated my forearm; that certain gentle, thudless ponk when I managed to get real, loopy topspin on my seriously erratic onehanded backhand.

Interestingly, not until the last hour of camp on Day 3 did we actually play a game of tennis. ‘‘Adults — especially the types who show up at a tennis camp — tend to be very focused on outcomes,’’ Dave had said when we had dinner together one night. ‘‘Wanting to win gets in the way of wanting to do things efficiently.’’ Too true: No sooner had the four of us begun a set of doubles as the warm, dry afternoon cooled than I was doing everything (opening up on the forehand, not bending on the backhand . . .) I had paid to be purged of.

Dave never stopped firmly admonishing our faults between points, and we never, or mostly never, got down on ourselves about it. It’s easier hearing criticism and facing your limitations — facing the fact that you will never be all that good, really — when you are old enough to have done a few things in your life, which I guess is what places like tennis camps for middle-age club players have to count on. ‘‘I submit that tennis is the most beautiful sport there is,’’ David Foster Wallace wrote somewhere, and I would submit that my time at the college at Green Valley Spa brought that beauty closer, even as it confirmed how unobtainable it was certain to remain. ■

ESSENTIALS • VIC BRADEN TENNIS CAMP The Vic Braden Tennis College at the Green Valley Spa is located in St. George, Utah. The two- and three-day weekend tennis camps, which do not include accommodations, cost between $255 and $510 per person. Private and group lessons are also available. Go to greenvalleyspa.com. Doubles from $190. Vic Braden camps are also offered in Arizona and Hawaii. Go to vicbradentennis .com. For both, call (800) 237-1068.

Spirit fingers Above: the iconoclast schnapps maker Wilhelm Jesche in his distillery near Treffen, Austria.

Left: one of Jesche’s stills.

Living Proof The art of schnapps is thriving in the Austrian Alps. By John Wray

I

n Friesach, the picture-perfect Austrian town halfway between Vienna and Venice, in the Carinthian Alps, there is a bar that changed my understanding of the word ‘‘schnapps.’’

Berni’s, an unassuming little storefront on Friesach’s Fabergé-like central square, seats a bit more than a dozen people, if they all hold their breath at once; if it’s open, Bernhard Kreiner himself is in the house, dispensing drinks and Alpine philosophy in equal portions. He makes a delicious espresso and always keeps a bottle of Grüner Veltliner open, and there’s no shortage of lager on tap, this being Austria. But like those of most other Carinthians, Berni’s sly, nut-brown eyes take on an almost mystical fire when the talk turns to schnapps. He serves three special varieties — apple, pear and apricot — each bought directly from a local farmer, and to taste them is to forget, momentarily, about everything else in the world. ‘‘Delicious, isn’t it?’’ Berni asked when I first tasted his Birnenbrand — exquisite pear schnapps in which the character of the fruit hits the palate like the chiming of a tiny silver bell. ‘‘A good schnapps should have no sweetness to it. It should be dry, even fierce, as in the case of grappa, or what the French call eau de vie. But after the kick of the alcohol has passed, after the fierceness is gone, your mouth should contain nothing but the aroma of the fruit. That’s why only the freshest pears or apples or plums should ever be used to make it. ’’ We in the United States have long labored under a profound misconception of what schnapps is, perhaps largely because of unfortunate associations with frat houses, flaming shots at

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P H O T O G R A P H S BY G R E G O R H O H E N BE R G

happy hours and that ungodly, mentholated monstrosity — consumed in Germany, its country of origin, primarily as a digestif — known as Jägermeister. The dictionary definition of schnapps (‘‘a strong liquor in which flavoring, for example, peppermint, is distilled in rather than added later’’) would be grumbled over by every true schnapps distiller, or burner, in Austria. The so-called flavoring of schnapps, I discovered, is neither more nor less than the aroma of the apples, berries, grains, herbs or pine needles that make up its mash: the word ‘‘peppermint’’ alone is enough to make most schnapps distillers cringe. In this sense, Cognac, grappa, aquavit and even gin are examples of schnapps, or would be if German-speaking people distilled them.

Much like dry sherry, genuine schnapps is uncharted territory for most Americans, a secret that our culinary biases have kept us from discovering. The swift rise of Austrian wine in recent decades is beginning to change that, however. American gourmands at dinner now request Austrian varietals that they’d never heard of a decade ago — Blaufränkisch, Zweigelt, the now-ubiquitous Grüner — which has led, in turn, to a new interest in Austrian food and drink outside the vineyard. And no small part of the pleasure in store for the budding connoisseur, or feinschmecker, lies in exploring the idyllic and tucked-away hamlets where most of the best schnapps is made.

The Gasthof Liegl, one of exactly six buildings that make up the Carinthian village of Sankt Peter bei Taggenbrunn, lies comfortably ensconced between a halfcentury-old barn and a millennium-old village church. Its apple-cheeked proprietor, Gerhard Liegl (no other expression but ‘‘apple-cheeked’’ will do), radiates warmth and well-being like the potbellied copper still

Village vanguard The town of Friesach in the Carinthian Alps, a center of schnapps making in Austria.

connection in Klagenfurt, the state capital, my growing collection of schnapps bottles caught the attention of a sporty young man in a green loden jacket. ‘‘Making the grand tour, I take it?’’ he asked me politely, in perfect Cambridge-tinged English. I confessed that I was, half-expecting him to arch an eyebrow.

Instead he leaned forward and said in a whisper: ‘‘Go to Jesche, near Treffen. Wilhelm Jesche’s your man.’’

I was already on my way to Wilhelm Jesche, as it happens, but I was a little uneasy about it.

Jesche is a controversial character in schnappsburning circles, a self-proclaimed outsider who has taken it upon himself to revolutionize the industry, and his well-known reclusiveness and ornery temperament haven’t done much to help his cause. What has helped his cause is his schnapps. The apple and pear varieties both won Austria’s prestigious distilling prize, the Destillata, the very first year he produced them. Since then, Jesche has become a cult figure among enthusiasts, a white-haired, ruddy-nosed Merlin, holed up in a shuttered gasthaus in the shadow of the castle Landskron, burning schnapps to please only himself and a devout following of Carinthia’s most prominent feinschmeckers. Jesche’s inn and distillery are open to visitors by appointment, but that doesn’t mean that visits are encouraged. It took me the better part of a

ESSENTIALS • AUSTRIA HOTELS Gasthof Liegl Gerhard and Alberta Liegl’s country gasthaus. Sankt Peter bei Taggenbrunn 2; 011-434213-2124; gasthof-liegl.at; doubles from about $76. Metnitztaler Hof Cozy and generous inn on Friesach’s exquisite town square. Hauptplatz 11; 011-43-4268-2510; metnitztalerhof.at; doubles from $64.

RESTAURANTS AND BARS Berni’s Schnapps and jazz and conversation. Hauptplatz 17, Friesach; 011-43-42682767. Braukeller Hirt Hearty cooking in one of Austria’s oldest breweries. Hirt 2, Micheldorf; 011-43-42682050; hirterbier.at; entrees $11 to $34. Café-Restaurant Burg Landskron Panoramic views and schnitzel in a historic castle. Burg Landskron, 011-43-4242-41563; burg-landskron.at; entrees $14 to $24. Friesacherhof Schnitzel-and-dumpling cuisine on Friesach’s main square. Hauptplatz 4, 011-43-4268-2123; friesacherhof.at; entrees $10 to $18. Konditorei Craigher Carinthia’s best ice cream, coffee and chocolate truffles. Hauptplatz 3, Friesach; 011-43-4268-2295; craigher.at. La Torre Haute Mediterranean cuisine in a beautiful medieval tower. Grabenstrasse 39, Sankt Veit an der Glan; 011-43-4212-39250; latorre.at; entrees $14 to $36.

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morning to get anyone on the phone, and then, to my surprise, it turned out to be the maestro himself. He’d been in the cellar, he explained, with the latest bottling of his Apfelschnapps.

What had he been doing, exactly? I asked.

Jesche considered my question. ‘‘Smelling it, mostly,’’ he answered.

Jesche’s property is just a few miles from Ossiacher See, one of the loveliest of Carinthia’s justly famous lakes, and on my drive there I passed waterside cottages, crumbling fortifications and vineyards on south-facing slopes. Jesche was waiting for me in the office of his distillery, a cozy, cluttered room that was utterly dwarfed by the enormous stainless steel kettles outside. We’d barely said hello before he gave me the Apfelschnapps to sample, but only a few precious drops: among his other eccentricities, Jesche is not much of a drinker. ‘‘Schnapps should be drunk for the aroma — not to get drunk from,’’ he said.

It was the Williams pear schnapps, Jesche’s first prizewinner, that ushered me into the cult permanently. The essence of the fruit was there, of course, a gold-green buzzing at the base of my throat, but that was only the beginning. As I stood with my elbows on the inn’s polished bartop, an entire autumn seemed to pass through me in a single instant. In my giddiness, I found myself recounting a run-in with Jägermeister at a party back in college, the experience that nearly put me off schnapps forever. There was a long pause — long even for Jesche — during which the maestro squinted at me blankly, as if I’d suddenly begun speaking Urdu. The sun was setting in the picture window behind him, dipping behind a ridge of blue-black firs, and the rear fender of my rental car was the only evidence that we were still in the 21st century. ‘‘Ah yes, Jägermeister,’’ Jesche said finally. ‘‘But I thought we were talking about schnapps.’’ ■

PHOTOGRAPH BY GREGOR HOHENBERG

he makes his schnapps in. Sankt Peter is one of the most picturesque nooks in a region of Austria that seems like a landscape on loan from the afterlife — golden wheat fields, blue-green forests, crumbling castles in the middle distance — and Liegl is clearly a man who knows he’s got it good. His family have been innkeepers for three generations and farmers since time immemorial, and schnapps burning has been a late-autumn ritual for 40 of Gerhard Liegl’s 57 years. The schnapps he makes — apple, pear, plum and obstler (a blend of pear and apple) — is clear and robust and ever-so-slightly rough around the edges. ‘‘We don’t have much use for big-city life here,’’ Liegl told me, sounding for a moment like the Alabama moonshiner he so resembles. When I asked him what big city meant to him, he thought for a moment. “What’s that town you live in?’’ Brooklyn, I told him. ‘‘Brooklyn,’’ Liegl said thoughtfully. ‘‘I guess that’s pretty close to what I mean.’’

The last few decades have seen a paradigm shift among Austria’s small distillers, from simplicity and tradition toward ever more rarefied and spectacular bottlings. Liegl’s schnapps, however, is unmistakably a product of the old ways. To savor a stamperl of schnapps at one of the little tables at the foot of the enormous lime tree in the middle of the Liegl farmyard, watching the sunlight leaving the facade of the church and the hilltop behind it, is to feel distinctly spoiled. As I listened to the chatter of well-fed Carinthians at the surrounding tables, feeling the warmth of the schnapps spread outward in all directions, I let my eyes close for a moment in childish delight. ‘‘That’s a good sign,’’ Liegl said, nodding.

When I asked him what he meant, he shrugged his broad shoulders. ‘‘The look on your face is,’’ he told me. ‘‘Good schnapps should turn everyone into a baby, just like good food does.

Isn’t that a glorious feeling?’’

There’s no better way to explore Carinthia than by eating and drinking your way across it, and the Carinthians know this better than anyone. While I was waiting for a train

A S P E C I A L A D V E R T I S I N G S U P P L E M E N T T O T : T H E N E W YO R K T I M E S S T Y L E M A G A Z I N E , M A R C H 2 8 , 2 0 1 0

Smooth Sailing Leave your cares on land

The new Azamara Club Cruise’s Journey sails on tranquil waters. Photo: Jackson Patterson

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n these challenging economic times, it’s no wonder people are seeking an all-encompassing break from it all. And a cruise is just that — a sort of pampered, worry-free parallel universe where all your needs and desires are met before you ask, and you’re transported, hassle-free to the world’s most exotic destinations. Perhaps for this reason, more and more people are choosing to leave their

This special advertising feature is sponsored by participating advertisers. The material was written by WriteOn Editorial, Inc., and did not involve the reporting or editing staff of The New York Times. ©2010 The New York Times

troubles on land, and step into the world of cruising; in fact, despite the recession, the cruise industry continues to experience double-digit growth, and vacationers are choosing longer voyages than ever before. What you may not know is that competition has forced prices down, while cruise lines continue to push the limits of possibility ever further, to make your trip extraordinary.

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T The royal treatment

(Above) Voila! From Seabourn Odyssey’s instant marina, passengers enjoy kayaking, sailing and all sorts of water sports.

(Below) The ultimate in leisure with an ocean view on Seabourn’s spa terrace.

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THE YACHTS OF SEABOURN

he ultra-luxurious Yachts of Seabourn, with their gracious, intimate feel, operate on the principle that a cruise should be an unforgettable experience. Each of the awardwinning Yachts was created for discriminating, sophisticated travelers who know what it means to travel well; who yearn not only to explore the world, but to expand their lives.

A cruise aboard the Yachts of Seabourn promises to add new chapters to your life story, along with the opportunity to share those stories with other passionate travelers.

With the introduction of Seabourn Sojourn, debuting in London on June 6, Seabourn ushers in a whole new realm of high living for travelers in Northern Europe. Seabourn Sojourn, whose elegant twin sister, Seabourn Odyssey, was hailed by travel crit-

ics as a game changer, will spend its maiden season in the scenic and perennially popular cruising regions of Scotland, the Baltic Sea, St. Petersburg and the majestic fjords of Norway. And with nearly one staff member per guest, Seabourn Sojourn will provide passengers with the line’s legendary personal attention, courtesy of a crew known to possess an almost clairvoyant ability to anticipate the wishes of its guests and fulfill them before they are voiced — an impromptu complimentary mini-massage by the pool; your favorite wine appearing in your suite.

Aboard Seabourn Sojourn, life slows down.

Sumptuous suites — and there are only suites, 225 of them — measure from 295 to more than 1,200 square feet, and 90 percent include private verandas. Each is furnished with a separate seating area, a fully stocked bar, a roomy walk-in closet, flat-screen television with movies and music, and an expansive granite bathroom with a separate tub and shower. The options for dining, socializing, rejuvenating or just relaxing are countless: four open-seating venues include the exquisitely appointed restaurant and a casual al fresco poolside grill; six distinctive bars and lounges feature world-class wine and champagne; open teak decks overlooking the ocean (of course) provide the ultimate in tranquility; and the largest spa on any ultraluxury vessel, with more than 11,400 square feet spread over two decks, offers a range of exotic and therapeutic treatments, plus a full-service salon and a state-of-the-art gym and fitness center.

Because of its intimate scale, the 450-guest Seabourn Sojourn can access unusual ports of call that larger ships must simply pass by.

Even in larger ports, Sojourn can sail right to the heart of town, delivering its guests to the doorstep of the city’s attractions. Shoreside excursions are designed for small groups; but if you have something else in mind, Seabourn’s Destination Services staff can custom-tailor experiences to create exactly the sort of day you’re looking for in every port of call. Marquee ports such as St. Petersburg, Stockholm and Amsterdam are given extra time, so there’s ample opportunity to explore the areas’ cultural, historical and commercial riches. And unusual gems such as Lerwick in the Shetland Islands and Lübeck in Germany add color and depth to your voyage.

For more information, visit seabourn.com or call (800) 929-9391.

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(Above) Holland America Line’s top-of-the-line Signature-class ship, ms Eurodam, plies the waters off Norway on its maiden voyage. Photo: Pam Kern /Holland America Line (Below) For an extra-serene cruise, a Signature of Excellence spa suite on Holland America Line’s ms Veendam features all your modern spa amenities.

Photo: Michel Verdure

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HOLLAND AMERICA LINE

rom its humble beginnings as a Dutch shipping and passenger service in 1873, Holland America Line has evolved into one of the most refined, highly rated cruise lines in the world. Combining a strong sense of tradition with innovation and luxury, the venerable line continues to raise the bar in style and service with its ongoing Signature of Excellence program ($525 million in fleet-wide enhancements) a soon-tolaunch Signature-class ship, the ms Nieuw

Tradition meets innovation Amsterdam, and new cruises to Bermuda, Alaska and Europe.

Each of the line’s 14 ships has been touched by the Signature of Excellence program, with upgrades and additions to accommodations, dining options, entertainment and enrichment activities. Though too numerous to mention, these enhancements include: The Retreat, a resort-style pool, with lounge chairs set in the water and a new pool bar, gourmet pizzeria and a giant LED screen for evening movies; an

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interactive, theater-style Culinary Arts Center staffed by celebrated chefs; innovative lanai and spa staterooms (all with plush-top mattresses); Explorations Café, complete with Internet stations and one of the most extensive libraries at sea; expanded Club HAL and teen facilities and programs; and the glamorous, nightclub-style Showroom at Sea. For the technologically inclined (or not), complimentary hour-long Microsoft Digital Workshops, led by top trained “techsperts,” teach both the advanced and the novice camera or computer user how to take better pictures, make movies, edit pictures and create scrapbooks using a variety of Microsoft Windows and Windows Live services.

Holland America Line’s 15th ship, ms Nieuw Amsterdam, with an interior design that reflects the glamour of New York City, will begin its inaugural voyage July 4 in Venice. Nieuw Amsterdam, sister to ms Eurodam, is the second of its top-of-the-line Signature-class ships, with new features such as the pan-Asian Tamarind restaurant and Silk Den lounge with panoramic views; a family-style Italian restaurant; expanded spa facilities and spa staterooms; and floorto-ceiling windows in the deluxe veranda suites, for truly unbelievable views day and night. Adding to the breadth of Holland America Line’s Europe offerings, the ship will sail the Mediterranean through summer and then cruise the Caribbean for winter/ spring. During the 2010 season, it, along with five other mid-sized ships, will sail 54 cruises and call at 142 ports from Norway to Turkey.

And beginning this year, Holland America Line reintroduces regularly scheduled cruises (24 seven-day itineraries), April 25 to October 10, between New York City and Bermuda — the only major cruise line that calls on both Hamilton and St. George’s, Bermuda’s cultural and shopping hubs.

For those who prefer a colder, more dramatic vacation, new 14-Day Alaskan Adventurer Cruises on the flagship ms Amsterdam sail roundtrip from Seattle and, for the first time, include a call at Anchorage, giving guests a full day and evening in Alaska’s major city.

For more information, visit hollandamerica. com or call 877-SAIL-HAL (724-5425).

YOU’VE TRAVELED WELL WHEN YOUR MOST VALUABLE SOUVENIRS ARE THE STORIES YOU CAN’ T WAIT TO SHARE.

Intimate yachts that sail to ports larger ships cannot visit. Staff who customize everything from your in-suite amenities to your excursions ashore. Adventures and experiences so personal, so in-depth, they become part of you. Aboard The Yachts of Seabourn, you’re not just traveling, you’re traveling well. Begin your journey on the World’s Best Small-Ship Cruise Line* by contacting your travel professional or going online at Seabourn.com.

*According to readers of both Travel + Leisure and Condé Nast Traveler and the over 6,000 travel advisors of Virtuoso Travel Network. Ships’ registry: Bahamas. ©2010 Seabourn.

877.291.8530 • Seabourn.com

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include cruises through the Mediterranean, Black Sea and Baltic, and around the North Cape, British Isles and the Middle East. Each journey is accompanied by over-the-top land experiences — some purely adventurous, some super-posh: VIP access to the Wimbledon Championships, with tickets to the men’s and women’s finals; VIP access to the final two days of the 150th anniversary of the British Open at St. Andrews Links, viewed from an Edinburgh Military Tattoo private box (plus whisky sampling, champagne and dinner); paragliding over Barcelona’s sublime Valley of Ager; or rock climbing on Dubrovnik’s scenic cliffs.

Onboard, life is equally dramatic. Beginning this summer, Crystal’s Emerging Artists

Sometimes, bigger really is better

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(Top) The beauty of the Mediterranean: the luxurious Crystal Serenity sails through Sorrento, Italy.

(Above) Nothing beats an ocean-view massage on a Crystal cruise.

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CRYSTAL CRUISES

elebrating its 20th anniversary this year (with loads of upscale revelry), Crystal Cruises combines the grandeur of a bygone era with the contemporary touches discerning travelers demand. Crystal’s lavish, ultraspacious dream ships — Crystal Symphony and Crystal Serenity, which each carry up to 1,000 passengers — offer an infinite array of big ship–style choices in entertainment, casinos, spa and fitness facilities, enrichment activities and kids’ programs, along with the first–class dining and service that are an expected part of a sophisticated, luxury experience.

The ships may be super-sized, but the on-board feeling is quite intimate. Crystal boasts one of the industry’s highest guestto-staff and guest-to-space ratios (and, not coincidentally, one of the most loyal repeatpassenger bases afloat); the goal of each crew member, hand-picked from the world’s leading training academies, hotels and resorts, is to make sure each guest — from the child to the octogenarian — is content.

Crystal designs its itineraries for the wellheeled traveler who is looking for something a little out of the ordinary. Its more than two dozen 2010 European voyages

Experiences of Discovery cruises will feature performances by the grand prize finalists of the coveted Spotlight Awards, given by the Performing Arts Center of Los Angeles County (American Idol finalist Adam Lambert was a winner). And Crystal’s Wine & Food Festival on select European cruises feature a who’s-who of world-renowned chefs and wine experts.

Throughout the year, Crystal celebrates its 20th anniversary with style: renowned champagne maker Billecart-Salmon has created a commemorative bubbly, available only in 2010 and only on Crystal Cruises, and Crystal has introduced its own 2010 Pinot Noir. Every voyage will feature 20th anniversary–themed cocktail parties, along with extravagant winemakers’ dinners in the Vintage Room, centering on special wines from 1990 (which just so happened to have been a fabulous wine year).

And Crystal is a great value, too. This year, promotions include 2-for-1 fares on all cruises in all categories; All Inclusive — As You Wish spending credits of $500 or $1,000 per person on every cruise; free roundtrip air transportation from more than 20 North American gateways for most voyages, even Business Class air in Europe for Penthouse guests; and finally, a price guarantee. If you book a 2010 Crystal cruise and the fare for that stateroom category is later reduced, you will receive the reduced fare.

For more information, visit crystalcruises.com or call (888) 799-4625.

Worldwide journeys amidst the intimate ambience of only 540 international guests Sumptuous, ocean-view suites — a full 95% of which feature elegant private verandas

The New Icon of Luxury Cruising Silver Spirit Has Arrived Six sublime restaurants — revolutionary for a ship its size Dedicated butlers to cater to your every whim, graciously anticipate every wish Bespoke adventures off the beaten path arranged by a knowledgeable concierge Revitalising spa therapies in 8,300 square feet of luxurious surroundings invite true bliss Extraordinary voyages from exotic South America, timeless Mediterranean and the Caribbean’s most idyllic islands.

Silver Spirit … Oceans Away from the Everyday

Visit Silversea.com/Spirit to learn more.

S I X I N T I M AT E S H I P S — S E V E N C O N T I N E N T S — M O R E T H A N 4 0 0 D E S T I N AT I O N S For more information about luxury voyages with up to 60% Savings plus Complimentary Airfare, kindly contact your Travel Professional, call 877. 258. 1099 or visit Silversea.com.

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The art of good living

(Top) Silversea’s lavish new Silver Spirit heads out to sea.

(Above) Casual elegance: the reception area of Silver Spirit’s innovative new spa.

(Below) Norwegian Cruise Line’s Epic is all about fun and entertainment, even at meal time.

SILVERSEA

ilversea’s new flagship, Silver Spirit, is an Art Deco–inspired beauty. While every cruise aboard any of Silversea’s intimate, ultra-elegant vessels is an all-inclusive experience, the 540-passenger Silver Spirit is the line’s largest, most innovative and luxurious ship yet, with an unmatched level of pampering and personal service.

How luxurious? Each of its massive suites (some up to 1,668 square feet) boasts ocean views, butler service and a minute attention to detail (for example, a choice of 10 different pillow options); white-glove dining and world-class wine lists; and a spa unlike any other — think acupuncture, Botox and your own private hammam (that’s a Turkish bath — Turk optional).

Foodies will thrill to Silver Spirit’s six diverse dining venues. The intimate wine restaurant Le Champagne pairs some of the world’s rarest vintages with a six-course menu; Seishin specializes in Asian fusion

cuisine set around a large chef’s table; and the Stars Supper Club, with décor inspired by the Rainbow Room in New York, features a set menu of divine small plates, presented to the accompaniment of live music — dancing optional.

The 8,300-square-foot indoor/outdoor spa, the largest in the Silversea fleet, adds another dimension to the line’s focus on luxury and personalized wellness. In addition to the fitness center, sauna, steam rooms and the new ceramic-tiled Thermal Suite, the spa will also offer a variety of new services.

Silver Spirit also pushes exploration to the limit. In 2011, the Silver Spirit will embark on a full world cruise traversing both hemispheres. The Spirit of Discovery cruise begins in Los Angeles on Jan. 19, as the Silver Spirit sets sail for a 119-day odyssey exploring 60 destinations in 25 countries — with 11 overnight port visits — before concluding in Southampton on May 19. Highlights include French Polynesia, Australia, Asia, Egypt and the Mediterranean.

Along the way, Silversea will host four complimentary World Cruise Events for guests sailing the full 119-day itinerary. These custom-designed experiences include the chance to sample some of Australia’s premier wines at the original Penfolds winery, Magill Estate and the National Wine Center in Adelaide; a Thai-themed gala dinner, with an overnight stay in the private Krungthep Wing of the five-star Shangri-La Hotel in Bangkok; and a private opening of Barcelona’s renowned Picasso Museum, with plenty of time to explore its treasures at a leisurely pace, without the usual crowds. Other complimentary amenities include eight Silversea Experiences ashore; baggage handling service between home and ship; a $2,000 onboard spending credit; and roundtrip business-class air and private car transfers.

For more information, visit silversea.com, or call (877) 215-9986.

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NORWEGIAN CRUISE LINE

ome summertime, Norwegian Cruise Line will introduce the largest, trendiest and most innovative ship the company has ever built (which says a lot), with a radical new design and some of the most revolutionary concepts in all of cruise travel.

The 153,000-ton, 4,200-passenger Norwegian Epic — setting sail in July from Miami on alternating seven-day Eastern and West66

destination cruising is more fun when you can share it with someone special.

2-for-1 fares complimentary veranda upgrade plus $500 onboard spending credit.

Enjoy 2-for-1 rates, complimentary Club Veranda stateroom upgrade, plus $500 onboard spending credit on select 2010 Europe voyages. Of course you’ll also receive all of the pampering, fi ne dining, wine tastings, and destination-oriented onboard programs Azamara Club Cruises is known for.

140 ports 50 countries 2 ships More overnights Longer stays Unique destinations Uniquely delivered

To make a reservation, contact your travel professional, call 877.999.9553 or visit AzamaraClubCruises.com.

Rates are per person, cruise only, in USD, and based on double occupancy. Onboard Credit offer is valid for new individual bookings made by April 15, 2010 for select Europe sailings and excludes bookings in interior staterooms. Onboard credit is in U.S. Dollars; per stateroom; has no cash value; is not redeemable for cash; is not transferable; cannot be combined with other onboard credits on the same reservation (exceptions apply); and will expire if not used by 10 pm on the last evening of the guests’ voyage. Guests purchasing single occupancy rates will receive the full suite/stateroom rate. NO CONSUMER REDEMPTION FORM REQUIRED. NO ACTION REQUIRED BY AGENT. Onboard Credit will be applied by Azamara Club Cruises via internal option code to applicable bookings, within 15 days from booking creation. 2-for-1 offer: applies to bookings made for voyages departing April 25th, 2010 through April 2011. Quoted prices reflect 2-for-1 savings in this mailing as well as on our website AzamaraClubCruises.com, no additional action required to benefi t from savings. Savings based on brochure pricing as found on AzamaraClubCruises.com/rates. 2-for-1 savings may be available on select categories and is subject to change. Offer expires December 31, 2010.

Free Veranda Upgrade offer: Please request price code FREEUP. Offer is valid for bookings made by April 15, 2010 on select Europe sailings. Rates vary by ship, departure date, and category. All offers and itineraries subject to change without notice, and offers may be withdrawn at any time. Certain restrictions apply. Offers not valid for charters or contracted groups. Government taxes & fees are additional. Other terms and conditions apply. ©2010 Azamara Club Cruises. SM Ships’ Registry: Malta.

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ern Caribbean cruises — takes Norwegian’s trademark Freestyle Cruising concept to a whole new level. Freestyle Cruising has always meant freedom and flexibility in all areas — dress, dining, entertainment, even disembarkation. On Epic, however, all traces of traditional cruise line features have been basically tossed out the porthole, and the sheer volume of options is positively dizzying, including 20 restaurants and 20 bars and lounges, from an Art Deco supper club with a dance floor to

A cruise of Epic proportions a Chinese noodle house, and round-the-clock entertainment of every imaginable form.

Multiple, specially designed entertainment venues feature a variety of diverse productions: In the 685-seat Epic Theater, the popular Blue Man Group performs its one-of-a-kind music-comedy-multimedia act. Meanwhile, the 265-seat theater-in-the-round — the only big top at sea — will host Cirque Dreams and Dinner, an interactive, theatrical dining experience, and the first Cirque Inc. show to be produced for a cruise ship (picture juggling

waiters and contortionist cocktail waitresses).

In yet another venue, Legends in Concert, the original live tribute show, will feature the greatest collection of live tribute artists and celebrity look-alikes in the industry.

The kids, of course, might not appreciate the Cher impersonator, however realistic she may be. That’s why Norwegian, forever aiming to please, has launched Nickelodeon at Sea, featuring SpongeBob SquarePants and Dora the Explorer, along with lots of Nickelodeonthemed family entertainment and programming.

Also new on Epic: A huge range and style of innovative accommodations. New Wave staterooms feature contemporary curved architecture and more open living space. The largest ship-within-a-ship suite complex at sea comprises 60 villas and suites on two private decks at the top of the ship. And, in a particularly exciting development for non-couples, the ship will feature an unprecedented number of studio staterooms designed and priced just for solo cruisers.

For more information, visit norwegiancruiseline.com or call (866) 234-7350.

AZAMARA CLUB CRUISES

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an fabulous become even more fabulous? Apparently, yes. Azamara Cruises, the boutique, two-ship line launched in 2007, has been elaborately revamped, changing not just its name but its way of cruising. The new Azamara Club Cruises is geared toward the upscale, experienced traveler, with a focus on exotic out-of-the-way destinations and more time to actually experience them. Inventive shore excursions (or shore “immersions,” as they call them) and enrichment-centered programming make an Azamara Club Cruise as much about the destination as the voyage.

In 2010, Azamara Journey and its sister ship, Azamara Quest, will visit 140 ports in 50 countries; and while many cruise lines feature overnight calls at marquee ports, Azamara offers overnight stays in a variety of offthe-beaten-path destinations. Among them are: Istanbul, Turkey; Sorrento, Italy, which includes a host of tour options along the Amalfi Coast and Capri; Ho Chi Minh City; Bangkok; Singapore; and Hong Kong.

“We’re slowing down the tempo,

You’ll love where they take you and allowing our guests to not just see the destination, but to live it,” said Azamara Club Cruises President and CEO Larry Pimentel. “Consider destinations like St. Tropez or St. Petersburg, Russia. If you’ve experienced them only by day, you haven’t really experienced them. With Azamara, through more overnight stays and late-night stays, you can.”

With destination specialists aboard every vessel, Azamara likens itself to traveling with a knowledgeable friend, one who knows the ins and outs of every port of call — its flavors, tastes and artisans — and one who can provide an insider’s guide to the best sights, museums, shops and restaurants. On an Azamara Club Cruise, you don’t just watch the world sailing by; you actually experience it through 68

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the local culture and its music, dance, art and history. And there are always opportunities for active excursions, such as extended biking trips, golf and hiking.

Azamara gets really creative with its specialty tours: Ferrari driving in Civitavecchia, Italy; Croatian liqueur tasting in Zadar; an imperial Russian Court evening at Tsarskoe Selo in St. Petersburg. Multinight tours take passengers into nontraditional cruise territory, such as a two-night trip from Bangkok to Laos; an overnight trip from Hiroshima to Osaka via bullet train; and a three-night trip from Mumbai to the Taj Mahal.

Onboard, life is as luxurious as you could want, with butlers for those in suites (trained by the Brits, so you know they’re good); in-suite spa treatments; acupuncture; personal trainers; gourmet cuisine made with ingredients taken from the regions in which you’ve traveled, and paired with extraordinary local wines unavailable back at home.

For more information, visit azamaraclubcruises.com or call (877) 999-9553.

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(Above) Enjoy the sun, the blue sky, and the picturesque scenery while dining at the Breeza outdoor café on Azamara Club Cruises.

(Below) Entering the heart of Mediterranean culture: Voyages to Antiquity visits the beautiful Santorini, Greece.

VOYAGES TO ANTIQUITY

nd now, beginning May 4, a cruise for the adventurous.

Voyages to Antiquity will take travelers on a journey to the cradle of civilization — the Mediterranean — where the history, art, myths and architecture of the ancient world are brought to life. It is the latest effort by cruise entrepreneur Gerry Herrod, founder of the preeminent destination-focused Orient Lines, whose famed solo ship Marco Polo pioneered world cruising to all seven continents. Now, Herrod turns his attention to what he calls his “favorite area in the world.” Inspired by historical author Lord John Julius Norwich’s book, “The Middle Sea,” Herrod and his team have created a unique cruise experience aboard the 350-passenger Aegean Odyssey, sailing deep into the heart of the ancient civilizations: the Mediterranean, Adriatic, Aegean and Red seas.

From the elegant ruins of Palmyra in Syria to the splendor of Norman Sicily, the Aegean Odyssey’s nine itineraries and 16 departures include visits to ports of significant historical and cultural interest. In line

History buffs rejoice with this premium experience, cruise fares include shore excursions, gratuities and wine with dinner. And for this innaugural year, there is no additional supplement for single travelers on most sailings (subject to availability).

While the newly rebuilt Aegean Odyssey offers the comforts and service of bouN Y T I M E S.C O M / T M AG A Z I N E • M A R C H 2 8, 2 0 1 0

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tique-style cruising, you won’t find casinos, big shows and other traditional cruise hoopla. Instead, the emphasis is on cultural enrichment and immersion. A hand-selected group of experts will provide intriguing destination insights, while a team of classical history graduates will be on hand to answer questions and assist the guides on sightseeing trips. Even the ship itself is an ode to the ancients: the library is packed with books on the ancient world, and the ship is overflow-

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VOYAGES OF DISCOVERY

hey call themselves the destination specialists, and after watching any one of Voyages of Discovery’s new online video itineraries for its 2010/11 cruises, it’s easy to see why.

Bringing Discovery’s brand of destination-focused, small-ship cruising to life, each two-minute video brochure gives potential travelers a taste of what they can expect from their cruise — a chance to see the world, up close, in its true colors, and in the hands of experts. It’s one thing to read about the vast ice-covered lands of Greenland and its incredible wildlife; it’s another altogether to watch actual footage of polar bears running through the snowy tundra, or whales and musk oxen gliding, sometimes surfacing, alongside the Discovery.

Built for global cruising, the 650-passenger Discovery is large enough to sail the world’s great oceans, yet small enough to reach those places others are forced to leave behind. No crowds or lines here; each

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ing with historical artifacts, sculptures and models of ancient ships.

“It is truly a cruise line with a difference,” said Mitchell Schlesinger, Voyages to Aniquity’s director of sales and marketing. “It’s educational and exciting, particularly for those looking for a fascinating, up-closeand-personal destination experience.”

For more information, visit voyagestoantiquity.com or call (877) 398-1460.

(Above) Voyages of Discovery cruises the majestic fjords of Norway.

cruise is carefully planned to maximize time spent ashore. Behind her classic lines, the emphasis is on space, understated elegance and service by a friendly, experienced and attentive crew. Moreover, Discovery’s wideranging cruises are always accompanied by world-renowned guest speakers, visiting historians, explorers, naturalists and diplomats — each of whom add rare insight to each destination.

The summer cruise season features 11- to 17-night voyages ranging from Greenland to Normandy, the Black Sea and Levant, as well as eight unique Grand Voyages.

Winter 2010/11 cruising includes a debut program of cruises in South and Central America, including the line’s first-ever circumnavigation of South America as well as a collection of Caribbean and Latin America cruises exploring the breadth and depth of the region’s history and culture.

For more information, visit voyagesofdiscovery.com or call (866) 623-2689. 

THE LITTLE GREEN BOOK For many travelers today, the question isn’t just where to go next but also the size of the footprint they’ll make when they get there. Which is why hotels, restaurants, cruise ships and even entire cities are jumping on the biofueled bandwagon — without giving up the glamour. BY ALEXANDRA ZISSU

ECO-TRIPPING

Hot Spots Around The World

Jean-Georges Vongerichten is going hard-core locavore. His forthcoming restaurant, at ABC Carpet & Home in New York, will use 100 percent local ingredients.

Even in winter.

I L LU S T R AT I O N S BY C R A I G R E D M A N

The new Soneva Kiri resort, on Koh Kood in the Gulf of Thailand, is actually carbonzero — and has rattan tree-pod dining rooms with ‘‘flying’’ waiters on zip lines.

Iceland’s financial system may have hit bottom, but it’s the world’s top-ranked country in environmental performance, getting virtually all of its power from renewable sources like geothermal energy.

Is El Salvador the next Costa Rica?

The country is emerging as the green mecca, with vacations like Planeterra’s coffee plantation farm stays (planeterra.org).

The already seriously green Southern Ocean Lodge on Kangaroo Island, Australia, just became selfpowered with the addition of 250 solar panels.

Hurtigruten’s inaugural 11-day Climate Pilgrimage cruise sets sail May 29, taking travelers to the Norwegian Arctic to see wildlife, research stations and dwindling ice.

The savvy trip operator Context (contexttravel.com) now offers ‘‘farm to fork’’ tours of Rome — a multiday experience focused on sustainable food.

N Y T I M E S.C O M / T M AG A Z I N E • M A R C H 2 8, 2 0 1 0

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ECO-TRIPPING

THE DREAM TEAM A few years ago, it was enough not to wash the towels every day. But it takes much more for hotels to earn their green stripes these days: those towels are now organic cotton, for starters, and the water to wash them is filtered and reused. Toilets are low flow, cleaning products are sulfate-free, hybrid cars meet guests at the airport, gardens are organic, and everything is recycled. Of course, it’s the rare hotel that actually does it all. But what if one did? Herewith, the hypothetically perfect eco-hotel.

With its own solar and wind power, the Three Camel Lodge in the Gobi Desert is fully off-grid.

A water purification system like the one at the LEED-gold-certified Ritz-Carlton in Charlotte, N.C., means you can drink from the tap instead of from plastic bottles.

The refillable natural and organic products at Hotel Terra Jackson Hole in Teton Village, Wyo., keep suspect chemicals off your skin and out of streams and lakes.

For hybrid- and electric-car owners, there’s a charging station at the Charles Hotel in Cambridge, Mass.

Even greener than a hybrid? The bicycle valet at the Park Hyatt in Washington, D.C. The green wall at the Distrikt Hotel in New York filters the air — a natural way to reduce pollution.

The research on chlorine’s effect on your health isn’t pretty.

Dunk the whole family — worry-free — in the saline pool at the Viceroy Snowmass in Snowmass Village, Colo.

Repurposing an old building is often greener than building from scratch; witness the Pappersbruket hotel, a former paper mill in Ostana, Sweden.

For children on an organic diet, the Ritz Paris will whip up made-to-order organic baby food — just the way it does for Stella McCartney and Katie Holmes’s little ones.

Even a 100-mile-radius diet is going too far afield for hotels with on-site organic gardens, like Natirar in Peapack-Gladstone, N.J., which features the Ninety Acres restaurant and a Viking cooking school.

Soneva Fushi in the Maldives converts and reuses almost 80 percent of the waste it generates through its integrated waste management system.

Wyndham Hotel staff uniforms are now made with washable fabrics derived from recycled materials.

RECOVERY ACTS Visiting endangered places — even ones that rely on tourism dollars — gives many an eco-traveler pause. To avoid contributing to the harm, check out the World Monuments Fund’s 2010 Watch List of Endangered Sites (wmf.org) before planning a trip. The site also lists these five destinations, once on the brink of ruin but now making a comeback to sustainability.

Falmouth Historic Town in Jamaica Well-preserved Georgian town founded in 1769.

Tomo-no-Ura Port Town in Fukuyama, Japan Edo-era fishing village known for its ancient method of catching sea bream.

Macedonian Tomb in Pella, Greece Recently discovered tomb dating from between the second and fourth centuries B.C. Scott’s Hut in Antarctica Erected in 1911 on Ross Island by the British ‘‘Terra Nova’’ expedition.

Capitanes Generales Palace in Antigua, Guatemala Splendid colonial building that once housed the king’s governors.

72

Block Watch It’s been shown that conventional sunscreens contribute to coral bleaching. So if you’re headed somewhere reef-y, your resort may ask you to wear a biodegradable, mineral-based sunscreen (made with titanium dioxide or zinc oxide). Soléo Organics’ sunblock (soleousa .com) scores highest in the Environmental Working Group’s Skin Deep database.

Continued on Page 79

Planning a sustainable trip? These sites can help: responsibletravel.org | nationalgeographic.com/travel/sustainable | ethicaltraveler.org | sustainabletourismcriteria.org | destinet.ew.eea.europa.eu

BOTTOM, FROM LEFT:STUART FRANKLIN/MAGNUM PHOTOS; BURT GLINN/MAGNUM PHOTOS; WILLIAM P. O’DONNELL/THE NEW YORK TIMES.

A green roof like the one at the Hilton Baltimore reduces storm water runoff and keeps the building cool. Looks good, too.

More and more hotels are getting involved in community preservation efforts; the InterContinental Resort and Spa on Moorea, in French Polynesia, runs a dolphin center and sea turtle rehabilitation clinic.

EXPERIENCE A VACATION FILLED WITH

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Experience it all with AMERICAN EXPRESS

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FROM

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Purchase this Universal Orlando vacation package with any American Express® Card.

To book your vacation visit www.UniversalOrlandoVacations.com/AE or call 1-866-420-4689.

HARRY POTTER, characters, names and related indicia are trademarks of and © Warner Bros. Entertainment Inc. Harry Potter Publishing Rights © JKR. (s10) All prices, package inclusions & options subject to availability and to change without notice and additional restrictions apply. *Rate is per adult, tax inclusive based on double adult occupancy for a 4-night stay at the Quality Inn International standard room. Room type, hotel, and travel dates selected subject to availability. Rate valid for bookings now - 4/30/10 and travel 5/28/10 – 12/31/10. Other hotels and rates are available. ^3-Day Base Ticket entitles one (1) guest admission to one (1) Universal Orlando Resort theme park per day. Ticket is valid for any three (3) calendar days during a fourteen (14) consecutive calendar day period which includes the first day any portion of the ticket is used.

Parking is not included. ^^With this package, Early Park Admission begins one (1) hour prior to Universal’s Islands of Adventure regular scheduled park opening and is valid 7 days a week for travel 5/28/10 - 12/31/10; valid only at Harry Potter and the Forbidden Journey™, Flight of the Hippogriff™, Dragon Challenge™ and The Cat in the Hat™. If technical problems arise or the opening of an attraction is delayed another Universal’s Islands of Adventure attraction will be opened. 9Additional days available for purchase. †Promotional code UNIAMEX valid for bookings through Universal Parks & Resorts Vacations, now – 4/30/10 with travel through 12/31/10. Must purchase with any American Express Card.

One per package, not combinable with any other offers or discounts. Universal Parks & Resorts Vacations is registered with the State of Florida as a seller of travel. Registration number ST-24215. Shrek 4-D TM & © 2010 DreamWorks Animation L.L.C. Marvel Super Hero character names and likenesses: TM & © 2010 Marvel © 2010 Universal Studios. THE SIMPSONS RIDE TM Twentieth Century Fox Film Corporation. The Simpsons TM & © 2010 Twentieth Century Fox Film Corporation. All rights reserved. Hard Rock Hotel ® Hard Rock Cafe International (USA), Inc. Universal elements and all related indicia TM & © 2010 Universal Studios. © 2010 Universal Orlando. All rights reserved. 245090/0110JL

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BERMUDA / CARIBBEAN 15 ELBOW BEACH. Elbow Beach Bermuda offers a world-class vacation experience for discerning travelers. mandarinoriental/bermuda 16 THE CAYMAN ISLANDS. “Close to home. Far from expected." caymanislands.ky

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EUROPE 20 ICELAND. Only in Iceland will you find unforgettable nature, sparkling nightlife and the Capital of Cool. Visit visitreykjavik.com for more info.

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39 NEW HAMPSHIRE. FREE New Hampshire Visitors Guide! Go to VisitNH.gov or call 1.800.FUN IN NH

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rooms on the beach, the new five-star ONE Bal Harbour, the classic Sea View Hotel, and the St. Regis Bal Harbour (opening in 2011). balharbourflorida.com 34 CANYON RANCH. THE POWER OF POSSIBILITY. For more information, please call 1.800.742.9000, or visit canyonranch.com 35 GREATER FORT LAUDERDALE. Save now on a Beach Chic Getaway. sunny.org/save or 1.800.22.SUNNY 36 FAIRMONT TURNBERRY ISLE RESORT & CLUB. Championship golf, Willow Stream Spa, dining, beach club. 1.800.326.0288,

41 VISIT ST. PETE/CLEARWATER. Venture beyond the awardwinning beaches of St. Pete/ Clearwater, and you’ll find a host of surprises from the quaint to the quirky. Explore the possibilities VisitStPeteClearwater.com 1.877.352.3224 42 DOUBLETREE BEACH RESORT. Tropical Beachfront Resort located directly on the Gulf of Mexico. 1.800.592.6159 Doubletreebeachresort.com 43 HYATT REGENCY CLEARWATER BEACH RESORT & SPA. Brand new world-class all suite beachfront resort in Clearwater Florida. 1.727.373.1234 clearwaterbeach.hyatt.com

fairmont.com/turnberryisle/nyt 37 THE FLORIDA KEYS & KEY WEST. 1.800.FLA.KEYS, FLA-KEYS.com 38 FONTAINEBLEAU RESORT MIAMI BEACH. An iconic, stylish and sexy ocean front venue. fontainebleau.com, 1.877.512.7992

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A S P E C I A L A D V E R T I S I N G S U P P L E M E N T T O T : T H E N E W YO R K T I M E S S T Y L E M A G A Z I N E , M A R C H 2 8 , 2 0 1 0

Spa Retreats From the moment you melt into the lap of luxury, you’ll experience a sigh-inducing sense of renewal and rejuvenation.

Deftly blending a Beaux Arts sensibility and 21st-century services, the 190-room Surrey Hotel recently emerged from a 14-month, $60-million gut renovation headed by interior architect Lauren Rottet, and now represents the next generation of luxury hotels for the Denihan Hospitality Group.

Set within a townhouse on East 76th Street between Fifth and Madison Avenues, The Surrey Hotel features 160 guest “salons” and 30 suites, including a glorious penthouse and spectacular presidential suite. Every accommodation is furnished with comfy Duxiana beds outfitted in luxurious Sferra linens — along with Pratesi robes especially designed for the hotel and marble baths stocked with bath amenities

by Italian perfumer extraordinaire Laura Tonatto.

Coming in at 1,200 square feet, with a full kitchen and large dining table, the penthouse boasts a 1,000-squarefoot wraparound terrace and private access to the hotel’s residents-only rooftop English garden, where butlers ferry fare from Café Boulud, Daniel Boulud’s three-Michelin-star onsite eatery. The 2,800-square-foot terraced Presidential Suite features a formal dining room, a working fireplace and a baby grand piano. A select number of Grand Deluxe and Ultra Deluxe accommodations also feature working fireplaces, kitchens and terraces.

Worth the Splurge Tucked away on The Surrey Hotel’s second floor is Manhattan’s newest oasis of calm: The Spa at The Surrey. This luxurious sanctuary comprises five treatment rooms, including two suites, one of which has its own infinity soaking tub. In order to provide the highest levels of pampering, each has its own shower, dressing armoire and vanity. Treatment tables are draped in the finest linens, and guests are swathed in plush Sferra robes.

“Our spa was intentionally designed without public changing rooms and lockers,” said spa director Cheryl Jacobs. “We wanted our guests to enjoy the ultimate in privacy from the moment they entered their treatment room. Equally important was an ability to get results through customized, out-of-the-ordinary programs based on our guests’ goals and personal styles.”

To achieve that, Jacobs chose two product lines. Parisbased Darphin creates treatments that combine scientifically advanced formulas with specialized techniques to deliver targeted, optimal results. Darphin’s signature Rose and Pomegranate Age Reversal Facial is exclusive to The Surrey’s Spa. Australia-based Li’Tya is the spa’s organic line. The 76

Photo: Tom McWilliam

Tranquilty in the City

The Spa at The Surrey Spa at The Surrey is the only spa on the East Coast offering Li’Tya, whose philosophy honors ancient Aboriginal healing practices. All Li’Tya treatments begin with a ceremony in which indigenous herbs are burned in a wooden vessel to detoxify and remove negative energy. Signature treatments include the Mala Mayi, Dreaming and Kodo massage.

The Mala Mayi head-to-toe experience starts off with an Australian Desert Salt and Aromatic Oil scrub and scalp massage while your body becomes cocooned in a layer of warm, mineral-rich Mapi Body Mud. Next, you’ll enjoy a Kodo body massage, which is made up of 70 choreographed rhythmic movements that work to balance and realign energy flow and enhance mind and body wellness. Dreaming begins with an aromatic Miji Jina foot soak — followed up with a Mala Mayi body wrap, a Kodo body massage, a Paudi head massage, a facial and a Miji Poloma hand treatment.

The rejuvenating Rose and Pomegranate Age Reversal Facial, created exclusively for the hotel’s spa, fights signs of aging with two proprietary massages intended to reshape the muscles and detoxify the skin, followed by a luscious firming mask.

The hotel’s spa services are available to both hotel guests and local residents. Currently, locals can enjoy a 20 percent discount on individual spa treatments through May 31, 2010.

For more information, visit www.thesurreyspa.com.

This special advertising feature is sponsored by participating advertisers. The material was written by Lauren Price, and did not involve the reporting or editing staff of The New York Times. ©2010 The New York Times

A DV E R T I S E M E N T

A Star Is Reborn

Set amid 50 acres of lush gardens gently sloping down to the South Shore’s powdery pink sand beaches, Mandarin Oriental’s award-winning Elbow Beach, Bermuda, recently unveiled 98 newly refurbished luxury suites and stand-alone cottages with private patios and commanding views — including the one-bedroom Bird of Paradise Cottage, which features a fireplace, private garden and covered terrace just steps from the ocean. “After 101 years of grand hospitality,” said Frank Stocek, the resort’s general manager, “Elbow Beach is poised to offer guests the next level of luxury accommodation in Bermuda.”

Bermuda Shorts

The Spa at Elbow Beach features six tranquil suites overlooking the Atlantic, including two couple’s suites. The four single suites feature balconies with daybeds, and all feature handcrafted granite soaking tubs and river pebble–lined steam showers. The oceanfront Spa Beach Pavilion offers holistic beautifying by the beach, with a full menu of Mandarin Oriental’s signature treatments plus an indulgent mix of Bermudian-inspired specialties.

The Rum Swizzle Ritual utilizes antioxidant-rich ingredients of Bermuda’s famous potent potable. Fresh lemon and lime juices soothe rough, dry skin, while orange aids in healing blemishes and scars. The experience begins with a

78

Elbow Beach, Bermuda Welcoming Foot Ritual, followed by a cleansing and rejuvenating Pineapple Body Scrub. Next, you’ll sip the famous cocktail while soaking in a bath sprinkled with citrus slices, followed by a full body and scalp massage using a signature Mandarin grapefruit–infused body oil.

The gentle Bermuda Pink Sand Scrub is a mix of organic grape seed oil and the pink sand from the resort’s private beach. Applied to the body with hot moist mitts, this treatment will smooth, exfoliate and invigorate your skin.

For more information, visit www.mandarinoriental.com/bermuda.

ECO-TRIPPING

GERMAN ENGINEERING

Hamburg is getting a lot of eco-buzz: it’s a darling of the Web site treehugger.com and will be Europe’s Green Capital in 2011. Surrounded by rivers and nature preserves, it’s navigable by bike, canoe, fuel-cell hybrid bus and solar-powered ferry. But what’s really driving the city forward are its enviro-minded chefs, designers and shop owners.

EAT

NIL ▼

STAY

FISCHMARKT ▼

The city’s many waterside cafes are nice to look at, but to understand what the landscape actually tastes like, head to Nil, a Slow Food kitchen serving regional organic produce (Neuer Pferdemarkt 5 and 6; 011-49-40-439-7823); the biodynamic restaurant Schanzenstern (011-49-40-439-8441; Bartelsstrasse 12); or the stalls selling smoked eel at the Sunday-morning Fischmarkt (at the Elbe River and Grosse Elbstrasse).

ECO CITY ▼

SHOP

EAST ▼

Until the LEED-platinum-certified Eco City complex (ecocity.de/en) opens — with its own wind turbines! — book a room in the Asia-meets-Europethemed East hotel (east-hamburg.de; doubles from $231). Done in a colorful mashup of styles by the designer Jordan Mozer, East makes use of a converted iron foundry for its 103 rooms, four bars, spa and restaurant.

KINGDRIPS ▼

JULIA STARP ▼

Hamburg’s designers have turned sustainability into a style of its own. Independent boutiques and Web sites sell everything from locally designed organic cotton tees — as at Kingdrips (Wohlwillstrasse 27; kingdrips.com) and fairliebt.com — to organic silk dresses by Julia Starp (at Stoffsüchtig, Rothenbaumchaussee 83; juliastarp.de) and office wear by So Pure (sopurefashion.com).

FROM TOP: HENNING BOCK (5); MARCUS WAGNER; FROM CAMANA BAY; FROM CITYCENTER LAND LLC; RAVI GOGTE.

New New Urbanism New Urbanist ideas are popping up in the unlikeliest places. These three developments — designed for travelers and locals alike — are all walkable, sustainable live-play hubs aiming to combat sprawl.

CAMANA BAY, GRAND CAYMAN A 500-acre village is taking shape in the Caribbean, with a mix of housing, shops, civic space, schools and parks already complete. Scheduled for full occupancy later this year, it will continue to expand gradually (slow growth being a basic tenet of New Urbanism), encompassing sidewalks, walkways and bike trails that make cars unnecessary. camanabay.com.

CRUISE CONTROL Boats have a unique capacity to make you feel close to nature, but they also have a unique capacity to pollute it. A few carriers, however, have set a course for sustainability.

Disney Cruise Line’s laundry facilities use water generated by their air-conditioners — some 50 tons a day. And the heat produced by the ship powers evaporators that turn 1,000 tons of seawater into potable water daily. disneycruise.disney.go.com.

Going from Amsterdam to Budapest, Viking Legend’s cruiser

has a diesel-electric hybrid engine and uses an onboard water-treatment facility to help lessen its environmental impact. vikingrivercruises.com.

To reduce pollution caused by tourists in the Galápagos, Ecoventura uses a hybrid-energy boat with solar panels and a wind turbine. ecoventura.com.

LAS VEGAS The words ‘‘Vegas’’ and ‘‘sustainable’’ seldom occupy the same sentence, but the new CityCenter is going to change that. The massive eco-development (18 million square feet on 67 acres) includes hotels, residences, restaurants, shops and outdoor spaces right on the Strip, all within walking distance of one another. Onlyin-Vegas details include slot machines that double as air-conditioners and a fleet of compressednatural-gas stretch limos. citycenter.com.

LAVASA, INDIA This visionary low-carbon city near Mumbai is part of a broad and fast-evolving initiative to improve the country’s infrastructure and handle its booming urban population. Lavasa will eventually comprise four towns; the first, Dasve — built across a hillside looking over a lake — will be ready this year with schools and residences, along with hotels and nature trails. lavasa.com.

Eighty-four percent of Expedia customers are interested in sustainability and are willing to pay 5 percent more; 59 percent of Travelocity users say a green rating makes a difference when booking a hotel.

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ECO-TRIPPING

CHICAGO Rick Bayless’s new joint, Xoco, serving spruced-up Mexican street food, takes the green restaurant concept a step further: it’s in a LEED-goldcertified space and has Energy Star appliances, eco-lighting, sustainable wood, natural light, a roof garden and less takeout waste. Chef Rick will even compost and recylce his cooking grease. 449 North Clark Street; (312) 334-3688; entrees $9 to $15.

2 ●

3 ●

GARDEN VARIETY Even locavores take vacations. Thankfully, they have plenty to eat wherever they go, as restaurants devoted (or re-devoted) to showcasing local food continue to sprout worldwide.

LONDON Oliver Rowe, the chef and owner of Konstam at the Prince Albert (1) — and the former star of the British TV series ‘‘The Urban Chef’’ — sources more than 80 percent of what he serves from within the London Tube network. Look for dishes like Amersham lamb with beetroot gratin. 2 Acton Street; 011-44207-833-5040; konstam.co.uk; entrees $20 to $31.

DURHAM, N.C. Eno Restaurant and Market, the hotly anticipated new venture from Sarig Agasi and Richard Holcomb, the cheffarmer duo behind Zely & Ritz in Raleigh, N.C., will open this year in a LEED-certified landmarked space serving organic and biodynamic produce and meat from Holcomb’s farm. 101 City Hall Plaza; enorestaurantand market.com; entrees $16 to $23.

TREASURE BEACH, JAMAICA Instead of flying in foie gras like many island resorts, Jake’s (2) creates its menu almost entirely around what’s grown on the island. About 90 percent of the produce — that is, all fruit and most vegetables — comes from nearby farms, and 80 percent of the meat and 100 percent of the seafood is local. Calabash Bay; (876) 965-0635; islandoutpost .com/jakes; entrees $9 to $21.

VANCOUVER, BRITISH COLUMBIA Billing itself as an ‘‘urban link to the freshest ingredients in British Columbia,’’ the Raincity Grill (3) offers a 100mile tasting menu that includes scallops from Baynes Sound and duck from Yarrow Meadows, along with wine pairings. For the deeply curious, the Web site profiles the farmers who supply the kitchen.

1193 Denman Street; (604) 6857337; raincitygrill.com; tasting menu from about $69.

Eco-Stow Look for luggage made from repurposed and recycled materials, like Heys’s recycled ABS plastic EcoCase, which comes in a rainbowof colors ($370 for a rolling three-piece set; shop.heys.ca); Endstar’s line of bags made with Bionic Yarn, a recycledplastic fiber; and Killspencer’s packs and duffel, which cleverly use reworked military truck tarps and other materials (killspencer.com).

BRAZIL THREE WAYS When it comes to sustainability, Brazil walks the walk: Eighty-five percent of its electricity comes from renewable sources, and it’s a top producer of environmentally sensitive products like vegetable-dyed leather and Amazonian cocoa butter. Now tourism is also going green, with a wide array of new conservation initiatives and eco-lodges proliferating across the country. Here, a regional sampler.

BEACH Rumor has it that the designer Anouska Hempel’s long-awaited eco-resort, Warapuru, will finally open this year on Engenhoca beach in Itacaré. In the meantime, there’s no dearth of sustainable spots along the coast of Bahia, like the Itacaré Eco Resort (ier.com.br; doubles from about $278), which sits on an old cocoa farm overlooking a gorgeous beach and has been certified carbon-free by a local organization. Just north, in Trancoso, is the new Uxua Casa Hotel (above; uxua.com; doubles from $474), a group of handsomely repurposed pousadas opened by Wilbert Das, the former creative director of Diesel; and in a federal nature preserve

80

on the Maraú Península is Kiaroa, a resort built according to strict ecological guidelines but with plenty of Egyptian cotton sheets (kiaroa.com.br; doubles from $375).

JUNGLE Amazonian deforestation is, according to the South American tour operator Dehouche (dehouche.com), responsible for around 20 percent of the country’s global greenhouse gas emissions.

So the company started a fund to pay farmers not to cut down trees. In exchange for donations, Dehouche offers travelers the chance to see their efforts at work at farm stays in the village of Paranaíta in Mato Grasso.

ISLAND Tourism to Fernando de Noronha, a Unesco Natural Heritage site 200 miles off Brazil’s northeast coast, is strictly controlled in order to preserve the ecological balance — 70 percent of the seven-square-mile volcanic island is a protected Marine National Park. Which is only one reason Fernando has taken off as the celebrity eco-hideaway du jour. Other draws include the luxe eight-room Pousada Maravilha (above; pousadamaravilha.com.br; doubles from $678) and the rustic Pousada Zé Maria, which has unparalleled views (pousadazemaria.com.br; doubles from $336).

TIP: Choose a destination with good public transportation so you don’t need a car. When you get there, stay put. Many short trips only add to the footprint.

TOP LEFT: 1. FROM KONSTAM; 2. FROM ISLAND OUTPOST; 3. HAMID ATTIE; LUGGAGE: TONY CENICOLA/THE NEW YORK TIMES; BOTTOM, FROM LEFT: FERNANDO LOMBARDI; FROM DEHOUCHE ARCHIVE; FROM POUSADA MARAVILHA.

1 ●

Unmaskthe truth...

Nomore cover-ups.

It’s not just subprime mortgages and derivative insurance that bury honesty in legal mumbo jumbo. A legal loophole allows some U.S. wines to masquerade as something they’re not.

There are many fine sparkling wines, but only those from Champagne can use that region’s name. Names of American wine regions like Napa Valley and Willamette are also misused.

Consumer groups agree: deceptive wine labeling must stop. Tell Congress to protect consumers. Sign the petition at www.champagne.us.

Champagne only comes from Champagne,France.

The New York Times Style Magazine

SPRING 2010

BUZZ OFF ART WORK BY JORGE PARDO

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the VANISHING THE SPECTACULAR TERRAIN OF AUSTRALIA’S TOP END BELIES A HARSH LANDSCAPE WHERE THE NATIVE WILDLIFE POPULATION IS ON THE VERGE OF COLLAPSE. VERLYN KLINKENBORG SEARCHES FOR SIGNS OF LIFE. PHOTOGRAPHS BY OLAF OTTO BECKER

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AUSTRALIANS CALL THE NORTHERNMOST CHUNK OF their continent the ‘‘Top End,’’ a breezy — bigger than Connecticut and Delaware moniker, as though Australia were a boiled combined. To Australians, Kakadu and the egg sitting upright in an egg cup waiting to country around it feels like an ancestral be cracked open with a silver spoon. Just reservoir, a cultural repository with Aboriginal how much Top End there is is open to debate, roots and an oasis of native biodiversity. Here, the kind that gets worried out with maps the sandstone endures, the monsoon floods drawn in the dust. While I was there last come and go, and then the fires follow — erratic September, I saw dust maps that gave the and regenerative in the early part of the dry Top End most of Australia north of the Tropic season, unforgiving in the later part. But this of Capricorn — about a third of the continent. oasis is going dry almost unnoticed.

Others included only Cape York and the This is a landscape that seems to ask, ‘‘Why rather wind-swept-looking peninsula that have you come here?’’ There’s no hostility in includes the roistering town of Darwin, the the question, only the indifference native to a capital city of the Northern Territory. continent of punitive, natural harshness. Every The Top End I visited was vastly narrower — traveler will have a different answer. Mine was the river flats and hill country just inland from mud, and also, more broadly, the difference Van Diemen Gulf. But it was still an between nature as a norm and nature as merely imponderable slice of terrain, long ridges of what is, whether it should be or not. Here, the sandstone giving way to the flood plains that grandeur of nature is well disguised by the edge Kakadu National Park, a Unesco World impenetrable thicket of life itself.

Heritage site and the largest park in Australia For weeks after visiting Australia, I found myself thinking about mud: the living mud on the banks of Sampan Creek, which Wild kingdom Above, from left: Twin Falls sandstone insinuates itself into Van Diemen Gulf, not far formation in Kakadu National Park; water buffalo, which from Bamurru Plains, a safari-style eco-lodge were introduced to the region in the 19th century, wade that opened here a few years ago. When the through a swamp. Previous spread: a view from Arnhem, the Aboriginal land in Australia’s Northern Territory. wicked tide falls on the creek’s lower reaches, 86

it leaves behind long, sloping shelves of ooze.

In December, the monsoon comes, and when it does, Sampan Creek and all its fellow creeks and rivers break their bounds and spread their mud — an originating mud — out over the coastal plains. It daubs the fur of Agile wallabies grazing on the flood plains. The water buffalo seem compounded of it. The magpie geese glory in it by the tens of thousands. I saw a similar mud in the billabongs at Kakadu and beneath the freshwater mangroves at Wongalara, a former cattle station southeast of Kakadu that has been converted into a nature sanctuary by the Australian Wildlife Conservancy.

On Sampan Creek, canoe-length saltwater crocodiles come creasing down the banks, slicking their tiled bellies across the mud. They slip into the silted current, eyes like dark and watchful bubbles. You may be on dry ground, termite plinths all around you, the astringent scent of crushed tea-tree leaves in the air, but a part of your mind will still be thinking of those estuarine eyes not quite looking at you, yet not quite minding their own business either.

One afternoon, I saw four young Australian men fishing in a Kakadu billabong. They

were standing in a small pram with plenty of beer. Meanwhile, around the corner, a line of crocodiles waited their turn at the carcass of a water buffalo, which lay half in the water, its central cavity opened, its wet, white ribs showing. The crocodile at work seemed almost drugged by the turbid scent of decomposition. At long intervals, it drove itself up onto the rib cage, rolling sideways, then using its weight to tear free a mass of rotting flesh. It showed a white stump where its left foot had been, lost in some recent crocodilian controversy — the very antithesis of Captain Hook.

THROUGHOUT THE TOP END, I sensed an incoherence, an unresolved moral burden in the landscape. Take Kakadu National Park.

It is a very recent creation, first proposed in the mid-1960s but not confirmed until more than a decade later. It is mostly escarpment country, a gouged wilderness, a landscape of rock and time. And yet in some sense Australia has not yet decided what Kakadu should be — a reminder of just how new the conservation ethic is here and how hard it is to create coherent preservation schemes in a place where time collides the way it does down under. In some ways, Kakadu is an experiment

in trying to resolve historical tensions rather than a place of natural conservation.

For one thing, Kakadu is one of the few truly national parks in the country — administered by federal, not state authority, for the simple reason that it sits on Aboriginal land. One of the great sticking points in the park’s recent history is whether Australians should pay an entrance fee. At present, the answer is best summed up by the empty site of the former east entrance station, expensively built and expensively bulldozed when fees were rescinded in 2004. The fees have just been reinstated.

Then, too, there is the critical shared management of Kakadu with its traditional owners, many of whom, mostly Aboriginal Bininj/Mungguy, still live within the park.

They’re conservators of the land and their traditions within it, visible in its rock art and its sacred sites, but the Aborigines hunt and fish throughout the park practically at will. They also harbor non-native animals like buffalo and, notoriously, a herd of shorthorn cattle visible in the grasslands around Yellow Water, for reasons that are both spiritual and carnivorous.

The park’s Aboriginal heritage is also overlaid with the more recent history of white

holdings within its boundaries. The strangest and most significant is the Ranger uranium mine, which is still being worked within the park’s borders. And then there is Jabiru — a town established to service the Ranger mine.

The streets are quiet, utterly domestic in feel.

Apart from the vegetation, and the flying foxes hanging dormant in a tree at midday above the elementary school, Jabiru could be a suburb of Dallas.

LIKE MUCH OF AUSTRALIA, the Top End demonstrates that nature favors invasive species over native ones, at least in the short term. They proliferate. They burgeon. But what matters isn’t only what invasive species do to the balance of life in the wild. What matters too is what they do to our minds, since that’s where the difference between native and invasive is finally assessed.

In their proper element, for instance, cane toads are no more loathsome than any other toad, though they are poisonous. On the flood plains east of Darwin, they will be clustering near the oil lamps by night, bobbing for insects and getting underfoot.

Or they’ll be lying tire-flattened on the Arnhem Highway (the east-west road between Darwin and Kakadu) or splayed out, N Y T I M E S.C O M / T M AG A Z I N E • M A R C H 2 8, 2 0 1 0

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In flight Kakadu’s various habitats support more than 280 species of birds.

on their backs in a dusty paddock somewhere, their digestible meaty bits eaten away by the few birds that have already somehow learned how to eat them without fatality. For cane toads are relatively new to Australia, which is not their proper element.

Cane toads explain the wistfulness you hear among some Australians when they talk about their roadkill. ‘‘You used to see a lot of pythons dead on the highway,’’ said Sab Lord, a legendary bush guide, as we drove one day across the Top End toward Darwin. The toads have spread outward across the country from Queensland cane fields, where they were introduced to help control beetles, and they have decimated the reptiles and birds that have eaten them. As a result, the roadkill census — which is how most people see most wildlife — reveals fewer and fewer native reptiles and more and more cane toads, which hark back to the Americas. The first cane toad arrived in Darwin only recently, and believe me, it was not welcomed.

I didn’t fly halfway round the world from New York to see cane toads. But then that’s the point of flying halfway round the world — to see what you didn’t expect to see.

I didn’t expect to see swamp buffalo in the Top End, either, and yet there they were, some domesticated and bucolic, some feral and simply rancid with anger, but all descended from the few Indonesian buffalo brought by the British to the Cobourg Peninsula in the 1820s. In the 1980s and ’90s, the government tried to shoot out the buffalo, to control disease. But the buffalo are making their way back, crossing out of the Aboriginal reserves, where they were never shot out, into Kakadu and the flood plains north of it. There, on places like Swim Creek Station, where Bamurru Plains is sited, the buffalo are a cash crop, gathered by airboats and helicopters in February during the monsoon and shipped back to Southeast Asia for human consumption.

One night, I walked back to my tent-cabin from the lodge at Bamurru Plains through the corkscrew pandanus palms. The full moon was high, cane toads were clustering in the dim glow, and the wallabies were moving through camp nearly silently. The water buffalo out on the flood plain had receded from view — drifting at sunset for the night into the woods, just up the trail from me.

From outside, the inward-sloping walls of the tent-cabin looked opaque. But when I stepped inside and doused the lights, the sheer canvas seemed to vanish, and I was left with only the Continued on Page 107 88

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PROFILE IN STYLE

DAVID DE ROTHSCHILD The eco-crusader is

HIS WANDERLUST By the time you read this, David de Rothschild will be floating somewhere in the middle of the Pacific Ocean on the Plastiki, a 60-foot catamaran made primarily from used plastic bottles. Assuming, that is, all goes as planned. ‘‘The boat only averages five knots,’’ he says with a laugh about the ambitious 11,000-mile itinerary. ‘‘That’s about six miles an hour.’’

But the 31-year-old heir to the de Rothschild banking fortune is no stranger to adventure.

Having visited some of the most beautiful places on the planet — in 2005 he trekked across Antarctica via the South Pole — he now travels to some of the most blighted, sharing his stories and spreading awareness through his Web site, adventureecology.com. In 2007 he took a team to Ecuador to explore the effects of oil drilling. The Plastiki expedition will take him and his crew to the Eastern Garbage Patch, an island of trash in the Pacific Ocean twice the size of Texas. ‘‘The list of problems is big,’’ he says optimistically, ‘‘but the list of solutions is even longer.’’

ABOVE: THE PLASTIKI ON A TEST RUN. LEFT: THE CREW WILL USE KLEAN KANTEEN’S SPECIAL PLASTIKI WATER BOTTLE.

ABOVE: THE ECO-ADVENTURER AT REST. LEFT: HIS EARTHFRIENDLY NIKES.

THE INTERIOR OF THE CABIN. RIGHT: HIS COMPASS NECKLACE. BELOW: CROSSING ANTARCTICA.

ABOVE: DE ROTHSCHILD AS A CHILD, ALREADY LOOKING FOR ADVENTURE. ABOVE RIGHT: AN EARLY ENCOUNTER WITH PLASTIC TRANSPORTATION. RIGHT: A PHOTOGRAPH BY RICHARD LONG, ONE OF HIS FAVORITE ARTISTS.

ABOVE: EVERYTHING THAT IS WRONG WITH GREEN MARKETING. RIGHT: HIS DOG SMUDGE. FAR RIGHT: SPECIAL KIEHL’S PRODUCTS FOR THE EXPEDITION.

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an old-school explorer in a brave new world. Next stop: Trash Island.

TEXT BY ALIX BROWNE

AN ART INSTALLATION BY DAN HARVEY AND HEATHER ACKROYD. BELOW: ONE OF THE GREAT ECO-STORIES OF ALL TIME.

STANDING ON THE BEACH IN BIG SUR.

RIGHT: A GREEN MARKETING ETING GIMMICK. CK. BELOW: A DIFFERENT ERENT KIND OF GREENBACK. EENBACK.

LEFT: A WATCH FROM IWC, ONE OF THE SPONSORS OF THE PLASTIKI EXPEDITION. RIGHT: NATURE AT ITS MOST MANICURED.

WHAT BUGS HIM

BELOW: ONE OF HIS FAVORITE BOOKS.

According to de Rothschild, we don’t get out enough. Our disconnect with nature is such that we will happily pay extra for a hotel room with an ocean view but won’t go so far as to get our feet wet. ‘‘It’s earth porn,’’ he says. Or, to put it more mildly, our idea of ‘‘out there’’ comes with a can of Off! ‘‘God forbid another species would land on me! We like nature when we can control it.’’

And market it. Another one of his big peeves is the use of nature to sell stuff like organic jeans. (Do we really need 10 pairs?) ‘‘We are not going to consume our way out of this problem,’’ he says.

And while there is an undeniable link between consumerism and the environment — something he explored as the host of the Sundance Channel documentary series ‘‘Eco Trip: The Real Cost of Living’’ — he is not a big believer in carbon offsets. ‘‘It’s haggling,’’ he says. ‘‘I do travel, and I’m the most blessed person in the world.

I try to reduce everywhere I can in my everyday life. My footprint is bigger than most, but it’s a lot smaller than it could be.’’

DE ROTHSCHILD WITH HIS SKIPPER, JO ROYLE. RIGHT: TAKING THE PLASTIKI OUT FOR A SAIL.

PIMPING HIS RIDE One can be a trash tourist and still travel first class. The Plastiki’s hull is made of junk, but the interiors — including a reclaimed wood table, swashbuckling pirate motifs and custom gear satchels — were created by the San Franciscobased designers Nice Collective. And even as the crew is restricted to the barest of essentials, they will enjoy special all-in-one grooming products from Kiehl’s (an official expedition supplier) and fresh vegetables from an on-board hydroponic garden. (Electricity will be generated by solar panels and energy bicycles, natch.) Indeed, de Rothschild has learned from past experience that a few treats, like a drop of whiskey or a nice chocolate bar, can go a very long way. To keep his friends close, he asked them to fill an iPod with music and an e-reader with books to take with him on his travels. And he’s admittedly lost without his compass necklace, which is loaded with lucky charms like a Saint Christopher medal, a wishbone and a harmonica. You’d be surprised, he insists, that where charms — or is that charm? — fail, music can get you out of a jam.

JUSTIN TIMBERLAKE, CHLOË SEVIGNY, RICK OWENS AND OTHERS GET THE ‘‘PROFILE IN STYLE’’ TREATMENT AT NYTIMES.COM/TMAGAZINE.

ABOVE: HIS CARE LABEL FOR THE PLANET. BELOW: TRAFALGAR SQUARE, REIMAGINED. RIGHT: DE ROTHSCHILD IN SOMERSET, ENGLAND.

PORTRAIT, BOAT, WITH SKIPPER AND WITH SAIL: LUCA BABINI; BOTTLE, SNEAKER AND NECKLACE: GARRY M C LEOD; CABIN: NICE COLLECTIVE; KIEHL’S: TONY CENICOLA/THE NEW YORK TIMES; © RICHARD LONG: ‘‘WALKING A LINE BY THE FOOTPATH’’ (2002), COURTESY JAMES COHAN GALLERY, NEW YORK; MARTIN HARTLEY/EYEVINE; WATCH: FROM IWC SCHAFFHAUSEN; ‘‘FLYTOWER’’ (2007); ACKROYD & HARVEY; MARIANA BASSANI/ ELEPHANT FAMILY; ‘‘THE LORAX’’: JENS MORTENSEN; ‘‘TRIBES’’: WILLIAM P. O’DONNELL/THE NEW YORK TIMES; TRAFALGAR SQUARE: ADRIAN DENNIS/ GETTY IMAGES; ALL OTHER GRAPHICS AND IMAGES FROM DAVID DE ROTHSCHILD.

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Naughty by Nature On the Big Island of Hawaii, Mother Earth gets hot and bothered. Maura Egan braves the elements.

PHOTOGRAPHS BY RAYMOND MEIER

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FIRE MIU MIU SHOES, $780. CALL (212) 641-2980. FASHION EDITOR: MELISSA VENTOSA MARTIN.

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CHANEL BAG, $1,995. GO TO CHANEL.COM.

E AEARTH RTH

CHANEL BAG, $1,995. GO TO CHANEL.COM.

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F LO R A

FLORA PRADA BAG, $2,695. AT JEFFREY. CALL (212) 206-3928.

PRADA BAG, $2,695. AT JEFFREY. CALL (212) 206-3928.

‘I started out in the south,

but the island kicked me up here a few years ago,’’ says Cathy Bilsky, who runs Cathy’s Angelite Om, a shop in the old plantation town Honokaa, on the northeastern coast of the Big Island of Hawaii. Like many locals, Bilsky, who came here from Michigan (by way of California), tends to anthropomorphize the island.

Her store is piled high with jagged rocks, posters of Ganesh and signed autographs from fans like Andy Dick, who scribbled, ‘‘Cathy, I love you!’’ on his photo. ‘‘This just felt like home when I got up here,’’ she says as she kneads my shoulders with one of her crystals.

About an hour’s drive up the coast in North Kohala, Jeanne Sunderland describes how she selected the plot for her eco-minded lodge Hawaii Island Retreat at Ahu Pohaku Hoomaluhia, which means Sacred Peaceful Stones in Hawaiian. Sunderland, a former spa director, and her husband spent a lot of time on these boulders; one of them, Tutu, is a sacred rock that Hawaiians visit to ensure that their newborns live long. ‘‘The stones would talk to us. They told us to make this land inclusive.’’ So last spring they opened their solar-powered lodge with a yoga studio, organic garden and several yurts on the property. ‘‘It took us 10 years to find the right place, or the right place to find us.’’

Despite the New Age speak, you can’t deny that the Big Island, the largest (bigger than all the other islands combined) and one of the least populated (less than 200,000 people) of the Hawaiian chain, has a life of its own. This is a place where Mother Nature had some kind of manic episode. No wonder those lucky enough to inhabit such a place can describe it only in exalted terms. ‘‘It’s like a mini-continent,’’ says Scott Hare, a woodworker who creates pieces from the hundreds of species of trees that grow here. (He’s made carvings for the likes of Bill Clinton and the Emperor of Japan.) ‘‘We got every climate except for Arctic.’’

There are snowcapped mountains, giant waterfalls, dense jungles, rain forests, lava fields, beaches of white, black and even green sand, and the most active volcano on earth, Kilauea.

STARTING ALONG THE KOHALA COAST ON THE MAIN HIGHWAY,

which runs the circumference of the island, you’ll be hard pressed to find any signs of life. The road cuts through endless arid black fields of hardened lava that evoke a postapocalyptic landscape. This is the island’s gold coast, so called because of the abundant sunshine — which is why exclusive resorts like the Four Seasons are tucked among the black rock and the beach coves. It’s where Laurance S. Rockefeller found his piece of paradise in the 1960s and opened the clubby Mauna Kea Beach Hotel (named after the island’s tallest mountain). As you head inward toward Waimea, the lunar landscape gives way to green hills, dotted with cows and sheep — if you squint, you’ll swear you’re in Scotland. Dropping down from here into the Hamakua coast, the green turns into a tangled canopy of dense foliage, where every few miles there’s a fruit stand offering the lush land’s bounty: Rangpur limes, lilikoi, cherimoya, durian, litchi, macadamia nuts, star fruit and red Cuban bananas that taste like Chiquitas on steroids. At some stands, there’s just an honesty box — throw down a few dollars and you’ve got enough fruit to rival Carmen Miranda’s headpiece.

Nearby in the town of Hilo, growers from all over the island come to the farmers’ market, held every Wednesday and Saturday, to sell a mixed bag of goods: hydroponic lettuce, raw honey, orchids, Peruvian tamales, Portuguese bread and various Jurassic-size fruits. ‘‘People have cut ferns from our property and sold them as lettuce greens at the market,’’ says Barbara Andersen, who owns the Shipman House Bed 96

and Breakfast, an inn perched on a hill above downtown Hilo. ‘‘Another woman came and asked if she could cut down some of our bamboo so she could make a bed frame. My husband let her because he was so impressed with her resourcefulness.’’ Her family has been on the island for generations, and she navigates her orchards with the assured gait of a native. She cautiously points out the very pungent noni plant, which produces a medicinal fruit that is alleged to cure everything from acne to cramps to cancer. ‘‘It smells like a combination of Limburger cheese and teenage boys’ socks,’’ Anderson says.

The source of all this abundance comes from the island’s five volcanoes. About 45 minutes from Hilo sits Kilauea, the most visited volcano, which has been erupting constantly for the past 27 years, replenishing the earth with mineral-rich soil. This, along with plentiful sunshine and mild temperatures, has created a sweet spot for coffee bean cultivation. Over the last decade, the Kona Coffee belt, a 20-mile strip of plantations along the island’s west coast, has become the Napa Valley for coffee devotees, complete with farm tours and tastings.

At Mountain Thunder Coffee Plantation, an organic farm located in Kaloko Cloud Forest, the employees speak of their coffee beans like prized grapes. ‘‘At 3,300 feet elevation, we’re not growing too many beans,’’ says the general manager, John Langenstein, who produces a Cloud Forest Reserve bean that sells for $55 a pound. ‘‘But what we do grow is ultrapremium.’’ Bong Brothers Coffee is an old general store in the town Honaunau, now run by Linda Bong and her partner, who restored the farm and the mill in the back. Besides producing their own coffee, they process the beans grown by the new population of gentleman farmers with a few coffee plants in their backyards. ‘‘Coffee culture is bigger than Hawaiian culture on this island because it generates so much income,’’ she says. ‘‘This land gives a lot.’’ ■

ESSENTIALS • HAWAII HOTELS Four Seasons Resort Hualalai Balinese-style villas with six swimming pools, a spa, a golf course and plenty of private areas for V.I.P.’s. 72-100 Kaupulehu Drive, Kailua-Kona; (888) 340-5662; fourseasons.com/hulalai; doubles from $775. Hawaii Island Retreat at Ahu Pohaku Hoomaluhia A luxury eco-friendly lodge. (808) 889-6336; hawaiiislandretreat.com; doubles from $275. Kaawa Loa Plantation Guest House & Retreat Stylish B&B in the Kona coffee belt with jaw-dropping views of the island’s southern coastline. kaawaloaplantation.com; (808) 323-2686; doubles from $125. Mauna Kea Beach Hotel A luxury resort sits on one of the island’s prettiest beaches. 62-100 Mauna Kea Beach Drive, Kohala Coast; (800) 882-6060; princeresortshawaii.com; doubles from $450. Shipman House Bed and Breakfast Inn Offers an impressive tropical breakfast and weekly hula lessons. 131 Kaiulani Street, Hilo; (808) 934-8002; doubles from $219.

RESTAURANTS Hilo Bay Cafe Serves seasonal fare like Hamakua mushroom pot pie and scallops with tobiko, wasabi cream and green-tea soba. Waiakea Center, 315 Makaala Street; (808) 935-4939; entrees $9 to $29. Merriman’s The James Beard Award-winning chef dishes up regional delights like Kalua pig and sweet-onion quesadilla and ponzu-marinated mahi-mahi. Opelo Plaza, Highway 19, Waimea; (808) 885-6822; entrees $22 to $47. Sombat’s World-class Thai cuisine just off the highway. 88 Kanoelehua Avenue, Hilo; (808) 969-9336; entrees $11.95 to $17.95. Teshima’s A local institution serving both Japanese staples and local fare. Highway 11, Honalo; (808) 322-9140; complete dinners from $12.75 to $23.75.

COFFEE TRAIL Bong Brothers Coffee A store and coffee mill. Highway 11, Honaunau; (808) 328-9289; bongbrothers.com. Hilo Coffee Mill Specializes in small-batch production. 17-995, Highway 11, Mountain View; (808) 968-1333; hilocoffeemills.com. Kona Blue Sky Coffee Company Over 400 acres on the slopes of Mount Hualalai. 76-973 Hualalai Road, Kailua Kona; (808) 322-1700; konablueskycoffee.com Mountain Thunder Kona Coffee Plantation An organic farm producing premium beans. 73-1942 Hao Street, Kailua-Kona; (888) 4145662; mountainthunder.com.

BEACHES Hapuna Beach A wide strip of sand ideal for sunbathing. Kaunaoa Beach The Mauna Kea resort’s beach offers tranquil waters and powdery sand.

(All hotel beaches are open to the public.) Kealakekua Bay Calm waters plus a diverse array of fish equal one of the best snorkeling spots. Papakolea Beach On the southern tip, it’s difficult to reach but worth it for a glimpse of green sand.

VALEXTRA BAG, PRICE ON REQUEST. GO TO BARNEYS.COM. FASHION ASSISTANT: JASON RIDER.

WATER WAT ER VALEXTRA BAG, PRICE ON REQUEST. GO TO BARNEYS.COM.

FASHION ASSISTANT: JASON RIDER.

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P

ALERMO PRIVATA

AN INSULAR CITY FULL OF ART AND RUINS REVEALS QUIET WONDERS AROUND EVERY PIAZZA. JIM LEWIS PROWLS THE SICILIAN CAPITAL. PHOTOGRAPHS BY DOMINGO MILELLA

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World of interiors Sculptures by Giacomo Serpotta surround a photograph of a stolen Caravaggio in the San Lorenzo oratory.

Opposite: Santa Maria dello Spasimo church.

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I

T SITS ON THE NORTH SHORE of Sicily on a fan-

shaped stretch of land between two towering stone promontories, and it’s been there, in one form or another, for almost 3,000 years. Empire after empire has trodden upon the place: Greeks, Phoenicians, Carthaginians, Romans; then Vandals, Normans, Moors, Spaniards; then Italians, the United States Army; and since the end of World War II, Cosa Nostra, whose influence over the place is only recently waning. For millennia it’s been built up and knocked down, robbed and bombed, patched up and left to fend for itself. So it is a spectral city, a city of ghosts and ruins, amid which the living citizens slip quietly and for the most part without expression; an inward city, not unkind but very private — Italia insulare, as they call it. Palermo can be very beautiful, in a decaying, Hubert Robert way; on sunny days the sky overhead is Mediterranean enamel blue; the food is wondrous. But above all, Palermo is full of secrets and very strange.

Even notional comparisons are hard to come by and incomplete.

Like Naples, Palermo is famous for its depredations, its crime and its unemployment; but Naples is far busier and more worldly. Like Havana, Palermo has the faint, heady air of isolation and rotting elegance.

But Havana is wide open, a city seemingly without interiors, whereas Palermo is nothing but: for all its markets and sidewalk restaurants, it feels as if most of life takes place indoors, behind curtains.

Wandering through one of Palermo’s outdoor markets one afternoon, I was hailed by a young man who asked me if I was Italian. I said no and he merely nodded, but he’d asked in English, so I stopped to chat with him. He had lived in California a decade or so before, and, judging from his black turtleneck and Iggy Pop haircut, time had simply stopped since he’d moved back. He presided over a small stall stocked with Sicilian staples: peppers and capers, fennel seed, infused olive oils, honey and homemade limoncello, but he seemed uninterested in selling me anything. We talked a bit. He shrugged matter-of-factly and said, ‘‘It’s like a third-world country around here.’’ ‘‘Otherworldly’’ might be more accurate. The city reminded me of nothing so much as Michelangelo Antonioni’s movie ‘‘L’avventura,’’ in which some young friends camp out on a tiny Aeolian island, only to find in the morning that one of their group is missing, though there’s no place she could have gone. They never do find her, the woman in the movie, and after a while no one wants to talk about it. Palermo is like that.

Consider, for example, the Caravaggio. Fewer than 100 paintings have been attributed to the master, and one of them, a large, late-period Nativity, hung in Palermo’s tiny Oratorio di San Lorenzo. The day I visited, there was a small orange tree in full fruit in the courtyard, and the place was so quiet that the young woman selling tickets almost jumped out of her skin when I knocked on the doorjamb. She pointed out a sad, photographic reproduction on the far wall and then left me: the Caravaggio was the jewel in Sicily’s patrimony, and in 1969 it was stolen, by thieves who simply tore it from its frame. To this day no one knows who took it or where it is now — whether it’s hanging in someone’s palazzo or stashed in a safe deposit box or whether, as one Mafia informant recently claimed, it was hidden by a crime boss in

a barn on his property, where it was gnawed on by pigs and rats, and finally burned in a fit of culturecide.

Left behind in the San Lorenzo are a series of plaster sculptures by a Baroque artist named Giacomo Serpotta. They cover the walls and ceiling with three-dimensional allegories — embodiments of the Virtues, scenes from the lives of saints — a population of eddying stucco figures that look as if they’d emerged from swirls of vanilla frosting and then begun leaping and crawling, alive and addressing one another, like the figures in a Tiepolo ceiling painting come to life. They are not quite enough to make up for the missing masterpiece, but they’re spectacular and eerie, and possessed of their own peculiar genius.

Little is known about Serpotta. He was born in Sicily in the mid-17th century and may have never left; he’s the kind of artist a city could boast about, but Palermo is not a place that boasts. It’s a place that takes the bad with the better. When I went into the San Lorenzo, it was raining; I was thinking about the Caravaggio; the day was crabby and dour.

By the time I left the church, I was thinking about Serpotta. A swift Mediterranean wind had blown the clouds off the island. Down the street I passed a music conservatory named for Vincenzo Bellini, housed in an old building whose windows had been flung open to catch the fresh air, and the sound of dozens of students playing scales and snatches of opera drifted over the street — one of the world’s most pleasing sounds.

TO GET AROUND THE CITY, you walk. Public transportation is spotty

and cabs are hard to come by, and it’s a small place anyway, with a little more than 650,000 people. Besides, the side streets are barely wider than a man’s outstretched arms, the piazzas so tiny they feel like courtyards, and all of it is a jumble. Each succeeding empire built upon the remains of the last; then, toward the end of World War II, the United States Air Force bombed the place, destroying a considerable part of the center, little of which has been repaired since, leaving gaping holes through which you can see layers of time. Everywhere there are ancient arches that lead nowhere, lintels supporting nothing, half-collapsed roofs, walls gouged with shrapnel and peppered with bullet holes, a half block razed down to its foundations, like an abandoned archaeological dig. It’s not uncommon to see aged apartment buildings only halfoccupied: one side reduced to rubble, the other occupied by families going about their lives. On the walls of buildings there is invariably graffiti, cryptic hollow-political slogans — ‘‘Masters of ourselves,’’ ‘‘You who have been warned, don’t give up’’ — rendered simply in black spray paint and signed with the anarchists’ encircled A, though the effect is more melancholy than fierce.

Every morning I would leave my hotel and start walking, choose a direction and get lost, wandering for hours, poking my head into stores and churches, looking for something, finding something else. On the western edge of town there is a catacomb, where exhumed bodies are stacked in an underground warren. You pay a fee to a fat Capuchin monk in dun-colored robes tied with a rope belt, head down a flight of stairs and gawk at row upon row of bodies, clothes over bones, that have been propped up on the wall. But aboveground, and for free, there’s a small, overbuilt cemetery filled with elaborate tombs, each plastered with a dozen or so small photographic cameos, generations passed saying, Remember me, remember me.

Near the antiques stores that line the Corso Alberto Amedeo lies the Palazzo di Giustizia, an enormous courthouse designed in the 1930s in kind of a high fascist modern — a fearsome thing when it was built, now mostly an architectural curiosity that lies sun-raked like the empty piazze in a de Chirico. Down by the Vucciria, the city’s great seafood and produce market, I stopped to eat in a restaurant called Trattoria Da Totò. When I asked to see a menu, the waiter hastily scribbled some words on a piece of paper and showed it to me. I chose a generic frutti di mare and received, a few minutes later, a glass of plonk and a dish,

City by the sea Palermo, invaded by countless empires during its 3,000-year history, is today a jumble of tiny streets and piazzas.

consisting of a very dense, oily spaghetti scattered with mussels, squid, baby octopus and other intensely flavored sea creatures. I polished it off without interruption, my only company a small piebald tomcat who begged cartoonishly at my ankles.

It was that way everywhere: Palermitani do not pander. You don’t get hustled; you don’t get hassled; no one volunteers charming anecdotes or touristy pointers; no one asks where you’re from. Palermo is for loners, misanthropes, the faintly morbid, the fatalistic.

ONE CAN HARDLY TALK ABOUT SICILY without talking about the

Mafia, which ran the place for the latter half of the last century and still have a hand in, though how much is anyone’s guess. Law enforcement estimates that 80 percent of businesses in town continue to pay some sort of kickback to organized crime.

In the early ’80s, the Italian government began a concerted effort to eradicate the mob, and for a while there was something like open warfare. Dead bodies of suspected informants were routinely found in parked cars, and in 1992 two prominent Italian judges, Giovanni Falcone and Paolo Borsellino, were assassinated by bomb attacks. A huge roundup and trial followed, but the Mafia has been more muted than silenced permanently; a more recent wave of arrests is in full swing.

The week I was there the police captured Gianni Nicchi, a 29-year-old

ESSENTIALS • PALERMO, ITALY HOTELS Grand Hotel et Des Palmes Old World institution where the French proto-Surrealist Raymond Roussel lived. Via Roma 398; 011-39-091-602-8111; doubles from about $311. Grand Hotel Wagner Slightly faded but still elegant neo-Classical building. Via Riccardo Wagner 2; 011-39-091-336-572; doubles from $426. Hilton Hotel Villa Igiea A converted palace on the water. Salita Belmonte 43; 011-39-091-631-2111; doubles from $280. Hotel Garibaldi Modern and close to the city’s shopping district. Via Emerico Amari 146; 011-39-091-601-7011; doubles from $282. Hotel Porta Felice A renovated palace with modern rooms and spa.

Via Butera 45; 011-39-091-617-5678; doubles from $135.

RESTAURANTS: Antica Focacceria San Francesco One of the oldest restaurants, serving pizza and pastas. Via Paternostro 58; 011-39-091-32-0264; entrees $21 to $30. Cin Cin Fancier dishes like beef fillet with mushrooms and buffalo mozzarella and pasta with sea urchins. Via Daniele Manin 22; 011-39-091-6124095; entrees $19 to $34. Kursaal Kalhesa A wine bar/bookstore/restaurant on the edge of the water. Foro Umberto I 21; 011-39-091-616-2282; entrees $15 to $20. Osteria dei Vespri Ambitious dishes from roast suckling pig to pasta with guinea fowl. Piazza Croce dei Vespri 6; 011-39-091-617-631; set menu from $115.

Trattoria Da Totò Homey place for fresh seafood and local wine. Via Coltellieri 5; 011-39-333-315-7558; entrees $7 to $14. Trattoria Tipica Altri Tempi Classic Sicilian favorites. Via Sammartino 65; 011-39-091-323-480; prix fixe from $34.

SIGHTS Palermo’s most famous food market is the Vucciria. Serpotta’s frescoes can be found at the Oratories Rosario di San Domenico (Via dei Bambinai 2), Santa Cita (Via Valverde 3) and San Lorenzo (Via dell’Immacolatella). The Capuchin Catacombs (Piazza Capuccini 1) are a macabre tourist attraction.

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Blight in the piazza Clockwise from top left: One of Palermo’s open-air food markets; many of the buildings are tagged with cryptic graffiti; Antica Focacceria San Francesco; the Capuchin Catacombs.

fugitive who is believed to be Cosa Nostra’s second in command. Still, you needn’t be alarmed; the worst of it is pretty much over, and the casual visitor will notice nothing untoward at all.

Moreover, the ebb and flow of organized crime has provided an opportunity for a new kind of ethical tourism. In 2004, a few young and very brave locals decided they’d had enough and started a remarkable movement called Addiopizzo. Pizzo is the local word for extortion, and they simply refuse to pay it. Thus far, about 400 businesses have joined them. I stopped in one, a store named Punto Pizzo Free, run by Fabio Messina. ‘‘It’s starting to change,’’ he told me. ‘‘But the Mafia is 100, 120 years old, and we’ve only been fighting them for five years. So there’s a long way to go.’’ And how was the movement’s recruiting going? Well enough, he indicated, but there are still holdouts. ‘‘Many people say, ‘Mafia? What’s Mafia?’ They say, ‘What’s pizzo? I never paid.’ ’’ He smiled. ‘‘Then you know they’ve been paying for years.’’

‘ ’

MANY PEOPLE SAY, ‘MAFIA? WHAT’S MAFIA?’

It’s a subdued city. At night there’s little going on, except for dinner, which starts quite late: the restaurants don’t begin filling up until around 10:30. Walking back to my hotel, I would occasionally pass an American-style bar, stocked with locals engaged in what seemed like an elaborate imitation of high life. Otherwise the streets were empty.

Then came Saturday, and with it the first real smiles I saw all week. It started with a few kids on scooters hanging out in the Piazza Ruggero Settimo, a grand square that serves as the city center. By evening there were dozens of them, sitting on the benches, laughing it up, making out. Then suddenly the streets were filled, the Via della Libertà, a grand boulevard stretching north from the piazza, teeming with sleek-looking men and women, the cafes crowded, noise everywhere, scooters revving — and outdoor televisions tuned to an important soccer game, Juventus versus Inter Milan. Make no mistake, Palermo is not in any way chic or hip, nor is it meant to be. But on that Saturday night, the residents had dressed themselves up and come out, and they were having a high time.

The following morning, all was quiet again. In the old city, I came across a small flea market in the Piazza Marina, where one could buy little fragments of antique Sicilian detritus: painted tiles salvaged from abandoned buildings, lire notes, old cigarette cases and jewelry boxes. But by 2 in the afternoon, the merchants had packed up and gone home, leaving the streets empty, the restaurants closed. Outside the Botanical Garden, a pair of dilapidated mossy stone sphinxes stood sentry. There’s nothing so quiet as a small city on a Sunday, nor any place quite as endearing, and I was glad it was my last glimpse of Palermo. Riding out to the airport just before dawn the next morning, I saw a single word emerge out of the darkness, spray-painted on the stanchion of an overpass in the same black writing I’d been seeing all week, but it was the only one in English, and the only one that wasn’t angry. ‘‘Love,’’ it said. ■

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PHOTOGRAPH BY OLAF OTTO BECKER

In plain sight The pool at the Bamurru Plains safari-style eco-lodge.

faintest scrim between me and the outer world, which lay in silhouette under the moon.

Out there was a realm of exceeding flatness, where saltwater and freshwater are fighting over the land. Each has its season.

Freshwater has the monsoon, when rain drowns the country.

Across the Top End, Aussies lead visitors to high spots, extend their arms and say, like so many Noahs, ‘‘All this will be under water during the wet’’ — the local name for the monsoon. Saltwater owns the rest of the year, and it’s always seeking to work its way inland, always trying to claim another portion of solid earth. As the planet warms and the oceans rise, this coastal fringe will be one of the drowned lands.

But for now there’s still a temporary truce between saltwater and fresh. One sign of it is the chenier just beyond the lodge at Bamurru Plains. A chenier — the name is Louisiana French — is a historic, hard-packed ridge of sand and shell rubble laid down by the sea.

At Bamurru, it looks like a slightly raised roadbed, a foot-high levee. During the wet, water fills the flood plains and advances right up to the chenier, where the guides park their airboats. You’d be tempted to say that the coastline, some three miles to the north, had wandered inland. But the floodwater is fresh — runoff from the rugged sandstone escarpment further inland, which sheds water like oilskin. And in this harsh but delicate landscape, where the overriding ecological concern is the balance between saltwater and freshwater, the buffalo trails act as unwanted capillaries, breaking through the all but indiscernible high ground and allowing saltwater to infiltrate the swamps.

I’d spent the morning on an airboat with a Scottish guide named Kat, flat-bottoming our way into the paperbark swamps. It wasn’t merely the mud that seemed primeval. It was also the abundance of life — the jabirus stalking the open shallows and the endless chatter of magpie geese. Ducks rose in whistling clouds, and from the tops of the paperbarks, sea eagles watched us drifting among the shadows. So did the crocodiles disguised as floating swamp scum.

This was nearly the end of the dry season, and the shrinking floodwaters had concentrated the flocks and extended the grassland, where buffalo and horses grazed in the distance. And because large mammals are endemic in the American imagination of nature — in my imagination, that is — it was hard to perceive them as historically ‘‘unnatural.’’ There they were, after all, their presence as undeniable as that of the wallabies and striated herons.

But the horses are wild, the feral relics of white men who came to this district for the buffalo shooting in the late 19th century. The

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Swamp thing Saltwater crocodiles, also known as saltys, have rebounded over the last several decades.

horses — ‘‘brumbies,’’ in Australian — stand hock-deep in water and develop swamp cancer: tumorlike, pustulant growths on their legs and bellies and noses. This is the northern edge of a continent-wide herd of feral horses and donkeys — about 300,000 horses and more than five million donkeys nationwide.

At Wongalara we flew low over the brush, stirring a small herd of horses and donkeys.

They loped ahead of our helicopter, casting scornful glances in our direction. The true work of restoration can’t begin until these animals are gone.

At Wongalara, too, I watched a pitfall trap being set for small, nocturnal marsupials — which is mostly what the Top End has for native mammals. The trap is a long wall of toughened rubber belting. Mammals run into the wall and scurry down its length, only to fall into a plastic bucket set into the ground. In the morning, they’re weighed, counted and released. But scientists are finding almost nothing in the traps anymore. The marsupials are ideal prey for feral cats, millions of them, which are also devastating small reptiles and ground-nesting birds. There are now indications of a full-blown population crash.

Wherever I went, I felt I was looking at a hidden landscape. What I needed most were guides to what could not be seen, to what was invisible. I don’t mean the Aboriginal spirits

inscribed in the rock of Kakadu itself. I mean the species that had gone or were going missing. As the days passed, I found myself becoming more and more a tourist of the vanished and the vanishing.

Saltwater crocodiles have rebounded since hunting was banned in 1971, and they now pervade nearly every body of water in the Top End. But for many other species, time in the Top End is now over. What makes it all the harder is this: The species becoming invisible through extinction were largely invisible to begin with.

Perhaps it would be easier just to take the Top End at face value: the uranium mine, the cankered horses, the missing mammals, the plague of toads. Perhaps it would be easier just to give in to the ‘‘naturalness’’ — to stand, as I did, one day, on a sandstone ridge with Sab Lord and look out over a beautiful grassland enclosed by rugged hills. Out on the plain, a herd of horses grazed beside a copse that might almost have been aspen. It looked more than natural. It looked like a pictorial vision of natural completeness, or would have if we’d been in New Mexico. But as we walked down the hill, Sab and I saw a small monitor — a type of native lizard — peering out of the stony shade. ‘‘That’s the first one of those I’ve seen this year,’’ Sab said, and there we were, back in the extinction we had never left. ■

GETTING THERE AND AROUND Virgin (vaustralia.com.au) flies from Los Angeles to Darwin with a stop in either Brisbane or Melbourne; flights on Qantas (qantas.com.au) stop in Sydney. Good places to begin planning a trip to the Top End are Tourism Australia (australia.com) and the Northern Territory Visitors Bureau (northernterritory.visitorsbureau.com.au). Sab Lord (lords-safaris.com), who grew up on a station in what later became Kakadu, is an indispensable guide for the area. Arnhem Land, the Aboriginal reserve east of Kakadu National Park, is closed to visitors, except to guides with permits and their clients. The best way to grasp the environmental problems facing Australia is to explore the work being done by the Australian Wildlife Conservancy (australianwildlife.org). It has established nearly 20 sanctuaries, including Wongalara.

LODGING There are good camping sites throughout the park. Go to kakadunationalparkaustralia.com.

Bamurru Plains One of a small group of Wild Bush Luxury holdings in Australia, notable for safari-style rooms and first-class food. 011-61-2-9571-6399; bamurruplains.com; doubles from about $1,650. Gagudju Crocodile Holiday Inn The building, shaped like a crocodile, is in the national park. 1 Flinders Street, Jabiru; 011-61-88979-9000; holidayinn.com; doubles from $330.

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PHOTOGRAPH BY OLAF OTTO BECKER

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TIMELESS

Give Her the Slip The Barneys fashion director Julie Gilhart goes for clothes with a conscience.

When Julie Gilhart gets behind something, you can be sure it’s going to be both stylish and sustainable. Take this silk dress by the Paris-based label E2. Fashioned from vintage Balmain scarves, it possesses qualities close to the heart of the women’s fashion director of Barneys New York. ‘‘For one thing, it’s not mass-produced,’’ Gilhart says. ‘‘Whenever possible, I like to know who a designer is, what they stand for and where their things are made. This is not just ‘fashion consciousness’ — it also adds a sense of story, romance and culture to the clothes you buy and wear.’’ She 110

P H O T O G R A P H BY J E N S M O RT E N S E N

refers to Michèle and Olivier Chatenet — the husbandand-wife team behind E2 — as futurists. ‘‘They sense what people will want and incorporate it into their collections,’’ she says. ‘‘Every piece they make is one of a kind and utilizes pre-existing fabric, but somehow they make it feel new.’’ The clothes are also practical for this inveterate traveler. ‘‘The pieces pack easily and are well suited for numerous occasions.’’ That’s perfect for Gilhart, who is planning a surfing vacation at Nihiwatu Resort on Sumba Island in Indonesia. SANDRA BALLENTINE

Gustav Klimt, der Kuss 1907/08 © Belvedere, Wien; Kunsthalle © WTV/Karl Thomas; Sachertorte © WTV/Robert Osmark; Muehlbauer Hat © Muehlbauer.

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