still cooking
Internationally lauded Thai artist Rirkrit Tiravanija might not be staging as many of his famous cook-ups, but his art continues to offer us food for thought.
by max crosbie-jones / photographs by benya hegenbarth
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he art gallery is a place where we hope to encounter the unexpected – precious objects that help us to discover the possibilities of life. And yet, Rirkrit Tiravanija has made a career by subverting that expectation. His latest show is a case in point. On a mundane level, it is a retrospective marking the tenth anniversary of one of Bangkok’s few bastions of world-class contemporary art, 100 Tonson Gallery; but on another it is a sort of Dadaist anti-show that snubs its nose at the sanctity of the precious, haughty, self-aggrandising gallery space. Yes, there are art objects on show, but none of them are hung. Instead, paintings from past shows and the owner’s collection are presented in bubble wrap and piled willy-nilly against the walls. Instead of a hushed reverence and eyes fixed on walls, this is an exhibition where gallery-goers gingerly squeeze past one another and try not to trip over things. Rirkrit thrives on such deceptively simple transgressions. Over the years, he has turned galleries into full-scale replicas of his apartment. Or a studio Marcel Duchamp, “Fountain” where street TV is broadcast to the neighbourhood. Or a shop where assistants screen print white T-shirts with block print headlines that range from political to absurd. Or, in the case of his landmark 1992 show, “Untitled (Free),” into a makeshift kitchen where he cooked and served Thai curry for free. Arguably, the only artist who trumps him in the iconoclast stakes is Marcel Duchamp, the prankster who, in 1917, changed the rules of the art game by presenting a porcelain urinal at the inaugural Society of Independent
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Artists exhibition in New York. However, whereas Duchamp’s “Fountain” blurred the boundary between art and mundane objects, or ready-mades, and so paved the way for conceptual art as we know it, Rirkrit’s material is the intangible stuff of everyday life – raw experience. “With my work I am pissing in Duchamp’s urinal,” he once told a BBC journalist. A throwaway comment? “Not at all,” he says, beaming his impish, Cheshire cat grin. “Duchamp’s urinal marked the end of art-making in one sense and the start of something new. That object or that idea can be understood in a very expansive way. It removed the necessity of certain things – the painterly hand, etc – and allowed us to think afresh about making things.” As well as signposting the main inspiration of his steadfast conceptualism, the quote’s scatological image is also useful. It highlights how his work took the logical next step – extended the outcome of Duchamp’s brazen act, which liberated art by introducing the notion that anything can be art, to the realm of human agency. “To piss into it is to use it,” he says. “Usage is a very important part of my work. Through usage, as Wittgenstein would say, you get the meaning, so my description of pissing into the urinal is about extending that.” Still with us? If Rirkrit’s practice sounds esoteric, there’s no way to sugarcoat, it is. Or at least the theoretic nuts and bolts can be. You could just simply say, as art historian Rochelle Steiner did, that his work “is fundamentally about bringing people together” and leave
Duchamp’s “Fountain” marked the end of art-making in one sense and the start of something new. That object can be understood in a very expansive way.
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Not everything should be torn down, but I think there are boundaries that are not real or not necessary. it at that. Stepping things up a notch: “Tiravanija is a catalyst; he creates situations in which visitors are invited to participate or perform. In turn, their shared experiences activate the artwork, giving it meaning and altering its form.” Or, if feeling really ambitious, you could pick up a copy of French theorist Nicholas Bourriaud’s Relational Aesthetics, the book titled after the movement he coined. But let’s keep it simple. All one really needs to know is that books have been written, -isms bandied around, and that, to his amusement, Rirkrit has become known as the cook-up or relational art guy. Oh, and that it all started with a few plates of curry. What made him decide, back in 1992, that eating together could be art? “Initially it had a lot to do with anthropology and archeology,” he explains, “and how Western institutions collect ‘the other.’ Museums are a good example of that – if you go to the Metropolitan Museum, or the Natural History Museum in New York, you see that they’ve been collecting a lot of others. For me, the food was to show that there is actually life around all those things.” But what began as a post-colonial critique of Western institutions quickly became more about the cooking and the conversations – what unfolded in the gaps between objects. “When I was cooking, people started to help me to cook. And then I realised that there’s something really important about that. Ultimately, the relations between people seemed more relevant.” People who encounter one of these live, anti-art cook-ups don’t always get it. But when they do, boy, they
really do. “It was disconcerting and thrilling to be this casual in a gallery, to go from passive viewing to active participation,” wrote curator Joan Young of his first New York cooking-as-art sculpture. “With this simple gesture, Rirkrit seemed to bridge a mind-body gap that often exists in Western art. Here was a medicine man who literalised art’s primitive functions: sustenance, healing, and communion.” Because for the most part his work can’t be bought or sold, some also find that the Rirkrit experience makes a refreshing change from the machinations of the market. “It’s a relief not to size up objects or think about sales. Life takes over, commerce fades,” as Young puts it. Such reactions haven’t been limited to New York art scene insiders, a crowd well versed with the art historical stepping stones that lead us close to relational art, such as performance art, Dadaism, Joseph Beuys, Warhol’s Factory scene, and the do-it-yourself ethos of punk. Over the years, Rirkrit has staged cooks-up far and wide A Rirkrit cook-up at venues around the world. This includes, to cite a recent example, the opening of La Triennale 2012, where he transformed the main nave of Paris’ Grand Palais into a 12-hour banquet composed of a single meal of tom kha gai soup. Why does he think people react so well to his cook-ups? “Because I think it is unexpected to be given permission to transgress the art. Not everything should be torn down, but I think there are also boundaries that are not real or not necessary. I want people to step over the line.”
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photography, I also took some art history classes,” he says. “Backthentheseconsistedofthree-hourlecturesinadarkened room with slides showing all the different -isms of art.” It was in this darkened room, somewhere between the slides of works by Matisse and Rothko, that he discovered Kazimir Malevich’s “White on White” and Duchamp’s “Fountain.” “Those two works struck me in a deep, profound way – so much so that I requested an appointment with a university councillor to see how I could move towards art.” It was in the waiting room for this appointment, while nervously looking around, that fate struck. “The waiting room was basically a library of catalogues, and I was scanning the shelves and saw a white spine that caught my eye on the bookshelf. And I pulled it out and it said ‘Ontario irkrit wasn’t a naturalCollege of Art, Toronto.’ born artist, or even I leafed through it, took down cook. Born in Buenos Aires, the address, and the next day Argentina in 1961, he led made an application. That’s something of a charmed early how I got into art school – life as the son of a diplomat that’s the beginning.” and oral surgeon. On After two years in Toronto, returning to Bangkok after New York beckoned. But not stints living in Ethiopia, for the reason you might think. Canada, the US and Germany, “Initially, I went because it was all he knew, he says, was that, warmer than Toronto,” he “I absolutely didn’t want to says. “I had no clue that New become a civil servant, which York was the centre of the art was something I realised universe, but my department watching my father.” Art was 100 Tonson Gallery’s “Ten Years After” Anniversary Show had a studio programme the last thing on his mind, there so I spent my last two he reveals, when he left high years studying there.” Here school. “When I was 19 I wasn’t engaged in art, or anything at all,” he quips. However, he discovered the museums of art, as so many do, but from eventually an interest in photojournalism led him to study the get-go he was never interested in slotting neatly into that scene. “In New York I was never engaged in trying to at Carleton University in Canada. It wasn’t long, though, before his inner art bulb was make Western art – I was always asking myself, ‘What will I do lit. “I studied in the history department as a prerequisite when I come back to Thailand?’, ‘what will it mean to make to journalism school; but because I was interested in art there?’” Transgressive thrill and free meal aside, what does he think is left behind when the plates of pad thai have gone cold? “Memory or experience,” he says. “I’m more interested in what people go away with in their heads than the objects left behind. What’s really left behind is just a dirty glass that you can wash and reuse; the conversation that you had over that drink is what I’m really interested in.” You could call it an open-ended and living-breathing form of art, and also utopian, in an anarchic sort of way. Every audience has a creative stake in completing the work, but the outcome is beyond anyone’s control, even Rirkrit’s. “Everybody reacts and remembers it differently and I think that’s very important,” he says.
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I’m more interested in what people go away with in their heads than the objects left behind.
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Over the years, Thailand’s most internationally recognised artist has responded in myriad ways to this question. And not just with works. Back in 1998, he and another New York-educated Thai artist, Kamin Lerthaiprasert, purchased a rice farm in the village of Sanpatong, a 20-minute drive from Chiang Mai. In the intervening years, The Land has served fitfully as a bucolic open space, a collaborative platform where farmers, students and international artists come to exchange or discuss or get their hands dirty. Rice is harvested in the paddies, but something more elusive germinates and grows in the stilt houses surrounding it. Rirkrit has likened the whole quixotic project to “an empty tabletop that people bring different projects to. They can bring [something] to it, use the top, leave things there or take them away.” Not quite as off-the-grid, but still ambitious is Gallery Ver. This began 15 years ago as an office on Bangkok’s Thonburi side, but grew to become one of the capital’s most defiantly experimental spaces. “Initially we were producing a magazine, Ver, but at some point we realised that the younger artists I was working The Land with didn’t really have a venue to show their work,” he says. “And other alternative spaces that were important to us, like Project 304 or About Café, had run into a wall, because there just wasn’t enough support to keep them going.” After relocating to Tanao Road, and a short stint in one of the gritty warehouses at Talad Rot Fai, the recently demolished railway market, Gallery Ver is now on hiatus – but still pops up now and then. A global nomad who flits between new projects, teaching at Columbia University, and Thailand, Rirkrit is well placed to survey Bangkok’s art scene. What does
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he make of it? “It’s very vibrant,” he says. “For a small place we have a lot of really interesting young artists who are well acknowledged by the Western art world.” The lack of a proper art market is something that needs to be addressed with “support and engagement,” he adds, but in a way this is liberating. “Even though the art circuit is not complete, artists can be challenging and be open and say things that are pushing the boundaries.” The fact that, unlike in say New York or Singapore, cold hard cash doesn’t rule is healthy, he thinks, for the integrity of the work. “Contemporary art is about finding new ideas and what the condition is at the moment, and in the big art centres the condition at the moment is the market. It’s great to be a Thai artist right now because you don’t have that situation.” Thailand’s turbulent politics, and the “impetus to address that,” also gives Thai art added vibrancy and bite, he thinks. On occassions, Rirkrit has done just that. His only other show at 100 Tonson, 2010’s “Who’s Afraid of Red, Yellow and Green?,” was a shot across the bows of this maddening viper’s nest, replete with harrowing paintings of the 1970s crackdowns and servings of red and yellow curries, referencing the colour-coded political parties. In 2011 he also touched on US politics with “Trespass,” a group reaction to America’s Occupy Movement. Participants paraded around L.A. wearing his T-shirts emblazoned with Situationist slogans. Given all this it seems fair game to ask him what he makes of the latest manifestation of Thai people power, which, at the time of this interview, was playing out only a few hundred metres away. Will he be reacting to it? “It’s not that there needs to be a reaction,” he says, hesitantly. “I have my stance, my ideology, but it
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I don’t believe in institutions – I believe in people. I’m interested in people being able to voice their ideas. doesn’t necessarily mean I feel the need to comment. Yes, I’ve made work about demonstrations, about lots of people coming together, but I’m more interested in ideas of representation than the politics. I don’t believe in institutions – I believe in people. I’m interested in people being able to voice their ideas and have space for that.”
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hich brings us back to his social installations – or platforms, as he calls them – aimed at bringing people together. Over twenty years after he started cooking-up art, and the term “relational aesthetics” began being bandied around, there are some who think that Rirkrit’s work has become part of the institution, lost its novelty. He even alludes to this during our interview, saying, “The problem with so many things is that we get turned into commodities.” So what next? How to keep the creative juices flowing and defy being turned into a brand? Forays into objects, more traditional works that aren’t “Oktophonie” obviously “relational,” are one. While he likens the t-shirts and paintings that often feature in his shows to road signs (“you know those ‘Jesus is Coming’ signs by the side of the road? My painting is engaged on that level”), other purely material works go deeper. Among these, “Untitled 2008–2011: The map of the land of feeling” is one of the most striking. For this elaborate print project he created three, 84-foot long scrolls, each one a strange and dense, psychogeographic map of his life as an itinerant, globe-roaming artist so far.
Another is the moving image. For Lung Neaw Visits his Neighbours, Rirkrit rekindled his early flirtations with experimental film to create a slow, visually sumptuous portrait of an old uncle from a northern Thai village. Shot on Super 16mm, it debuted at the Venice Film Festival and was called “one of the year’s best films” by film critic Kong Rithdee. “Lung Neaw, who just passed away six months ago, was a man I was attracted to for many reasons,” says Rirkrit. “I could see life on his face, and that was interesting to engage with, but I was also interested in him because he was somebody in this society that nobody addresses. People talk about poverty, but I don’t think they really know what it means to walk for food, to forage in the woods, to live off 100 baht a month. For me it wasn’t about talking about that but representing it.” Above all, collaborations, not cook-ups, are now Rirkrit’s focus. In early 2013, he staged “Oktophonie”: a recital of music by the late German composer Karlheinz Stockhausen (the audience wore white smocks as an artificial indoor eclipse took place around them). And, at the moment he is working on another film about the eccentric Swedish artist-poet Karl Holmqvist. “For me the condition of making things is no longer an individual act,” he says by way of explanation, sounding like a true disciple of Duchamp. “It’s about a co-operative of people. The idea of having my signature at the bottom of the work is no longer that relevant.” In other words, Rirkrit’s art is exploring new paths, but remains rooted to life, relationships, the social.
Meat-skewer vendor in Yangon, Myanmar
Foodies Without Frontiers The cross-border food secrets of Southeast Asia unveiled on tour with the Globetrotting Gourmet. by philip cornwel-smith
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anoians rug up for winter, yet happily huddle in an open shophouse over freezing cups of chè – iced syrupy sundaes of grains, pulses, jelly, fruit and bright green paste. They are joined at the long, low table by a group of shivering foreigners brought to this humble venue by Globetrotting Gourmet, which runs food tours of Southeast Asia. Tour host Robert Carmack points out how foods the West considers savoury get transformed in the East as sweets. We sample them in every imaginable combination: kidney beans, corn kernels, spawn-like sesame, swollen barley, gloops of nutty paste, wriggly bean threads and russet cubes of a mystery gelatinous flavour. Think of ASEAN’s porous cuisines as a banquet of chè, featuring a multi-coloured blend of local ingredients and foreign influences: iced parfait from the West, hot gruel versions akin to China’s sweet warming soups, and culinary flows between neighbours. Thais know chè as lord chong Singapore, and Singaporeans got it from Javanese cendol, which the Burmese name mont let saung and the Filipinos call halo halo. As ASEAN gears up for integration, this disparate union is bonding through food tourism. As nations opened up, and as diasporas started restaurants abroad, their foods by turns have been treated as a curiosity, then as a cuisine, and ultimately as a menu fixture worldwide. Now foodies – whether neighbours or longhaul travellers – can fly in on an empty stomach, Instagram lunch, and return with a suitcase of souvenir nibbles and tipples. The hot new offering is Myanmar, but its diverse ethnicities are a mystery to most
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Hanoi-style chè parfait in Vietnam
Now foodies can fly in on an empty stomach, Instagram lunch, and return with a suitcase of souvenir nibbles and tipples. Shan food at Nyaungshwe Market, Myanmar
A tea picker in Yunnan.
epicureans. Bangkok has lacked Burmese fine dining since Mandalay on Surawong Road shut in the 1990s, while few outlets serve Myanmar migrants. Pretty much the only Burmese dish vaguely known remains la phet – tea salad. Like other cuisines before it, Burmese food needs explaining. Into the breach saunter Globetrotting Gourmet, aka Sydney-based cookbook writer and food stylist Robert Carmack, and weaver/designer Morrison Polkinghorne. Since 2000, their culinary tours have inducted small groups to the region’s cuisines. Unusual among food tours, they cover all the mainland countries, even crossing borders within a single tour. Robert, a classically French-trained chef, also parlays his insights into recipe books: Thai Home Cooking, Vietnamese Cooking and, just released, The Burma Cookbook. Part travelogue, part food history, The Burma Cookbook couldn’t have been written without the co-authors’ two decades of visits to Myanmar, “at a time when it was quite difficult and not very fashionable to travel there,” says Carolyn Lockhart, editor in chief of Gourmet Traveller. “Robert writes with love, intelligence and a real depth of knowledge.” Their photography springs from tour locations: homes, markets, festivals, street stalls, teashops. Morrison’s design integrates graphics from street signage and Edwardian-era books. The history and recipes were collated from Yangon’s sidewalk bookstores and conversations that only come with the earned trust of chefs, vendors, and The Strand Hotel, which granted access to its archives. “I could almost sense Somerset Maugham strolling The Strand’s wainscot
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Khmer grocery stall in Battambang
corridors,” Robert says. “The more we returned to The Strand, the more we came to realise that the country deserved a heritage cookbook that includes 20th century Eurasian and immigrant dishes, not just ethnographic recipes. That’s why it features lost gems like Burman Scotch eggs seasoned with masala.” The recipes come from different eras, but are practicable for a modern kitchen, and as Lockhard notes, “are the result of meticulous research and handson testing.” Behind an IndoShan restaurant in the Maymyo hill-station, our tour group jot notes around a wok as the thirdgeneration chef conjures the tang of mulligatawny pepper water. This retro tome captures a timeless Asia preserved in aspic. Empire Brits in the Pegu Club would have quaffed the book’s recipe for gin pahit, a cocktail with Angostura Bitters. Raj Indians settling in Rangoon would recognise the “tiffin” or “light meal” of Indian roti curry that
the tours sample, while learning how to inflate roti dough into a crispy poori balloon. Another revivalist inclusion is lobster Thermidor, because Myanmar supplies top-grade lobster. The Strand has served the dish continuously for a century. ithin the escarpment of the Shan Plateau, pilgrims thread around thousands of Buddha statues in the Pindaya Caves. Before joining them, our tour enters another darkened interior by the lake below: a workshop for la phet. Shafts of light cast an eerie green mist on a juddering wood contraption that sifts tea from the Shan hills. Staff toss huge baskets around to shake loose wilted, fermented leaves, then pound these into bags with pumping fists. That’s what la phet means: “massaged tea.” Going to the true origin of a dish takes a lot of pre-tour groundwork. “On research trips we’ll have three breakfasts,
three lunches, three dinners,” says Morrison. “Even on the actual tour we might provide two lunches.” Persuading cooks and factories to let strangers in requires allaying suspicion. In the Red River Delta, Hai Duong’s rival bean cake outlets jealously guard their secrets. One lets us see its spotless hand-assembly line. In its shop, we dissolve cubes of powdery bean candy on our tongues with sips of montagnard tea. But we don’t swig any of the whisky that’s steeping on the shelves in jars filled with cobras. Snakes, native wildlife, dogs – there are some food frontiers Robert and Morrison don’t cross. Globetrotting Gourmet champions under-recognised regional cuisines. In 2009, they founded the 1st Isaan Food Festival in Khon Kaen, lending a gourmet platform to rustic fare like Isaan’s superlative grilled meats, jaew sauces and
invigoratingly bitter flavours. Their Isaan tours included stopoffs to meet Eh Laowirodge at Supanniga in Khon Kaen, before he went off to wow Bangkok and New York with premium somtam. Across the Mekhong, the spectrum of Lao food broadens with the addition of creative twists from local chefs and infusions from the French – seen in sweet Lao-style ragu and the Indochinese paté baguette khao jee. Robert lauds the Lao chef Yannick Upravan, formerly of the Three Nagas in Luang Prabang, as “inspirational in his reinterpretation of Lao classic dishes, as is Johannes Rivière in Siem Reap with his take on Cambodian regional dishes.” Khmer cuisine faces the challenge of having to be rebuilt from scratch. Robert has compared old Khmer cookbooks with recipes from the diaspora, and found spices and richness largely absent from today’s
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simple dishes, centred on krong paste. “I’m a bit suspicious of the diaspora’s cooking,” he says. “Many were upper class immigrants who didn’t know how to cook, or who learned to cook in the Philippines or Indonesia as refugees before resettling in the West.” Food tourism fuels a demand for purity, but purity can prove elusive. “We’re always learning,” Morrison says. “I like to say that we’re not the experts, the locals are. A hawker making khanom krok every day for her entire life is the expert making that, not us.” Constant research enables their tours to broach new terrain, so they rarely encounter other foreigners. One tour stop is the sugar-dusted factory in Chauk that makes Myanmar tamarind 184 Morning market in Bagan, Myanmar
flakes. Like something out of Dickens, the cooking, kneading, rolling, disc-punching, stacking, wrapping and packing of these potent flimsy wafers couldn’t be more labourious. But the commercialisation and mass production of this candy could herald the end of its organic ingredients. “That is where we truly are losing our traditions – in the sources and flavours of foodstuffs,” Robert says. “Recipe adaptations and compromise is much less of an issue. At Alila in Bali, I was awestruck by the hotel supporting two-season heritage rice crops, instead of buying cheaper thrice-ayear hybrids.” Market visits are standard food tour procedure, so Globetrotting Gourmet bypasses
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the touristy bazaars, opting for quirky realism. “That could be a supermarket in Kunming, or produce sold at dawn on the desert ground in Bagan,” says Morrison. Their cooking classes likewise reflect the tours’ juxtaposition of high-end and low-end, whether by star chefs like McDang in Bangkok and Didier Corlou in Hanoi, or by a Shan family restaurant in Pyin-oo-lwin which opens its kitchen specially for our group. “We started tours as a reaction to hotel food classes,” Robert recalls. “I’d go home with 25-30 recipes, but I’d have forgotten what the dish looked like, what the flavour profile should actually be. Foreigners don’t always know, as it’s too alien for us.” Instead, Globetrotting
Gourmet offers just a couple of classes in a 10-day trip, and focuses on ingredients, methods and tastings. “Training the palate is the basis of discovering new foods and techniques,” Robert says. “We joke that you’ll learn how and when to add sugar to your fish.” n the Japanese film Tampopo, the protagonists seek out the perfect noodle. Their quest might have led to a shophouse in Hanoi Old Quarter, where my tour joins Hanoians slurping through a breakfast of pho. Not just any pho – an ambrosial broth, chock with handcut noodles, aromatic leaves and beef done two ways: long-stewed slices of shank and slivers of raw meat
cooked in the soup itself. Our group forgoes the hotel breakfast because that pho was to be the first of six we’d sample on a morning “pho crawl” through Hanoi’s “36 Streets” by cyclo pedicab convoy. “We ride a bit, eat pho, browse the markets, have a pho, wander down Tin Street and have another pho,” says Morrison. The inspiration for this came from a bartender in LA’s Musso & Frank Grill, who lined up five vodkas for them to taste for their martini. “Anyone can get a recipe book, but if you’ve eaten half-a-dozen pho back-to-back then you’ll know how yours should taste. Pho is known as the entire soup dish, but actually pho is the noodle. So we include a dry pho with no soup at all.” Tastings are Globetrotting Gourmet’s bread and butter – or rather paté baguette and fish sauce. Yes, they sample wines – in Thailand’s Khao Yai or Myanmar’s Taunggi – and teas in Yunnan, from prized oolong to aged bricks of pu-erh. But they also taste lesser known specialities: insects in Khon Kaen, dried fish at the Tonle Sap, jaggery in Kyaukpadaung. Over hearty beer food amid the clattering Haiphong Brewery, we concurrently chug bia tuang lager and bia hoi, a fresh brew that must be drunk within a day, invariably downed first. Alerting the palate to differentials is the key. Didier Corlou became Hanoi’s premier chef through mastering Asian terroir, and the use of rare seasonings. “I like chicken with curry, not curry with chicken,” quips Didier during a spice tasting. He provokes our palates with tamky pepper, musk seed, forest pollen, the peel of the Buddha Hand citrus, and the most expensive spice in the world, talauma. Didier also
Tour lunch served on Inle Lake, Myanmar
infuses local salts into his dishes, and sources fleur de sel crystals from nuoc mam, Vietnamese fish sauce. Fish sauces and soy sauces may have evolved some barrel-aged vintages, but many brands use additives to achieve their flavour. “Our soy sauce tastings start with a chemical one and most people say, ‘OK, it’s what I’m used to’,” Robert says. “We go through 20 and when we retry the first one they wince and go ‘ugh.’ It’s like good wine versus bad.”
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Tastings are Globetrotting Gourmet’s bread and butter – or rather paté baguette and fish sauce. Baguettes sold from a bike in Haiphong, Vietnam
here are few articles of food which meet with more energetic denunciation than the favourite Burman condiment ngapi,” runs a quote in the 1882 book, The Burman: His Life and Notions by Burma explorer James George Scott. Fermented fish polarises tastebuds even now. Colonialists in British Burmah hired Indian chefs because the Burmese cooked with fish sauce. Yet no appreciation of Southeast Asian food can ignore this regional seasoning, which we sample along with shrimp paste and plaa raa. Other foods, too, have become an intangible heritage that transcend national borders. Witness the flavour profile – oily sauces, fried pork rind, prickly ash spice – that spans Upper Burma, Shan State, Lanna and Luang Prabang. Thai hor mok pops up in Laos as mok and Khmer-style in Battembang as amok, with kale-like nhor leaves lining the banana leaf cup of fish mousse. The most contested food in terms of origin must be khao soi. Mandalay regards ono khao shwe as the prototype, yet the Chiang Mai take on curry noodle soup is its own hybrid. Culinary historians trace elements of both to spice routes that passed through Shan State and Yunnan
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to Muslim Central Asia. Claiming national uniqueness in food can be a minefield. “The best pho we’ve had is not in Vietnam,” Polkinghorn reveals. “On our tours crossing from central Vietnam to southern Laos, the groups’ favourite dish is always Lao pho at the Lankham Hotel in Pakse.” “Food people make good travellers because they break bread together,” Robert remarks. “They like to share and they are open to new experiences.” Globetrotting Gourmet have built on a warm camaraderie with humour and surprises. The tour mascot – a blue decoy doll from Pakse with her own blog – even acts as an icebreaker to disarm stern officials and shy villagers alike. Cherry Ripe, a top Australian food writer, has joined five times. “I have been on dozens of international food tours, most of them impersonal and promotional. The reason I fork out for Robert and Morrison is their attention to detail, their cultural and culinary knowledge, and the creativity they bring to entertaining, whether it’s buffalo carts awaiting us on a beach, or a personalised goodie basket on an overnight train to Sapa.” Morrison is a weaver of jacquard brocade and mudmee ikat who specialises in 18thcentury French passementeries. While that might sound esoteric, his artisanal skills build connections with local craftspeople, like the lotus stem silk weavers of Inle Lake. He employs those craft skills on tour, packaging lunches or wrapping gifts for the gala dinner, which might be a ninecourse degustation, or lobster Thermidor at the Strand. “Their tours use food as an entree to the cultures,” Cherry
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Metal crafting in Shan State, Myanmar
Balancing local and visitor needs is a delicate task when the daily fare of one people becomes the gustatory grail of another.
says. “They get into the real fabric of a village, or the noncommercial local festivals where we are the only Caucasians among hundreds of thousands at a remote balloon festival. It is like being on a moveable feast, with constant intellectual and sensory stimulation.” Food should be enjoyed on all levels, Robert insists. “We have learned that our guests appreciate a deluxe hotel, and exquisite crafts to buy, but with the food it’s important to have what the common folk eat, just a delicious version of it.” The standout meal of my Vietnam tour turned out to be an astonishing bowl of banh da crua crab noodle soup down the filthiest alley in Haiphong. Balancing local and visitor needs is a delicate task when the daily fare of one people becomes the gustatory grail of another. Morrison sums up their approach: “We start with a quality restaurant that has, say, cutlery! After a while they gain the confidence to eat at hawker stands. By the last night they see how a suburban hole-in-the-wall is so much better than the ‘safe’ food on the first night. That’s when we know we’ve done our job.”
Globetrotting Gourmet can be contacted at AsianFoodTours.com and GlobetrottingGourmet.com. Upcoming tours include Burma (two tours, June 29-July 15), Cambodia (late Oct), Yunnan (Dec/Jan) and Laos (to be confirmed).
Dried fish from Inle Lake, Myanmar
The Burma Cookbook by Robert Carmack & Morrison Polkinghorne is published by River Books; 392pp hardcover, 343 illustrations, 1,195 baht. www.burmacookbook.com
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Tourist arrivals in Thailand have mushroomed from 62,000 in 1959 to almost 27 million in 2013. themagazine steps into the time machine – and speaks to industry veterans – to find out how tourism has changed, and where it might be headed. by max crosbie-jones
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Thai Airways advert for ‘The Royal Orchid Jet Service’ (1962)
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ack in the early 1960s the Thai government’s tourist department produced a quarterly magazine entitled Holiday Time in Thailand. Retailing for 5 baht an issue, it was a tourist primer not unlike the promotional enticements it still churns out today, only much, much quainter. To flick through a copy of this retro time capsule is to be warped back into an era when Thailand was, like much of the free world, living under the perceived spectre of communism, and the influx of Americana that was part and parcel of being closely allied to the United States. Evidently, it was also gleefully embracing a nascent tourist industry. Alongside features that trumpet the compliant charms of this gracious land (“come enjoy the potpourri of fun that is Songkran – the gayest time of Thailand’s festival filled year”), adverts for Kodak-sponsored classical dance shows, Thai Airways jets piloted by Scandinavian pilots, and the Oriental Hotel – “the only
riverside hotel in Bangkok” – fill its mildewed pages. So much has changed. Or has it, really? A speech published in the Songkran 1962 issue (Vol. 3, Issue. 2) reveals a lot about the modus operandi of the Tourist Organisation of Thailand, namely a fixation on the numbers game that perseveres to this day. “The number of tourists visiting Thailand in the past two years has increased rapidly,” said then tourism minister Thanat Khoman at the opening of the TOT’s new headquarters on Ratchadamnoen Avenue. “Before the establishment of the Tourist Organisation in 1959, the number of tourists was 61,571; when it was established in 1960, the number increased to 81,340, and in the past year the number was 107, 754.” A couple of other statements from Khoman’s speech also stand out. One is, “tourism provides great benefit and revenue without in any way causing deterioration in the natural resources of the
country,” just one of several clunkers that would raise hoots of derision among travel industry experts today (but can perhaps be explained by a naive exuberance on this young department’s part). Another to which history has been kinder is, “there is no limit to the expansion of the tourist industry in Thailand.” Fiftytwo years later and, with tourist arrival figures for 2013 having just hit an all-time high of 26.7 million, and predicted to rise even further, Khoman appears to have been right – there is no limit to the expansion in sight. Yet, some in the industry are asking ‘should there be?’ “I don’t think we really want 30 million tourists coming a year,” says Daniel Fraser, a travel industry veteran of over a decade who knows the Tourism Authority of Thailand, or TAT, as it is known today, more intimately than most. Best known as the presenter of hit Thai Monumental sculptures TV travel show Long Krung, this by Beijing-based sculptor Shu Yon. preternaturally chirpy Canadian
runs Smiling Albino, a Bangkokbased travel company specialising in tailor-made tours for small groups of high-end travellers. Like many, he laments how the tentacles of mass tourism have been allowed to squeeze the lifeblood out of many parts of the Kingdom. “Compared to 50 years ago, Pattaya, Phuket and parts of inner Chiang Mai have already lost their Thainess, whatever that is. Rapid development without an aesthetic vision or a beautification plan to go along with it has eroded some of the beautiful parts of Thailand’s main cities. Plus, it’s quite obvious that a jaded tourist culture has formed on the part of some locals.” Also, he thinks that the natural bedfellow of mass tourism, bargain basement tour packages, are eroding the Thai experience for locals and tourists alike – “you should never be going round the Grand Palace in groups of 30 or 40” – and, in some cases, even dangerous.
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Rapid development without an aesthetic vision to go with it has eroded the beautiful parts of Thailand’s main cities.
Christian Jankowski, “Museum Director’s Chair”
“Too many people in buses, ferries sinking off Pattaya – those things all stem from the fact that the supply and demand game means that there are so many tourists that people can get away with breaking the rules and flouting safety standards.” Some working on the fringes of the industry believe that domestic tourism, an increasingly important part of the tourism mix thanks to the rise of the Thai middle class (in 2013 the TAT forecast 107.4 million trips and revenue earnings of 453 billion baht), is having a detrimental impact too. Take wildlife photographer Lawrence Bruce Kekule, who has lived in Thailand for over four decades. For him, there is “nothing positive” about tourism to the country’s national parks, most of which is by locals. “All of the mainparks are completely overrun,” he says. “This has destroyed or chased out all the wildlife. Go to Khao Yai, Doi Inthanon or Kaeng Krachan National Park
Prime Minister Srisdi Dhanarajata Contemporary art on display in at the inauguration of the 798 includes paintings, photos, TOT’s new sculptures andoffice glass (1962) works.
during a festival time and see for yourself. Even weekends can be devastating in terms of the amount of people, traffic and trash. The day the Department of National Parks limits visitation is the day Thailand steps in the right direction, but at the moment it’s a mess out there.” Meanwhile, up in the northeast’s Loei province, namely the charming riverside hamlet of Chiang Khan, domestic tourism has brought wealth but also unforeseen changes to the fabric of village life. According to the deputy mayor, Thatpong Suksiri, something ineffable yet important – the community spirit – has been lost. “We used to get up early in the morning to offer alms to monks but now people get up early to open their shop for tourists. People care more about money than how we lived in the past,” he says. Land prices have also shot up. A plot that would have cost 700,000 baht three years ago now goes for about 4 million, according to Suksiri. Meanwhile, the numbers of tourists keeps on rising. “Last year 570,000 tourists visited Chiang Khan, a 50 percent rise on 2012. During peak times, like New Year holiday, there were 20,000 to 50,000 visitors per day. And we are expecting more than a million tourists this year.” For anyone who has ambled down Chiang Khan’s narrow main street, with its old timber shophouses that back onto the Mekong, these numbers are alarming – when a quaint, quiet village of only 5,000 residents starts getting 50,000 visitors a day how could it not become a madhouse? Tourism has also proven to be a mixed blessing for Thailand’s domestic elephants, around 4,000 of which are employed in camps and zoos across the Kingdom. On the one hand,
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A lot of people ask me why Thai tourism is so resilient – it has a lot to do with how many investments have been made here over the past 50 years.
Beast vs. man at the TOT Sponsored Elephant Round-up in Surin (1962)
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tourism dollars have enabled mahouts to feed them at a time when traditional sources of income have dried up (logging was banned in 1989). But on the other, it has resulted in these giants of the forest becoming little more than holidaymaker playthings. The TAT is, according to a study called “Explorations in Thai Tourism: Collected Case Studies,” culpable for this to some extent. It traces the origins of the elephant’s role in tourism back to the time when royal elephant round-ups gradually morphed from being “hunts with real purpose, to staged displays of such encounters featuring half-tame or domesticated animals for the entertainment of guests.” But the final stage of the transition, it claims, happened when the Tourist Organisation of Thailand co-opted the 1962 edition of the Surin Round-up: a still popular annual tourist draw at which around 150 pachyderms reenact war battles while clad in
Contemporary art on display in 798 includes paintings, photos, sculptures and glass works.
State Railway of Thailand advert (1962)
the regal finery of centuries past (the June 1962 edition of Holiday Time in Thailand records this event in breathless, ‘tally-ho!’ style.) To the occidental tourist, plied with shots of lao khao and free elephant rides, this must have been a memorable day out. But according to the report the effect was insidious: “Various tourism establishments afterwards introduced a curtailed and simplified version of the Surin Round-up.” Arriving roughly at the same time were also “elephants at work” shows, which developed gradually from real training sessions observed by tourists into performances devoid of any real purpose. Over the years, these have morphed into the displays of callous anthropomorphism that now prevail: shows in which elephants are forced, using metal prods and conditioned responses, to mimic human activity, be it by drawing paintings, playing drums (“If pachyderm Picassos are possible, why not Paganinis?” a specialist at the Elephant Conservation Centre was once quoted as saying), walking tightropes, kicking footballs, or dancing from side to side. iven this litany of negative effects – not to mention that huge Pandora’s Box, sex tourism – is it time for a change? Should the TAT’s success, say, now be measured in environmental or socio-cultural impact, not merely unchecked growth in arrivals and revenue? For some years now the TAT has, in fact, been making gestures in this direction. One of the first statements of tourism minister Suvit Yodmani following the coup of 2006 was to declare that he would target the quality of tourists, not the quantity (visitor numbers remain the headline figure on TAT press releases, but today other statistics that
Tourists feed elephants at the Surin Elephant Round-up (1962)
underscore tourism’s qualitative benefits, such as average length of stay and average daily expenditure are included too). Moreover, the new TAT governor, Thawatchai Arunyik, admits that mistakes were made. “In the past we did not pay enough attention to tourism resources management when promoting visitor arrivals,” he told themagazine. “A lot of adjustment is now becoming necessary, especially the adoption of carrying capacity systems.” A sea change or merely lip service? Fraser, for one, is sanguine about the direction in which the TAT is headed. “It’s an inter-governmental organisation with a budget and a target, so, whether we like it or not, it’s unavoidable – the TAT is a business and they have to turn over the numbers. But in their defence, they’ve not turned a blind eye to the realities of promoting responsible tourism as a sustainable way of keeping the numbers in check.” As an example he cites the “Little Big
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Project.” Launched in 2013, this TAT-sponsored initiative encourages tourists to take “purposeful vacations” by getting involved in everything from marine conservation to learning local ways of life, be it rice farming or traditional weaving, during their stay. For Fraser it is an “outstanding project” that demonstrates the TAT is serious about socially conscious tourism. Richard R. Brouwer, the CEO of Diethelm Travel Group, one of the oldest tour operators in Thailand, is skeptical that the numbers are as high as the authorities say they are. Some tourists are double-counted, he says, and border traffic between Malaysia and Thailand also included. But he agrees that quality is what the industry at large should be aiming for. “I would prefer to see quality tourists coming because they are comfortable paying the correct market price if this experience is worth it. We try to bring out the best for our customer, and
that requires an investment on our part, such as staff skills and ensuring the appropriate levels of insurance are in place.” He points out that the TAT is not the only stakeholder driving the numbers. “A lot of people ask me why Thai tourism is so resilient – it also has to do with how many investments have been made here over the past 50 years. Just take the Accor, Starwood and Marriott groups – they have more than 180 hotels here between them. The marketing machine that rolls in order to make sure that those are full is tremendous.” Then there’s word of mouth. “Tourists are effectively doing the marketing for us,” he says. So if tourism is a monster the TAT alone wouldn’t be able to reign in even if it wanted to, what lies ahead? Perhaps its future lies in spreading the best practices of the past 50 years and phasing out the less mutually beneficial ones. One of the biggest changes in the tourism industry over the past 15 years, says Brouwer, has
been a move away from seated coach tours to more intimate, experiential tours. This has been heralded by the rise of Free Independent Travellers, or FITs. “Fifteen years ago Diethelm’s seven-day Thailand package would run five days a week, with departures in German, French, Spanish and English,” he says. “Today, weeks go by and none depart, as these days people want to travel individually with their family or loved one and do focused tours about religion, food, waterways. We’ve gone from selling Discover Thailand in Seven Days tours to Discover Thailand in-depth tours.” Fraser thinks that this new breed of more socially conscious tourist, with their interest in the arts, culture, architecture and environment, can actually be a force for good. “Muay thai, Thai dance and cooking are all more popular than they were 20, 30 years ago and I think socially conscious tourism is to credit for that,” he says. It is also less
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obtrusive, as it doesn’t profoundly change the environment you’re in, and better at income distribution. “The trickle-down to the mum and pop shops and local restaurants, as opposed to the large tourist conglomerates and middlemen, is greater,” he says. Though it would mean more competition, Fraser hopes to see more of these sorts of enriching tours – from animal conservation projects to Buddhist meditation retreats – coming on to the market, as he believes this would create a “virtuous cycle” that helps to sustain and perpetuate Thai culture rather than eradicate it. Domestic tourism, a sector spurred on by low-season marketing campaigns by hotels and low-cost airlines, is also showing promise. “From Ratchaburi to Korat, Thais are doing some neat, localised forms of tourism: traditional house type homestays, farm projects, eco-friendly activities ranging from mud-skiing and biking to camping out with beekeepers in Ratchaburi,” says Fraser. If the TAT fosters these “patches of blue sky,” as he calls them, the future could be bright. But there is an elephant in the room. Though traffic from traditional source markets such as Europe and America is slowing, mass tourism is on the rise. Take the figures for China, the biggest emerging market. Tourist arrivals from the PRC jumped 69 percent to 4.7 million in 2013 (this has been attributed partly to the success of the Chinese film Lost in Thailand, which was shot in northern Thailand). If the rise continues (which seems likely given the recent opening of the Fourth Thai-Lao Friendship Bridge, linking South China’s Kunming to Thailand’s Chiang Rai by road) many in the industry are worried about the prospect of more overpeopled tourist sites
Glazed tiled roof at Bangkok’s Marble Temple, or Wat Benchamabopitr (1962)
Contemporary art on display in 798 includes paintings, photos, sculptures and glass works.
TOT Painting Contest Winner by Sawasdi Tantisuk (1962)
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and more hulking hotels – exactly what disciples of the socially conscious tourist movement don’t want. Figures are one way of surveying the changing tourist landscape. Another is the number of local media selling the dream. Back in the 1960s, Holiday Time in Thailand was the only tourist magazine, and its readership predominantly Anglo-American; today there is a myriad variety published in several languages. The latest entrant to this field is Nihao: Thailand’s first Chinese language magazine. Its publisher Jaffee Yee believes the Chinese package tourists of today will be the independent luxury travellers of tomorrow. “Initially I thought there were not many independent Chinese travellers coming apart frsom those from Hong Kong and Taiwan. But in the past couple of years, things have changed – more and more are venturing out on their own.” He thinks the numbers of Chinese coming could rise to 10 million by 2020, and that a large proportion of them will be “luxury FITs looking for something different.” Perhaps herein lies the rub. The trajectory of holiday time in Thailand over the next 50 years – be it positive or negative – may rest largely on whether the more culturally sensitive tourist operators can get to them, and tourists from other emerging markets, before the package tour operators do. And what of Thailand’s allure – is there still much left to go round? Plenty, believes Fraser, whose travel TV show on Thai PBS has taken him all over the Kingdom. “The essential Thainess, the beauty of the country, the experiences that make for lifetime memories... they’re all still here. Sometimes you have to go further to find them, but the essential charm, the sanae as Thais call it, is still very much alive. The next 50 years should be about preserving that in conjunction with tourism, and I think it’s possible.”
AWALK ON THE CLIFFSIDE Experience the enchantments of the Cinque Terre. by keith mundy
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“
he Riviera” conjures up images of ostentatious luxury, fast cars and beautiful women – or handsome men – beside exclusive beaches. But one piece of the Italian Riviera is a world apart from all that – the Cinque Terre, where wild cliffside walks have pauses in tiny villages that have never known a designer store. The Italian Riviera leads on from the French Riviera, with the western part called the Riviera di Ponente – translating poetically as the Riviera of the Setting Sun – running from the French border to Italy’s biggest port at Genoa, and the eastern section called the Riviera di Levante, the Riviera of the Rising Sun. The Riviera di Levante lies between Genoa and La Spezia, and poets love it. The English Romantics Byron and Shelley spent much time at the Gulf of La Spezia, with Byron – always one for the dramatic gesture – swimming across it from the Grotto dell’ Arpaia to meet
Shelley at Lerici in 1822. It later got called the Poets’ Gulf. This area is easy to access, but the hidden jewels of the Riviera of the Rising Sun lurk in the steep stony shore to its west: the Cinque Terre – the Five Lands in literal English. That’s not very poetic, but the lands are. Italian being a language made
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poet had his roots in this rocky landscape, the Nobel prizewinner Eugenio Montale, who spent childhood summer holidays there and took refuge there as a young adult from the burgeoning of Mussolini’s fascism. Far from The Five Lands romantic, Montale saw a “wiry, are one of the best harsh, scary beauty” in the places in Italy for landscape, reflecting the poverty a holiday that and isolation as well as the combines spectacular natural drama of its steep wavelashed cliffs. scenery, old world Punctuating the jagged coastal charm, fresh air and poetry with picturesque commas, blissful calm, along the Cinque Terre are five with good food hardy fishing villages founded and wine. in Roman times, abandoned in the Dark Ages when pirates marauded along the coast, then refounded a millennium ago. Fixed in their remote rocky coves like limpets, until the end of the 19th century they were accessible only by sea or via rough mule for poetry, Cinque Terre sounds tracks. Then came a railway and nice when you get it right: cheen- during the last century some of the tracks became narrow kway tay-ray. And they are not lands but villages, jumbles of tall winding roads. Still poor in the 1940s as World War II ended, the houses painted red and orange, hills above the villages became yellow and pink, huddled in infested with bandits in the rocky coves and clinging to precipitous mountain sides above lawless post-war years. But you would never guess any a cerulean blue sea. of these tough times in today’s Italy’s foremost modern tourist-friendly ambience. In the last few decades, from being a little-known holiday escape for discerning northern Italians, the Cinque Terre have become a magnet for tourists from all over the world, with all the villages offering accommodation and sustenance, mostly simple and affordable. Now a protected area with both National Park and World Heritage Site status, the Five Lands are one of the best places in Italy for a holiday that combines spectacular scenery, old world charm, fresh air and blissful calm, along with good food and wine. Plus – a key element – fine doses of exercise on the celebrated coast path that
FACT FILE Getting there Fly to Milan; Thai Airways has nonstop flights; www.thaiairways.com. Take a direct bus from Malpensa airport to Genoa central station, then take a train to Monterosso. Getting around Cinque Terre Card and Cinque Terre Treno Card give access to the paths and the trains, details at www.parconazionale5terre.it Sleeping In Monterosso, Porto Roca (Via Corone 1, +39 187 817 502) has a spectacular view of the coastline and will send its minibus if you call from the train station. In Manarola, Ca’ d’Andrean (Via Discovolo, 101; +39 0187 920 040; www.cadandrean.it) is a charming hotel converted from an old oil press and wine cellar. Eating In Corniglia, A Cantina de Mananan (Via Fieschi 117, +39 0187 821 166) serves authentic, good-value Ligurian cuisine in a rustic stone wine cellar. In Monterosso, Il Ciliegio (Località Beo 2, +39 0187 817 829) has a terrace looking down on vine-covered slopes to the sea, and makes its own white wine.
Stromboli of the Aeolian Islands
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More than 7,000 kilometres of dry-stone terraces corrugate the precipitous slopes, the labour of countless generations forming a stunning artificial landscape, hanging over a deep blue sea.
links the five villages. The classic Cinque Terre activity, drawing so many of its visitors, is the walk along this path. So popular is it that the National Park now levies a toll, and it’s best to pay it with a Cinque Terre Card (details are in the Fact File) which includes the use of shuttle buses, or a costlier card which also lets you use the train at will. If you keep going, you can do the whole path in five hours, but lingering wherever you find something special is the real way to enjoy it. Wherever you get to, if you don’t want to walk back to the village you’re staying in, then take one of the frequent trains, or the less frequent ferry which also links the villages. From west to east, the villages are Monterosso al Mare, Vernazza, Corniglia, Manarola and Riomaggiore. In October 2011, a huge rainstorm caused flash flooding and mud slides that severely damaged the first two, sparing the other three, but with a speed and commitment miraculous for Italy, almost everything was back to normal within six months. Now in 2014 you’d hardly know anything had happened. Fishing remains a livelihood, and, amazingly, wine-making. More than 7,000 kilometres of dry-stone terraces corrugate the precipitous slopes, the labour of countless generations forming a stunning artificial landscape, hanging over a deep blue sea. Despite their impossible location, each of the Cinque Terre did well enough in the Middle Ages to afford the local status symbol: a sculpted marble rose window for the parish church. Each terra has a sanctuary high above, dedicated to the Madonna and affording astonishing views. Westernmost Monterosso
From Monterosso, a strenuous hour-and-a-half cliff walk leads to the prettiest terra of all, Vernazza.
cliff walk leads to the prettiest terra of all, Vernazza, which you approach from above, sighting first the two guard towers built by the Saracen Arab occupiers in the Dark Ages. ‘The Pearl of the Cinque Terre,’ Vernazza, was founded by the Romans on a rocky spit, which shelters the only true harbour in the five villages. Colourful fishermen’s houses in the tall Genoese style line the harbour and cluster upwards, many hosting cafés and restaurants, with the 14th century church, Santa Margherita d’Antiochia, standing by a charming little piazza. A medieval castle, Belforte, towers above the harbour, once a protection from pirates, and Vernazza’s past wealth is evidenced by arcaded buildings
and elaborate doorways. On steep terraces above are olive groves said to give rise to some of Italy’s finest olive oil. The 90-minute walk from Vernazza to Corniglia is the steepest but the most beautiful of all the inter-village paths. It’s a dirt path with many stone steps and a few switchbacks, affording great forwards views of both Corniglia and Manarola. Unlike the other terre, Corniglia sits on a hilltop 100 metres above the sea and 365 steps above its station. Train travellers can hop on the National Park shuttle bus to get up there from the station. Smaller and calmer than other villages, aloof on its summit, it has a little piazza with a communal olive press where you can sit and pass meditative 207
al Mare is the main resort with the only sandy beaches and the most hotels, located largely in its newer part near the station. A huge cement statue of Neptune known as II Gigante guards the tiny harbour, near the villa where Eugenio Montale lived and wrote. The poet called it a “plain village made of stone, a refuge for fishermen and farmers.” Things have changed: lots of concrete and fancy food, a refuge for city folk. But the old town keeps its treasures, like San Giovanni Church with its horizontally striped facades, and the hill above is crowned by the Cappucine Convent with its medieval Dawn Tower and San Francesco Church. The fine art you find in the church is surprising, including a Crucifixion by Van Dyck. A bus goes up to the 18th century Sanctuary of Soviore, and a climb even higher gets you the stunning views from Punta Mesco. From Monterosso, a strenuous hour-and-a-half
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moments. With a dash of flamboyance, San Pietro parish church is in Gothic Ligurian style, with a lovely rose window. Wine-making is Corniglia’s main activity, as it always has been: a wine amphora bearing the village’s classical name of Cornelius was found in the ruins of Pompeii. In May, Corniglia holds a festival honouring the local dessert wine, Sciacchetra, of age-old renown, boasting a 14th century mention by Boccaccio in The Decameron. If you go on down from the station, you find this shoreline’s longest beach, pebbly and boulder-strewn, at a place called Guvano. Favoured by nudists for its seclusion, it’s rated the best for swimming too. From Corniglia another hour’s walk through splendid scenery, switchbacking downwards, leads to pretty-as-apicture Manarola, its colourful houses piled on a great black rock by the sea, its gaily painted fishingPalazzo boatsdelle hoisted Syracuse, Poste up from the
exposed port into the sinuous main street to protect them from the Scirocco gales that may blow in from the Sahara. Founded in the 12th century within a fortress that was later demolished, Manarola’s outer houses follow the line of the old castle walls. The Gothic church of San Lorenzo has a superb rose window, as you now expect. There are stairs going all the way down to sea level where, avoiding the mussels and barnacles on the rocks, you can enjoy great swimming without many people. Manarola is linked to Riomaggiore by the most popular section of the footpath, the Via dell’ Amore or Path of Love, carved out of the curving cliffside. Gently sloping and paved, it’s an easy path that runs about 20 metres above the sea, just over a kilometre long, and takes little time unless you’re canoodling. Cut during the building of the railway line, it got used by amorous young people of the two villages to meet up,
and that’s how it got its name. In earlier days, marriages were normally concluded between people of the same village, but the “Lovers’ Way” changed that for good. Amorous graffiti now lines the walk, as you might expect, started by loving locals, hugely amplified by ardent visitors. Riomaggiore is the most populous of the Cinque Terre (population 1,890) and visitors crowd its lively cafes and rocky beaches. Pretty paths go up to the castle ruins and to the spectacular viewpoint of the Sanctuary of Our Lady of Montenero, 340 metres above the sea, or else you may be able to take the rickety rack railway, the trenino del vino that’s used for the grape harvest. Legend has it that Riomaggiore’s founders built a church here to house an icon painted by St Luke himself, later stolen by the Lombards. The views all along the Cinque Terre coast and towards the Poets’ Gulf are incomparable and truly breathtaking.
The Cinque Terre draws visitors year round, but March to May is best when the flowers are in bloom and the walking is a not-too-hot delight, or September during the world’s most vertical wine harvest. A crucial element of the harvest is the system of specially designed rack-railways running on monorails whose wagons get the grapes up to the hilltop road – a boon compared to the old days when the pickers had to do it all with ropes. The Cinque Terre’s tangy Vernaccia white wines have won praise since the Middle Ages, when the poet Petrarch enthused about “vineyards illuminated by the sun’s benevolent eye and much loved by Bacchus.” The Roman god of wine and revelry doubtless enjoys the sweet honeyhued Sciacchetra, too, a tipple which ends a meal very well. That meal should include tasty local dishes like pansotti – ravioli filled with ricotta and herbs – in walnut sauce, fresh-off-the-boat
Alternative Rivieras Cinque Terra’s tangy Vernaccia white wines have won praise since the Middle Ages, when the poet Petrarch enthused about ‘vineyards illuminated by the sun’s benevolent eye and much loved by Bacchus.’
fish, and thyme-scented rabbit stewed in Vermentino wine, which can all be started off with a plate of anchovies, marinated in olive oil and lemon or stuffed with breadcrumbs and herbs. Let’s end with some fine prose by a reviewer of the Collected Poems of Eugenio Montale, a foreigner with a deep affinity for the Cinque Terre. Even if this previously inaccessible coast is now deluged with visitors in the high season, the magic still prevails and stirs the romance in our souls. “Houses are stacked with a jeweller’s care off a sea so blue it seems black in places,” wrote Steve Donoghue, “and the sun seems somehow to disappear into its own light, creating a daily luminescence that feels like it had no beginning and will have no end. Along those narrow cliff-side tracks or in the paradisiacal shade of the many sequestered gardens behind those old, watchful hillside houses, the days feel like they will never reach twilight.”
Meaning simply ‘shore’ in Italian, the original Riviera is the Mediterranean coastal region between Cannes, France, and La Spezia, Italy, renowned for its natural beauty and benign climate. Now Rivieras pop up around the world, the name signifying choice pieces of vacation coastline. Here are three of them.
The African Riviera At a regional summit last year, the President of Somalia said Mogadishu, the Somali capital, and its faultless coastline had once been the African Riviera, and would be again. This was a surprise, given Somalia’s reputation as the world’s most lawless and therefore touristless country, but it turns out that this Indian Ocean shore, back in its colonial heyday, was indeed renowned for its lovely beaches and fine hotels. Today things are indeed looking up for Somalia. The Western media are in some agreement about the country’s prospects. The Economist sees blossoming entrepreneurship in Mogadishu, and said of the city’s Lido beach, “Long a no-go area, it now draws big crowds after Friday prayers. The sand and surf are filled with people. Girls in full dress splash about next to boys who have put down their guns to learn to swim.” Beachside hotels and restaurants are reappearing, but before foreign hedonists rush to experience a new tropical destination, be aware of the local beach bylaws: women must remain fully clothed, even when swimming. In this strict Muslim land, morality guards replace lifeguards.
The Indian Riviera When the hippie trail to India began in the 1960s, one of the key destinations was Goa, where idyllic sandy beaches with swaying palms, plus a laid-back Indo-Portuguese culture, had magnetic appeal for young Westerners with plenty of time and little money. A centuries-old Portuguese enclave reclaimed by India in 1961, located on the western coast, Goa was just too good to be kept a hippie escape, so – in a process seen in many idyllic locations first discovered by budget travellers – the coast gradually drew in adventurous vacationers, and then the package holiday crowds. The consecration of Goa as a holiday resort destination came when it got dubbed the Indian Riviera a decade or so ago, and today its wide range of accommodation makes it a popular vacation place not just for Westerners but for India’s fast-growing middle class. Just 3,700 square kilometres with a population of 1.5 million, this is where India’s bustle and jostle gives way to coconut groves, birdcalls and the whisper of sea on sand, summed up in the local Konkani language word, sussegad, meaning ‘laid-back’ or ‘relaxed.’
The Riviera Maya Mexico decided it had a Riviera in the 1990s, when the Riviera Maya was christened. After the successes of Puerto Vallarta and Acapulco on the Pacific Coast in attracting US tourists in the mid -20th century, the far eastern peninsula of Yucatan realised that it had the same kind of stuff to offer: a string of beautiful beaches with powdery white sand lapped by the clear turquoise waters of the Caribbean Sea, stretching along the peninsula’s eastern shore from Puerto Morelos down to the Sian Ka’an Biosphere Reserve. Once home to small fishing villages, now a favoured holiday destination of North Americans, that coastline has morphed into a hectic tourist corridor offering luxury resorts, nightlife, spa retreats, shopping, golf, water sports and all the things that the conventional moneyed tourist loves. A top venue for scuba diving with an expansive coral reef system just off the coast, the Mayan Riviera, as it is also known, has the extra frisson of being located where the ancient Maya civilisation once flourished. One atmospheric Maya temple ruin sits on a low cliff above a Riviera beach, at Tulum.
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