November 2010 by Travel + Leisure Southeast Asia

NOVEMBER 2010

SAMUI’S

high style

THE COOLEST NEW HOTELS, THE HOTTEST ISLAND FASHION

SHANGHAI Your complete guide, +23 essential stops KUALA LUMPUR

The T+L guide to the city’s rocking new music scene

NEW WAYS TO STAY, SHOP, EAT & PLAY

CHEJU ISLAND REDISCOVER SOUTH KOREA’S LOST WORLD

INTO THE WILD

WADING THROUGH FLORIDA’S GREEN EVERGLADES FOR HIM

Packing Made Easy

PLAN LIKE A PRO, AND SAVE MONEY!

Tra v e l a n d L e i s u r e A s i a . c o m

SECRET PARIS

SINGAPORE SG$7.90 ● HONG KONG HK$43 ●THAILAND THB175 ● INDONESIA IDR50,000 MALAYSIA MYR17● VIETNAM VND85,000 ● MACAU MOP44 ● PHILIPPINES PHP240 BURMA MMK35 ● CAMBODIA KHR22,000 ● BRUNEI BND7.90 ● LAOS LAK52,000

OUR TOP FIVE DIVE WATCHES

(destinations)11.10 Paris 132 Cheju 120 Shanghai 42, 144, 154

The Everglades 97

Manila 102 Samui 40, 77, 110

World Weather This Month -40oC

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Issue Index

SOUTHEAST ASIA 20 20 40 Kuala Lumpur 85 Mae Salong, Thailand 92 Manila 102 Saigon 49 Samui 44, 76, 110 Singapore 45, 46, 154

-20 0 Hong Kong -20 0 56

40oF 0 oC

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ASIA 40 Beijing 65 50 60 7550 80 Cheju 120 Shanghai 42, 144, 154 Sri Lanka 154

20 C

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France 40, 58 60Germany 90 110 5875 Italy 54, 58 Paris 132 Spain 58

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30 C

New Zealand 58

110

AMERICAS Argentina 58 Chile 58 The Everglades 97 San Francisco 40 U.S. 58

PACIFIC Australia 40, 58

EUROPE Belgium 68

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World o Air Temperature o

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75oF

Currency Converter Singapore Hong Kong Thailand Indonesia Malaysia Vietnam Macau Philippines Burma Cambodia Brunei Laos (SGD)

US ($1)

1.30

(HKD)

7.76

(BT)

(RP)

(RM)

(VND)

(MOP)

(P)

(MMK)

(KHR)

(BND)

(LAK)

29.8

8,915

3.10

19,498

7.99

43.4

6.41

4,230

1.30

8,035

Source: www.xe.com (exchange rates at press time).

n o v embe r 2 0 1 0 | t r a v e l a n d l e i s u r e s e a . c o m

m a p by e t h a n co r n e l l

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t r a v elan d leisu r easia . c o m | v o l 0 4 | issue 1 1

(contents)11.10 >144 High above Shanghai at the Ritz-Carlton.

110 Tune In, Chill Out While Ko Samui continues to change, with more five-star hotel options than ever before, it still offers that chance to get away from it all in a tropical setting. By Richard Hermes. Photographed by Cedric Arnold. Guide and map 119

120 A Trip in Time Seeking a break from the modern world, Min Jin Lee explores Korea’s Cheju Island, searching out its volcanic landscape on foot and making sure she’s never far from a good meal. It turns out to be a journey that stirs a few memories. Guide and map 130 132 Paris Secrets Want to find the hidden joys of one of Europe’s most iconic cities? ALEXANDRA MARSHALL

n o v embe r 2 0 1 0 | t r a v e l a n d l e i s u r e a s i a . c o m

shares her favorite haunts in the city she now calls home. Photographed by Richard Truscott. Styled by Mimi Lombardo. Guide and map 143 144 The New Shanghai In a city where surprises await at every turn, Adam Sachs wends his way from gleaming high-rises to sleepy French concession lanes to chaotic night markets. Photographed by Morgan & Owens. Guide and map 153

morgan & owens

110-144 Features

2010 Hotels Issue • It List • Krabi • Kyoto • Laos • China • Singapore • Tuscany • Serviced Apartments

high style

THE COOLEST NEW HOTELS, THE HOTTEST ISLAND FASHION

SHANGHAI

Your complete guide, +23 essential stops

KUALA LUMPUR

The T+L guide to the city’s rocking new music scene

NOVE M BE R 2 0 10

Tra v e l a n d L e i s u r e A s i a . c o m

SECRET PARIS

NEW WAYS TO STAY, SHOP, EAT & PLAY

CHEJU ISLAND REDISCOVER SOUTH KOREA’S LOST WORLD

INTO THE WILD

WADING THROUGH FLORIDA’S GREEN EVERGLADES FOR HIM

Packing Made Easy

PLAN LIKE A PRO, AND SAVE MONEY!

Departments 12 Editor’s Note 16 Contributors 18 Letters 20 Best Deals 25 Strategies 34 Smart Traveler 154 My Favorite Place

TRAVEL+LEISURE SOUTHEAST ASIA

(contents)11.10

NOVEMBER 2010

SAMUI’S

OUR TOP FIVE DIVE WATCHES

11 Cover_FINALS.indd 1

12/10/2010 15:48

Cover

At YL Residence No. 17. Photographed by Nat Prakobsantisuk. Model: Raiane Marques Maderin. Styling by Kontee Pamaranond. Make-up by Kamol Chatrasen. Hair by Pongsiri Pornpijaipark. Assistant: Ekarat Ubonsri.

> 49

> 102

> 68

75-76 Stylish Traveler 85-109 T+L Journal 39-68 Insider

75 Icon Watches that make a splash. 76 Fashion Garbo-esque glam at Ko Samui’s exclusive YL Residence No. 17.

40 Newsflash Thailand’s hottest new resort, Hermès hits Shanghai, dugong spotting, a thirst-quenching bottle and more. 46 Room Report Singapore chic meets radical design at Wanderlust. By Naomi Lindt 49 Shopping Unearthing Saigon’s most stylish finds. By Niloufar Motamed 54 The Expert Italy’s hidden treasures mapped out. By Maria Shollenbarger 56 High & Low Two Hong Kong design hotels go head to head. By Lara Day 10

>75

85 After Dark Kuala Lumpur’s music scene is worth checking out, writes robyn eckhardt, but treat it as a cultural treasure hunt. 92 Drink In the far reaches of Thailand is a taste of Chinese history, one best enjoyed over a local cuppa. By karen j. coates 97 Outdoors Miami native tom austin rediscovers a wild terrain filled with mangroves, crab shacks and 3-meter alligators. 102 Food Manila teems with cosmopolitan flavors, yet its best local fare has been hidden away. Now, it’s time to go global. By lara day

c l o c k w i s e f r o m fa r l e f t : s e a n r o c h a ; d av i e s + s ta r r ; p h i l i p p e n g e l h o r n ; j a m e s w o j c i k

58 Wine Tippling tips for globe-trotting oenophiles. By Bruce Schoenfeld 62 Tech Never get lost again. By Jeff Wise 65 Trip Navigator Beijing transforms into a nocturnal playground. By Meghaan Foye 68 T+L Guide Ghent returns to its former glory. By Sean Rocha

(editor’s note) 11.10 You might be surprised to learn that I don’t have an iPhone (I also don’t have the “other” smartphone of choice in Asia), and it took me eight years to acquire an iPod following its a useful transition to talking about this month’s mag), I was asked, on a recent trip to KL, whether the iPad would kill off printed magazines; my reply was that when I started writing about the Internet in 1996, many pundits much predicted the end of all printed material by the 2000’s—and they’ve been wrong so far. So there will always be a Travel + Leisure Southeast Asia magazine that you can lovingly hold and enthusiastically digest. Take this issue, for example, which is led by a stunning Ko Samui cover, photo shoot (page 76) and lead feature (“Tune In, Chill Out,” page 110) taking you to the newest luxe developments at this everpopular destination. My advice? Make use of the fact that the summer on Samui lasts longer than in Bangkok and its environs, so book late and get a better deal and fewer crowds. I also love our After Dark article on KL (page 85), which comes a little late for me following my trip there last month, but which I’ll keep for my next visit. And since I’m in Singapore in a few weeks’ time, I’ll be sure to check out the Wanderlust Hotel (“Singapore Glam,” page 46). Who knows, I may even pick up a shiny new iPad.—m a t t l e p p a r d

Travel + L eisure editors, writers and photographers are the industry’s most reliable sources. While on assignment, they travel incognito whenever possible and do not take press trips or accept free travel of any kind. 12

n o v embe r

2 0 1 0 | t r a v e l a n d l e i s u r e a s i a . c o m

tom hoops

2001 launch. So despite being quite tech-versatile, I am rarely, if ever, an “early adopter,” especially of gadgets that seem more like toys. This was my pre-prepared attitude towards the iPad, until I used one, which is when all my objections went out of the window. Here’s a game-changer, I thought, and now I’m counting on a slim but reliably hefty gift-wrapped special surprise this Christmas. All that aside, the emergence of the iPad, and to be fair to competitors, any similarly sized tablet with similar operability, represents a huge shift in the way information can be presented for most of us in the media, and also for you, the consumer, in how you access this information. No doubt, the convergence of technologies certainly makes putting Travel + Leisure Southeast Asia on the iPad or anything similar a very interesting proposition. Not only does it change our potential audience, in that readers worldwide will have easier access to T+L SEA, but it also means that in the future, we’ll likely have loads of multimedia tricks we can pull. Interested? Well, if you are an early adopter, go to www.zinio.com or visit our website to download the new digital edition. As an aside (and as

COULD

IT BE

T H E F A RT H E R YO U T R AV E L

♥ 2010 Φουρ Σεασονσ Ηοτελσ Λιµιτεδ

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Regular contributors / photographers Cedric Arnold, Jennifer Chen, Robyn Eckhardt, Philipp Engelhorn, David Hagerman, Lauryn Ishak, Naomi Lindt, Jen Lin-Liu, Nat Prakobsantisuk, Adam Skolnick, Darren Soh, Daven Wu

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travel+leisure southeast asia Vol. 4, Issue 11 Travel + Leisure Southeast Asia is published monthly by Media Transasia Limited, Room 1205-06, 12/F, Hollywood Centre, 233 Hollywood Road, Sheung Wan, Hong Kong. Tel: +852 2851-6963; Fax: +852 2851-1933; under license from American Express Publishing Corporation, 1120 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10036, United States of America. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording or any information storage or retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the Publisher. Produced and distributed by Media Transasia Thailand Ltd., 14th Floor, Ocean Tower II, 75/8 Soi Sukhumvit 19, Sukhumvit Road, Klongtoeynue, Wattana, Bangkok 10110, Thailand. Tel: +66 2 204-2370. Printed by Comform Co., Ltd. (+66 2 368-2942â&#x20AC;&#x201C;7). Color separation by Classic Scan Co., Ltd. (+66 2 291-7575). While the editors do their utmost to verify information published, they do not accept responsibility for its absolute accuracy.

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(contributors) 11.10

Min Jin Lee | Writer The Assignment Wrote our

story on the popular Korean getaway Cheju (page 120). Favorite Cheju moment

Exclaiming “waaaaaaaahhhh” in awe like a real Korean when I reached the peak of Halla Mountain. Cheju in three words Sublime, poignant, scrollpainting–worthy. Food you’d fly back for Paht bingsoo at any one of Paparagi’s locations around the island. Advice for first-time visitors Make a list of unesco sites you want to see and hire a taxi for the day. Don’t forget to negotiate a price beforehand. Your next trip Beijing this month! Morgan & Owens | Photographers

based couple photographed “The New Shanghai” (page 144). Missed Shot If we had time, we would have checked out M50—the Moganshan Road Arts District. Best Photo Museum Maison Européenne de la Photographie, in Paris. Favorite T+L Assignment A feature on Luang Prabang, Laos. It’s remote and friendly. Dream Assignment Is that an offer? Travel Photography Tips Give something back. Have lots of conversations. Bring a Polaroid. Alexandra Marshall | Writer The Assignment Wrote

and reported “Paris Secrets” (page 132). Francophiles Shouldn’t Miss… The city’s Vietnamese food. The French really do understand its cuisine. Favorite French Expression “Voilà.” It doesn’t

just mean “Look at this!” but also “Yes,” “I agree,” “I get it,” and “Oh, really?” Don’t Leave Without Visiting the Musée des Arts Décoratifs. For Romance Go to Pont Marie, which joins Ile St.-Louis to the Right Bank. Not Just For Tourists I’m a sucker for the Musée Rodin, especially its gardens.

A b o v e , f r o m l e f t : c o u r t e s y o f m i n j i n l e e ; S e o n g J o o n C h o . m i d d l e , f r o m l e f t : CO U RTE S Y OF MORGAN & OWEN S ; MORGAN & OWEN S . b o t t o m , f r o m l e f t : c o u r t e s y o f a l e x a n d r a m a r s h a l l ; r i c h a r d t r us c o t t

Assignment The Singapore-

(Letters)11.10

letter of the month

Magical Escape I had to write to tell you that your story about the Japanese mountain farmhouse [“The House of the Flute,” October 2010] left me yearning to visit. My only problem with this discovery was that it was only one page long! You should run more of these inspirational getaway stories—as Alex Kerr said in this one, “Chiiori is a place of magic. It has this grip on your soul.” Very true words, at least to me.

Beauty Spots

—jennifer

Thanks for the great write-up on Bali [“Spirit of Bali,” October 2010], an island I love visiting, and for a tale of what would be my dream trip to Africa [“Unchartered Kenya”] in the same issue. Peter Jon Lindberg’s take on Bali made me laugh out loud at what each of us considers beautiful and “real,” nowhere more than at the end of his story. As for Kenya, I can only dream, but I have added it to my wish list. Then, just when I thought all was perfect in the travel world, a few pages about the Giorgio Armani hotel in Dubai [“Star of Dubai”], which didn’t interest me in the slightest! You know what they say about beauty.

Transport Woes I’d like to suggest that you give more coverage to airport transportation in the region. All too often, most recently in a taxi in Bangkok where the driver didn’t seem to know where he was going, I feel like I’m being taken advantage of as soon as I arrive. This isn’t the case in only Bangkok, since I’ve had friends visit me and tell me the same about Kuala Lumpur. No matter where this happens, it leaves a bad taste in the mouth. I would think that tourist boards around Asia would do more to train their taxi drivers. While you’re at it, can you include some information on how to complain about transport services and, more importantly, whether it would do any good?

—clara

—lola

)

lee, singapore

m c d o na l d , ja k a rta

p i s a n , k ua l a lu m p u r

E-MAIL T+L send your letters to editor @ travelandleisuresea.com and let us know your thoughts on recent stories or new places to visit. letters chosen may be edited for clarity and space. the letter of the month receives a free one-year subscription to travel + leisure ( southeast asia only). reader opinions expressed in letters do not necessarily reflect those of travel + leisure southeast asia, media transasia ltd., or american express publishing.

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(best deals) 11.10 deal of the month

One-Year Anniversary package at The PuLi Hotel & Spa (8621/3203-9999; thepuli. com) in Shanghai.

Gear up for the winter months on one of these refreshing breaks n LAOS Opening offer at the Alila Luang Prabang (856-71/260-777; alilahotels.com). What’s Included Welcome drinks; daily breakfast and afternoon tea; free Wi-Fi; and a US$30 donation to a local community project for every three-night booking. Cost From US$170 per night, three-night minimum, through December 23. Savings 25 percent. Mekong Spa Experience package at La Résidence Phou Vao (856-71/212-194; residencephouvao.com). What’s Included Daily breakfast for two; a three-course dinner for two at Phou Savanh restaurant; a 90-minute Mo Hon massage for two; tea, coffee and bottled water; round-trip airport transfers; and free Wi-Fi. Cost From US$415 per night, two-night minimum, open validity. Savings 30 percent. n SINGAPORE Romantic Escapade package at Wangz Hotel (65/6730-1811; wangzhotel.com). What’s Included A stay in a Canopy or Soak room; breakfast for two; Internet and local calls; selected mini-bar drinks; a bottle of sparkling wine; 15 percent off dining; and late check-out until 4 p.m. Cost From S$288 per night, through December 31. Savings 45 percent. 20

110th Anniversary Weekend Rest & Relax package at Goodwood Park Hotel (65/67377411; goodwoodparkhotel.com). What’s Included A stay in a Deluxe room; and a Poolside suite upgrade for S$110 per night. Cost From S$110 per person per night, two-person minimum, valid Friday to Sunday, through December 31. Savings 60 percent. n THAILAND Opening offer at Four Points by Sheraton Bangkok, Sukhumvit 15 (66-2/309-3000; fourpoints.com). What’s Included Daily breakfast for two; four beverages (coffee or beer); late check-out until 4 p.m. if available; and double points for Starwood Preferred Guests. Cost From Bt2,500 per night, through March 31, 2011. Savings 37 percent. n VIETNAM Family Escape package at Six Senses Ninh Van Bay (84-58/372-8222; sixsenses.com) in Nha Trang. What’s Included Daily breakfast; welcome drinks; a bottle of sparkling wine; snorkeling and kayaking; round-trip airport and boat transfers; and a US$40 spa voucher. Cost From US$280 per night, two-night minimum, two-adults–two-children maximum per villa, through December 19. Savings 40 percent.

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What’s Included A 60-minute aromatic body massage for two; breakfast for two; mini-bar soft drinks; free wired and Wi-Fi Internet; and access to health club facilities. Cost From RMB1,999 per night, two-person maximum, through November 30. Savings Up to 60 percent.

The PuLi Hotel & Spa, Shanghai.

F r o m t o p : c o u r t e s y o f S i x S e n s e s N i n h V a n B a y ; c o u r t e s y o f T h e PuL i H o t e l & S p a

At Six Senses Ninh Van Bay, in Nha Trang.

(Strategies) 11.10

i l l u s t r at e d by wa s i n e e c h a n ta ko r n

T+Lâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Packing Primer

Our guide to saving money, the best carry-ons, expert packing tips and more

t r a v e l a n d l e i s u r e a s i a

c o m

| november 2010

strategies | packing

Checking in on Baggage Fees How do you navigate the ever-evolving landscape of luggage surcharges? T+L finds out. By NAOMI LINDT travel, those of us in Asia have it pretty good. Of the 10 international airlines to make T+L’s World’s Best Awards 2010 (determined by readers like you), eight carriers call Asia-Pacific home. Other lists, like the World Airline Awards, came up with similar results. Our airports are equally adored, with Singapore’s Changi, Seoul’s Incheon and Hong Kong International topping the rankings year after year. Elsewhere, decreasing amenities and increasing fees, particularly on baggage, are turning air travel into a less than pleasant experience. Things are especially dismal in the U.S., where carriers reportedly earned almost US$8 billion in airline fees just last year. Passengers are hit with fuel surcharges, costly checked bag rules (expect to pay US$25 per piece or more on airlines that charge) and, in some cases, carry-on fees. And, judging by the recent behavior of JetBlue flight attendant Steven Slater—who became an Internet sensation after he berated a misbehaving passenger over the plane’s intercom, grabbed two beers then slid down the emergency chute—tensions are high both with passengers and airline staff. Even Asia has its share of baggage-related headaches, whether it’s carried on or checked. Depending on where you’re headed, it’s essential to do some research beforehand as the rules are continually changing—most airlines clearly spell out online what their limits are. For example, economy passengers on Malaysia Airlines, Cathay Pacific, Thai Airways and Singapore Airlines going anywhere but the Americas may check in up to 20 kg, while travelers to 26

North America are permitted two bags, each weighing no more than 23 kg. There’s talk of standardizing this across alliances— all the more reason to double-check your allowance before leaving home. Once you leave the full-service carrier realm, be extra careful. Regional carriers Bangkok Airways and Lao Airlines, for example, only allow 20 kg of checked baggage per person (Lao will charge US$1.74 per additional kilogram). Restrictions on low-cost carriers are even stricter: AirAsia charges range from US$7 (15 kg) to US$17 (30 kg), while 20 kg of luggage on Jetstar will set you back as much as US$40 if you haven’t pre-booked it, which saves US$20. And here, the opposite is true in the U.S., where budget carriers like JetBlue and Southwest Airlines allow one or two free checked bags, respectively. In Europe, whose budget carriers are notoriously fee-happy, EasyJet charges at least US$15 per 20-kg bag, while fees on Wizz Air, Central and Eastern Europe’s leader, range from US$20 to US$60 per bag. Ryanair, the continent’s largest low-cost airline, is reportedly considering a radical move to eliminate check-in luggage entirely, leaving carry-on baggage to be stored in the cargo hold and redistributed after landing. It’s a lot to keep track of, so it is somewhat reassuring to hear that the International Air Transport Authority (IATA), an industry authority that represents some 230 airlines, has plans to introduce a central database that would inform passengers of bag conditions and rules upon booking. In the meantime, we’re all going to keep traveling, so read on for tips and tricks to minimize your baggage woes.

nove m b e r 2 0 1 0 | t r a v e l a n d l e i s u r e a s i a . c o m

tips of the trade We asked IATA for its advice on keeping your bags out of harm’s way. • As a general rule, if you can’t lift your bag, it’s likely that airline staff won’t be able to either. (And it’s probably overweight.) • Pack your bag evenly. Dense, heavy objects can cause your bag to shift and create delays at security checks. • Always use something to identify your bag, like a colorful strap, though bear in mind that cloths tied to the handle may obscure the baggage label. • Store any detachable carrying straps in the bag itself before checking in. • Place a luggage label on one handle of your bag and another inside your bag. • If your luggage has wheels, be sure to lock them so they don’t move after check-in. • Check that your travel insurance covers the cost of replacing your bag and its contents in the event that anything happens to it. • Make a list of your bag’s contents in case you need to place an insurance claim.

i l l u s t r at e d by n i c h o l a s b l e c h m a n

hen it comes to air

strategies | packing

Well-Wheeled

Time for a luggage upgrade? We tested the latest carry-on rolling bags for durability, packability and ease of use. Below, our picks Great Value

best interior space

KITS TO GO

American Tourister ilite dlx H 21" x W 14" x D 7.5" WT 3.9 kg americantourister.com

atlantic ultra-lite H 22" x W 14" x D 9" WT 2.9 kg atlanticluggage.com

hartmann mobile traveler spinner H 20" x W 13.5" x D 8.75" WT 4.4 kg seager.com.sg

THE VERDICT

This affordable roller bag is for no-nonsense travelers. It has a durable frame and fabric, spacious interiors and unique front support that keeps the bag from toppling forward.

At under US$100, this is hands-down the best value. The heavy-duty fabric is stain-resistant, and the bag has a surprising amount of pocket storage space.

A pinstripe exterior and leather detailing add to the bag’s practical features — large interior side pockets, buckle straps to compress clothes and an extra compartment for laundry.

samsonite xspace Spinner H 21.5" x W 14.75" x D 8" WT 4.7 kg samsonite.com

Tumi super leger international carry on H 20.5" x W 15.25" x D 8" WT 2.5 kg tumi.com

victorinox Mobilizer NXT 5.0 H 20" x W 14" x D 8" WT 4.1 kg seager.com.sg

THE VERDICT

Thoughtful details define this wide-framed bag: padded handles, multiple locks, wellorganized interiors, expandable pockets and wheels that rotate a full 360 degrees.

Made out of flexible nylon, this chic, python-patterned case is both ultralight and surprisingly tough. It’s perfect for city trips, but may not suit more rugged travelers.

The Mobilizer comes in easy-to-identify red and has a ballistic nylon case, strong zippers and a lifetime warranty. Maximalists beware: interior space is limited.

easiest to maneuver

nove m b e r 2 0 1 0 | t r a v e l a n d l e i s u r e a s i a . c o m

T o p C e n t e r : D av i e s + S ta r r

Don’t worry about packing your cosmetics: the new service suitearrival. com delivers airportapproved toiletry kits directly to your hotel. Pick your products online from more than 70 brands. Just be sure to plan ahead: arrange several weeks in advance for non-U.S. destinations, and you’ll be cleared for takeoff (kits from US$15). —m i c h a e l g r o s s

strategies | packing

in the bag

T+L’s fashion director and packing guru MIMI LOMBARDO recommends nine compact items to help you save space—and stay organized—on the go 3 2 1

1 Brookstone travel iron Just over 13 centimeters long, it fits right into a corner of your suitcase. brookstone.com. 2 AQUA 0 trench These polyester jackets come in five different colors for women (and two for men) and fold into small envelopes that slide right into your laptop case. aqua0.net. 3 SHUBI SHOE BAG Protect your shoes, socks, scarves and

undergarments with this grosgrain-drawstring cotton bag. shubilove.com.

bathroom door; there’s even a removable mirror inside. eaglecreek.com.

4 Merrell guise jacket Perfect for the plane: a men's jacket that can fold into your own portable neckrest. merrell.com.

6 cocoon innovations grid-It organizer Keep your electronic chargers tidy with a clever elastic-covered board that straps everything firmly into place. cocooninnovations.com.

5 Eagle Creek Pack-It Slim Kit This three-in-one toiletry case opens into one large zipper pocket along with two mesh pouches, with a swivel hook to hang on the

nove m b e r 2 0 1 0 | t r a v e l a n d l e i s u r e a s i a . c o m

7 conair minipro ½" straightener At 15 centimeters, it’s the smallest ceramic flat iron I’ve ever

seen; there’s also a curling version. conair.com. 8 Baggu reusable bag An extra bag is a must for any trip; this nylon one holds up to 22.5 kilograms and folds into a small zipper pouch for easy storing. baggubag.com. 9 Nike free run+ Sneakers Made of lightweight materials, Nike Frees have uppers that collapse to their soles. nikerunning.com.

C l o c k w i s e f r o m B o t t o m L e f t : C o u r t e s y o f B a g g u ; D av i e s + S ta r r ( 3 ) ; C o u r t e s y o f S h u b i ; D av i e s + S ta r r ; c o u r t e s y o f t h e p l a n e t t r av e l l e r a n d s e a g e r ; c o u r t e s y o f c o c c o o n i n n o vat i o n s ; D av i e s + S ta r r

strategies | packing

pack like a pro

Susan Harmsworth

philosophy Less is more. cHECK OR CARRY ON? Unless I’m away for more than five days, I carry on. PREFERRED LUGGAGE A Mulberry semi-hard-sided suitcase. packing list Elegant basics: two pairs of trousers, one dress and one pair of shoes (the other is on my feet). technique Solid items go on the bottom. Then I layer my clothes, which I roll, using tissue paper for delicates. double duty

My Smythson travel wallet (1) also works as an evening clutch. beauty sleep To cut out the drone of the engines, I use Bose noise-canceling headphones (2). At touchdown, I use Bach Rescue Remedy drops (3) to reenergize. Jet-lag cure Upon arrival, I try to go for a swim in my Miraclesuit (4). It’s so much easier to adjust to the time change when you’re relaxed.

Founder and CEO, Espa, Spa and Skincare Brand Home base: London Annual miles on the road: 125,000

Dieter Morszeck

philosophy Comfort and efficiency are everything. CHECK OR CARRY ON? If I’m flying within Europe, I carry on. For transatlantic flights, I check. PREFERRED LUGGAGE Our own Rimowa Topas Titanium suitcase (1) with a removable Flex Divider System, which helps everything fit and eliminates shifting. packing list Two Brooks Brothers non-iron dress shirts (2) for work and

special occasions. If I have to go straight to a meeting, I wear my jacket on the plane and tuck an Hermès tie (3) into my pocket. technique I fold and stack everything neatly, and never overload. It’s horrible on the luggage itself and wrinkles your clothes. mile High I’m a pilot, so I always travel with Ray-Ban Aviator sunglasses (4) on the chance I can squeeze in a few hours flying in a new city.

President and CEO, Rimowa Home base: Cologne, Germany Annual miles on the road: 200,000

Lisa Sun

philosophy Never scrimp on style. CHECK OR CARRY ON? I never check. People call me Mary Poppins because stuff just keeps coming out of my bag! PREFERRED LUGGAGE The Louis Vuitton Damier Ebene canvas suitcase (1). JUST IN CASE I have a Goyard tote that smooshes into my luggage, so when I buy something I can still meet the two-bag carry-on rule. technique Eagle Creek folding bags

compress, but don’t wrinkle. I start with one for clothing, then layer a bag for socks and intimates, another for jewelry and toiletries, and finally shoes on top. fashion STATEMENT I’m all about bold costume jewelry, from Chanel pearls (2) to an oversize Dior cocktail ring. FEET FIRST I wear black patent Christian Louboutin pumps (3), but carry Havaiana flip-flops (4) for running through the terminal.

Associate Principal and Fashion Consultant, McKinsey & Company Home base: Washington, D.C. Annual miles on the road: 1 million

Brad Horn

philosophy Keep it light, but don’t compromise on quality. check or carry on? If I need more than one bag I’ll check, but I always carry on my necessities. LESSON LEARNED Once I didn’t carry on and the airline lost my bag. I had to walk about 80 kilometers in a pair of rudimentary boots. Low-cut trekking shoes — mine are by Merrell (1) — are essential. PREFERRED LUGGAGE North Face Base Camp duffels are durable

and can be squeezed into small aircraft cabins. packing list A jacket — Columbia’s (2) are waterproof but breathable, so you won’t overheat. And I like shirts made of wicking material. travel Tools My Swarovski 8 x 32 binoculars (3) are powerful without being bulky. And whenever I check my bags, I carry a Leatherman (4) — with a corkscrew for opening wine bottles in the bush!

Safari Specialist and Founder, Epic Private Journeys Home base: Toowang, Australia Annual miles on the road: 80,150

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F r o m T o p, L e f t t o r i g h t : C o u r t e s y o f S u s a n H a r m s w o r t h ; c o u r t e s y o f s m y t h s o n ; c o u r t e s y o f B o s e ; C o u r t e s y o f w w w . b a c h f l o w e r . c o m ; c o u r t e s y o f m i r a c l e s u i t ; C o u r t e s y o f RIMOWA ( 2 ) ; C o u r t e s y o f B r o o k s B r o t h e r s ; C o u r t e s y o f H e r m è s ; C o u r t e s y o f R a y - BAN ; D o u g l a s S o n d e r s ; C o u r t e s y o f L o u i s V u i t t o n ; C o u r t e s y o f C h a n e l ; C o u r t e s y o f C h r i s t i a n L o u b o u t i n ; C o u r t e s y o f H ava i a n a s ; C o u r t e s y o f B r a d H o r n ; C o u r t e s y o f M e r r e l l ; C o u r t e s y o f w w w. C o l u m b i a . c o m ; C o u r t e s y o f S w a r o v s k i O p t i k ; C o u r t e s y o f L e at h e r m a n

How do some of the world’s most experienced travelers arrange their suitcases? T+L takes a peek inside for some helpful suggestions

How to Avoid Fees. Baggage charges

may seem to be the new reality, both in Asia and beyond, but there are still a few ways to give them the slip

Maximize your miles. Achieving elite status on one airline helps you avoid fees on that carrier and increase your baggage allowance, but also gives you privileges with other alliance members. Think ahead. You’ll save if you prepay for a checked bag while booking with airlines like AirAsia and Jetstar. Know your friends. If you’re traveling in Asia, you’ll get ample allowance from major carriers but pay up for low-cost carriers; in the U.S, the opposite applies. A JetBlue ticket includes one free checked bag; Southwest Airlines passengers can check two bags free. Team up. If you’re traveling with someone, pack in tandem so that one person carries on and the other checks. Fill the checked

bag with toiletries, shoes, bulkier items or anything that won’t make it through a security checkpoint. Shop till you drop. Hitting Orchard Road or Sukhumvit to refresh your wardrobe? Minimize what you bring (you’ll want to wear your new clothes, anyway) and pack a foldable bag into a carry-on suitcase. Pay to check it on the return leg only. Not all bags are created equal. Carry-on bags that meet dimension requirements on certain flights won’t always fly with others; if you haven’t used the bag with a certain carrier before, call ahead to ensure it’ll fit. Do your duty, free. Bags packed to the limit but no gift for the in-laws? Buy duty-free, which won’t go against your weight limit. —andrea bennett and naomi lindt

Lost Luggage. It happens to

the best of us: you arrive in Bangkok, but your bags land in Bahrain. Here, our tips on how to prepare for the eventuality—and avoid losing your luggage in the first place

in safer hands

According to figures provided by the air transport industry, only 25 million bags around the world were mishandled in 2009 — or roughly 11 bags for every 1,000 passengers. That’s a resounding 23.8 percent decrease (or 7.8 million bags) from 2008 and more than 40 percent from 2007.

Before You Leave • Book a direct or nonstop flight, which will minimize the chance of losing a bag. • Choose an airline that has a good baggage record. Compare online at airconsumer.dot.gov. • Pack your carry-on wisely so that you can live out of it for a few days—toiletries, medications, a change of clothes—in the event that you have to. • Remove old luggage tags to avoid confusion.

i l l u s t r at e d by wa s i n e e c h a n ta ko r n

At the Airport • Don’t check in late, or your bags might not make it onto the plane in time for takeoff. • Make sure the desk agent places a destination tag on your suitcase. • Hold on to your baggage-claim ticket. It’s often attached to your boarding pass and easy to forget on the plane. After Landing • Be at the carousel when bags are off-loaded. • If your bag is lost or delayed, file a report immediately at the airport and get a copy. • Ask at the lost-luggage counter for the airline’s contract of carriage, which spells out your rights. • Consider following up with a certified letter to the airline’s customer service department restating the details of the incident.—mark orwoll t r a v e l a n d l e i s u r e a s i a

c o m

| november 2010

strategies | smart

traveler

e’ve all been there before: the economy long-haul flight from hell. It’s packed to the gills and you’re stuck in the middle of a row with what feels like just a few inches of legroom. Your neighbors have far too much carry-on and they’ve stuffed laptops/shopping bags/home appliances under the seats. The in-flight meal of murky curry, dubious tuna salad and brick-like coconut flan is giving you indigestion. To top it all off, a baby is crying inconsolably just one row ahead of you. There’s a good reason why it’s called cattle class. With just a bit of planning, though, you can make your experience in coach more comfortable. Here are some tips on how to deal with everything from bad seats to unappetizing meals.

Choose your seats or check in early Exit-row and bulkhead seats are the most prized, but many airlines won’t let you book them until the day of the flight. To snag these seats, check in online on the day you’re traveling or show up early at the counter. Cathay Pacific and Singapore Airlines let you reserve extra-legroom seats for a fee: on Cathay, it’s US$100 for long-haul flights or 20,000 miles and US$25 or 5,000 miles for regional ones, while Singapore charges US$50 for all flights except those in Southeast Asia. If you can’t get one of these, book your seats ahead of the flight either through your travel agent or the airline. Log onto seatguru.com or seatexpert.com for a better idea of choice seats, and make sure to avoid the seats with their backs against the lavatories and in the far back because they don’t recline fully.

2 How to Make Coach Feel Classy 3

Don’t travel during peak times If you’re flexible about time, choose flights in the middle of the week and during mid-day when planes are likely to be less full. Times to avoid: Thursday afternoon and evening, all day Friday and Monday morning.

Facing a 12-hour flight in economy class? Don’t fret—these simple steps can make your journey more endurable. By JENNIFER CHEN Illustrated by Wasinee chantakorn

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Carry on as little as possible Traveling light has a couple of advantages. First, you can save yourself precious legroom by keeping the space in front of you free. And second, you can take your time boarding—others can fight for space in the overhead bins. Trust me, you can still cram a small backpack or tote into a packed bin.

But bring the comfort essentials A horseshoe-shaped pillow and eye-mask can make all the difference when it comes to sleeping on board. An extra pair of socks lets you kick off your shoes and a lightweight jumper or shawl will keep you

toasty. (Blankets are too bulky.) Before you leave, don’t forget to update your iPod, which will save you from the in-flight entertainment system.

5 6

Dress APPROPRIATELY This might seem like a no-brainer, but I’ve seen women board planes in mini-dresses and six-inch heels—wardrobe choices they probably regretted three hours into the flight. Stretchy and breathable are the way to go. Pack your own meals Let’s face it: a homemade sandwich beats an in-flight meal any day. If you don’t have time at home, grab something from a café before you board. Bring a granola bar or apple for snacking—just make sure to eat what you bring—especially fruit—before you land, lest you get nabbed at customs.

Invest in noise-cancelation headphones Three hundred and fifty U.S. dollars might seem like a lot to pay for Bose Quiet Comfort noise-canceling headphones. But if you’re a frequent flier, it’s an investment you won’t regret. Goodbye roaring engines, across-the-aisle conversations, and yes, even that screaming baby.

Mind your manners Being polite to flight attendants usually means better service, especially in Asia (with the glaring exception of mainland Chinese carriers). That beleaguered flight attendant won’t forget your attitude when you make a special request like having your seat changed. ✚

Special Promotion Platter of shellfish, with Loch Fyne in the background

Hand-dived scallops from Orkney

Celebrating Scotland’s Glorious Food

Chef from top: Michelin-starred chefs Marcello Tully and Martin Wishart

cotland’s bountiful nature rewards this beautiful nation not only with stunning landscapes, but also fresh produce throughout the year. It’s no wonder that Scotland’s chefs have completely embraced local and organic produce as the cornerstone of their gourmet scene. Marcello Tully, head chef at Michelin-starred Kinloch Lodge in the Isle of Skye, certainly appreciates this unique splendour of Scotland. “It is amazing how much Scottish produce replicates the land, air and sea around us – whether it be the lamb, venison or game, or the freshest seafood from our crystal clear waters. We have a huge amount to offer in terms of the produce we have available and I just enjoy the privilege of being the messenger and have the honour of taking it from the producer, grower, farmer to the consumer.” The International Culinary Tourism Association, in its first ever worldwide study, declared Scotland as one of the most “unique, memorable and interesting” places for food and drink on the planet. The ICTA report praised Scotland’s range of highquality agricultural and seafood produce, as well as whiskies, soups, jams and cheeses. Scotland was also rated highly for the number

of initiatives promoting high quality food industry, training programmes, food and drink events, gourmet attractions and food and drink trails. One of the chefs driving this movement is Michelin-starred chef Martin Wishart. Martin, through his Cook School, has extended his influence beyond his mouth-watering menus, training Scotland’s next generation of chefs the discipline and responsibility of harnessing local produce. “We started the Scottish Food Scholarship programme 5 years ago, to mentor promising young emerging talent to develop their passion for food and continue to pursue the trade.” So what are the “must-not-miss” food recommendations for your Scottish feast? “Cheese!” proclaims Marcello, a self-confessed lover, “And of course, fresh seafood from the Isle of Skye- simple yet so delicious and inspiring.” Martin also recommends simple, glorious food “Definitely oysters, I really don’t think chefs can do anything further to it to make it better.” He also recommends trying hand-dived scallops from Orkney, as well as Scotland’s seasonal game birds which are only available during autumn.

www.visitbritain.com

Cool Rooms. A new hotel pushes design frontiers in Singapore <(page 46)

Vietnam Chic. The lowdown on Saigon’s shopping scene <(page 49)

La Dolce Vita. Navigating Italy’s most authentic stays <(page 54)

• Hong Kong design hotels • Local tips on global vintages • Our guide to gorgeous Ghent

(Insider) Photo credit by tktktk

C l o c k w i s e f r o m t o p L e f t : c o u r t e s y o f w a n d e r l u s t ; b r o w n w . c a n n o n III ; o b e r t o g i l i ; s e a n r o c h a ; j a s p e r j a m e s

Bottoms Up. Top spots in Beijing for the perfect night out (page 65)>

Where to goWhat to eatWhere to StayWhat to buy

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| newsflash

MISSION DISTRICT, SAN FRANCISCO Known for its vibrant Latino culture, colorful murals and hip, artistic spirit, the Mission is now experiencing a second coming with a new crop of restaurants, boutiques and more.—JA I ME G RO S S SHOP 1. Siblings Danielle and Luke Teller helm the well-edited Afterlife Boutique (988 Valencia St.; 1-415/796-2398; afterlifeboutique. com), which carries reconstructed antique jewelry by the shop’s Adoura Demode line and collectible rock-concert T-shirts priced from US$45 to US$1,000. 2. The light-filled Gravel & Gold (3266 21st St.; 1-415/ 552-0112; gravelandgold.com) is a treasure hunter’s dream, filled with everything from Japanese paper goods to wool blankets made on Prince Edward Island.

6 Lexington St.

5 14 2

6 6 20th St.

51 3 2

Alabama St.

Florida St.

Folsom St.

e. S. Van Ness Av

Mission St.

Valencia St.

21st St.

3 4

DO 6. A showcase for local, cutting-edge artists, Southern Exposure (3030 20th St.; 1-415/863-2141; soex. org) relocated to a soaring 372-square-meter gallery.

24th St.

on the map

4 EAT 3. The izakaya Nombe (2491 Mission St.; 1-415/681-7150; dinner for two US$50) — its name translates, roughly, to “drunkard” — serves haute Japanese pub food (grilled shishito peppers with bottarga; grilled skewers of chicken thigh with ume and shiso) accompanied by a great sake list. Added bonus: the kitchen is open until 2 a.m. on Fridays and Saturdays. 4. Chef-owner Matt Straus turns out simple, delicious, seasonal dishes at the intimate Heirloom Café (2500 Folsom St.; 1-415/821-2500; dinner for two US$80). But for a real treat, ask for the off-menu burger with Époisses cheese.

Bring Your Own Bottle You’ll never go thirsty again with 321 Water (321-water. com; A$32.10 in Australia and A$44.60 internationally), an ingenious, eco-friendly bottle that makes any tap water drinkable. The brainchild of Greta Oost, founder of Melbourne sustainable-design firm Half A Teaspoon, the 50-centimeter Bisphenol A–free container works like a French press, but with a carbon-block filter: just push down the tree-shaped plunger to remove contaminants and unpleasant tastes. What’s more, it means no more wasteful plastic bottles. We’ll drink to that.—L I A N G X I N Y I 40

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STAY 5. Set in an 1872 mansion, the 21-room Inn San Francisco (943 S. Van Ness Ave.; 1-415/641-0188; innsf.com; doubles from US$175) brims with authentic Victorian details — ornate woodwork; marble fireplaces; featherbeds — minus the chintz (not a doily in sight). Don’t miss the rooftop deck with 360-degree views of the city.

design

321 Water bottles are easy on the eye and the planet.

top: steve kepple (6) bot to m : co u rt esy o f h a l f a t e as p o o n ( 2 )

| newsflash

Natural Highs book

shop

Hermès Shanghai Style What do you get when Hermès goes to Shanghai? Shang Xia (283 Huai Hai Middle Rd., 1F, Hong Kong Plaza; 86-21/6390-8899; shang-xia.com)—Mandarin for “up and down.” The sleek 125-square-meter store, with its white oak floors and cloud-like molded walls, was developed by Japanese architect Kengo Kuma under the direction of designer Jiang Qiong Er. Inside you’ll find a collection made using indigenous Chinese materials: think handwoven Mongolian cashmere and felt coats inspired by the Han dynasty, and silk-blend kimono-style dresses. It’s a nod to the country’s past, present and future.—J I M S H I 42

As travelers, we’ve all had heightened moments of perception when we seem to view the world with a fresh set of eyes. In his latest book, In Motion: The Experience of Travel (Knopf; US$27.95), former New Yorker staffer Tony Hiss explores this lucid state, which he calls “deep travel,” explaining that it can occur whenever we visit a new place. “It’s a kind of wide-angle, wide-awake awareness that’s exhilarating,”Hiss says. The author has experienced this all over the world, from the western reaches of China’s Great Wall, where you can leave the 8,000-kilometer-long barrier and stand in unobstructed freedom, to Supai, Arizona, an isolated Native American village below the Grand Canyon’s rim that feels like a trip back in time.—ja m e s j. j u n g s

Sirenia song Dugongs—herbivorous marine mammals belonging to the scientific order Sirenia—are the underwater stars of Trang, a province that hugs the Andaman Sea on Thailand’s peninsular south. Now, travelers can get up-close and personal with these endangered giants on an Eco Wild Life Trail tour run by the Anantara Si Kao Resort & Spa (sikao.anantara. com; 66-75/205-888; tours from Bt1,500 per person, including lunch). The full-day tour explores the seagrass-fringed shores of Trang’s Libong Island, where dugongs are known to graze: you can kayak in the shallow waters or snorkel among reef fish while waiting for the creatures to surface for air, then take a nature hike after lunch. While sightings aren’t guaranteed—dugongs are notoriously shy—you’ll still take in views of stunning limestone karsts and creatures like yellow-headed terrapins and black-necked storks.—l . x .

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tour

The shores of Libong Island. Right: Dugongs are a rare, rewarding sight.

c l o c k w i s e f r o m t o p : C o u r t e s y o f SHANG X IA ; d a v i e s + s t a r r ; c o u r t e sy o f a n a n ta r a ( 2 )

insider

FROM HANOI TO AMSTERDAM AND ASWAN, LIVE THE LEGEND OF THE UNIQUE SOFITEL HISTORICAL HOTELS COLLECTION. A FABULOUS BLEND OF CLASSIC REFINEMENT AND FRENCH “ART DE RECEVOIR”.

WWW. SOFITEL-LEGEND.COM

| newsflash fa s h i o n

Thailand’s Stylish New Retreat Looking for Thai-inspired serenity with an urban twist? Head to the newly opened W Retreat Koh Samui, just an hour’s flight south of Bangkok. This Starwood brand’s Southeast Asian debut is a sexy addition to the isle’s secluded northern shore, with its striking open-air lobby, where circular, lime-colored ottomans float in a man-made pond. Scattered along a golden-sand peninsula, the 75 glass-walled villas have private pools and bedrooms with views of the azure Gulf of Thailand. True to

W’s street-smart ethos, the resort offers plenty of distractions (DJ lessons, anyone?), but for a real adventure, ask your concierge to arrange a midnight squid-fishing trip, then have your catch cooked up at the Japanese Namu restaurant. It’s a tantalizing formula that’s sure to work as well at the hotly anticipated W Retreat & Spa Bali-Seminyak, slated to open next month. 4/1 Moo 1 Tambol Maenam; 66-77/915-999; starwoodhotels. com; doubles from Bt16,000. —J ENNI F ER CHEN

re sort

The Tropical Oasis Villa at the W Retreat Koh Samui, in Thailand.

music

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Grain-leather Tiffany East Side Totes.

Timeless Totes Tiffany & Co. (tiffany.com) has teamed up with handbag designers Richard Lambertson and John Truex to present a line of travel-friendly accessories for fall. The result? Suede and metallic reversible totes, quilted lambskin clutches, and nylon-andleather duffels—imbued with the brand’s timeless style (and, naturally, Tiffany-blue interiors). —ch r isti n e ajudua

Sister Act

What’s black and white and soon to be heard all over? The Nuns of the Abbaye de Notre-Dame de L’Annonciation, whose sound is set to grace spas and coffeehouses across the land when their debut album is released this month on Decca Records. Unlike fellow Universal Music Group artists Lady Gaga and Amy Winehouse, the sisters of this French Benedictine abbey near Avignon, France, have shunned the material world for a life of quiet seclusion, and hone their craft by singing eight times a day. Their haunting Gregorian chants—rarely heard by outsiders—are as mellifluous as a Provençal morning, conjuring up sun-dappled cloisters and cypress-lined allées and reminding us of the transportive power of the human voice. chantfromavignon.com.—p e t e r j o n li n d b e rg

f r o m t o p l e f t : c o u r t e s y o f w h o t e l s ; s t e p h e n l e w i s / c o u r t e s y o f t i ff a n y & c o ; i l l u s t r at e d by e d w i n f o t h e r i n g h a m

insider

f r o m l e f t : c o u r t e s y o f m s m lt d . ; M a r t i n e B e r e n d s e n ; z o u k o u t ; c o u r t e s y o f w i l l r a m s ay

on the radar

Singapore Sizzle

Three don’t-miss events are set to see the Lion City through to the year’s end. Catch the reliably glamorous Singapore Sun Festival (through Nov. 7; singaporesunfestival.com): highlights include a concert with José Carreras (Nov. 2) and an audience with Sharon Stone (Nov. 6). Launching this month is the first ever Affordable Art Fair (Nov. 19—21; affordableartfair.sg), a three-day buying extravaganza that offers art lovers a chance to collect contemporary pieces for under S$10,000. Next month marks the 10th anniversary of legendary dance-music festival ZoukOut (Dec. 11; zoukout.com) on Sentosa’s Siloso Beach; expect dusk-till-dawn partying with acts like DJ Tiësto and Midnight Juggernauts.

q& a

Will Ramsay The Affordable Art Fair’s founder gives T+L three tips for first-time art buyers

• Buy what you like, not what you think you should be buying. Don’t be afraid to ask questions •

to the gallery owners: the more you understand about the artwork, the more you’ll be able to enjoy it. Create a short list before making a final choice; ask if the gallery will keep a piece on hold for an hour while you browse. For more tips and the full interview,see TravelandLeisureAsia.com

•

josé carreras

Affordable Art Fair

ZoukOut

con: For more tips and the full interview, see TravelandLeisureAsia.com

Fusion Maia Da Nang is a new, unique and exciting fusion of 5 star international resort and all-inclusive spa; where spa treatments in the largest spa in Central Vietnam are included in the room rate and a part of daily living in this beach resort. Fusion Maia Da Nang is the first all pool villa style resort in the destination and offers 87 villas and suites with private swimming pool.

F E E L T HE DIF F E R E NC E TEL. +84(0)511 3967999 WWW.FUSION-RESORTS.COM RESERVATION-DN@FUSIONS-RESORTS.COM

insider

| room report

Singapore Glam. T+L visits the newly

opened Wanderlust and finds a design-savvy boutique with an edge. By NAOMI LINDT

■ The Overview Given the success of his retro-chic New Majestic Hotel and Hotel 1929, it’s no surprise that Singaporean Loh Lik Peng’s latest creation, Wanderlust, is generating plenty of buzz just three months after opening this summer. The chic yet casual boutique stay, housed in a renovated schoolhouse built in the 1920’s, has fast become a favorite for fashion shoots thanks to its playful, riotously inventive aesthetic: think eye-popping details both old and new, from the façade’s original Art Nouveau–inspired tiles to the lobby’s spherical Tom Dixon plastic-andchrome lamps and angular gray molded-polymer Heller sofa by Frank Gehry. 2 Dickson Rd.; 65/6396-3322; wanderlusthotel.com; doubles from S$180.

Radical Rooms Clockwise from top: A typewriter sofa at Wanderlust; a Mono room designed by DP Architects, the team behind the Esplanade and the Singapore Flyer; a Whimsical Tree loft; a spaceship-themed suite; the hotel’s Pantone rooms are compact but stylish.

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■ The Design The hotel’s show-stopping design flourishes come courtesy of four leading local creative agencies, each tasked one of four floors. Asylum’s street-level restaurant– lounge, Cocotte, has white-washed wooden tables, raw oxidized-steel counters, pendant lamps fashioned from Campari soda bottles and vintage barber chairs hand-picked from Loh’s

co u rt esy o f wa n d e r lu st ( 8 )

singapore

■ The Area On the fringe of Little India and a 10-minute walk to Kampong Glam’s hookah bars and Malay eateries, the hotel offers easy access to two of Singapore’s most vibrant neighborhoods. Guests receive complimentary passport-size guides to the area upon arrival, which include shopping, sightseeing and, of course, eating tips—be sure to get your hands dirty with some of the excellent South Indian cuisine nearby. The Little India and Bugis MRT stops are both within walking distance.

personal collection. Accommodation runs the gamut from Phunk Studio’s second-floor Pantone units to DP Architects’ third-floor monochrome rooms and fFurious’s wildly inventive fourth-floor lofts, which might include a typewriter-styled sofa, a tree swaying with felt leaves or a star-spangled ceiling. Even the outdoor elevator shaft is hung with outsize metal flowers. ■ The Service Don’t be fooled by the front-desk staff ’s youthful looks: they’re professionals in every way. Taxis were ordered promptly, a noise complaint in one of the elevator-facing rooms resulted in an immediate switch, and guests were greeted by name. Breakfast—comprised of eggs, bacon, sausages, rolls and muffins—could do with more variety, particularly if you’re staying for more than a few nights. ■ The Rooms The most economical of the 29 rooms are the Pantone series: 10 compact capsules outfitted in shades like yellow, purple or red, with queen-size beds sunken into a tiled platform. Hue-appropriate song

titles—“Purple Haze,” “Yellow Submarine”—emblazon the walls in neon. Eight black-and-white Mono rooms take their cues from origami and pop-up books, with structural folds in the ceilings and illuminated wall cutouts—lamps, flowers—reminiscent of pen-and-ink illustrations. The extra space—larger beds, closets and desk areas—make them ideal for couples. The most spacious and luxurious rooms are saved for the top floor: with themes like spaceships and friendly monsters, these nine fantastical, lofted Whimsical suites are enough to transport you to another world.

■ The Amenities Complimentary daily newspapers, water and soda are available in every room, along with free Wi-Fi, flat-screen TV’s, iPod-friendly alarm clocks and espresso makers. The restaurant Cocotte, already a hit with locals, serves up rustic French dishes like steamed mussels and roast pork in Dijon mustard, while its loungey bar area is a comfortable spot to sip an espresso or glass of wine, or even play a game of foosball. Just upstairs is an outdoor patio and rainbow-tiled Jacuzzi for guests. ✚

■ The Bathroom In most rooms, the toilet and rainfall shower are enclosed in partially frosted glass stalls lined with tiny tiles to match the room’s color theme; a compact sink–vanity area sits in between. (These facilities are not for the shy.) Deluxe and Whimsical rooms offer funky bathtubs, whether made of vintage cast iron or encased in transparent glass. The Kiehl’s products in every room are a lovely touch.

Back to the Future Clockwise from above: Wanderlust’s lobby blends old and new; the hotel is converted from a 1920’s schoolhouse; a tech-inspired Whimsical Ascii suite.

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shopping | insider Style Central Clockwise from left: L’Usine’s selection of vintage bicycles; a Ramyda Keth dress from Gaya; pausing for coffee at the concept store L’Usine; a beachy silk top with beaded embellishments from Villa Anupa.

vietnam

Saigon’s Best Boutiques. Vietnam’s most

frenetic city is a trove of stunning, stylish finds. Niloufar Motamed opens her little black book

s i l k t o p : d av i e s + s ta r r

lanning a trip to Vietnam

invariably summons visions of the purchases that await: flawless custom clothing, one-of-a-kind colonial curios, high-gloss lacquerware. But high expectations often fizzle upon arrival in Ho Chi Minh City (Saigon, to almost everyone). On the well-trammeled corridor of Dong Khoi Street, in the shadow of Louis Vuitton and Yves Saint Laurent, desultory shops crammed with tchotchkes fail to impress even the most enthusiastic shopper. But singular, affordable discoveries await at lesser-known addresses. Here, 12 of the city’s top shops. Added bonus: all but one are within walking distance of one another.

Photographed by Brown W Cannon III

■ Bespoke Saigon’s streets are lined with 24-hour tailors hawking cheap silk ao dai tunics and promising to copy your Margiela trousers and Prada sheaths overnight. Instead, follow the lead of in-the-know expats to Kin Boutique, on Le Thanh Ton Street, where couturier Nguyen Cong Tri fashions runway-worthy satin and silk frocks at ready-to-wear prices (a floaty, turquoise chiffon dress for under US$300). But don’t expect a quick turnaround: it will take up to 10 days and a couple of fittings (shipping is available). For dapper menswear—think Seize Sur Vingt—look for the unfortunately named Massimo Ferrari, a narrow boutique in treelined District 3. Custom-made »

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| shopping Viet Chic Clockwise from left: A Vivek light fixture at Saigon’s Gaya; a 19thcentury Chinese glass painting at Verlim Interiors; embroidered cotton children’s pajamas from Than Thuy; a range of rainbowhued lacquerware at Gaya.

■ Clothing For more immediate sartorial gratification, Valenciani is the Saigon fashion set’s destination of choice. Racks of candycolored Indo-chic dresses (from US$120) fill the sleek pink-and-black space. Traditional Asian silhouettes are modernized and delivered in unusual fabrics such as houndstooth or nubby wool. Westerners take note: clothes in Vietnam are often displayed only in small sizes, but can be made to your specifications in just a few days. The same holds true at Thuy Nga Design, a minimalist shop tucked under the Beaux-Arts Municipal Theater. Graphic primary-color classics are reminiscent of Michael Kors; a crimson satin party dress with an exposed zipper is a steal for less than US$100. If your taste sways more toward breezy linens and silks, head to Sông. Paris-born designer 50

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Valerie McKenzie’s eminently packable clothes in saturated hues are a cross between Donna Karan and Calypso. ■ Leather Goods Locating Villa Anupa, hidden down a slender lane off Le Thanh Ton Street, is a challenge; even harder is deciding which of Anupa Horvil’s butter-soft leather bags should come home with you. Will it be the white hobo with tourmaline beading (US$250)? Or the metallic-gray clutch (US$160)? Resort caftans in saturated orange, sapphire and ikat patterns are ideal for the beach-bound. ■ Lifestyle Stores The white-onwhite Modernist building that houses Gaya makes a dramatic first impression (yes, those are giant fountain-pen nibs on the façade). Inside, you’ll find the best haute souvenirs in all of Saigon. Highlights include Michele de Albert’s lacquer bowls (from US$18) and trays (from US$36) in psychedelic colors; with 12 coats of varnish, they practically glow from within. Stepping into L’Usine is a

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cotton shirts with a dozen collar options start at US$110; chic patchwork pants (US$165), deconstructed seersucker jackets (US$400) and Hermès-style suede loafers (US$145) offer the urban dandy plenty of choice.

whole other sensory experience: the lightfilled industrial space (polished concrete floors; exposed beams) holds a café, a gallery and a bevy of casual-cool clothing labels—even a selection of vintage bikes. ■ Linens Saigon is a bastion of reinvention, and Catherine Denoual, a former Parisian fashion editor, has found her second calling as the doyenne of the perfectly kitted boudoir. Her latest boutique, Catherine Denoual Maison, in the towering Saigon Centre mall, features delicately embroidered sateen bed linens in rich chocolates, golds and caramels, as well as perhaps the world’s most decadent silk charmeuse robe (US$185), for your inner Marlene Dietrich. For more-affordable table linens, head to tiny MG Decoration, on Le Thanh Ton Street, where the selection includes hemstitched cotton and linen pillow covers, table runners and napkins (from US$3), as well as painstakingly crafted needlepoint and cutwork linen place mats.

SAIGON address book Catherine Denoual Maison Saigon Centre, 65 Le Loi Blvd., District 1; 84-8/3914-0269. Gaya 1 Nguyen Van Trang St., District 1; 84-8/3925-1495. Kin Boutique 198 Le Thanh Ton St., District 1; 84-8/3502-3090. L’Usine 151/1 Dong Khoi St., first fl., District 1; 84-8/6674-3565. Massimo Ferrari 42A-1 Tran Quoc St., District 3; 84-8/3930-6213. MG Decoration 92C5 Le Thanh Ton St., District 1; 84-8/3822-6003. Sông 76D Le Thanh Ton St., District 1; 84-8/3824-6986.

Bespoke dresses at Kin Boutique, on Le Thanh Ton Street, above. Below: L’Usine’s industrial-chic shop, on Dong Khoi Street.

Than Thuy 93 Le Thanh Ton St., District 1; 84-8/3822-4893. Thuy Nga Design 7 Lam Son Square, District 1; 84-8/3823-3478.

■ children’s clothes Parents of little girls thank heaven for Than Thuy, a shop packed to the rafters with adorable gingham dresses with Peter Pan collars, plaid jumpers and eyelet nightgowns—all meticulously embroidered, stitched and smocked by hand. An ideal gift for any new baby: crisp white Mao collared cotton pj’s with frog closures (US$9).

Valenciani Saigon Centre, 65 Le Loi Blvd., District 1; 84-8/3821-2788. Verlim Interiors 41 Ho Tung Mau St., District 1; 84-8/3821-1655. Villa Anupa 17/27 Le Thanh Ton St., District 1; 84-8/3825-7307.

■ Interiors and Furnishings Around the corner from Nhu Lan Bakery, one of Saigon’s best banh mi joints, you’ll find Verlim Interiors, whose two rooms abound with perfectly curated antiques and Art Deco reproductions such as a sexy, low-slung mahogany club chair for just US$400. If you fall for a tasteful settee or an oversize glazed-ceramic lamp, the shop arranges shipping. That striking 19th-century Chinese glass painting in the front room? US$2,300. For a more accessible (and luggage-friendly) alternative, Verlim’s lacquer tea caddies come in oxblood or robin’s-egg blue (from US$35).✚

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benefits that are guaranteed to whet your appetite for exotic Bali. These include upgrade to a superior room as available upon check-in, daily breakfast for two, a 4pm late check-out and an additional privilege unique to each property—giving you access to more than US$550 in top-drawer benefits* for a twonight stay.

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Our Fine Hotels & Resorts Programme continues to offer you myriad memorable experiences and a full suite of exclusive

*Based on double occupancy. Actual value varies by property, room category, length and date of stay. Other terms and conditions apply. In order to receive Fine Hotels & Resorts programme amenities and rates, reservations must be made through The Platinum Card® Service and payment must be made using the American Express® Card in the Platinum Cardmember’s name. Room upgrade at check-in is based on availability. One special programme amenity per room, per stay. Not combinable with corporate or group contracted rates. Participating partners and programme benefits are subject to change without notice. Programme valid for travel until December 31, 2010. Information is correct at the time of publishing.

For details & reservations, please call The Platinum CARD Service AT Singapore: +(65) 6392 1177 (option 1) HONG KONG: +(852) 2277 2233 Thailand: +(66) 2273 5599

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| wine

How to Drink Like a Local.

Below, our tips for globe-trotting oenophiles, from Salta to Sonoma County. By Bruce Schoenfeld Throughout the wine-producing world, delicious everyday bottles are made for nearby consumption, which means you’ll find them on menus, but they don’t show up in guidebooks or get rhapsodized about online. You just have to know about them. Want in? Here, T+L’s guide to ordering the best regional wines.

■ Australia/New Zealand Marlborough’s Pinot Noirs and Sauvignon Blancs are New Zealand’s export standards, but the wines of Martinborough are often more nuanced. Producers such as Palliser and Te Kairanga make expressive reds and whites, some served for around US$25 a bottle at restaurants. And while Australia’s Barossa Valley Shiraz is known worldwide, those from the McLaren Vale region are often more balanced, more aromatic and just as sturdy. Two names to know: Coriole for feminine, dressed-up wines and Two Hands for pure power. ■ Germany This country is known for its dessert wines: Auslese, Beerenauslese and Trockenbeerenauslese that go for hundreds of dollars. But you’ll find the younger generation of Germans drinking more of the sharp, dry (trocken) Rieslings of the Rheingau and Rheinhessen from top-quality producers such as Schloss Johannisberg and Gunderloch. They’re affordable; have low alcohol content, so you can have a glass at lunch; and will complement anything you’re likely to be eating, even the experimental food of Berlin’s creative restaurant scene. ■ France The funky, earthy, Grenache-based wines from the village appellations of the southern Rhône have always been appealing. Increased attention to vineyard practices and new wine-making techniques have raised the quality a notch higher, but prices remain low. Tardieu-Laurent is a

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négociant (meaning it buys grapes from many sources) that makes wines from throughout the Rhône Valley. Try the fruity red Côtes-du-Rhône Villages Les Becs Fins or the slightly pricier old-vine St.-Péray, Vacqueyras and Gigondas from the eponymous villages. Look for the 2007 vintage, one of the best in years. ■ South America Torrontés grapes grow as high as 2,300 meters in the Argentine Andes, and the chilly nights make for a white wine that’s fresh and tangy. The Colomé, from Salta, is one of the most fascinatingly complex US$15 options in the world, but the ubiquitous Alamos, from Mendoza, may be even more versatile. Chilean winemakers discovered Syrah a decade ago, and lately that country’s wine drinkers have fallen head over heels. The Matetic, from coastal San Antonio, tastes like earth and smoke; two years in the bottle will bring out the subtleties. ■ Spain If you don’t consider Spain when thinking about white wines, you’re stuck in 1990. While the familiar Albariño can be an expensive proposition, Spaniards gravitate toward the light-bodied Verdejos from the northern appellation of Rueda, which are priced for daily consumption. They’re also— increasingly—terrific, especially when sourced from gnarled old vines. Try Angel Rodríguez’s Martínsancho, a versatile thirstquencher that can be found at restaurants in Madrid and Barcelona for about US$20. Illustrated by freshdracula

■ italy Tourists shop for Brunellos and Super-Tuscans, but locals order Morellino di Scansano. Made from a type of Sangiovese grown only on the last ridge of hills before the sea, it usually sells on Italian wine lists for less than US$20. The maritime breezes keep it fresh, and the hot summer sun gets it ripe, typically with black cherry and blueberry flavors and enough tannin to stand up to robust food. This isn’t a wine for long aging, so choose a recent vintage—2007, even 2008—from a producer such as Fattoria Le Pupille.

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■ united states California Restaurants from Mendocino to Mission Beach will sell you cult Cabernets, renowned Bordeaux and Burgundies, and famous names from everywhere else. But the best choices come from just up the road—those venerable California producers that turn out drinkable wines one vintage after the next. Try Chateau St. Jean, a Sonoma County property with impressive continuity (only four winemakers in its 37-year history, two of whom are husband and wife) and a reliable stable, from easy-drinking Pinot Blanc to muscular Malbec.

Washington If Merlot strikes you as underwhelming (and overpriced), you haven’t tried one from Washington. The state’s eastern half may be the only area in North America where the varietal truly thrives. Boutique producers such as Hightower, Barrage and Beresan typically make a few hundred cases of bright, fruity Merlot that never travel farther than Seattle or Portland. Or look for Januik’s raspberry-red Columbia Valley Merlot, which is often the best value in the house. ✚

Drink Up From left: A muscular Malbec from Chateau St. Jean; Palliser, in Martinborough, makes nuanced reds and whites; Januik’s Columbia Valley Merlot is excellent value.

T+L’s Vintage Cheat Sheet When you’re juggling varietals, regions and producers, vintages may be one variable too many. The good news: better wine-making techniques have made bad years almost extinct. Follow these tips and order like a pro. l Years to Know In Bordeaux, 2000, 2003 and 2005 got the headlines, but seeking out 2001, 2002 and (especially) 2004 from top châteaux will get you a great bottle that’s ready to drink at sometimes half the price. l When Age Doesn’t Matter For all but the most age-worthy white wines and pretty much all rosés, the rule is that the best vintage is the newest one. l Sweet Finish With dessert wines, it’s the opposite direction. Anything with a little age will have its edges rounded,

its angles softened and a mellow sweetness. l Finding Value In Italy’s Piedmont and Spain’s Rioja regions, difficult years like 2002 mean that there aren’t always enough superior grapes to make reserve and single-vineyard bottlings, so many wineries include their superior grapes in basic releases, making them even better. l lesser knowns If you’re in doubt, sommeliers are often eager to recommend wines from years that didn’t get the hype. (They’re known as restaurant vintages, after all.)

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| high and low

Hong Kong. T+L puts two design hotels head-to-head china

and shows a stylish urban stay can be had on any budget— it just depends on what you’re looking for. By LARA DAY HK$1,600 per night

HK$3,000

The Upper House • Location A 117-room hotel overlooking mountains and harbor, hidden atop the JW Marriott. • First Impressions The arrival, like the property, is understated yet stunning, from the Bedonia sandstone–clad entrance to the blondwood-paneled elevators that whisk you up to your floor. In-room check-in takes place via iPad, followed by a pot of green tea. • Rooms Starting from 68 square meters, rooms feel luxuriously spacious. Natural-toned furnishings, plush king-size beds, ultra-fluffy bathrobes, and a generous free mini-bar and Nespresso machine keep the vibe homey, while jaw-dropping views and cutting-edge conveniences— room service is summoned with an iPod Touch—create the effect of a lofty cocoon. • Pedigree Swire Hotels’ second venture, after The Opposite House in Beijing. Local wunderkind André Fu, a protegé of minimalist icon John Pawson, designed the sleek, subtly Asian interiors. • Drawbacks The hotel’s former life as serviced residences means there’s no pool or spa, but the expansive, sumptuous bathrooms—think standalone limestone tubs, panoramic vistas and Ren products—arguably make up for both. Don’t Miss Brunch at the swish 49th-floor Café Gray Deluxe, by executive chef Gray Kunz—try the 10-grain cereal with stewed raspberries and agave nectar. • Value Factor Space and seclusion—and those bathrooms—are rare commodities in this hectic financial hub. Pacific Place, 88 Queensway, Admiralty; 852/2918-1838; upperhouse.com. 56

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The Mira • Location A 492-room hotel amid the shopping-and-dining frenzy of Tsim Sha Tsui, with leafy Kowloon Park close by. • First Impressions A sculptural waved façade conceals a high-gloss lobby abuzz with a restaurant, a bar–lounge, a DJ booth and VIP seating area, a chic café–patisserie—oh, and check-in counters. • Rooms All room types score high on both style and function, with red, purple, silver or green color accents, Egg chairs by Arne Jacobsen and high-tech gadgetry like Bluetooth wireless keyboards linked to a 40-inch flat-screen TV (hello, giant Facebook wall). Our favorite touch: use of a mobile phone, complete with local SIM card. • Pedigree The first and only Hong Kong member of the prestigious Design Hotels group, following a US$65 million makeover last year. • Drawbacks The technological wizardry could prove hostile to Luddites, and the low-ceilinged hallways may be an issue for taller guests. Don’t come expecting spectacular views—there are plenty of other distractions. Don’t Miss A dip in the sexy 25-meter, LED-lit indoor infinity pool—check out the underwater sound system—capped with a treatment at the award-winning MiraSpa. • Value Factor Both hip and supremely convenient, this is a destination in itself. 118 Nathan Rd., Tsim Sha Tsui; 852/2386-1111; themirahotel.com. ✚

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per night

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| expert

Italy’s Hidden Treasures. Author Marella Caracciolo and photographer Oberto Gili reveal the countryside’s best agriturismi, hotels and villas. By maria shollenbarger

n their new book For the

Love of Italy: Rural Pleasures and Hotel Estates (Clarkson Potter; US$60), Marella Caracciolo and Oberto Gili travel from the tip of northern Italy to the southern Salento region to the island of Sicily in search of authentic and often overlooked places to stay. The result is an insider’s take on a country still very much engaged with the land, where artisanal cheese producers, oil purveyors and winemakers continue to embrace Italy’s long-standing rural traditions. “We’re both deeply tied to the countryside,” Caracciolo says, “in part because we spent a great deal of our childhoods on

farms.” (Caracciolo lives in Rome; Gili in Piedmont.) Here, they share eight of their favorite places found along the way. ■ for history buffs Caracciolo and Gili fell in love with Piedmont’s 15th-century Castello di Bagnolo (23 Via Palazzo, Bagnolo Piemonte; 39-0175/391-394; castellodi bagnolo.it; rentals from €327 per week), which holds an 800-year-old family archive. But, Caracciolo says, “Art historians must visit Padua’s La Montecchia (11 Via Montecchia; 39049/637-294; lamontecchia.it; doubles from €235, including breakfast, two-night »

Rustic Chic Above: For the Love of Italy guides readers to the country’s most authentic corners. Below: The study at Oberto Gili’s Il Picot, in Bra, Piedmont, as seen in the book.

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italy

t s e b e h t , e s a c t i Losing your sgu that can happen to you thin

www.spain.info

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| expert The restaurant and villa Don Alfonso 1890, on the Sorrentine Peninsula. Below: The exterior of Villa Emo Capodilista at La Montecchia estate, in Padua.

a very remote landscape just over an hour from Rome,” Gili adds. ■ old meets new At Sextantio Le Grotte della Civita (28 Via Civita, Matera; 39-083/5332744; sassidimatera.com; doubles from €269, including breakfast), prehistoric cave dwellings have been reimagined with spare, sleek interiors. “Architect Laura Einaudi did a great job preserving the original patina of Matera while adding modern accents by Philippe Starck, among others,” Caracciolo says.

minimum), a 16th-century folly designed and frescoed by Dario Varotari, a pupil of painter Paolo Veronese.” ■ Seeds of love The sheer beauty of the gardens is the real reason to see many of these villas. “I am, of course, partial to mine,” says Gili, speaking of his own Piedmont villa Il Picot (38 Strada Gariglio, Bra; 39-0172/431-645; doubles from €196). “I have vegetables, fruit trees, roses and peonies, and aromatic herbs.” Caracciolo also cites Consolata d’Isola’s garden at Castello di Bagnolo, which is based on an original 18th-century plan. ■ Meal With A View On the Sorrentine Peninsula, Don Alfonso 1890 (11/13 Corso Sant’Agata, Sant’Agata sui Due Golfi; 39-081/8780026; dinner for two €255) is a standout for its classic Italian dishes with a twist: “Definitely the most amazing food and 60

impressive wine list I’ve ever encoun tered. Try the linguine con vongole veraci e zucchine with whisper-thin slices of zucchini,” Caracciolo says. ■ a Romantic escape Sextantio (Via Principe Umberto, Santo Stefano di Sessanio; 39-086/289-9112; sextantio.it; doubles from €216, including breakfast), in the mountainous Abruzzo region, is the ultimate 16th-century borgo turned luxury resort. “Intimate rooms; crackling fireplace; discreet service,” Caracciolo says. “And all in

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■ AgriturismI Most of the farms featured in For the Love of Italy apply the rules of organic agriculture, though some take eco- practices a step further. GREAT VALUE Lama di Luna (Località Montegrosso Andria, Puglia; 39-0883/569-505; lamadiluna.com; doubles from €137) is “a temple to feng shui, renewable energy and biodynamic agriculture,” Caracciolo says. Gili recommends Case Vecchie di Regaleali, whose proprietors are producing top-quality oils, sheep’smilk cheese and vegetables with the same care and techniques that have been used for hundreds of years. ✚

oberto gili (2)

■ Best for an italian cooking class Gili and Caracciolo were impressed by Fabrizia Lanza, the teacher at Sicily’s Case Vecchie di Regaleali (Contrada Regaleali, Scalfani Bagni, Palermo; 39338/152-3175; annatascalanza.com; oneday lesson with lunch from €147 per person), a 19th-century country house with four rustic rooms. “She is a well-traveled, warm-hearted polyglot who turns very basic but high-quality Sicilian ingredients into delicious cooking,” Caracciolo says. “You’ll learn to make a sweet cassata, a traditional spongecake dessert filled with ricotta cheese and covered with candied fruit and a sugar glaze,” Gili adds.

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Rates are subject to availability at participating hotels. Book at least 21 days prior to arrival. Full non-refundable prepayment required at time of booking. Each hotel has specific booking terms and conditions that vary. Please check with your hotel at the time of booking to determine if any additional conditions apply.

| tech

Let’s Get Lost. Technology has made

losing your way a thing of the past. But do we really know where we are? By jeff Wise

ast summer, a Swedish

couple bound for Capri entered the name of the Italian resort island into their GPS incorrectly and wound up in the city of Carpi, 640 kilometers away. Somehow, they failed to notice that landlocked Carpi could hardly have been their destination. “Capri is an island,” said a town spokesman. “They did not even wonder why they didn’t cross any bridge or take any boat.” GPS has, at its worst, become yet another distraction-enabler, a way to plug in and let our navigational instincts shut off. On the other hand, GPS does have an inherent use, since people have notoriously unreliable internal compasses. As Colin Ellard notes in You Are Here, his 2009 book about navigation, our minds tend to straighten roads, align points of reference and turn coasts onto a more orderly north-south or east-west axis. “Our mental maps are not geometrically accurate,” Ellard says. “They’re more like subway maps. They work because they tell the true story about what’s connected to what,

but in terms of distance and angle, they’re not right.” And so we get lost. And alarmed. Not knowing where we are represents a primal loss of control. Yet isn’t that what travel is really about—moving from the known to the unknown? Heading for Marina del Rey, in California, one day, I mistakenly wound up zigzagging around the charming canals of Venice Beach. With GPS, this sort of thing doesn’t happen: in most cases, you just get to where you’re going. You don’t need to pay attention to landmarks. You can ignore your environment altogether. Instead, we suggest a compromise: By all means, carry a GPS. (Consider one of our top picks of the new crop, shown at right.) Let satellites guide you to that crucial meeting or rehearsal dinner. But on vacation—when your destination is not so much a place but a state of being—consider turning your GPS off. Open yourself up to the idea of losing your way. It might seem unsettling, but there’s a chance that some “accidental” discovery will make your journey all the richer. ✚

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three for the road Below, a trio of standouts in the new field of navigation. —j o s h ua p r a m is TomTom Go 740TM Live Why We Love It Live traffic reports and five-day weather forecasts make this in-auto GPS helpful for planning multiday itineraries and spontaneous detours. Downside Initial setup is a bit of a pain. tomtom.com; US$280. Droid Incredible by HTC Why We Love It The phone’s GPS and camera team with Wikipedia to deliver content related to your surroundings (using the free Wikitude app, available via the Android store). Downside While impressive, the points-of-interest database isn’t all-encompassing...yet. htc.com; US$530. Garmin Oregon 550t Why We Love It This handheld has a built-in 3.2-megapixel camera with geo-tagging capabilities, so you can photograph your surroundings and plot them on a map. Downside The device is rather bulky. garmin.com; US$600.

Photo-illustration by Lars Klove

i n s e t , F r o m t o p : C o u r t e s y o f T o m t o m i n t e r n a t i o n a l ; c o u r t e s y o f HTC c o r p o r a t i o n ; c o u r t e s y o f g a r m i n

insider

trip navigator | insider Xiu Bar & Nightclub, in Beijing’s Central Business District. Below: Owner Leon Lee making a “secret Earl Grey” cocktail at his Apothecary Bar & Restaurant, in the Chaoyang District.

china

Beijing After Dark. The Chinese

capital has become one of Asia’s most exciting nocturnal playgrounds. T+L hits the town. By Meghann Foye

For more ideas on Asia’s hottest bars, clubs and nightlife, check out TravelandLeisureAsia.com. Photographed by Jasper james

wo years after the Olympic

Games, Beijing continues to evolve at full tilt, with exciting new lounges, restaurants and hotels popping up across the sprawling metropolis. From an under-theradar whiskey club and a buzzy locavore restaurant to a sleek skyscraper hotel, the city’s latest after-hours offerings are giving Beijing’s glittery sister—yes, Shanghai—a run for its money. Scene The heart of expat nightlife is the centrally located Sanlitun Village, where newcomer Apothecary (Nali Patio, third floor, D302, 81 Sanlitun Bei Rd.; 86-10/5208-6040; drinks for two RMB148) is shaking up local cocktail culture with creative concoctions and housemade mixers. Try the “secret Earl Grey,” Beefeater gin finished off with pomelolavender bitters. A five-minute stroll south will lead you to D.Lounge (Sanlitun Nan Rd., Jindian Huayuan; 86-10/6593-7710; drinks for two RMB335), a brick-walled gallery that, come night, morphs into a gathering spot

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insider

| trip navigator for fashion designers and media types. The most creative drink: “emperor’s whiskers,” made with tea-infused vermouth. Across town in the Central Business District, wellheeled urbanites take in live jazz over Moët champagne, crispy prawn fritters and Cohiba cigars at Park Hyatt Beijing’s Xiu (Beijing Yintai Centre, Building 8, sixth floor, 2 Jianguomenwai Ave.; 86-10/8567-1108; drinks for two RMB148). The rooftop lounge has five interconnected pavilions inspired by Song dynasty architecture and an outdoor patio with 360-degree views of the city. Don’t be fooled by the fading paint and dusty velvet banquettes at D-22 (242 Chengfu Rd.; 8610/6265-3177; drinks for two RMB67): the best young Chinese indie bands cut their teeth at this respected rock bar in the university district. For something more

Beijing Chic Above: A Premier room at the China World Summit Wing, in the Central Business District. Right: Dining at Room Beijing, a restaurant and club.

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subdued, head to Ichikura (36 Dongsanhuan Bei Rd.; 86-10/6507-1107; drinks for two RMB134), which has a 12-seat Japanese whiskey bar stocked with a selection of rare vanilla- and cherry-scented whiskeys. Food The convivial atmosphere and tender duck pancakes at Da Dong’s (22 Dongsishitiao; 86-10/5169-0328; dinner for two RMB670) make it one of the top places to try Beijing’s most famous dish, but Peking Duck, Private Kitchen (Vantone Center, 6A Chaowai Ave.; 86-10/5907-1920; dinner for two RMB268), in the historic Chaoyang District, is a noteworthy new contender. Here, the plump bird is presented in heated rosewood boxes in an intimate dining room. On Beijing’s oldest commercial street, established China restaurateur Michelle Garnaut’s Capital M (2 Qianmen Pedestrian St., third floor; 86-10/67022727; dinner for two RMB872) draws the city’s glitterati with seasonal, locally sourced dishes such as wild-mushroom-and-truffle risotto. Graffiti art covers the walls of Ireland-born chef Brian McKenna’s new restaurant/

China Nights Right: The Gold lounge, at the Fairmont Beijing. Below: Punk, an underground lounge at The Opposite House.

f r o m l e f t : c o u r t e sy o F T h e o p p o s i t e h o u s e ; c o u r t e sy o f fa i r m o n t b e i j i n g

Beijing Airport Update

lounge Room Beijing (Beijing Yintai Centre, third floor, 2 Jianguomenwai Ave.; 86-10/8517-2033; dinner for two RMB335), which turns out whimsical, Chinese-inflected creations (chicken wontons with avocado-and-lime dip; raspberry-and-herb-infused chocolate pop tarts). Reservations are essential at Temple Kitchen (171 Fuchengmennei Ave.; 86-10/66181119; dinner for two RMB1,676), where a traditional 10-dish menu highlights classic regional ingredients (sea cucumber, abalone) in a 700-year-old former Buddhist temple. The best place to recover from a late night out? Brunch at Maison Boulud à Pékin (23 Qianmen Dong Ave.; 86-10/6559-9200; brunch for two RMB369), Daniel Boulud’s French– American outpost with a Beijing twist housed in the former U.S. Embassy. The goose egg en cocotte with smoked potato and chorizo is a surefire way to refuel. Rooms The China World Summit Wing (1 Jianguomenwai Ave.; 86-10/6505-2299; shangri-la. com; doubles from RMB1,944), a serene 278room hotel in the bustling Central Business District, resides in the top 18 floors of Beijing’s tallest building. Views extend from the Rem Koolhaas–designed CCTV tower

The new Norman Foster– designed Terminal 3 turned Beijing Capital International Airport into the world’s second-busiest hub, with 50 million passengers yearly. Langham Place, Beijing Capital International Airport (1 Er Jing Rd.; 8610/6457-5555; langhamhotels. com; doubles from RMB1,408) just opened near T3 with 372 spacious, wood-accented rooms. Tech amenities include smart phones with free instant messaging and a lobby bar filled with Macs and PC’s. T3 also has a wide collection of shops: White Collar (86-40/0650-7400; white-collar.com) carries Chinese designers for women (look for patent-leather wallets and colorful knit sweaters) and Huaxiangyuan Tea Shop (86-10/6455-8615; hxytea.com) has quality Lapsang souchong and pu-er, wrapped in pretty packaging.

to the golden rooftops of the Forbidden City and beyond. Start (or finish) your evening at the exclusive Atmosphere cocktail lounge. Mixologist Serhan Kusaksizoglu—who trained at Munich’s iconic Schumann’s bar—has a sophisticated menu of bourbons, rye whiskeys and single malts. After exploring the city, guests will appreciate returning to the new Gold Rooms at Fairmont Beijing (8 Yong An Dong Li, Jianguomenwai Ave.; 8610/8511-7777; fairmont.com; doubles from RMB1,790), where bathrooms now have oversize bathtubs, heated floors and over-thetop, 24-karat-gold rain showerheads. Yi House (706 Hou St., Building 1; 86-10/64361818; yi-house.com; doubles from RMB939) is the first boutique hotel in Beijing’s edgy 798 Art District, an enclave of galleries in former factory buildings. Work by notable locals such as photographer Chi Peng is on view in the 30 gray-walled guest rooms. Sanlitun fans will want to check in to one of the 98 lightfilled Studio suites at The Opposite House (11 Sanlitun Rd., Building 1; 86-10/6417-6688; theoppositehouse.com; doubles from RMB1,944) for unbeatable access to the area’s nightlife. Survey the scene at the hotel’s chic subterranean lounge, Punk: David LaChapelle and art enfant terrible Ai Weiwei, among others, have been spotted here. ✚

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| t+l guide

Simon Turner, co-owner of Simon Says, a B&B and café in Ghent’s Patershol neighborhood.

belgium

Next Stop, Ghent. Once the

crown jewel of medieval Europe, this vibrant Belgian city has finally returned to its former glory. Story and photographs by Sean Rocha

ts Flemish sisters Antwerp and Bruges

may be better known, but the town of Ghent, a 48-kilometer drive northwest of Brussels, has the best of both worlds: stylish new restaurants, bars and boutiques that compete with Antwerp’s line centuries-old cobblestoned streets similar to those in Bruges. Together, they bring a palpable energy to this city of roughly 240,000. In the Middle Ages, Ghent (Gent to the Flemish and Gand to the French) grew fantastically rich on cloth and wool and was the second-biggest town in Europe, after Paris. Today, its medieval heritage is on view on the Graslei, an old merchants’ street that

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runs along the bank of the Leie River, home to Gothic guild houses with stepped roofs and ornately carved façades. University students account for 15 percent of the population, and on weekends they fill the Old City’s Friday Market square and the pintsize cafés of arty neighborhoods such as Patershol, to the north. Just east of the Graslei lie two of Ghent’s great monuments—St. Nicholas Church and St. Bavo Cathedral—and, in the ultimate juxtaposition of the sacred and the profane, Vlaanderenstraat, a narrow street that leads practically from the steps of the cathedral’s door to Ghent’s small red-light district and has become the center of cutting-edge design and clothing shops. Stay Ghent’s hotel scene was once dominated by generic chains, with the occasional offbeat option such as the Boatel GREAT VALUE (44 Voorhoutkaai; 32-9/267-1030; theboatel.com; doubles from €88), a moored canal boat refashioned into a seven-room floating hotel. The past few years, however, have »

insider

| t+l guide

Ghent Style Clockwise from below: Caroline Naudts’s Het Oorcussen clothing boutique; glassware on display at the Design Museum Gent; a vintage-style dress from Eva Bos.

seen an explosion of chic inns. In the Patershol district, British transplants Simon Turner and Christopher Joseph recently opened a B&B at their casual coffeehouse Simon Says (8 Sluizeken; 32-9/233-0343; simon-says.be; doubles from €94). The Art Nouveau building has two contemporary rooms with funky white fluorescent light fixtures and sandstone bathrooms. The husband-and-wife team behind Chambre Plus GREAT VALUE (31 Hoogpoort; 32-9/225-3775; chambreplus.be; doubles from €95) run a cooking school in the cellar where guests learn to make Belgian chocolate. Upstairs, you’ll find three spacious guest rooms—the best is the honeymoon suite, with private access to a vine-covered garden. At the family-run Hotel Harmony GREAT VALUE (37 Kraanlei; 32-9/324-2680; hotel-harmony.be; doubles from €152), top-floor rooms have views of the Kraanlei canal and the city’s tiled rooftops. SHOP Vlaanderenstraat is the city’s ground zero for shopping. The latest boutique arrival: Switzerlandbased Vitra (107 Vlaanderenstraat; 32-9/234-0709), which sells Midcentury Modern furniture by such legendary designers as Charles and Ray Eames and Jean Prouvé. For more local finds, head to Eva Bos (66 Vlaanderenstraat; 32-9/495-496-164), who makes custom vintage-style jackets and dresses. Pick up one of her tailored, Audrey Hepburn–inspired evening gowns. Caroline Naudts was so taken with Belgium’s emerging fashion scene that she opened Het Oorcussen (7 Vrijdagmarkt; 32-9/233-0765) to showcase innovative designers such as Ann Demeulemeester and Dries Van Noten. Around the corner, Naudts’s brother Frank runs Obius » 70

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A KALEIDOSCOPE OF CULTURE AND HERITAGE BECKONS

Discover the many facets and rich cultures of our ethnic communities when you stay at Village Hotels & Residences. Located in the heart of Singapore始s diverse enclaves, our exclusive hotels and residences offer modern comforts with friendly and attentive service wherever you stay.

insider

| t+l guide

Old meets new Clockwise from top: A glass of Rochefort beer at Belga Queen; the Switzerland-based Vitra furniture company; a view of the Belfort tower from the entrance to St. Bavo Cathedral.

(S.M.A.K.) (Citadelpark; 32-9/240-7601; smak.be)

is one of the best contemporary art museums in Belgium, with a permanent collection that includes works by late-20th-century artists such as Joseph Beuys and Luc Tuymans.

(4 Meerseniersstraat; 32-9/233-8269), a clothing boutique with Martin Margiela sweaters and Veronique Branquinho heels. See and Do The Gothic spires of St. Bavo Cathedral (SintBaafsplein; 32-9/269-2045; sintbaafskathedraal-gent.be) are one of the town’s most recognized landmarks, but inside the church is the true treasure—the 15th-century altarpiece Adoration of the Mystic Lamb, a towering, multi-panel painting by Jan van Eyck. Farther west, the Design Museum Gent (5 Jan Breydelstraat; 32-9/267-9999; design.museum.gent.be) is a building in two parts: the old wing, an 18thcentury mansion that showcases re-creations of domestic life in that era; and next door, a modern extension with rotating exhibitions and a permanent collection that ranges from early-20thcentury Art Nouveau cabinets by Henry van de Velde to whimsical 1970’s Flemish furniture. A two-story, white-walled space in the southern part of the city, Stedelijk Museum voor Actuele Kunst 72

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Eat Brussels-based designer Antoine Pinto was one of the first to put Ghent on the traveler’s map in 2003 with the stylish Belga Queen (10 Graslei; 32-9/2800100; lunch for two €32), a cavernous restaurant with a wood-beamed ceiling and stainless-steel accents. The menu includes updated Belgian classics such as eel stewed in cream and herbs. Pinto’s magic continues at his newly opened Brasserie Pakhuis (4 Schuurkenstraat; 32-9/223-5555; dinner for two €69), the place to go in town for oysters, with an Art Nouveau glass roof and cast-iron interior worthy of Gustave Eiffel. Opposite the towering St. Nicholas Church is the Michelin-starred C-Jean (3 Cataloniëstraat; 329/223-3040; dinner for two €152), where the ninecourse seasonal menu of local specialties such as grilled herring and beef carpaccio with clams is lighter than it sounds. To sample the best in Belgian ale, head to the cozy Het Waterhuis aan de Bierkant (9 Groentenmarkt; 32-9/225-0680; drinks for two €7), overlooking the Leie River. What to try: one (or more) of the 22 beers brewed by Trappist monks. Rochefort and Orval are our favorites. ✚

f a s h i o n

. . . 7 6

StylishTraveler Waterworks From top: Stainless-steel Pantheon Automatic Sport watch with luminescent hands, rubber strap and water resistance to 330 meters, US$1,795, Gucci; Oyster Perpetual Submariner Date chronometer with 18-karat-gold-andstainless-steel bracelet and pressure proofing to 330 meters, US$10,400, Rolex; stainless-steel Eco-Drive Diver’s 2009

with 50-minute chronograph and rotating elapsed-time bezel, US$756, Citizen; J12 Marine mechanical Swiss watch with rubber bracelet and ceramicand-steel case, US$4,900, Chanel; Aquaracer 500M with rubber strap and stainless-steel case, US$2,600 (with 10 percent of proceeds benefiting the Natural Resources Defense Council), Tag Heuer.

time to make a

splash

Ready for your next aquatic adventure? These five diving watches are sure to keep you sharp—above or below sea level. Photographed by James Wojcik. Styled by Mimi Lombardo

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stylish traveler

| fashion

perfect fit Classic chic and vintage style aptly reflect the luxury of YL Residence No. 17 on Ko Samui. Photographed by nat prakobsantisuk. Styled by Kontee Pamaranond

Dress and shoes, HermĂ¨s.

ith a nod to the “Roaring

20’s,” we push the clock back to high-glam vintage fashion in our November fashion set, shot at the stunning YL Residence No. 17 on Ko Samui. With its sleek, classic lines, elegant styling and sumptuous luxury, the resort is the perfect backdrop for stunning looks like these. Of course, in Samui’s tropical climate, maintaining your cool is of utmost importance, which is why these light styles allow you to effortlessly move around the resort’s classic, private villas while enjoying the perfect five-star service of an upmarket hotel. ✚

fashion | stylish traveler

Swimwear, Jantzen; bracelet, Chanel; shoes, Louis Vuitton. Opposite: Jacket, HermĂ¨s; underwear, La Perla; bag, Fendi.

stylish traveler

| fashion Swimwear, BSC Swarovski. Opposite: Dress and bag, Fendi; shoes, Louis Vuitton.

fashion | stylish traveler

Dress and shoes, Hermès.. Opposite: Bikini, BSC Swarovski; pants, Hermès; bag, Chanel; shoes, Jimmy Choo. Model: Raiane Marques Maderin Make-up: Kamol Chatrasen Hair: Pongsiri Pornpijaipark Assistant: Ekkarat Ubonsri Stockists BSC Swarovski bscswimwear.com Chanel chanel.com Fendi fendi.com Hermès hermes.com Jantzen jantzen.com Jimmy Choo jimmychoo.com La Perla laperla.com Louis Vuitton louisvuitton.com

~ t r e

n d s ,

c u l t u r e ,

f o o d

n d

m o r e ~

t+L Journal The living-room-like space at The Annexe Gallery.

drink 92 outdoors 97 food 102

Malaysia

Finding a

Voice

Kuala Lumpurâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s music scene is worth checking out, writes ROBYN ECKHARDT, but treat the search as a treasure hunt. Photographed by DAVID HAGERMAN

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t+l journal

| after dark Think! Tadpole! Think! on stage, below. Right: Mathematix performs at No. 1 Café. Below right: Nao livens things up.

I spent a long weekend in Kuala Lumpur. What I remember most: an unplanned Merdeka (Independence Day) evening in Chinatown that began with a plate of transcendent wok-charred noodles and finished with three hours of energetic and, at times, astoundingly good live music played by local bands at a dive up the street from the police station. Two years later I moved to the Malaysian capital and went looking for that street stall and for the club. But they were no more. While I eventually found an acceptable substitute for those noodles, my efforts to unearth the local live music scene, inferred by the energetic jamming I heard that night, never bore fruit. Until recently, that is, when a friend told me about a favorite pastime: gig-hopping in greater Kuala Lumpur. Turns out I’d been living in a state of ignorance. This city has much more to offer in the nightlife department than DJ’s, glittery dance clubs and see-and-be-seen bars. I’ve learned that, despite an environment sometimes less than friendly to artistic endeavors outside the mainstream, the city boasts a posse of artists making original and interesting music. True, the local independent music scene is far from frenetic—“steadily percolating” might be a more apt description—and it would be a long stretch to describe

even years ago

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Kuala Lumpur as Asia’s next San Francisco or London. But in spaces ranging from grotty to bordering-on-glam are soloists and bands performing in genres that run the gamut from grindcore and metal to folk and Brit pop. You just need to know where to find them. One Saturday in August, Febry Supriyadi, a young Indonesian graphic designer saddled with the aforementioned gig-hopping habit, led me downtown to Palate Palette, the casually stylish bistro a short walk from well-known evening street stalls along Jalan Alor. Supriyadi, who grew up in Jakarta and began exploring Kuala Lumpur’s indie music happenings not long after moving here six years ago, tries to see at least one show a week. She reckons this scene beats the one currently in Indonesia’s capital. “The crowd is different here, more diverse. And the music is more varied.” We made our way past alfresco diners and up a winding staircase to a cement-floored room decorated with murals and crowded with a mix of locals and ex-pats. Members of Singaporean-Malaysian band The Observatory passed a donation box and tissue paper (for fashioning into earplugs) before launching into space-rock/electronica/avant-garde played so loud that my gut vibrated. Three days later we returned, for a buka puasa barbecue— think halal dogs and burgers, rice and sambal—and sets by

artists with entirely different styles. Singer-songwriter Azmyl Yunor sang jangly folk in Malay and English, accompanying himself on acoustic guitar and harmonica. Next up was an intriguing underground trio called Think! Tadpole! Think! led by a dashiki-sporting poet who shouted lyrics into his microphone to an electronica backbeat. Gears switched again when Mislina Mustaffa, a Norah Jones-esque crooner, took the stage.

ndependent music isn’t new to

Kuala Lumpur. “It’s always been around, but was more underground before—mostly metal in the eighties, punk rock and alternative in the nineties,” singer-songwriter and guitarist Aidil Rusli of power-pop band Couple tells me as we enjoy buka puasa at a roadside tom yam stall in the suburbs. “In the nineties we had to buy cassettes. We’d wait for somebody’s brother to bring back a bunch from the U.K.,” laughs Rusli, who co-founded Couple with a schoolmate 15 years ago (the band’s current line-up dates back four years). Things changed when Internet downloads and online music publications “where you can read about all kinds of obscure music” allowed access to a wider spectrum of genres. Malaysian musicians started experimenting, and local audiences became more receptive to sounds beyond pop, says Rusli.

He acknowledges that compared with scenes in cities in the U.K. and the U.S.—and even with Beijing’s—the capital’s is small. “There are lots of bands, but the ones actually gigging are probably less than a hundred.” Many musicians blame the scene’s limited size on a lack of venues willing to open their doors to indie bands. For bar and restaurant owners, noise complaints are a worry (members of The Observatory were asked to turn down the volume after their first set at Palate Palette), and local indie fans are notoriously tight-fisted—staging a show is often more an act of charity than a profitable enterprise. “Malaysians will pay 300 ringgit for a ticket to a pop-star concert but not even 10 to see an indie band,” complains Jimmy Chong, drummer for progressive rock band Nao. For owners, selling liquor can increase revenue but also invite the wrong kind of attention. In Malaysia, nonmainstream music is viewed with suspicion by some authorities. Stereotypes of indie musicians as undisciplined, drug-addicted negative influences on Malaysian youth are widely subscribed to, and harassment isn’t uncommon. Five years after the fact, a New Year’s Eve police raid on a punk show at popular Brickfields club Paul’s Place is still fresh in the minds of indie-scene regulars. Allegedly undertaken as part of a wider effort to stamp out the so-called harmful effects of “black metal” sub-culture, the raid included the »

t+l journal

| after dark

arrest of more than 300 concert-goers (all but a few were released without charge) and the confiscation by police of musicians’ instruments and equipment. Some say that it’s not outside forces but indie fans themselves who constrain the size of their own scene. “The key to the longevity of any scene is diversity. But there are not enough listeners who appreciate diversity or are open to a wide spectrum of music,” says Jerome Kugan, a singersongwriter from Kota Kinabalu who moved to the Malaysian capital 10 years ago. Kuala Lumpur’s independent-music landscape is divided, not only by genre, but by race and language, Kugan tells me during a break from his job as media manager for The Annexe, an alternative art gallery and performance space behind Kuala Lumpur’s Central Market. “It’s a really small market if you’re performing in English. And there are other problems if you sing in Chinese.” That’s something that the members of Malaysian-Chinese band Nao know well. Once vocal performers, the band’s members switched to instrumental-only performances after being criticized by members of their audiences for not singing in Malay, even after they began passing out photocopied Malay translations of their songs at gigs. The final straw, says drummer Chong, was the heated controversy in 2007 over a YouTube video of a Malaysian-Chinese student in Taiwan performing a rap version of the

Malaysian national anthem that touched on issues of corruption and economic inequality and Islam. “Language has caused so many problems in Malaysia. Music explains better,” Chong says. Guitarist Tat Yap says the group simply decided “to transform our message from words to sounds and notes.” A music scene is always expressive of the larger culture, observes singer-songwriter Yunor, so it should be no surprise that “our hang-ups as Malaysians are reflected in our arts.” Yunor, who sandwiches a busy performance schedule between his obligations as a cultural-studies and masscommunications instructor at a local college, touches on issues of nationhood, ethnicity, bias and migration in his overtly political songs. For him, the beauty of indie: “I’m happy as an independent. I can say anything I want because no one has invested anything in me.”

he curious and open-minded music lover will

find that the problems plaguing Kuala Lumpur’s indie scene are balanced by its pleasures. Yet it’s not an easy scene to navigate. With no websites or stores proffering a comprehensive Malaysian indie catalog or an all-inclusive listing of upcoming gigs, sussing out the lay of the land can seem like a treasure hunt. The scene is nurtured in cyberspace and on the grapevine. With little support from mainstream media—the mention of X-FM, one Malaysian radio station devoting air time to indie music, elicits praise from some quarters and scorn in others—musicians depend on social media to sell CD’s and keep fans updated on gig schedules. »

The INDEPENDENT music landscape is divided, not only by genre, but by race and language

A Breathy Chick session at Palate Palette, left. Right: Kuala Lumpur’s indie music scene continues to evolve.

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t+l journal

| after dark Singer/songwriter Azmyl Yunor, left. Below: A crowd gathers at Palate Palette.

“We’re not like cities in the U.K. or U.S. that have regular live-music circuits,” says Couple’s Rusli. “But if you’re looking for live music, it’s everywhere.” Like Palate Palette, whose general manager Su-Ann Wong never imagined hosting musical performances when she opened three years ago but was inspired to open her restaurant’s doors by a growing awareness that “there’s a lot of interesting stuff out there.” And Ecoba, a sleek spot with outdoor seating in the suburb of Petaling Jaya that’s only recently begun to host indie groups. The Annexe Gallery’s intimate living room–like space is home to monthly group gigs called “Blue Wednesday” that see the likes of long-time independent scene player Yunor and recently formed girl group Shh…Diam! No. 1 Café, a typical open-air mamak joint on a down-and-out stretch of Jalan Tuanku Abdul Raman seems, at first glance, an unlikely place in which to find inspiring music. But its basic adjacent performance space—dark, sparsely furnished and fronted by a well-lit stage—is a dive designed for nothing but gigs. In Kuala Lumpur, performances and jamming sessions take place in shopping malls, assembly halls and recording studios hidden away in the suburbs. Venues live and die, and finding gigs can be hit-and-miss. Kugan admits that “unless you are a musician and in the know, you wouldn’t necessarily be aware of all the places” to see indie bands. But the effort invested in research is rewarded. Kugan equates the city’s independent music scene to a diamond in the rough: “There are always new kids out there, new voices, new things to say. That’s the one thing about KL, there’s always gonna be a scene. No matter how small.” ✚ 90

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GUIDE TO kl’s music scene In Kuala Lumpur, live shows often start early and end by midnight. Marathon group gigs usually kick off in the afternoon. Cover charges (or “donations”) can be as low as RM10 and rarely top RM35. Beer and alcohol are always available at bars and restaurants but not guaranteed at other venues. Getting up-to-date information on what’s going on and where can be problematic. The Ricecooker Shop distributes Malaysian and Southeast Asian indie recordings and posts updates on happenings not only in KL and Malaysia but all around the region on its Facebook page (SB18, Cahaya Suria, Jln. Tun Tan Siew Sin). Alternatively, Junk, an online Malaysian music publication publicizes indie and mainstream gigs (junkonline.net). @Postagig on Twitter is an often-updated indie music listing service that also has a Facebook page. A good source for upcoming shows in KL is to follow performers on their MySpace or Facebook pages. A few to get you started: Azmyl Yunor, Jerome Kugan, Nao, Shh… Diam!, Think! Tadpole! Think!, Matematik, Kottal, Citizens of Ice Cream, Tempered Mental, Butterfingers, Cats in Love.

WHERE TO GO The Annexe Gallery Second floor, Central Market Annexe, Jln. Hang Kasturi; 60-3/20701137; annexegallery.com. Artista The bar-restaurant has shows several times a week. Tropicana City Mall, No. 3 Jln. SS 20/27, Petaling Jaya; artista. com.my; drinks for two RM60. Ecoba About 20 minutes by taxi from downtown, this sleek space occasionally hosts live gigs. Level 1, Tower B Menara Bata, 8 Jln. PJU 8/8A, Bandar Damansara Perdana; 60-3/7710-1118; ecoba.com.my. Laundry Bar Also 20 minutes away, it hosts indie acts. Ground floor Western Courtyard, The Curve Shopping Centre, 6 PJU 7/3, Mutiara Damansara; 60-3/7728-1715; laundrybar.net; drinks for two RM60. No. 1 Café The café has no phone, no website and no Facebook presence but often hosts gigs most weekends. Jln. Tuanku Abdul Rahman near the corner of Jln. Sultan Ismail. Palate Palette It’s best to reserve if you’re planning to dine here before seeing a show. 21 Jln. Mesui; 60-3/2142-2148; palatepalette.com; dinner for two RM80, drinks for two RM60.

t+l journal

| drink

thailand

Tea Time I

In the far northern reaches of Thailand is an intriguing taste of Chinese history, one best enjoyed over a locally grown cuppa. By Karen J. Coates Photographed by Jerry Redfern wake to a butter-colored sun cast across a

green valley. Neat, parallel rows of tea bushes ribbon their way across the terrain. The sky spreads wide and clear with a single cotton-candy cloud, the air sweet with frangipani. I drink in the moment before my head begins to swirl, and my mood turns slightly mean. It’s early, and I need caffeine. Ask, and I shall receive. A young man shuffles across the tiles, quietly serving a pot of oolong so crisp and clean with light floral hints, it’s like drinking the morning light. My head clears and I start to feel alive. Better than that, actually. This tea is exceptional. It’s said this local brew, in the northern hills of Thailand, outshines its ancestral mother in Taiwan. Doi Mae Salong is a mountain made for tea—and for soldiers with a colorful past, one tinged with its own addictions. In the 1950’s, anticommunist Kuomintang forces settled in these serpentine hills of the Golden Triangle.

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They’d been driven out of their homeland in Yunnan by Mao Zedong’s communist army. They spread first into Burma’s jungles, gaining reputations as fierce fighters and the region’s heavyweight traders in opium (which helped fund their fight). When their presence in Burma became untenable, many Chiang Kai-shek loyalists were shepherded to Taiwan, headquarters of the KMT. But a band of soldiers known as the “Lost Army” remained in the region, settling across the border in Thailand. Eventually Thailand’s king granted refuge to the soldiers and their families in exchange for defense against the kingdom’s own communist enemies. Those battles lasted through the early 1980’s. When they ended, the Thai government strongly encouraged the soldiers to kick the opium trade and grow alternative crops. Tea proved a logical contender; the high-value substitute crop provided a viable income as well as a direct link to Taiwan. Today, Mae Salong, also known as

Tea tasting at Mae Salong Central Hills. Center: The Chinese Martyrs Memorial Museum, in Mae Salong, is dedicated to Kuomintang soldiers. Far left: The valley’s lush slopes once grew opium. Inset: A member of the Akha tribe.

Santikhiri, remains an enclave of Yunnan: red lanterns dangle from doorways, restaurants specialize in Yunnan ham and the children here learn three languages in school—Thai, English and Chinese. “I am Yunnanese,” a vendor in the local morning market announces proudly, before serving a spicy bowl of noodle stew with cabbage, pork and chili. She offers two little cups of strong, amber-colored tea, for free. Tea is the reason most travelers visit Mae Salong. It’s the spark of life for most residents, too. On weekends, locals gather around wooden counters at teashops scattered across town. People sip, gossip and linger. There is a protocol to serving and tasting tea. It varies slightly from server to server, but more or less everyone abides by certain rules. The dried leaves are always handled with wooden, bamboo or ceramic scoops (metal can taint the taste). Water is boiled to 100 degrees Celsius, utensils are doused, leaves rinsed and rinsed again. The tea is never left long to steep in the pot. The owner of Ming Yong Tea Factory sets a pot of water on a tabletop tray with built-in burner. She scoops a spoonful of oolong into a clay serving pot. When the water boils, she rinses a set of tasting cups, then fills the pot and immediately dumps the water. The first pour is never to drink, only to “clean glass, clean tea,” she explains. Perfectly mirroring the town’s mingled cultures, my server goes by alternate names: Phantipa in Thai and Lin in Chinese. She pours a second round of water over the leaves, then immediately transfers

the tea to a small, elongated cup for tasting—but not yet. A second, round cup is placed upside-down over the vessel containing the tea. I allow it to sit a moment before flipping the ensemble. As all the locals instruct, I roll the elongated cup in my hands and lift it to my nose to absorb its fragrance. Then I place the hot cup on my eye, as residents tell me it awakens one’s vision. Finally, I sip the tea. I taste an oolong infused with local herbs that smell of rice. Another oolong, #12, offers a floral bouquet and a hint of bitterness at the back of the tongue. Oolong #17, by contrast, tastes and smells flowery throughout. Though other varieties are grown, Mae Salong is known for its oolong, which, in terms of fermentation, falls between black (fully oxidized) and green (not oxidized at all). Dozens of shops sell oodles of oolongs, each imparting »

Tea is the REASON most travelers come to Mae Salong. It’s the spark of life for most residents, too

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2010

t+l journal

| drink

Hanging lanterns at the Mae Salong Villa Restaurant. Center: Oolong varieties at a small family-run tea factory. Far right: Tending tea fields in Mae Salong. Below right: Tea leaves, densely packed, at Yeng Hong Factory.

distinct characteristics that reflect the land, the water, the way the tea is grown, picked and dried. “My factory makes 19 different teas,” Lin says, each with its own fragrance, shape and body.

he large factory room buzzes with workers.

Women sort through small mountains of tea, removing stems from each pile of dried leaves spread across tarps on the floor. Another area houses freshly picked green leaves, supple to the touch. The entire room smells of a hot tea bag on a summer day, as if I’ve jumped right inside the pitcher. Dryers growl and rumble as men load leaves onto a giant conveyor belt that switchbacks through the machines, coming out the bottom in streams of warm, crisp, dry leaves. Across the street, at the Yeng Hong Factory, workers form giant cannonballs of leaves that are wrapped in cloth and rotated beneath a machine that spins the balls and presses them hard. This continues for several minutes until an employee unravels the balls and dumps the tea into another spinning machine, which ultimately drops the leaves onto the ground for another worker to sort and sift. Some of Mae Salong’s factories and plantations are nondescript, family-run affairs while others, such as the 101 Tea Plantation, loom above the landscape from dominant hilltop perches. The 101 visitor’s center is equipped for tour buses with ample room to taste and shop.

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Its walls are decked in signs describing the necessary steps to processing tea. First, the youngest growth is plucked from the plants. The leaves are “withered” in sunlight for 10 minutes, then stacked in bamboo trays for winnowing. They’re sorted, fermented, fired, rolled, spread, covered in white cloth, bound, kneaded and dried. Out in the sloping fields, 19 workers weave their way through the rows, picking weeds and digging little holes for fertilizer pellets. It’s a multicultural field bearing the unique tribal dress of villagers who live throughout this hilly region. “Mingalaba,” a worker with a goatee, greets me in Burmese. “We’re all from Burma.” Their homeland lies just a few kilometers to the west—they came to Thailand’s upland fields and farms seeking better opportunities. In between plucking weeds, a woman picks a clump of pennywort growing among the tea plants. “You can eat,” she says. “Delicious!” Women stuff their sacks with edible herbs they take home for dinner. I touch the soft, pliant tips of new growth on an old plant. This is my first up-close encounter with the region’s tea, but it’s not my first trip to Mae Salong.

y introduction to these striking hills came

about 18 months earlier, when I arrived with a small group of Asian journalists seeking to interview General Lue Ye-tein. It was cold that day, in the early November rain, and General Lue wore a heavy jacket with a furry collar.

He greeted us in his parlor, serving magnificent little cups of peach-fragrant tea. In his early nineties, the general sported a silvery patch of hair and wiry eyebrows. He spoke with utter clarity, recalling his fellow soldiers’ days in Yunnan, then Burma, then Thailand. “Before I was a soldier, I was just staying in the countryside in Yunnan,” he told me. “The Japanese invaded China so I had to become a soldier to protect China.” He ran away from home to train in Nanjing. “I didn’t want my parents to know,” he said. “I had no money in my pocket.” He walked for days. “At that time my shoes were woven from grass. I could walk many kilometers.” That was the existence Lue knew for decades. “My whole life was always walking and climbing mountains and carrying guns. Every day was exercise.” War was life; it defined him in most every way. He has never wanted to return to the land that took his father, mother and brother. “They were just all killed and thrown away.” His life, now, is firmly planted in the hills that grow this tea we drink from steaming little glasses. War is long gone; so is the opium trade—a subject he does not wish to discuss. The general has moved on, happy to have found peace and a new prosperity for his people. “I’m not a soldier anymore,” he says. “That’s all history.” ✚

GUIDE TO mae salong GETTING THERE From Chiang Rai, travel north to Mae Chan, then follow Highway 1089 toward Tha Ton. Watch the signs for Mae Salong and when you reach a police station checkpoint, turn right on Highway 1234 for 21 kilometers over some of the country’s steepest, curviest stretches of pavement. WHERE TO STAY & EAT Maesalong Mountain Home Private accommodation overlooking a quiet valley of tea plantations. 9 Moo 12, Maesalongnok, Mae Fah Luang, Chiang Rai; 66-84/611-9508; maesalongmountainhome.com; bungalows from Bt600. Mae Salong Villa Restaurant Serves an extensive Yunnanese menu (try the roast pork) as well as local Akha black chicken. 5 Moo 1, Maesalongnok, Mae Fah Luang, Chiang Rai; 66-53/ 765-114; maesalong-villa.com; dinner for two Bt950. Mae Salong Central Hills The hotel restaurant offers Yunnanese ham, sausage, t r a v e l a n d l e i s u r e a s i a

pork and cheese as well as tea-leaf salad. Next door is a tea-tasting room. 66-53/ 765-113; maesalongcentralhills. net; dinner for two Bt450. Salima Restaurant Serves excellent Muslim noodles. 66-53/765-088; a few hundred meters from the Shin Sane Guesthouse, on the north side of Highway 1234 as you come into town; dinner for two Bt320. .

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outdoors | t+l journal A view of the Everglades wetlands from an airboat.

u.s.a.

Escape to the Everglades

On a journey through Americaâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s largest wetlands, Miami native Tom Austin rediscovers a wild terrain filled with mangroves, crab shacks and three-meter alligators. Photographed by Blasius Erlinger t r a v e l a n d l e i s u r e a s i a

c o m | n ov e m b e r

2010

t+l journal

| outdoors

or a kid growing up in the overly

manicured Miami suburbs of the 1970’s, the Everglades were a jolt of fear and freedom—a vast expanse of subtropical wetlands made for mischief. It was here I had my first taste of whiskey brewed in backwoods stills, while riding around in an airboat with a half-crazy old-dog Gladesman. Then as now, the Tamiami Trail, a 443-kilometer road between Miami and Naples and on up to Tampa, offered easy access to this wonderland. Nothing is more freeing than that first glimpse of the Glades along the trail, those endless watery savannas framed by an eternal sky bleached nearly white by the leering sun. It took 13 years (1915–28) to hack out the almost culvert-free road, which effectively dammed up

The no-frills seafood joint Joannies Blue Crab Café, in Ochopee, near Everglades City.

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the sheet of shallow water that had always flowed uninterrupted from Lake Okeechobee to Florida Bay. Overnight, the Glades were thrown into an ecological tailspin: without a flowing stream, the wetlands south of the trail become too dry, and saltwater intrudes and damages the area’s freshwater habitats. To help restore the balance, the National Park Service broke ground last year on a 1.6-kilometer-long bridging project (that will eventually be supplemented with nine more kilometers). According to Michael Grunwald, a Miami-based Time magazine senior correspondent and author of The Swamp: The Everglades, Florida, and the Politics of Paradise, the Tamiami Trail bridging project is a start. “Restoring a more natural flow of water will help the Everglades,” he says. The recent Gulf of Mexico oil spill has brought renewed attention to Florida’s natural world, and there’s hope that the U.S. government will now do more for the Glades. Despite constant threats, the Glades endure and still retain otherworldly tableaux that are as eerily art-directed as the dioramas at New York City’s American Museum of Natural History: crystal-clear eddies flanked by bonsai-like trees appear to have been arranged by fussy landscape architects; egrets and roseate spoonbills stare balefully at one another as if an unfortunate conversational lull had descended upon a cocktail party. Along with being a unesco World Heritage site, the region is as rich, variegated and weird as America itself—full of eccentric characters and big enough for all manner of dreams. Driving west along the Tamiami Trail, I come across the Skunk Ape Research Headquarters, which is dedicated to the study of a two-meter-tall swamp creature with an odor problem. At command central, owner David Shealy, who claims to have seen the Skunk Ape three times, points to a blurry 1997 photo of the skulking animal and, hinting at the dark traditions of the Glades, says to me: “There’s lots of things that go on down here that outsiders don’t know about.” To fund his mission, the gift shop sells alligator-foot-shaped back-scratchers and includes an impolitic mini-zoo with Nile monitor lizards and Burmese pythons: monster snakes are often abandoned in the Glades by bored owners; one recently made headlines when it died in an attempt to swallow an alligator. A few kilometers up the road is Joannies Blue Crab Café, outfitted with rockers and pure charm,

and the glorified shed that houses the two-by-twoand-a-half meter Ochopee Post Office—billed as America’s smallest. Nearby, I find the Fakahatchee Strand Preserve State Park, featured in Susan Orlean’s book The Orchid Thief and the subsequent movie Adaptation. Throughout the year, biologist Mike Owen conducts guided swamp walks through a 32-kilometer-long slough filled with a million bald cypress trees, 7,000 royal palms, tropical ferns, bromeliads, otters, Everglades mink, eastern diamondback rattlesnakes, the occasional bald eagle and, of course, delicate ghost orchids. This is a cacophony of natural order and visual chaos, and not a landscape to trifle with: on a recent tour, a sixtysomething woman told a story about how months beforehand she had wandered in alone for a casual stroll in flip-flops and, within minutes, got lost for two days without water, food or a tent to ward off the mosquitoes. From the Fakahatchee, it’s a 10-minute drive to Everglades City, roughly 48 kilometers southeast of Naples. The town is the perfect jumping-off point for exploring the nearby Ten Thousand Islands, a dense, mangrove-filled archipelago along the coast. The islands have always been manna to the locals, who segued from fishing and stone-crabbing in the 1800’s to rum-running and drug smuggling in the 20th century. Indeed, the DEA arrested nearly the entire adult male population back in 1983. These days, the mostly reformed city is the unofficial capital of the Glades and is recasting itself as the next Key West, with winks to its tumultuous past. The island retreat of Totch Brown—the late pioneer Gladesman, media darling and pot smuggler—is now a featured attraction on airboat tours, as is the island of Edgar “Bloody” Watson, a sugarcane farmer turned alleged murderer from the 1800’s who was immortalized in Peter Matthiessen’s Killing Mister Watson. In 1910, a mob gunned Watson down at Ted Smallwood’s store, on nearby Chokoloskee Island; the spot is now the Ole Indian Trading Post & Museum. Then again, the working dock of City Seafood is still authentic and funky as hell, filled with patrons chucking the shells of just-eaten stone crabs into the water. And at the Camellia Street Grill, the down-home dishes are made with homegrown herbs and Willie Nelson wannabes saw away at “Mamas, Don’t Let Your Babies Grow Up to Be Crabbers” during dinner. Down the road, Ivey House hotel has a modern, eco-lodge vibe with

The region is as rich, variegated and weird as America itself—full of eccentric characters and all manner of DREAMS

An airboat guide, just outside Everglades City.

guided kayaking tours and membership to the Society for Ethical Ecotourism, but the 1864 Rod & Gun Club nearby is still the hotel that time and tourism forgot. It’s an Everglades remake of The Shining with hanging alligator skins, stuffed bobcats and narcoleptic front-desk clerks. » t r a v e l a n d l e i s u r e a s i a

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2010

t+l journal

| outdoors

On or off the Tamiami Trail, the Everglades have remained wild at heart. Florida was the last state to get fences: cattle were controlled with dogs and cracking whips, the genesis of the term Florida Cracker. In Indiantown, a half-hour drive from Lake Okeechobee, the 80-year-old Iris Wall, a fifth-generation Cracker, runs the curious Seminole Inn and a nearby ranch with cattle, horses and a

These days, Everglades City is RECASTING itself as the next Key West, with winks to its tumultuous past

Tampa Lake Okeechobee Tamiami Trail Gulf of Mexico

Naples

Fakahatchee Strand Preserve State Park Big Cypress National Preserve

Everglades City

GUIDE TO the everglades Miami

Everglades National Park

Biscayne Bay

Florida Bay Key West

25.7 km

Tallahassee

florida

100

restaurant featuring tasty frog’s legs and fried green tomatoes. The hotel was built, along with most of Indiantown, by Solomon Davies Warfield: part of the lobby is dedicated to his iconic niece, Wallis Warfield, who hosted the opening night gala in 1926, a decade or so before becoming the Duchess of Windsor. And yet, this is also a land of old-line Gladesmen, attuned, like snail kites, to the natural rhythms of swamps. For feasts, they chop down sabal palm trees and cut out the heart for “swamp cabbage,” fresh hearts of palm that are boiled or sautéed. Hunting is often done at night, a tribal rite that can always go wrong, especially when dealing with wild boars and vengeful alligators. Every moment of primal joy the Glades brought me as a kid comes flooding back at the Swamp Buggy Races outside Naples, a ceremonial ritual of mud and supercharged engines. Swamp buggies are cheap, jury-rigged affairs of old truck parts and giant tractor tires that have been used for hunting for years. On the racing circuit, they morph into bellowing dinosaurs charging down the straightaway. At the end of the day, the anointed Swamp Buggy Queen, dressed in a gown and tiara, jumps into the cold, muddy water. It’s a splendidly absurd finale to the rich terrain that is the Glades. “This is swamp culture,” one contented fan says. “This is the real America.” ✚

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WHERE TO STAY Ivey House 107 Camellia St., Everglades City; 1-239/6253299; iveyhouse.com; doubles from US$157. Rod & Gun Club 200 Broadway, Everglades City; 1-239/695-2101; evergladesrodandgun.com; doubles from US$140. Seminole Inn 15885 S.W. Warfield Blvd., Indiantown; 1-772/597-3777; seminoleinn. com; doubles from US$72. WHERE TO EAT Camellia Street Grill 202 Camellia St., Everglades City; 1-239/695-2003; dinner for two US$60. City Seafood Café & Market 702 Begonia St., Everglades City; 1-239/6954007; lunch for two US$20.

Joannies Blue Crab Café 39395 Tamiami Trail, Ochopee; 1-239/695-2682; lunch for two US$26. WHAT TO SEE AND DO Big Cypress National Preserve 33100 Tamiami Trail E.; Ochopee; 1-239/6952000; nps.gov/bicy. Everglades National Park 1-305/242-7700; nps. gov/ever. Fakahatchee Strand Preserve State Park 137 Coastline Dr., Copeland; 1-239/695-4593; floridastateparks.org/ fakahatcheestrand. Swamp Buggy Races Collier Blvd. and Rattlesnake Hammock Rd., Naples; swampbuggy.com.

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| food

Manila Modern Clockwise from above left: The entrance to the high-ceilinged dining room of Bistro Filipino, in Taguig; one of the restaurant’s street-food-inspired starters, lumpia served with a garlic-and-chili vinegar sorbet; empanaditas at New Manila Kitchen.

On the Menu

Manila teems with cosmopolitan flavors, yet up to now the best local fare has been hidden away in homes or private kitchens. Now, it’s time to step out and go global. By Lara Day. Photographed by Philipp Engelhorn

Philippines

102

y journey into Manila’s Filipino dining scene begins in a

modest, halogen-lit restaurant on Roxas Boulevard. I don’t know which is more discomfiting: the television that blares a noontime game show whose theme song takes its cues from Sonic the Hedge-hog, or the tiny cockroach that twitches its antennae at me from the wall. The roach, I decide eventually, as it scuttles out of eyeshot. And yet, I have faith. My lunch companions are Chinese-Filipino TV chef Bruce Lim, of Asian Food Channel fame, and his manager and wife, Michelle. They’ve taken me to the original, 1974-built branch of Aling Tonya’s, a dampa where seafood is cooked to order from a nearby wet market. This is where the San Francisco–born Lim first came with his father at the age of 12, and where today he sources ingredients for Chef ’s Table, his acclaimed private studio kitchen. “If the food’s not good here, it’s your own fault for not choosing properly,” says the warm, immensely knowledgeable Lim, as we tuck into his choice of garlic-butter shrimp, adobong pusit—squid braised with vinegar, garlic and spring onions—and bifstek tanguingue, immersed in calamansi

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and soy and topped with translucent onions. Lim is right: everything here is delicious, baby roach be damned. But much as I relish the simple, home-style fare, this isn’t what I’ve come for. I’m here to experience Filipino cuisine, one of the world’s least understood culinary traditions, taken to the next level—not muddled by the bromides of “fusion,” but deconstructed and reimagined for the 21st century. I first went to Lim’s kitchen a year ago, and the meal I had was transformative. Not only was it beautifully presented, as you’d expect from a Cordon Bleu–trained chef, but it took the dishes and flavors I’d grown up with and demanded that I experience them as if for the first time: kilawin, or Filipino ceviche, rendered bright and zesty with succulent scallops bathed in chilled carrot-and-ginger soup; pork-belly adobo that transported me to umami heaven on a bed of Singaporean-style chicken rice. Now, I’m thrilled to learn that Lim is training up his cadre of chefs so he can retire his appointment-only, 20-cover kitchen in favor of a bona-fide restaurant. With my booking for the last edition of Chef ’s Table private kitchen confirmed, I pause for a moment to digest. What else, I wonder, is out there?

istro Filipino, the brainchild of husband-and-

wife chefs Roland and Jackie Laudico, is perhaps Manila’s best-known bastion of modern Filipino cuisine. I sit down with Anton Diaz, a Manila-based food blogger, in the high-ceilinged contemporary Filipino dining room, outfitted with pendant capiz-shell lighting, antiquestyle mirrors and a black-and-white checkered floor. Roland emerges from the kitchen in chef whites, sporting a baseball cap and ponytail—a relic of his rock-band past, whose ethos he now channels into his cooking. After training at the Culinary Institute of America, and in restaurants in France, New York and Australia, he returned here, he says, to “make a statement. If the Philippines can be appreciated by foreigners, so can Filipino cuisine.” He serves us a trio of street-food-inspired appetizers: a deep-fried lumpia, or spring roll, rolled into a cone and topped with an icy sorbet of chili-and-garlic-infused vinegar; a skewered fish ball made of smoked bangus, or milkfish, and creamy mozzarella; and pork sisig, a sizzling cheek-to-jowl dish presented in a crisp rice basket and chased with a poached quail’s egg. My interest, and taste buds, are piqued. »

top right : lara day

Bold Flavors Clockwise from bottom left: The light-filled dining room at Restaurante Pia y Damaso; the restaurant serves modern interpretations on Filipino cuisine; chef Bruce Lim, of Chef’s Table, and his team; a trio of appetizers at Bistro Filipino.

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The rest of the courses are equally ambitious: adobo “cappuccino” garnished with garlic-cream foam and white-truffle oil; cashew-encrusted quesong puti, or carabao’s-milk cheese, served with ripe, green and dried mango, garden greens and tomatoes drizzled with bagoong (fermented shrimp paste) vinaigrette; slow roasted beef kare-kare, a peanut-based stew, with pickled eggplant on a mound of turmeric-flavored rice. We finish off with suman, or coconut rice cake, with pannacotta and fresh mango; Spanish tsokolat-eh delivered as a rich chocolate mousse; and, my favorite, a mini halo-halo disguised as an ube “shooter.” “When we started a lot of the chefs and friends of ours told us we were crazy,” Jackie says as we sample her award-winning truffles in flavors like calamansi, and mango and passionfruit. It turns out Bistro Filipino started as a private kitchen before transforming into its current incarnation. “They said you can’t do a Filipino 104

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restaurant and charge more than you pay at Aristocrat’s,” a wallet-friendly restaurant chain. The perception is why pay for Filipino food when you can get it at home? Luckily, the Laudicos’ risk paid off, and here we are four years later. Before waddling home, I ask the Laudicos why they think Filipino food has yet to take off internationally. Roland sees a lack of chefs willing to serve—and therefore develop— Filipino food, both at home and abroad. “There’s no shortage of talented Filipino chefs,” he says. “Some of our best chefs work abroad in another cuisine. The head chef at the White House is Filipino. It’s not that Filipinos aren’t talented as chefs; it’s that they’re not doing Filipino food.” “We shouldn’t scare people off with our food,” Jackie adds. “Ninety percent of people don’t eat balut.” Diaz quips: “Balut made it onto Fear Factor. And not just on any episode. The Finale!” They are, of course, referring to the notorious fertilized duck-egg snack that’s also popular in Vietnam,

b o t t o m r i g h t : l a r a d ay

Perfectly Pinoy Clockwise from top left: The flamboyant interior at Café Juanita; adobo pâté at New Manila Kitchen; the entrance to Restaurante Pia y Damaso; calamares at Chef’s Table; chef Jacqueline “Jackie” Laudico; dessert at Bistro Filipino.

Cambodia and Thailand, where I live, but is somehow reflexively associated with the Philippines. Perhaps there’s also something more fundamental at play. Manila is a place of voracious internationalism: here, you’ll find Brazilian churrascerias, Japanese sushi joints, French bistros, even northern California–style diners serving jambalaya with kielbasa. But that’s not surprising, given the Philippines’ colonial history. In a place whose blend of Chinese, Malay, Spanish, Mexican and Arab influences is notoriously hard to grasp, it makes sense that defining Filipino food can be a challenge. It’s as complex as defining what being Filipino is, yet it’s this process of assimilation and adaptation that makes the cuisine, and the culture, distinct. Few know this better than Myrna Segismundo, one of the pioneers of Filipino cooking in the 1970’s and 1980’s, and corporate chef to ABS-CBN, the country’s largest TV network. With her genial personality and culinary credentials, Segismundo is like a cross between Oprah and Delia Smith, not least because she’s a co-author of Kulinarya: A Guidebook to Philippine Cuisine, which aims to promote “greater understanding of our cuisine” (similar to Delia’s How to Cook in the U.K.). The title itself speaks volumes: it’s a guide to a terrain that’s somehow foreign even to locals—one of the book’s enlightening factoids is that adobo isn’t a dish, as commonly assumed, but a cooking technique. What’s more, unlike, say, Thailand, France, Spain, Japan or China—all of which benefited from the culinary directives of a monarch or emperor—the Philippines has a grassroots, in-the-home tradition that hinders consensus on basic recipes. I’m invited to the opening of Segismundo’s private dining studio, New Manila Kitchen, by the Peninsula Manila’s Mariano Garchitorena, and after a long drive to New Manila in Quezon City—during which we get lost not once, but twice—we arrive late at a dark, silent house. My heart sinks: have we missed dinner? Thankfully, down a flight of

stairs is a door leading to a buzzing room, packed with food writers and leading lights of the Philippine food scene. I spot the illustrious Glenda Barretto, president of the Via Mare restaurant chain and chef to Ferdinand and Imelda Marcos during the 1960’s and 1970’s. “We need to open more restaurants in the major cities,” she tells me, when I ask her about Filipino food’s prospects internationally. “The current restaurants are usually mom-and-pop operations, though that’s starting to improve now.” I think of certain lackluster restaurants in London, Hong Kong, even the Midwest, where the “Filipino” food is virtually unrecognizable, and I can only hope she’s right. Squeezing onto a table, I’m immediately won over by the introductory nibbles: savory empanaditas, adobo pâté and crunchy shrimp ukoy fritters served with garlic-andchili-infused vinegar. Next, a teacup arrives, bearing a wonton-style molo dumpling and thinly sliced vegetables: a teapot materializes and immerses it in aromatic chicken broth. I lap it up gleefully. I also make swift work of the ubod, or palm heart, salad with fresh pomelo and shrimp dressed in honeyed fish sauce and dayap lime, plus the beef caldereta, a hearty stew with flavorful green olives. And then comes the pièce de résistance: kinilaw of tuna, the flesh seared with the naturally occurring acids in white vinegar, perfectly paired with sweet oranges, fresh peppers and red-onion chutney caramelized in muscovado. Over the dessert counter, piled high with delectations such as turon, or deep-fried banana fritters, and queso de bola cheesecake, I find Claude Tayag, an artist, writer, sculptor and chef who hails from Pampanga, widely considered to be the Philippines’ culinary heart. We discuss a recent LA Times article titled “Off the Menu,” in which one Fil-Am chef—a Cordon Bleu instructor, no less—described Filipino food as “stewed and brown and oily and fried,” a contention that caused outrage in local food circles. You can see why: »

Eclectic Eats From left: At Café Juanita in Pasig; Boy Vasquez, the restaurant’s owner, with his sous chefs.

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Hidden Tastes From left: An ornate table setting at Câfé Juanita; Sisa’s Dementia, a dessert inspired by Jose Rizal’s novel Noli Me Tangere, at Restaurante Pia y Damaso; chef Myrna Segismundo at her private New Manila Kitchen in Quezon City.

the cuisine tonight—light, fresh and sublimely flavorful— is a world away from that description. But when I ask Segismundo if she’ll be opening up a restaurant so more people can try it, she’s staunch. “This sort of setup works for me,” she says. “I wouldn’t want to invest in a big restaurant and burn out. I have the best of both worlds here.”

round town, I enjoy a cavalcade of meals that

prove that despite its detractors, Manila’s Filipino food scene is maturing. In the Philippine wing of Greenbelt 5 mall, I try Bambi Sy Gocio’s wickedly playful Pia y Damaso, where “subversive Filipino cuisine,” inspired by Philippine national hero Jose Rizal’s seminal novel Noli Me Tangere, takes the form of salty-sweet pork asado tarts and brazo ni Dona Vicki, a twist on the rolled meringue cake known as brazo de Mercedes. At sleek Sentro 1771 in Serendra, I delight in the fresh lumpia with smoked bangus, and the corned-beef sinigang, a stew soured with tamarind to taste. I also return to a favorite home-style haunt of mine, Café Juanita, in Pasig, to discover that it has moved from its location, in an old house, to a newer, more spacious setting. While the eclectic curiosityshop interior has been upgraded with décor that can only be described as flamboyant ethnic chic, the food, by Dr. Boy Vasquez (a former ob-gyn turned restaurateur; don’t ask), stays reliably delicious: velvety kare kare with plenty of sauce, angel-hair pasta with decadent crab-fat sauce, and delicate, smoky ginataang gulay, made of eggplant and water cabbage simmered in coconut, ginger and chili. The new Chef ’s Table, I imagine, will both feed on and drive these developments. At press time, it will have been open for more than a month. But for now, I sit down to its final turn as a private kitchen, in the small, intimate space above Lim’s family’s furniture factory. Despite a week of 106

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nonstop feeding, I eat with renewed vigor, polishing off a six-course meal, parts of which, I’m told, will be on the menu at the new restaurant. So here’s a tip: don’t miss the ambrosial steamed lapu lapu, or grouper, atop ube and bokchoy. The dish’s use of ube is doubly risky—this is, after all, a rice-loving city, where ube is traditionally a dessert— but the room devours every last bite. For a moment, I consider licking my plate. But then I remember something Lim said over that humble lunch on Roxas Boulevard: “As a TV chef, your face is going to bring them to the restaurant. Your food is what will keep them coming back.” Tongue firmly in mouth, I begin to plot my next trip. ✚

GUIDE TO manila dining Chef’s Table Ground floor, Unit 106, The Infinity Tower, 26th St., Fort Bonifacio Global City, Taguig; 63-2/399-1888; chefstablemanila. com; dinner for two P3,000. Bistro Filipino Ground floor, Net 2 Ericsson Bldg., 3rd Ave., Fort Bonifacio Global City; 63-2/8560634; dinner for two P3,000. New Manila Kitchen 45 Sunrise Hill, New Manila Rolling Hills Village, Quezon City; 63-2/7210736; dinner per head from P1,500, 10-person minimum. Café Juanita 19 West Capitol Dr., Barrio Capitolyo, Pasig; 63-2/6320357; or Unit WS-2 Burgos Circle, Forbestown Center, Fort Bonifacio Global City, Taguig; 63-2/4031952; dinner for two P1,800. Restaurante Pia y Damaso Unit 2-053, 2nd level, Greenbelt 5,

Ayala Center, Makati; 63-2/7295511; dinner for two P2,000; cocktails for two P500. Sentro 1771 Serendra Piazza, Fort Bonifacio Global City, Taguig; 63-2/856-0581; dinner for two P1,200. Adarna Food & Culture Regional and heirloom recipes in a cosy space. 119 Kalayaan Avenue, Quezon City; 63-2/926-8712; dinner for two P100. Aling Tonya’s Seafood Palutuan Fresh seafood cooked to order. Unit 105, Seaside Macapagal Blvd., Pasay; 63-2/556-1781; lunch for two P600. Aristocrat The main branch of the popular chain, established in 1936. 432 San Andres corner Roxas Blvd., Malate, 63-2/5247671; lunch for two P300.

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110 FIVE-STAR energy on Ko Samui 120 Cheju stirs some old MEMORIES 132 Unearthing the hidden JOYS of Paris 144 Surprises at EVERY turn in Shanghai 109

Tune In, Chill

While Ko Samui continues to change, before, it still offers that chance to get By Richard Hermes. Photographed 110

Out Have jeep, will travel. From opposite left: At the Banyan Tree Samui; fusion fare at the new Hansar Samui.

with more five-star options than ever away from it all in a tropical setting. by Cedric Arnold 111

when I spent a week there,

fat moon hangs over June’s Art Café in Bophut, Ko Samui, and Chana Kuanlieng, an old artist friend of June Kerdsompong, is making deep, resonant music from a twometer-long, bright blue PVC didgeridoo. It’s difficult to believe that such a complicated sound could come out of an instrument that looks comically homemade. “You stole my water pipe,” one wit shouts from the corner. But there’s no denying the mesmerizing power of Chana’s playing. The shifts in register come in hypnotizing waves, breaking unexpectedly at times, jolting the listener out of a trance and then, just as quickly, lulling him into a new one. Another musician places a microphone at the bottom of the tube. Diners set down their forks. Two rosy-cheeked Russian toddlers, a brother and a sister, lay transfixed with their bellies on the floor, jaws slack, ignoring their teddy bears and books, involuntarily nodding their heads. It’s a primal call resonating through everything: the wooden tables, chairs, tapping feet, bones in the legs. The sound might even be shaking the small images of Buddha on shelves; it looks like their heads might be nodding along with the toddlers’. Or it’s an optical illusion. When the music stops there is a collective inhale. The little boy starts to cry. Like everyone else, he doesn’t want it to end. In six years of living in Thailand, I had never viewed Ko Samui as anything other than a ferry stop to further islands. It seemed that there were always other, less-developed locales to explore. Yet, when I spent a week there in late September, I saw a different Samui. It was a good time to be on the island, just before the October rains and concurrent with two festivals: one, the Jazz Festival, quickly establishing itself as a draw for tourists; and another, the Samui Mala Festival, a more local affair that offers a window into what’s truly special about Samui, including Seva Night at June’s. June came to Samui more than a decade ago, prodded by what she calls the “two people inside me, who were always fighting”—the busy Bangkok marketing professional and the woman with a desire to live life at a different rhythm. She, too, was told that Samui people »

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i saw a different samui

Island Tastes Clockwise from above: June of Juneâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Art CafĂŠ; a vendor on Chaweng Beach; the Langham Place courtyard; the pool at Beach Republic; at the new Hansar Samui; pan-seared sea scallops at Langham Place.

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Samui retains its local Muslim roots.

guests read novels to the 114

didn’t welcome other Thais, but she ignored that advice. “When I came here,” she said, “I felt good energy and thought this is my home.” One evening every month, June opens her doors with free food as a way of saying thanks to the customers who have, in many cases, become her friends. She’s been doing it for the past year and a half. In return, they might bring something for her: a song, or a poem or a book for the library. They can also make a donation to the local charitable project that June is supporting that month. The vegetarian fare—including tofu cakes with sesame, garam masala and pumpkin sauce—is delicious, and among the people in the room, including a number of Samui’s old hands and colorful characters, there’s a palpable sense of gratitude. To be sure, there is truth in what people say about the island’s growing pains, and the scale of its problems may be even greater than local officials let on. Waste processing is at critical capacity; freshwater resources are stretched perilously thin. But standing there in June’s café amid an atmosphere of mutual generosity, I asked myself why it had taken me so long to get myself to Samui.

Poplak, a 13-year resident of Samui and co-founder of Tamarind Springs Forest Spa, gets passionate when she speaks about the island she calls home. She started the Mala Festival four years ago as a single-day event coinciding with the United Nations Day of Peace—mala is Sanskrit for bead. Since then it has grown into a full-fledged festival that brings people together under the ethos that, rather than complaining about what’s wrong with a place, it’s better to be proactive in creating the environment you want. For many, that change starts with one’s self, and so the spirit of Mala is an eclectic blend of personal growth and community activism. In Shelley’s view, the economic slowdown, despite the difficulties it may cause for people in the tourism sector, is an opportunity for the island to catch its breath. “Samui is ‘Stop, be quiet, listen,’” she says. “We’re taught that we should always have more.” With the Mala, “We’re learning to find the rituals for gratitude.” Early in the week, those rituals included a session at Samahita Yoga Thailand, led by Dorien Israel, on “the playfulness of peace.” Israel invited participants to act like kids: to roll around, skip and blow bubbles. She played the theme from Dirty Dancing, “The Time of My Life,” a song so cheesy it’s guaranteed to provoke giggles. Which was the point. “I was asking, ‘Does your peace have laughter?’ My feeling is that peace does not have to pretend to be something. It’s synonymous with joy, exuberance and helley

enthusiasm. It doesn’t have to be sitting on a cushion, chanting ohm shanti, as if ‘I’m so quiet and serious and peaceful but I don’t like anyone who’s not like me.’” To prove her point, Israel asked the group to vocalize whatever sounds came out naturally. Soon they started laughing, embarrassed by their spontaneous outbursts of ohhhs and ahhhs. “We had peals of laughter, the best detox for the body.”

ost people who combine a yoga retreat into

their vacation start with the decadent eating and drinking and end with the stretching, sweating and breathing. I did it in reverse, beginning my trip with three blissful days of ashtanga practice at Samahita Yoga Thailand, followed by a bit of a retox. Samui’s identity as “The Healing Island” developed organically. When Paul Dallaghan and his wife Jutima founded Yoga Thailand in 2003, it was the first dedicated yoga retreat in the region. They’d come by chance, but stayed because it simply felt right. Now, it’s places such as their resort, along with Tamarind Springs, and others, that form Samui’s “heart center,” to borrow a yogic term. Historically, the island has had a strong relationship with the dhamma, Paul says. The well-known monk Luang Phor Daeng, who lived not far from Yoga Thailand’s new location on the southern Laem Sor Beach, was “a realized master teacher… one of those advanced presences in Thailand.” Similarly, Karina Wagner, co-owner of Kamalaya Koh Samui, said that she and her partner knew they’d found the right piece of land when they saw the 700-year-old meditation cave built into its hillside. This tradition has been largely eclipsed by tourism, but the two do coexist. Still, you can be sure that for every yogi-intraining bowing their head and saying “Namaste,” there are dozens of revelers across the island praying to a bucket of Sangsom and Red Bull bristling with straws. Luxury hotel openings are also moving along, with a cluster of upmarket projects opening this year and next. They include the Banyan Tree, an all-villa development occupying a private bay; Langham Place, with a meld of pan-Asian design, right on Lamai Beach; the W Retreat Koh Samui, which opens this month on a peninsula on Mae Nam; and the Conrad, slated for next year. Unlike many new hotel developments that are isolated from any walkable experience of the island, Hansar Samui boasts a location right next to Fisherman’s Village on Bo Phut Beach, with its funky shops and beachside ice cream cafés. Hansar is also home to H-Bistro, which local foodies are calling one of the very best restaurants on Samui. »

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For many who call samui Hansar’s developers stirred up controversy when they removed of a line of native tonson trees from the beachfront road, but the result, for better or worse, is an unobstructed view of the shimmering Gulf. Guests read their novels to the steady massage of the water jets built into the submerged seats in the infinity pool. Newer is not always better. At Tamarind Springs, the hydrotherapy comes in a more natural form: a small waterfall pressing down on your shoulders for as many luxurious minutes as you care to receive it. “The luxury here is nature,” says Benjamas Pongchababnapa, managing director and co-owner. “That’s what we provide for the customer.” Benjamas is being modest; Tamarind Springs also provides excellent massages. My own therapist is named Tak. She tells me that she’s from Nakhon Phanom, in the northeast. She came to Samui with her husband when she was 16, enquiring at Tamarind Springs with nothing but a desire to learn. They took her on, and now she’s doing body-melting things to the underside of my scapula. Benjamas actually prefers to take on aspiring therapists with no experience, the better to mold them in their training program, led by Austrian Heimo Reiger. A former ski instructor, Reiger broke his neck when he was 20 and doctors said he wouldn’t walk again. After a year in the hospital of drilling and pulling on his spine, he landed on Samui to learn about Buddhism and discovered the healing art of Thai massage. He has his therapists do 90 minutes of led yoga every morning to strengthen them for the daily grind and teach them about the meditative moment. The environment, too, feels carefully considered. The place is so simple, so admirably executed to be both comfortable and natural, functional and inspirational, someone should put it on the national register of protected places. The people who attend Mala events, like the people who spend a lot of time on Samui in general, are a diverse bunch. There are fasting fanatics and psychological astrologers (combined in one lovely woman named Hillary Hitt, a sprightly 60-year-old who can twirl to techno with so much verve that she makes you wonder if a limited caloric intake could enhance your rhythm). There’s a former polo pony trainer, hydroponic lettuce farmer, Tongalese island surveillance equipment maintainer, and current carnivorous plant grower. Also all the same person. He lives in the forest and his name is Shawn Mayes. Don’t dismiss this beautiful collection of kooky folks as eccentrics. If there’s a set of shared values that attract them to the Mala Festival, it’s a sense of openness, appreciation and good old-fashioned fun. You don’t set up shop in Ko Samui in the first place if you’re allergic to fun. 116

On Friday, most of these folks came to Rock Bar to celebrate the memory of Asambai, a widely loved musician who died in September in a motorbike accident. Poplak tears up when I ask her about her friends on the island, because this year she has lost three, including Asambai. It’s a reminder that life on Samui—which includes a dangerous ring road and the highest motor vehicle accident rate in the nation—is not all ecstatic giggles. Tonight, though, is about celebrating Asambai’s life in his favorite pub. Rock Bar, relocated not far down the beach from its former spot underneath the famous genital-shaped rocks Hin Ta Hin Yai, might be the last of its species. With makeshift platforms built against tall rocks that shelter the beach, it’s the kind of ultra-casual place that’s still common on Ko Pha-Ngan or Ko Tao, but nearly extinct on Samui. Before sunset, we carry our drinks up a bamboo ladder to sit on top of a huge granite boulder, perhaps six meters tall. Together we watch the sea turn to ink while, below, a young woman in a white dress twirls flames on chains with such casual grace and charm—if it’s possible to be charming while you spin fire—that I begin to wonder if two people can build a meaningful relationship around a shared appreciation for things that twirl and glow. Next to her, a young man balances himself on a line of rope suspended over the surf. Legs wobbling but holding firm, he perches a full bottle of Singha on his forehead and proceeds to toss three flaming torches into the night sky and, for the most part, catch them and send them up again. I sit and stare in awe, occasionally eyeing the bamboo ladder, considering with cowardly trepidation my next trip down for another beer. For many who’ve come to call the place home, it’s not too late for Samui. Traffic may get worse before it gets better; construction may boom further before a more managed form of chaos, if not tranquility, rules the day. But peace and happiness are inside us, Israel tells me, even if we woke up that morning questioning our pursuit of both of them at Rock Bar. It’s Sunday, the last day of Mala and the last day of my trip. We’re at Kamalaya, sitting on a much smaller rock now, with a view through the trees to the water below. It’s one of the many spots at the resort that are conducive to quiet reflection. “Samui is a microcosm of the world,” she says. That’s partly true. Like many other places, it has inspiring vistas and greedy land developers, sex tourists and shopkeepers. It also seems special, for having a greater concentration of people like Israel, June, Benjamas and Poplak. But I do not object. “When I came to this island I didn’t even know if I could feed myself,” Israel tells me. “And it wasn’t romantic, it was terrifying.” After the end of her 33-year marriage, “I think »

home, itâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s not too late Samui Sounds Clockwise from below: Oceans Elite charters take guests on exclusive private excursions; solitude at Ang Thong Marine Park; local reggae along Chaweng Beach; a dish from Saffron at the Banyan Tree.

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Thai massage yoga at Tamarind Springs.

I came here to die, but something majestic and mysterious picked me up.” “So the question is, what do you want to focus on? You can stay up until 6 a.m. being drunk or wake up at four in the morning and watch the sun come up over the most exquisite nature.” Thais, Israel points out, are very good at “live and let live.” There’s a lesson in that. “If there’s something you don’t like, you don’t have to fight it. That’s what every war is about: we know better how it should be.” Embrace what you love, she says. Like laughing. Our mind tricks us, she says, into thinking that we need to keep moving to the next geographical location where we’ll be happiest. The “remote” island she fell in love with no longer exists, but she’s not leaving any time soon. “Home is just where you feel comfortable in your own skin,” she says. Later that night, I peruse the Sunday market on Walking Street with Benjamas, who grew up in Lamai town. She helps me find local delicacies like yam sarai kaew (spicy seaweed salad) with crab, and khanom jeen nam yaa pak tai (a rice noodle dish with fresh and pickled herbs). An old lady selling mee phat calls out to her and says she knew her dad. On the beach in

front of the Jazz Festival stage we scoop out a hole in the sand for a candle, the way she and her friends used to do when they were kids, and eat our meal to the syncopated beats. I had avoided Ko Samui all these years because I was afraid I wouldn’t be able to find an “authentic” Samui. But I was missing the point. Yes, I enjoyed hearing stories about old island life from people who grew up there. Yes, I’ll miss the yam sarai. And I’ll admit that a part of me wishes I’d asked about the sign along the ring road that reads monkey show monkey work coconut. But what is Samui? Samui is my Isan therapist and her Austrian teacher. It’s sound meditation at Kamalaya led by a woman from Alabama and pumpkin pie served in a café owner from Bangkok. It’s an artist from Hua Hin visiting with his aboriginal Australian instrument made from PVC, playing for babies from Russia. It’s every part of the great microcosm that is this quirky, gem of an island. Disparate wavelengths that keep humming and buzzing and chanting along, and somehow, impossibly, manage to merge into a real community. And visitors like us, well, we’re lucky. All we need to do is tune in. ✚

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guide to ko samui GETTING THERE Bangkok Airways (bangkokair. com) has frequent daily flights direct to Samui from Bangkok, Phuket, Hong Kong and Singapore. Thai Airways (thaiairways.com) operates two flights a day from Bangkok. WHERE TO STAY Banyan Tree Most of the villas in this private crescent-shaped cove have a sea view, and easy access to the 35-square-meter pool. 99/9 Moo 4, Maret; 66-77/ 915-333; banyantree.com/en/ samui; villas from Bt25,000 a night. Four Seasons 219 Moo 5 Angthong; 66-77/243-000; fourseasons.com/kohsamui; doubles from Bt18,700. Hansar Samui You could throw a mangosteen and hit Fisherman’s Village from this new, well-run hotel. 101/28 Moo 1, Bophut; 66-77/245-511; hansarsamui.com; doubles from Bt9,000. Langham Place With its hybrid Chinese—Southeast Asian look, Langham Place is a modern twist on a beach resort. 146/24 Moo 4, Maret; 66-77/960-888; kohsamui. langhamplacehotels.com; suites from Bt6,500. The Library The 26 individual cabins here are designed with a minimalist bent with strong colors. 14/1 Moo 2, Chaweng Beach; 66-77/422-767; thelibrary. co.th; cabins from Bt12,600.

thescenthotel.com; suites from Bt5,300.

Dern (Walking Street); dishes from Bt30.

W Samui It’s all about glitter and glam at the newest luxury hotel on the island. A towering observation deck, with a reflection pool lounge, looks out over 43 villas, the spa and the sea. 4/1 Moo 1, Maenam; 66-77/ 915-999; whotels.com; doubles from Bt16,000 per night.

Orgasmic Walter Andreini, or Chef Wally, was well-known as the chef at Zazen before opening this independent restaurant on Bophut Bay. The menu makes an admirable effort with creative Mediterranean and Thaiinfluenced dishes. The lovely beachside setting, in the garden of an old house, helps set the mood. Bophut Beach Rd.; 66-86/276-9101; dinner for two Bt3,000.

YL Residence No. 17 Set on 5 hectares of the southeast coast, this resort has 10 exclusive rooms. 117 Moo 2, Maret; 66-77/ 419-150; ylresidence.com; villas from US$3,000. WHERE TO EAT Beach Republic The Sunday brunch buffet makes all-you-can-eat look stylish. Afternoon DJs play chilled-out beats while loungers drink, digest and watch the sun set on the weekend. 176/34 Moo 4, Tambon Maret; 66-77/458-100; beachrepublic.com; brunch Bt695 per person. H-Bistro In the four months since he opened, chef Stephen Jean Dion has quickly created one of the island’s very best upscale Western dining options. The chocolate fondant is memorably rich and molten. 101/28 Moo 1, Bophut; 66-77/ 245-511; hansarsamui.com.

Samahita Yoga Thailand If you’re serious about your yoga, look no further. Their expanded wellness offerings are tailored to support your practice. Retreats and classes offered regularly. 66-77/920-090; yoga-thailand. com; one-week retreats from ¤650, including food and accommodation.

June’s Art Café The original Nathon branch was one of the first places to offer fresh coffee on the island. Now in Bophut too, June sells great baked goods, along with a variety of healthy shakes and creative vegetarian fare. Be sure to try the tofu masala patties. 119/17 Ring Rd., Bophut, in the Samui Town Center building; 66-77/425-587; juneartcafe.com; breakfast or dinner for two Bt300.

The Scent Hotel There are 15 guestrooms here stylishly designed in European, Chinese or Thai-Chinese mode. Moo 4 Bangrak Beach; 66-77/962-198;

Lamai Sunday Market Only six months old, this market and its wide selection of local street food is already a weekly ritual for many hungry Thais. Thanon Khon

Sabieng Lae A local institution, this is the place to go in Lamai for Samui-specific Thai seafood, like plaa sai thot kamin (small fish fried with turmeric) and black pepper nam prik. 438/82 Ring Rd.; 66-81/538.7045; dinner for two Bt500. WHAT TO DO Kamalaya Koh Samui Expansive in both area and offerings, this holistic wellness resort has something for nearly everyone, including India-trained ayurvedic massage therapists. 102/9 Moo 3,

Laem Set Rd., Namuang; 66-77/429-800; kamalaya.com; spa packages from Bt6,400. Oceans Elite For a trifling Bt350,000, you can charter a 30-meter motor yacht, complete with Jacuzzi, to any of 50 possible Gulf island destinations that are within an hour of Samui. With the addition of a bay cruiser to their fleet there’s a more affordable option, too: Bt40,000 for the whole day, including park admission, food and open bar for up to 12. 33 Moo 4, Bangrak, Bophut; 66-77/427- 244; oceanselite.net. Tamarind Springs Forest Spa The shortest packages are four hours, but you won’t want to leave the chirping birds and breeze blowing through the open salas. 205/7 Moo 4, Thong Takien; 66-77/230-571; tamarind springs.com; spa and steam treatments from Bt5,500. Fisherman’s Village Walkable, colorful and full of character, this stretch of shops and restaurants on Bophut Beach is most lively on Friday nights.

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Rape flowers and a Tol-Harubang, a large statue common to Cheju.

A Trip in Time

Seeking a break from the modern world, MIN JIN LEE explores Cheju Island, searching out its volcanic landscape on foot and making sure sheâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s never far from a good meal. It turns out to be a journey that stirs a few memories. Photographed by Seong Joon Cho

Atop Mt. Halla. From right: Climbing the 1,950-meter volcano; barbecued Cheju black pork; the bell tower of one of the island’s Buddhist temples.

y plane, we were just two-and-a-half hours away from Tokyo where we’d recently made our home, and one from Seoul, my birthplace. But despite its proximity to these two Asian metropolises, Cheju was improbably emerald green, and everywhere you looked lush flora covered its fantastic geometry of basalt. From the plane, the rock island seemed to float between two seas resembling a large black mussel with Halla Mountain as its dark green heart. On the ground, as our airport taxi cut across the 1,847-square-kilometer island, the air moved briskly from warm to cool to warm again as we ascended up to 640 meters and descended as much before reaching our hotel at sea level. The driver, a Cheju native and son of a tangerine farmer, was eager to chat. He asked us questions about our stay, and I half-listened to Christopher answering him as I rolled down the car window some more and inhaled deeply the evening breezes. You could smell the delicious orange leaves spiked by the damp sea air. Finally, I was back in Cheju. Even before it started, the trip had felt packed to bursting with life’s benchmarks: a 15th wedding anniversary, the first holiday without our son Sam who was having his own first experience at camp, my 40th birthday, Christopher’s first trip to the island and my return after 21 summers. We had just finished up our first year of expatriate life in Tokyo, so this time we skipped Seoul—another fast urban capital—and flew directly to Cheju. Christopher and I would break from the modern world, and we’d hike an ancient volcanic isle and eat with abandon, not always in that order.

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In 2002, unesco designated the island of Cheju a Biosphere Reserve—a globally significant, diverse ecological system worthy of conservation and study. There are only 564 Biosphere Reserves in 109 countries, with South Korea possessing exactly four. Then in 2007, Halla Mountain, Geomunoreum lava tube system (Manjangul) and Seongsan Ilchulbong tuff cone (Sunrise Peak) were collectively designated one of the 180 Natural sites on the unesco World Heritage Foundation list. Cheju is a subtropical island with four seasons, and it is South Korea’s premier tourist destination. The getaway— about 97 kilometers south of the mainland—is best during fall and spring when gorgeous tangerine trees are harvested, and the 1,800 kinds of local flora shamelessly hold sway. We were there in the first week of August, considered the peak of the summer season, and with neither of us being beach types, we got to enjoy the prime rock marvels of the island, curiously neglected by local tourists. One of the hardest things for an urban girl like me—born, raised and having only lived in a collection of gritty cities like Seoul, New York and now Tokyo—to understand is that

millions of years ago, Earth’s surfaces could have actually cracked open beneath the sea and spewed magma to form a lava island, a mountain 1,950 meters high and more than 360 parasitic volcanoes—bizarre humps and craters that the natives call oreums which bubble across the Cheju terrain. Mind you, I’ve skipped a dozen steps at least to spare you my amateur volcanology, but that was how Cheju happened. It is one thing to look over the diagrams of your earth science textbook, and surely another to walk across the physical evidence of Earth’s spitting range. We wanted to begin our trip with strange rocks so we drove east to Swesoggak, a lava estuary. The estuary, or as Christopher termed it the “mini-fjord,” was enclosed by an agglomeration of soft-edged boulders. It looked as if giant preschoolers had squished putty then tossed it in a pile, leaving behind their oversize thumbprints and fist marks. The lavaformed Hyodoncheon stream that can alter the water level of the canyon is largely dry except during the rainy seasons, so the waters from the South Sea primarily fill Swesoggak. Christopher and I clambered across the lava boulders—he, more sure-footed than I, but I felt happy to be wobbly, the » 123

way you are when you try a new sport. When the view became too pretty to walk past, I plopped down on a sun-warmed stone, the size of a loveseat à la The Flintstones to really take it in. The canyon water shimmered green and aqua in the early light of the day. I was reluctant to leave this quiet, old spot, but a tuff cone was waiting. One hundred thousand years ago, Earth’s crust beneath the eastern end of Cheju ruptured again and the interaction of magma, steam and volcanic gases ejected a floury ash that consolidated into a tuff cone. Seongsan Ilchulbong, also known as Sunrise Peak and a third of the World Heritage Site trinity, heads the Top 10 list of the Most Beautiful Views of Cheju, and no one would contest this baby’s number one position. At 90 meters high with a diameter of 610 meters, this volcanic landform is about half the size of the more famous Diamond Head in Hawaii—a classic example of tuff or pyroclastic cones—but Sunrise Peak is more visually arresting because it is surrounded by the deep blue waters of the East China Sea and only minimally attached to Cheju itself. The outline of this dramatic tuff cone is more ring-like than conical, resembling a glorious fallen cheesecake bobbing 124

in the sea. As we drove along the Shinsanri seaside road, the peak—singular against the backdrop of water—loomed closer, and though I’d seen photographs of it many times previously, its vertical cliffs, verdant and partly sunken crater and its overall, well, stateliness were bewilderingly beautiful to both of us. Once out of the car, we walked along the majestic rockpaved road to approach the foot of the peak. We’d expected to brave a crowd, but there were perhaps two dozen tourists hiking around us. It was almost like having your very own unesco World Heritage Site. Christopher and I stood at the crest of Sunrise Peak, marveling over its vast crater chock full of pines, evergreens, and blue and white flowers. A gray rabbit darted across our feet then parked itself beneath a low bush and gazed at the sea. Not far off, you could make out the old lighthouse and the white coral beaches of Udo—one of the few inhabited lava islets of Cheju. Koreans are temperamentally antsy, but half a dozen stood fixed with their mouths agape, unable to make words, for it was one of those transformative, gob-smacking views. When it was time to go, we climbed down slowly, »

The sheer coastline on Cheju.

Hiking Chejuâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s interior is popular during the colorful fall months.

On Cheju, thereâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s no shortage of natural beauty.

lingering to snap the photographs that would doubtlessly fail to capture the Peak’s sublime fullness.

Cheju was in 1987. I was 18, and had returned to South Korea where I’d lived until age seven. That summer, I studied Korean language in Seoul, but mostly, I was listless and sad about a boy back home, so in the humid afternoons, I lingered at a bakery near the college and ate paht bingsoo—a dreamy confection of shaved ice, paht (sweetened azuki beans), fruit and milk—to numb my injured ego. The language course ended soon enough, but without a word from that boy. My mother and father, however, had not forgotten me. They wired money so I could go to Cheju on a weekend holiday—a luxury they’d never allowed for themselves. I traveled with a daughter of a family friend, and together we trudged to Cheonjeyeon to admire the threetiered cascading waterfalls where the seven nymphs bathed under the moon. More in line with my lovesick mood, we also walked silently along Jungmun Beach in the gorgeous twilight as I continued to simmer in my adolescent broth of self-pity, vaguely aware of walking on volcanic soil. For food, I ordered naengmyun— chilled buckwheat noodles in an icy soup that I doctored with vinegar and inadvisable spoonfuls of hot mustard—for every meal. Cheju was historically the island for honeymooners, and on the island of love, with the conviction of a high-minded girl who’d evidently been jilted, I vowed never to have such lousy feelings again and let the calm of the island work like a salve on my young heart. At a family reunion in Seoul, I asked my chic thirtysomething cousin her opinion of Cheju. She and her handsome currencytrader husband lit up. Everyone goes to Cheju, she said—the hip couple agreeing that it was a national treasure. “Did you spend your honeymoon there?” I asked. They looked puzzled. “No. You go to Cheju before you get married,” she hinted knowingly. “Or after. With the kids, parents and grandparents. Some people go once a year.” For our parents’ generation, exotic Cheju had been a oncein-a-lifetime holiday. Since then, the stunning island has only added to its charms while the mainland has also been prospering, so now, worldly South Koreans allow themselves what might’ve once been considered scandalous notions—of lovers’ getaways or regular summer vacations for the extended family on Cheju. Today, wealthy South Koreans keep country residences in Biotopia—a swank villa community in the y first trip to

Sangcheon township of Cheju—developed by Kim Hongjoo, the owner of both the Pinx Golf Club and the luxurious Podo Hotel. Christopher and I wanted to see more rocks. About 2 kilometers west of Seogwipo City, we had no trouble finding Oedolgae, the 20-meter tall lava column that had risen from the East China Sea 1.5 million years ago. Like many of Cheju’s wonders, Oedolgae, translated loosely as Lonely Rock, is attached with several legends. The most affecting one is of the fisherman’s wife who waited faithfully for her husband to return from his hard labor at sea, and when he did not, she turned into a rock. Indeed, the basalt pillar has an imaginable profile of a woman bereft. The trees on its crown make up the widow’s mourning headdress, and at her feet, it is said that not long after the wife petrified, a flat boulder appeared mysteriously—the body of the husband—and joined itself to her. Have I mentioned that my people are notoriously romantic? On the advice of Minsuk Cho, one of Asia’s rising young architects, we headed out to Jusangjeolli along the Jungmun coastline. We had never seen hexagonal basalt column formations before—the most famous one being Giant’s Causeway in Northern Ireland—and it was shocking to see these black columned cliffs ascending in size order. The rapid contraction of basalt flow had made these elegant, seemingly man-made forms, conjuring up the coin stacks of a giant miser. It made sense to me that an architect—an eternal student of design and ecosystems—would have been impressed by this pre-modern creation exhibiting nature’s aesthetic genius and wit. From the top of the promontory, the sea air felt cool and salty, and it was possible to imagine what the world might have looked like 1.5 million years ago. My husband nudged me from my reverie. “Look left,” he said. The haenyo were here. I’d hoped to see Cheju’s celebrated women sea divers working, but I’d been warned that this would be unlikely. This aging group of divers had learned their trade from their mothers who in turn had learned it from theirs, and due to the life-risking nature of their profession, their numbers were rapidly diminishing. During the mid 20th century, there had been almost 30,000 registered haenyo, but today there are only about 5,000—nearly all of whom are past 50. Soon, catching sight of the camera-shy haenyo will be like spotting unicorns. Nevertheless, the modern haenyo continue to dive to depths of 20 meters for three minutes at a time without any external breathing equipment to harvest the Cheju abalone, sea urchin and sea squirt. »

Soon, catching sight of the camera-shy haenyo, korea’s women sea divers, will be like spotting unicorns

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Kayaking along Swesoggak, a lava estuary. From right: Hairtail fish for sale at Dongmun wet market; local bite-size delicacies; snapping a vacation memory.

Below us, the four haenyo were treading the East China Sea. Their taewak—an empty gourd flotation device—bobbed near them, attached to mesh nets storing their catch of the day. Suddenly, the haenyo—their faces sun-wizened and bright, their bodies still girlish—filled up their supernatural lungs then vanished into the water. I stopped breathing, too, but quit well before they shot up, breaking up the glassy surface of the water. Christopher and I had known that our pal John Bu was born in Cheju and had emigrated to the U.S. as a child, but what we hadn’t known was that, as a scion of the Bu, Go and Yang brothers who founded the independent Tamna kingdom—the precursor of Cheju—John was also a descendant of a demigod. His family lore, also known as the Tamna genesis myth goes like this: When Cheju was a desolate lava island, three brothers emerged from underground caves at the foot of Halla mountain. One day, the brothers spotted a wooden box floating toward the shore from the East Sea. In it were an envoy and a jade case housing three princesses in blue frocks, seed of five different grains, cattle and horses—all gifts from the king from Byeongnangguk of the East Sea. The 128

brother gods married the princesses. Then, from the peak of Sasijanorak oreum, each brother shot his arrow, and where it landed became his portion. There, the young patriarchs planted the dowry grains and raised livestock, thus beginning Tamna’s agricultural era. We went to Cheju City to see Samseonghyeol—the spot where the brothers first appeared. The small plot of land was encircled by 24 wooden stakes, and two of the three holes had been mostly covered over by time. We peered into the grasscarpeted cavities, not unlike the green of a golf course, and with no disrespect to John, imagined three Koreans popping out like groundhogs.

s the island’s capital,

Cheju City reflects the commonplace East Asian architecture of the late 1980’s and early 90’s with low-slung glass buildings and strip mall–type storefronts, but as the home to more than two-thirds of the 565,000 residents of the island, it is the best place to see how the islanders work and live in their developing province. Not being a crowded city, it is easy to identify Cheju National University female students strolling

arm in arm, government workers lunching near City Hall and housewives shopping for their groceries at E-mart, the mainland chain supermarket, as well as its old-style markets. The Dongmun wet market was churning with the women of Cheju setting up shop, and immediately on arrival, I bemoaned our lack of a kitchen. The night before, we’d had a tasty Cheju dinner at Oreumak Garden with barbecued Cheju black pork, stewed hairtail fish, grilled okdom—the halved and sun-dried sea bream, and of course, naengmyun, but the market’s splendid produce, displays of just-caught fish made me want to try my hand at making haemul ttukbaegi—the spicy red seafood stew cooked and served scalding hot in a ttukbaegi, the Korean clay pot. In the immaculately clean fish stalls, silvery hairtail were displayed like polished cutlasses and red tilefish shone like ingots of gold. Cheju women hawked genially for customers. In my mind, I was already putting on a pot of barley rice and chopping green chili peppers for my crock of stew, but as we turned a corner, I was diverted. Last night’s dinner, the black pig—Cheju’s culinary pride—was thickly sliced and grilled over glowing charcoal at the table. When the meat was

cooked, I dabbed a morsel in chili–miso paste then wrapped it in lettuce like a savory present. It just didn’t get better than that for eating pig. However, my urban squeamishness returned full blast when a butcher in a white undershirt with a movie-star profile, no less, was hacking away at a pig carcass with a hatchet. Three grinning pigs’ heads, glazed to a tawny golden hue, decorated the front of his stall. Suddenly, fruits and vegetables seemed more appealing. About a full city block down the cavernous market, we located the tangerines. Even at 6,000 won a piece, I filled my tote bag with a half-dozen of the Hallabong variety, a deluxe hybrid of native tangerines and the Japanese ponkan. Physically, they are a cross between the tangerine and grapefruit—and the scent was heady. Nearing lunch time, we found ourselves floating toward the back of the market, following the wafting aroma of roasted sesame oil. Hello, snack stalls. Fortunately, Sam did not have to witness his mother and father darting shamelessly from stall to stall—from chapssal doughnuts to ttukbokki—sticky rice-cake tubes and oden swimming in a sweet, chili gravy—before moving onto pudgy rolls of kimbop bursting with yellow » 129

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meditating cross-legged. But there was no one there. In the hushed, elevated heights, it was as if we had entered the landscape image of an ancient scroll painting. Christopher and I rested on the smooth, lava peak of Halla Mountain, and, much improved and restored, we headed down before losing the light. We returned to our hotel exhausted and triumphant—a physiological condition worthy of sugar, I think. Christopher and I looked for paht bingsoo. Tipped off by our Cheju intelligence, we went in search of the basement of an unremarkable Cheju City office building. Paparagi was styled as a whitewashed brick grotto, and this Cheju insider café serves the planet’s best bingsoo year round. Groups of college girls and tables of moms were sharing these KRW13,000-apop desserts served in family-size salad bowls. Unfazed, we ordered the original paht bingsoo and a chocolate bingsoo. On top of the must-have base ingredients, they were topped with kiwi, ice cream, bananas, watermelon, Asian pear, cornflakes, cherry tomatoes and sweet corn. It was scrumptious— somehow altogether crunchy, cold, sweet, light, nourishing and creamy. When I looked up momentarily to forestall any bingsoo brain freeze, I realized that Christopher hadn’t said a word, because he was so fully engaged with his bowl. Twentyone years—or a generation—later, I was finally having paht bingsoo with a boy. ✚

guide to cheju

HOW TO GET THERE There is no shortage of daily, nonstop flights from Seoul and nearby foreign cities such as Fukuoka, Osaka, Tokyo and Beijing. Asiana (flyasiana.com), Korean Air (koreanair.com), All Nippon Airways (ana.co.jp), Japan Airlines (jal.com/en) and China Eastern Airlines (flychina eastern.com) all offer services. WHERE TO STAY Podo Hotel San 62-2 Sangcheon-

ri, Andeok-myeon, Seogwipo; 8264/792-8000; podohotel.co. kr; doubles from KRW400,000. Shilla Cheju 3039-3, Saekdaldong, Seogwipo; 82-64/738-4466; shilla.net; doubles from KRW310,000. WHERE TO EAT Paparagi Various locations around the island including 1772-17 Ido 2-dong; 82-64/722-1888 and 129814 Ildo 1-dong; 82-64/753-2888.

map by wasinee chantakorn

pickled daikon, seasoned mushrooms and spinach, and its star, ahem, Korean ingredient: pink cords of SPAM. Nearby, an olive-complected woman fried battered hot dogs on skewers, but lest we call them corndogs, these puppies were distinguished by being battered once more with adorable cubes of potatoes, then fried again, forming a double-layered bumpy golden crust. Unwilling to forsake this heart-stopping vittle, I did as any honorable returnee Korean does: I picked up the red condiment bottle and Jackson Pollocked my corn dog cousin with ketchup drips to share with my agreeable half. A few steps away, boiled ears of corn were heaped in an aluminum washtub. Flecked with amber-, gold- and carneliancolored kernels, a mouthful was chewy and nutty like boiled peanuts, and though the corn resembled American maize, it tasted nothing like it. Clutching our bellies, Christopher and I waddled out of the market, but not without first saying yes to irresistibly good griddle cakes filled with a sweetened mungbean puree. We nibbled at the crisp edges while the vendor watched us like a happy mother. Holiday or no, the next morning, we would atone for such indiscretions, and thus we found ourselves climbing the highest mountain in South Korea. There are four trails for Halla, and I lobbied hard for the three- to four-hour roundtrip Yeongsil course—considered the easiest one, sure, but universally acknowledged as the most scenic. Yeongsil started at 1,280 meters, so even after 15 brisk minutes of climbing, the effort-to-extraordinary-view-payoff-ratio was unbeatable. A few minutes later and a bit higher, we gasped at the stark beauty of the Yeongsil Giam—the Mysterious Rocks, also known as 500 Generals, 500 Disciples or 500 Sons—varying monikers but all referring to these bizarre masculine rock formations. They were like nature’s giant gargoyles or the Abstract Expressionist figureheads on the prow of a lava ship. Unlike many mountain hikes where the vista is obstructed, and where you are promised a great view if and only if you keep up the death march upwards for hours, this climb was ideal for the impatient or, you might say, for those who prefer immediate gratification (read: me). The ascent was approachable to this newbie hiker, and we were regularly nourished by spectacular views—steep rock faces pleated like folding fans and tall cliffs ringed by white clouds. The velvety greens of Korean pines, firs and summer maple were ornamented by lush jewel-pink and blue mountain orchids, and the air was so sharp and clean that breathing felt new. I would do this hike again tomorrow if I could. Two short hours later, we reached the summit and came upon a vast prairie as flat as a table. It was almost impossible to accept the pale gray and blue sky, the white mist shifting like gauzy panels across the jagged basalt, the surging lava cliffs piercing the heavens, and the hunter green foliage everywhere else because it was altogether too ravishing. Yeongsil means “holy room,” and I half-expected to stumble upon a hermitage at the peak with a doddering mystic

A cloudy dawn from Sunrise Peak. Clockwise from above: Grilled and sundried sea bream; topping the stairs at a lava estuary; chilled buckwheat noodles in an icy broth.

Paris

Secrets Want to find the hidden joys of one of Europe’s most iconic destinations? ALEXANDRA MARSHALL shares her favorite haunts in the city she now calls home. Photographed by Richard Truscott Styled by Mimi Lombardo

Getting the lay of the land at the Parc Monceau, in the Ternes district. Jacket by YSL Edition 24; pants, Max Mara; earrings, Van Cleef & Arpels; scarf, Façonnable. Opposite: Montmartre’s Rue Chappe, in the 18th Arrondissement.

was only supposed to stay for two months. It was early 2006, my father had just passed away, and I was courting massive burnout. When a saintly friend offered me a free room in his three-bedroom apartment in St.-Germain-des-Prés, I booked my ticket. Okay, I thought. Get away, learn a little French, smell the rosé and come back fresh. But Paris had other plans for me. The way the apricot light at sunset bounced off its pale façades; the slower pace of life; the disdain for hysterical consumerism and the workaholism it requires; the tragic, fascinating history and the civic pride that comes with having survived it; the neighborhood markets, the organic markets, even the supermarkets, filled with readily available terroir: before my sojourn was up, I was hooked. When I discovered that I could buy an apartment for half of what I’d spend back in Brooklyn, the choice was practically made for me. As grateful as I was for the free digs, St.-Germain is a better neighborhood for finding a luxury handbag than a couple of lemons and a six-pack of Kronenbourg. But the perch I settled on, in Montmartre’s little village of Abbesses, is fit for my kind of living: relaxed, friendly and pleasantly cacophonous. It’s been almost five years and several swings of currency later, and with every passing day, my roots grow deeper. Despite the bureaucracy, which is even worse than people say, the occasional explosions of nastiness (Parisian manners are either baroque or shockingly bad) and the weird in-between-ness of expat life, it would take a government intervention to get me to leave. In the time from being a visitor to setting up house, I’ve learned that the Paris I live in is a much lovelier place than the one I had ever known before. The city’s deeply grooved tourist tracks—St.-Germain, the First, the Latin Quarter, the Champs Élysées—have much worth seeing, but compared with the life I live in the 18th Arrondissement, they feel slick and prefab, like a gift set of experiences shoved brusquely through a revolving door. In spite of being the world’s most visited urban center, and the proliferation of Subway sandwich shops, the occasional Starbucks and all those homegrown luxury companies gone multinational, the city is fueled by mom-and-pop businesses that allow it to maintain a profoundly, sometimes anarchically, idiosyncratic character. During an interview I did with the British actress Jane Birkin recently, she joked that France is a nation of soloists, incapable of forming an orchestra, and this is especially true in the capital city, which houses 10 million of the country’s boisterously unique, queue-jumping citoyens. The expressiveness, eccentricity and drama on display here are rivaled only by New York City at its most vibrant. It’s in the farther flung corners, the parts of the city less manicured for the consumption of outsiders, where you find the earthiness that mellows that bad temper, and where you more clearly see what makes Paris one of the most authentically charming places on earth.

VISIT “THE BIG NEIGHBORHOOD” Time for an American bakery metaphor: imagine the cinnamon bun–shaped map of Paris. Now slice a large wedge from the top section. You’ll end up cutting the Ninth, 10th, 17th, 18th and 19th Arrondissements, or what Sébastien Guénard, the chef at the fêted Abbesses bistro Miroir, calls “le grand quartier.” In the short time since I’ve moved to the area, I’ve watched the steady onslaught of gentrification (Hello, Kiehl’s; thanks for popping up, Comme des Garçons). The same is true for Pigalle and Notre-Dame-de-Lorette, just to the south; Batignolles, to the west (the rest of the 17th was already pretty haute-bourgeois); the Canal St.-Martin, in the 10th; Belleville, in the 19th and 20th; and other areas in the 19th that surround the Parc des Buttes-Chaumont. I’ll add the Oberkampf piece of the 11th to the east, »

À la Mère de Famille, a traditional confiserie in the Ninth Arrondissement. Coat and dress by M Missoni; boots, Charles David; bag, Jérôme Dreyfuss. Opposite, from top: Corinthian-style pillars in the Parc Monceau; Spree clothing boutique, in Abbesses; black pudding with Ibaïona pork at Miroir.

The lobby’s banquette-lined lounge at Hôtel Jules. Dress by Miu Miu; tights, Falke.

too; though it’s not geographically in le grand quartier, it shares the same earthy spirit as its neighbors. There are few tourist landmarks in these areas, except the Palais Garnier opera house and the Butte-Montmartre, a scene whose kitschy church of Sacré-Coeur and pseudo-artists I avoid like a tropical disease. If you’re afraid you’ll miss Paris’s traditional beauty wandering outward from the attraction-heavy center, know that while Haussmann’s grand boulevards and soaring town houses have become the de facto look of Paris, his 1860’s overhaul homogenized a lot of the city’s architecture. In fact, the areas he left alone (Montmartre’s dollhouse scale and picturesque steps; the Marais’ medieval warrens) are more apt reminders of the Paris of long ago. As with so many “outer” neighborhoods that are now “in,” the traditional working-class immigrant population of the northeast has been diluted by bohemian professionals and the small boutiques, organic food stores and casual, food-fetishist bistros that nourish them. Turns out my new home shares a lot more than I realized with the Brooklyn I left. Yannick Flageul, an accessories designer and the creator of the indie perfume brand NSEW, could have his pick of neighborhoods in town but couldn’t imagine living outside of Paris’s most thriving immigrant hub, Belleville. The area is a tossed salad of Chinatown, souk and ghetto, and its residents are fiercely loyal. “I love the intelligent human patchwork here,” says Flageul, a resident there for over a decade. “We’re artists and we’re workers. We’re trendy, sexy, ugly, gay, straight, Arab, Jewish, black, white, yellow. Life here is awesomely unstuffy.” FORGET TABLECLOTHS—AND COME HUNGRY If you think back to the traditional stereotype of French restaurant dining, you’ll envision grumpy, bow-tied waiters and a confusing array of silverware. All of this fusty silliness is now more and more easily avoided thanks to the “bistronomy” revolution so thoroughly chronicled by both the French and American press. Allow me to join in the adulation and note that le grand quartier and the 11th are home to some of the best examples of the phenomenon. Bistronomy is a back-to-basics movement that started with Yves Camdeborde’s La Régalade in 1992 and continued in outlying neighborhoods where the chefs and owners live. Generally, a restaurant in this genre serves under-€39 prix fixe menus by young chefs who cut their teeth in haute establishments. Diners are either neighbors or playing follow-the-chef along with the slavering food press and blogs such as lefooding.com. They’ll depart their beaten paths for an impeccable meal combining the finest small-producer ingredients with low-key presentation. I fell in love with Miroir the first time I walked in the door and was greeted by the smile and neon green Adidas of the owner’s young wife, a former employee of the magnificent wine emporium Lavinia, who steered me through the small, refined carte as if I were an old friend. Then I ate their caramelized pork belly from the Basque producer Louis Ospital, served au jus with roasted root vegetables. Cartoon hearts floated above my head, and soon the restaurant and I had each other on speed dial. The upside of bistronomy is massive for the individualistic French: young restaurateurs need only toil at grand, Michelin-starred places long enough to learn something about polish and technique before jumping ship to a homier, more autonomous vessel. “I need to see the plates and talk to the guests,” says Frédéric Hubig-Schall, one of the owners of the 11th Arrondissement’s Astier, who previously worked with Yannick Alléno at Le Meurice. (His chef at Astier is a Relais & Châteaux veteran and the brilliant sommelier was previously at Le Grand Véfour.) When Hubig-Schall and his partners took over the place in 2006, it was a corny café with a predictable meat-sauce-starch menu. They kept the down-atthe-heels décor, but upgraded the menu to include far finer examples of traditional French cooking. Astier’s pressed beef cheek with a deviled egg is a prettier »

with every passing day, my roots grow deeper in Paris. It would take a government intervention to get me to leave

endeavor than the description might suggest, and its copious cheese plate and more than 350 choices of wine are worth lingering over much longer than the average lunchtime would allow. (Do clear your schedule; Hubig-Schall and his sommelier are usually in house at lunch, speak English and love to pop by tables for a chat.) “When a restaurant is too big, there are too many people between you and the guest. A smaller scale means more pleasure and sensitivity.” For Miroir’s Guénard, grad school was Alain Ducasse’s Aux Lyonnais and the Hôtel du Palais. One of Le Bistral’s chefs trained at the Ritz. And at Le Bouchon et l’Assiette, in the 17th, it was Michel Sarran, Hôtel Le Bristol and the Hôtel du Palais again. My friend Jean-Luc, who works for a fashion house, followed his favorite pastry chef to Le Bouchon et l’Assiette and it has never disappointed. Their food is hearty and painstakingly sourced, with soft flashes of globalism—scallops in wispy ginger bouillon, velouté of garbanzo beans with sobrasada sausage or rich gâteau basque. Even as more of these restaurants open, the shock of eating so well for such little fuss and money somehow never wears off. And there’s more to come: so in love with the quality of their products are these restaurateurs that many of them have or are about to open groceries (Le Bistral; Astier) and wine stores (Miroir) nearby. DRINK SOME WINE A close cousin to bistronomy is a wave of wine bars with a similar approach to impeccable ingredients and low-key refinement. The Parisian wine bar—a working-class hangout with copious by-the-glass choices that thrives at lunchtime— seems like it’s been with us forever. In fact it’s a creation of the post–World War II period, when France wrested its wine industry back from the industrial swill it was producing during the war. In 1954, some Beaujolais producers started the Coupe du Meilleur Pot award, which is managed by the Académie Rabelais, a food society peopled by French critics and scholars. Its criteria nail the ideal wine bar equation: great wines by the glass, a favorable ratio of quality to price, and an in-house proprietor. That last element is crucial, as a jocular owner full of opinions is just as important as what’s on tap. You couldn’t ask for better than Gilles Bénard at Quedubon, in the 19th, which opened in 2007 and has yet to attract the Rabelaisians—though the local media attention it has received makes me think it’s only a matter of time. Minutes off the east side of the Buttes-Chaumont, with modern but warm interiors, Quedubon’s list has some 150 vins natures, or beyond-organic wines untainted by additives or chemicals. If Bénard, a voluble leftist of the old school, is on site, and your French is passable, you’re in for a good time. “People in Paris now are searching for quality and authenticity,” he says after an amusing digression about the sensual importance of the mouth. “Maybe it would have been easier for me to have opened in Sentier [the garment district in the Second Arrondissement], but the crowd that comes here is not coming by chance. Here we have a whole conversation with guests. We’re doing real sommellerie, trying to transmit a culture.” Bénard sings the praises of Olivier Camus’ equally impressive Chapeau Melon, in Belleville, with about 200 natural wines and a similarly market-driven menu four nights a week. Honorable mention also goes to fellow natural-wine vanguardists Le Verre Volé, near the Canal St.-Martin, and La Muse Vin, in the 11th. PLEASE STAY ON THE GRASS If you’re a toddler, the Jardin de Luxembourg, in the Sixth, with its paddedground play space and rental toy boats, is ideal. To me, the sight of all that gravel and roped-off lawns is torture. I guess my southern California upbringing begs for a park where you can sit on the grass wherever you please. For its location, its relative peace and its 25 hectares of shaggy, open greenery, the Parc des Buttes- »

In the Parc Monceau. Dress by Rebecca Taylor; beret, Hat Attack; bag, Devi Kroell; shoes, Anyi Lu. Opposite, from top: Spree co-owner Bruno Hadjadj with his pug, Sergio, in front of his gallery, Papiers Peints; a junior suite at H么telJules; outside Astier, in the 11th Arrondissement. Coat and dress by CH Carolina Herrera; shoes, Stuart Weitzman.

In the passage leading to the Marché des Enfants Rouges, on Rue de Bretagne in the Marais. Peacoat and shirt by Petit Bateau; jeans, J Brand; scarf, Hermès; belt, Devi Kroell. Opposite, from top: Miroir bistro’s chef Sébastien Guénard; Raspberry tart with almond-pistachio-lime cream and assorted jars of marshmallows at Pain de Sucre, on the Third Arrondissement’s Rue Rambuteau; the Fifth Arrondissement’s zoo and botanical garden, Jardin des Plantes.

Chaumont is bohemian Paris’s favorite picnic spot. And on the weekends, thanks to the in-park wine-and-snack bar Rosa Bonheur, it’s a major scene. If you’re in search of an only-in-Paris experience, head to the Pavillon du Chemin de Fer, inside the park’s southern border, well before dark, and make sure to get on the right side of the barricades the house erects around 7 p.m., when the party begins. Once the stanchions go up, those unlucky enough to be on the other side must wait in a brutally long line to get onto the patio (or catapult themselves over the barricades, as several girls in American Apparel rompers pulled off the last time I was there). Under colored Christmas lights, a hip crowd—a mix of fashion, advertising and art types—drinks enough rosé and eats enough saucisson to give a nutritionist fits. Occupying a different spot on the socioeconomic spectrum is the majestic Parc Monceau, which lies between the 17th and the top of the Eighth in the fancy Ternes district. Every time I pass by the park’s grand, gold-tipped, 19th-century gates, I am struck by the desire to walk barefoot. Planted in the English style, the abundant flowers and trees feel a bit wilder than in your typically manicured French garden. International “follies,” such as a windmill and a Chinese fort, make for multiple jewelbox vistas. Nearby, on the Boulevard de Courcelles, are all the cheese, wine and roast chicken you need for a stellar déjeuner sur l’herbe. There are few places in Paris where I’d rather spend hours lolling around among dogs and families. For a slightly more structured experience of an enormous green space, the Jardin des Plantes, on the border of the 13th and the Fifth, is pure magic Created in 1635, the park includes a zoo, natural history museum and sprawling botanical garden. I have spent hours in its Gallery of Paleontology and Comparative Anatomy sneaking camera-phone pictures of mutant animal skeletons and snapping the snow leopards and macaws in its sweet little zoo. Due to its 24 hectares of space, it’s a child-friendly paradise that never feels stifling, but it can be a lot in one go. Next to the western entrance on Rue Geoffroy St.-Hilaire is La Mosquée. The complex, one of the country’s Muslim institutes, is the largest mosque in France and has a charming restaurant that opens onto a wide patio. A kaleidoscope of traditional Algerian tile, with exposed entrances that allow birds to fly through its halls, the restaurant serves so-so couscous and great mint tea and pastries. SHOP IN PEACE I am proud to say I have almost shed my new yorquaise shopping addiction. Almost. My credit card still occasionally hears the siren call. How could it not? Paris is a city that, despite the natives’ relative disinterest, is a paradise for the acquisitive. Rather than endure the throngs at the grands magasins or on the Rue St.-Honoré, my first stop is always the Galeries du Palais-Royal. It’s got excellent shops along the galleries that enclose the garden behind the palace itself: Stella McCartney, Marc Jacobs, the glove maker Mary Beyer, Rick Owens, the king of vintage couture Didier Ludot and the accessories genius Pierre Hardy, who also designs for Balenciaga and Hermès. Despite its dead-central location, the Palais-Royal is quiet and calm. This is partly due to its status as a historically protected monument (it was built as Cardinal Richelieu’s home in the early 1600’s): the companies it houses can never eclipse the structure itself. In most cases, the original shop signage remains virtually unchanged from a century ago, so it’s the windows, recessed under those gorgeous colonnades, that do the talking, and most choose to whisper. You could visit the gardens and not know you were in the city’s coolest de facto luxury mall. Boutiques in neighborhoods that don’t scream “Shopping!” help to thwart the conveyor-belt feeling, too. Spree, in Abbesses, offers a mix of European and Asian labels (Isabel Marant, Martin Margiela 6, Helmut Lang, Tsumori Chisato, Comme des Garçons Shirt) casually strewn over Midcentury furniture, and it still feels fresh to my seen-it-all friends. The shop’s owners, Bruno Hadjadj and Roberta »

Oprandi, used to live across the street, but they’ve just transformed their former house into an art and furniture gallery called Papiers Peints, named after the sign on the building’s façade, designed by Le Corbusier for what was once a wallpaper store. Then again, there are times you just need to go to the Marais. The historically orthodox-Jewish neighborhood is one of a growing number in Paris that allows shops to stay open on Sunday, and on the weekends, the place is as densely packed as the Champs-Élysées. In the past decade the throngs have been coming for hipster Gallic sportswear (Comptoir des Cotonniers; Maje; Zadig & Voltaire), but I am a bigger fan of the area’s vintage shopping. I’m not talking so much about precious, forbiddingly expensive bijou stores like Olga, on the Rue Vieille-du-Temple, but the down-and-dirtier friperies, or thrift stores, such as Free‘P’Star. A recent houseguest of mine runs a vintage business out of Nashville, and she shopped the boutique’s airy 1980’s-era print dresses so hard that she’ll be fully stocked until next season. SNACK! What they say is true: French people don’t really eat on the go. But they couldn’t care less if you do. In high-density situations like, say, shopping in the Marais, fast sustenance, especially of the sugary variety, is key. While I love Pierre Hermé, in St.-Germain, the lines are a lot shorter at the brilliant Pain de Sucre and the comestibles just as deft and original. Years ago, the French husband of one of my oldest friends laid down his boulangerie rule: if it is great at breads and savories, it will not be so at pastries and vice versa. He lives near Pain de Sucre, and since it opened in 2004, the place has changed his mind. Didier Mathray and Nathalie Robert’s salty, flaky, olive-oil brioche is what first turned my head; their pirouette pomme, with crunchy almond crust, pistachio-and-lime cream, and apples caramelized with rosemary, made me a believer. Another delicious escape in the area is the Marché des Enfants Rouges, on the Rue de Bretagne. A covered market with a poorly marked entrance, it’s easy to walk by without knowing what lies in wait: an alluring hive of fish, meat, fruit and flower peddlers, with several fast lunch options. (The Japanese bento is terrific; the pizza is not.) If you’re brave enough to attack the grands magasins, know that the food halls at the Galeries Lafayette and Printemps are both extraordinary, though not exactly Zen. But À la Mère de Famille, a few blocks east of the department stores, is everything you want a traditional confiserie to be: full of froufrou offerings and temptations at every turn. Traditional Breton caramels au fleur de sel often lack the chewy texture they master here, and their dense, flavorful chocolate-almond ice cream is a killer. BOOK A HOTEL IN THE NINTH Paris has been on a hospitality roll lately. In the shadow of the Arc de Triomphe, there’s the new Intercontinental Paris Avenue Marceau, with its careful and chic assemblage of design furniture and modern art. Right off the Champs-Élysées is Grace Leo’s cheerfully sleek new Hôtel Beauchamp, and there’s something of an Asian invasion afoot with the arrival of Raffles’s Royal Monceau, Shangri-La, later this year, and of Mandarin Oriental and Peninsula in 2012 and 2011, respectively. Of course, grand hotels have their charms, but the smaller hotels of the Ninth Arrondissement are worth a second look. Staying at one of the quartier’s new crop of hôtels particuliers means the best of both worlds can be yours. You’re in le grand quartier, but convenient to the central city’s monuments. When Hôtel Amour made its debut in 2006, its rock-bottom prices, cheeky décor, hourly rate policy and boldface-name patrons shook up the district. Now, just a few blocks away, is the new Hôtel Joyce. It doesn’t have the fashionable pedigree of Amour, whose owners are the nightlife kings Mr. André

H A I R : M A T H I E U G U I G N A U D E A U / M A R I E - F R A N C E T H A V O N E K H A M . M A K E U P : O N O D A / M A R I E - F R A N C E T H A V O N E K H A M . A S S I S T A N T fashion editor : J E S S I E B A N D Y. S T Y L I S T ’ s A S S I S T A N T : A L E X P A U L . M O D E L : M A R I A N A I D Z K O W S K A / W M . paris producer : jmg production . M useum photograph by H E M I S / A L A M Y. map by maria ebbets

and Thierry Costes. Nor does it have the youthful crowds. But it’s a poppy, quirky newcomer with immaculate, affordable rooms that have great beds and lots of light. A few minutes southeast is the boutique Hôtel Jules, also a Grace Leo–managed property, with small but well-kitted rooms and a lobby that feels like a space-age library. Finally, almost across the street from the migraine-inducing department stores on the Boulevard Haussmann is the neo-Baroque opulence of the Banke Hôtel, with all the jewel tones and gilt accents of the First Arrondissement’s Hôtel Costes sans the appalling service. For the most part, Parisian hotels have their manners together much more than the shops and restaurants. But don’t expect the city on a whole to bend too much to fit foreign expectations. If it weren’t intransigent, it wouldn’t be Paris. But in a town with sculpture in every doorway, 10 kinds of organic smoked salmon in every supermarket, and a value system that prizes sensual pleasure above all, you will always come out ahead. ✚

guide to paris MONTMARTRE

200 m

18th

19th

ABBESSES

17th

Parc des Buttes-Chaumont

Parc Monceau

TERNES 9th

8th Cha

-Ély sées

MARAIS 3rd

7th

Se 6th

Paris

Jardin du Luxembourg

e R ive

Jardin des Plantes

GETTING AROUND The easiest way to get around the city is with a week-long Passe Navigo Découverte (available at most Métro stations). The pass also allows you to uses Paris’s bicyclerental program, Vélib’, once off limits to nonresidents. WHERE TO STAY Banke Hôtel 20 Rue La Fayette, Ninth Arr.; 33-1/55-33-22-22; derbyhotels. com; doubles from ¤181. GREAT VALUE

Hôtel Amour 8 Rue Navarin, Ninth Arr.; 33-1/48-78-31-80; hotelamour paris.fr; doubles from ¤174. GREAT VALUE

Hôtel Joyce 29 Rue la Bruyère, Ninth Arr.; 33-1/5507-00-01; astotel.com; doubles from ¤230. Hôtel Jules 49–51 Rue La Fayette, Ninth Arr.; 33-1/42-85-05-44; hoteljules.com; doubles from ¤187. GREAT VALUE

11th

5th

LATIN QUARTER

33-1/42-27-83-93; dinner for two ¤66. Le Verre Volé 67 Rue de Lancry, 10th Arr.; 33-1/48-0317-34; lunch for two ¤39. Marché des Enfants Rouges 39 Rue de Bretagne, Third Arr.; 33-1/40-11-20-40; lunch for two ¤23.

10th

mps

1st

in a town with a value system that prizes sensual pleasure above all, you will always come out ahead

WHERE TO EAT AND DRINK À la Mère de Famille 33–35 Rue du Faubourg Montmartre, Ninth Arr.; 33-1/47-70-83-69; pastries for two ¤19. Astier 44 Rue Jean-Pierre Timbaud, 11th Arr.; 33-1/43-5716-35; lunch for two ¤67. Chapeau Melon 92 Rue Rébeval, 19th Arr.; 33-1/42-0268-60; dinner for two ¤60. La Mosquée 39 Rue Geoffroy St.-Hilaire, Fifth Arr.; 33-1/4331-18-14; tea for two ¤15. La Muse Vin 101 Rue de Charonne, 11th Arr.; 33-1/4009-93-05; lunch for two ¤23. La Régalade 49 Ave. Jean Moulin, 14th Arr.; 33-1/45-4568-58; dinner for two ¤62. Le Bistral 80 Rue Lemercier, 17th Arr.; 33-1/42-63-59-61; dinner for two ¤85. Le Bouchon et l’Assiette 127 Rue Cardinet, 17th Arr.;

Miroir 94 Rue des Martyrs, 18th Arr.; 33-1/46-06-50-73; dinner for two ¤62. Pain de Sucre 14 Rue Rambuteau, Third Arr.; 33-1/45-74-68-92; pastries for two ¤12. Quedubon 22 Rue du Plateau, 19th Arr.; 33-1/42-38-18-65; dinner for two ¤66. Rosa Bonheur 2 Allée de la Cascade, 19th Arr; 33-1/48-0405-11; wine for two ¤22. WHERE TO SHOP Free‘P’Star 8 Rue Ste.-Croix de la Bretonnerie, Fourth Arr.; 33-1/42-76-03-72. Galeries du Palais-Royal 6 Rue de Montpensier, First Arr.; 33-1/47-03-92-16. Papiers Peints 11 Rue de la Vieuville, 18th Arr.; 33-1/ 42-59-99-90. Spree 16 Rue de la Vieuville, 18th Arr.; 33-1/42-23-41-40. WHAT TO DO Jardin des Plantes 57 Rue Cuvier, Fifth Arr.; 33-1/40-7956-01. Parc des Buttes-Chaumont Rue Botzaris, 19th Arr. Parc Monceau Blvd. de Courcelles, Eighth Arr.

Opposite, from top left: the Ninth Arrondissement’s Hôtel Joyce; the Gallery of Evolution at the National Museum of Natural History, in the Jardin des Plantes; Ahmed Mosbahi at the reception desk at Hôtel Joyce.

000

The New Sh Flair bar, on the 58th floor of the Ritz-Carlton Shanghai, Pudong, with views of the Huangpu River, the Bund and Puxi beyond.

In a city where surprises await at every turn, Adam Sachs wends his way from gleaming high-rise hotels and sleepy French concession lanes to chaotic night markets. Oh, and Jackie Chan makes an appearance, too. Photographed by Morgan & Owens

hanghai

Shanghai Rising Clockwise from left: The Rockbund construction site, on the northeastern edge of the Bund; the new El C贸ctel cocktail bar, in the Xuhui District; Ming Ming Chen and Jeff Zhou at Around Space Gallery; xiao long bao at Jia Jia Tang Bao, in the Huangpu District.

erupting across the river is pu 146

t is, conservatively, a thousand degrees in

the shade of Spencer Dodington’s 10-gallon cowboy hat. So, while I’m enjoying this tall Texan expat’s learned discourse on the crosscultural stylings of Chinese Deco architecture in 1930’s Shanghai, it’s frankly a relief when the subject turns to ice cream. Dodington and I are standing in the empty streetscape of what will soon become a bustling complex called Rockbund: future home to boutique hotels, status-confirming condos, the kind of shops with guards in natty suits—all the nice stuff that would justify expensively gutting and reappointing a city block of handsome, historically significant buildings at the edge of the Bund. We’re a minute’s walk from Shanghai’s storied embankment and prime tourist prowl. For now, it’s quiet at Rockbund, its buildings’ well-scrubbed shells awaiting their retail reincarnation. Save for a man power-buffing the paving stones and a few genteel ladies looking lost and melting under their parasols, we’ve got Shanghai’s next great neighborhood to ourselves. Dodington went to architecture school here but dropped out when he realized, as he puts it, “they were training students to modernize China and what I loved were the old buildings that were in the way.” Now he makes a living restoring apartments for Chinese and foreign clients in those very buildings, predominantly in the gracious Deco apartment blocks and traditional lane houses of the French Concession. He also takes guests along on meandering walks, talking architecture and history, looking for fragments of the old romantic city in the torrent of the new. Shanghai is a city layered in symbols, shifting signs, mixed metaphors. The thing is, it can all be a little overwhelming. The sheer physical clutter of the place, its overlapping histories and real-time reinventions, conspire to make it unusually hard to get casually acquainted with. It helps to get to know seasoned observers who can separate the strata of urban archaeology. Few of Shanghai’s expats cut quite as distinctive a figure as Dodington, 1.9 meters in cargo shorts and walking shoes, looking a bit like Curious George’s Man with the Yellow Hat and barking now into his mobile phone in what I’m told is the best Shanghainese dialect spoken by a foreigner in the city. That I’m told this by Dodington himself in no way diminishes that fact. This is confirmed for me by the open-mouthed gape of the kid in the corner store where we go to buy our ice cream when the heat becomes too much. The boy and his mother praise Dodington’s small talk. They

want to know, without putting it quite this way, how someone who stands out so much fits in so well. He says something to leave them laughing and we’re back in the sweltering street with our frozen treats (a sweet green-pea ice pop for me, a raisin-and-milk confection for him). Today I’ve asked Dodington to take me around town not just to show off the buildings he loves or to translate our ice cream orders but to help interpret the city itself. Shanghai is a place of competing myths, kaleidoscopic dreams: a marshy backwater turned into a thriving metropolis, opened up by the Brits to sell opium to the Chinese, carved into international trading concessions, a busy port, a not-quitecolonial city where you didn’t need papers and the bankers and thieves and adventurers and refugees of the world came and everything went. Then the war and foreign flight. In 1949 the city was reshaped by the competing dreams of the People’s Republic liberation and later the nightmares of the Cultural Revolution. In the 90’s, the money and foreigners and building cranes abruptly returned as state planners aggressively pursued a new dream of a different kind of international city, an audacious showpiece of Chinese economic might. “We Americans tend to think of China in terms of walls and tombs and dynasties,” Dodington says. “Shanghai doesn’t have any of that. As an international city, it’s really only about 168 years old. In China, that’s nothing.” Leaving dormant Rockbund to its minders, we cross the street and come to the sludgy waters of Suzhou Creek near where it runs into the Huangpu River. Erupting in full view across the river is Pudong, hallucinatory megacity of supertowers. Pudong is the size of 20 Manhattans, conjured from flat farmland in as many years. Here is the Pearl of the Orient TV Tower, a retrofuturistic disco ball on stilts. It looks Soviet and 60’s but was in fact completed in 1994. Dodington recalls the feeling of exuberance at the birth of the boom. “I’d be walking along the embankment and strangers would stop me and point across the river and say, ‘This is the shape of things to come!’ And you’d look and there was nothing there. It was like, ‘Sure, whatever you say!’”

here is a tiny, crumpled piece of trash

improbably clinging to the window ledge of my hotel room on the 79th floor of the Park Hyatt Shanghai. The room is impeccably, almost surreally, calming, with a long lacquered table and cream-colored daybed by the window. I’m on the Pudong side now, looking down at the bend in the Huangpu where I was standing earlier. But the exterior reality doesn’t really matter once you’re in this serene cloud city, an »

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the fact that there is a 19-room otherworldly place of whispered well-being. Up here, the toilet seat in my bathroom raises robotically as I approach, as if in salute. Up here is one of my new favorite places in the world. For pure city-watching thrills there aren’t many views better than the ones out of my wide-angle windows. My gaze floats out past the prickly pagoda peaks of the Jin Mao Tower and down over the blinking Pearl TV needle and the whole clamorous cluster mellows to a silent meditation on Shanghai’s hypermodernity. But for some reason, my eye keeps returning to this little ball of paper teetering just beyond the quiet of my happy space pod. No bigger than a gum wrapper, it looks fragile, an infinitesimal speck of the tactile world below. Then it’s blown away, returned to the great abstraction, a backdrop to be enjoyed over gin and tonics at the 87th-floor lobby bar. When I’m down there—in the street-level world of close crowds, of beeping motorbikes and laundry hanging in the lanes—life up here in the cloud villages seems just as distant, abstract. Much of my time in Shanghai is spent shuttling between these two abstractions: elevators up and down, taxis back and forth, shifting perspectives, a chance to play up in the clouds.

I leave the Park Hyatt with a plan to find some of the city’s best xiao long bao, the famous soup-filled dumplings. Xiao long bao is to Shanghai what pizza is to New York. Which is to say: ubiquitous and not always very good. I’ve been warned that Jia Jia Tan Bao, in the Huangpu District, can sell out of the dumplings, so I am happy to see that the tiny shop is still open. The bad news is they are out of everything except the all-crabmeat version, and these are only available at a decadent (for Shanghai) splurge of RMB94 for a dozen. The good news is they are easily the best I’ve tried: thin-skinned with a deeply, sweetly crabby rich broth and meat. I don’t need 12, but the two bamboo steamers don’t last long. The place is one small room with about 30 seats, bright cafeteria lighting, linoleum floors and a clear view into the kitchen where two girls are pinching and steaming the remaining orders of the night. A young man with a spiky New Wave haircut at the next table smiles and asks how I found the place. He is Shanghainese, he says, and this is his favorite spot. We both nod, sweating and self-satisfied like Russians after a shvitz. I don’t mention to my new friend that the dumplings are mere warm-up for a second dinner later that night. A few days earlier I’d met up with Ming Ming Chen and Jeff Zhou, who run the modern-art gallery Around Space, housed in a bunker-like complex of studios and galleries called 696.

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ne night

hotel is a sign of maturing tastes

Crowds gather to gaze at Pudong.

As they showed me around the space, talk had turned from art to lunch and they’d taken me to a restaurant at the top of a mall called One Hundred Families, One Thousand Tastes. After a great, long meal—Yellow River bamboo with ham; translucent gooey balls of summer yam with pork and scallions; lu yu, a river fish with a sour, spicy broth; and many other things, ending with a dessert of shaved ice that tasted like peanut butter turned into a cold whisper—they had suggested I meet them later in the week at their favorite night food street. Shouning Road is lined with street-side grills, men kneeling in alleys shucking oysters and throwing shells on alleyway middens, food carts selling roast duck, dessert stalls and grill stands circled with stools and parked motorcycles, and a constant, moving, happy throng of late-night snackers. Chen and some friends of hers lead me to a tiny restaurant where we order beers and platters of crayfish and spiky, sweet boiled shrimp that rip the disposable plastic gloves you wear to tear into them. “Spicy or very spicy?” Chen asks. Both, please. After establishing a base and filling our bowls with shells, some of us venture into the open-air food court to order dozens of grilled oysters and clams with black-bean or garlic sauce, skewered duck tongues, charred rice cakes and cold, crunchy pigs’ ears. Each vendor delivers the food to our “home” restaurant. More beer arrives. Chen, stylish and funny with her gray newsboy cap and elfin grin, wants to know if New York is exactly the way it seems on Sex and the City. Precisely. I ask if the food we’re eating represents a certain province. “No,” Chen tells me, “it is night fashion food.” On the third floor of the Shanghai Urban Planning Exhibition Center there’s a room-size scale model of the city in 2020. The joke about the place is that all the locals are here to see if their house will still be around a decade on, or if they should gear up for relocation to the high-rise burbs. For a very different kind of field trip to the near future, I leave behind the grand planning dreams of the People’s Park and head south along the Bund until I come to a no-man’sland dock area far from the touristy center. I’m headed to Waterhouse at South Bund, a new hotel that is quietly setting the bar for quirky, cool design. Actually, the mere fact that there is a quirky, intelligently designed 19-room hotel at all is a sign of maturing tastes in a city where style and luxury are more frequently associated with bigness, brand names and bling. Inside yet another rejiggered 1930’s warehouse, the lobby soars with unfinished concrete, steel beams, patches of brick and cryptic messages painted onto the stone floor (some » 149

China Markers From left: Late-night seafood vendors on Shouning Road; a soaking tub in a Garden View suite at the Ritz-Carlton Shanghai, Pudong; the courtyard of the Waterhouse at South Bund hotel; the lobby of the newly restored Fairmont Peace Hotel; architect Lyndon Neri.

in Chinese, others that might as well be: glutinous and hairy). From my room I can look down a glass shaftway and into part of the room below me. Happily for all parties, my unseen neighbors never looked up while I passed by in my robe on the way to the sleek, glassed-in concrete bathroom. Waterhouse was designed by husband-and-wife team Lyndon Neri and Rossana Hu of Neri & Hu Design & Research Office. “Ah, yes, room 31,” Neri says, smiling, when I ask him about the accidental exhibitionist possibilities of my glass wall. “Traditional lane houses are phenomenal because you can see pieces of people’s living rooms,” Neri says. “From your house, you see snippets of other families’ lives. This is the voyeuristic nature of the lane house. You’re part of a community.” Neri studied at Harvard and worked for Michael Graves for years before moving to Shanghai in 2004. The couple live by their tenets of transparency. While remodeling their traditional nongtang house in the French Concession, they added three-meter-tall glass doors to the back. “My toilet overlooks someone’s kitchen,” Neri says, gleefully. “Every morning I see them about two meters away, cooking. “It took a very courageous client to allow us to do what we did,” Neri says of the Singapore hotelier Loh Lik Peng.

“Many people told us that this lobby doesn’t have a lot of ‘face,’” Neri says. “Meaning it’s not dignified. You walk in and there’s no chandelier, no ostentatious double stairway.” Projects like this signal a new phase in Shanghai’s recent development. Less face, more personality. Another sign the city is developing into a more mature destination: the sheer range of interesting hotels recently opened or reopened around town. The Waterhouse is as raw and intimate as the Park Hyatt across the river is soaringly remote. But both do what they do with conviction and neither could really exist anywhere but here. That’s especially true of the Peace Hotel. The 19th-century British financier Sir Victor Sassoon’s Art Deco grand hotel, which opened as the Cathay in 1929, was known for its tea dances and Lalique fixtures and attracted all the swells, from Charlie Chaplin to Chiang Kai-shek. The hotel finally closed in 2007 after years of slow decline. Last summer, following extensive restoration, the property reopened as the Fairmont Peace Hotel. And across the street, the Palace Hotel has undergone a radical remake and will soon become the Swatch Art Peace Hotel, a multifunction, high-design space owned by the Swiss watch company and housing a gallery, luxury shops, working artists’ studios and a seven-room boutique hotel. June also saw the arrival of the

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Ritz-Carlton Shanghai, Pudong atop Cesar Pelli’s Shanghai IFC complex. The new Ritz-Carlton sets the standard in the luxuriantly rich, Deco-inspired, modern Chinese swank department, with deep freestanding copper-clad bathtubs in the rooms and a nicely clubby, ski-lodge-in-the-skyfeeling bar called Flair on the 58th floor. At the Peninsula, the porter delivering my bags to the room suggests I might wish to watch football on the TV while taking a bath. It would have been a good plan if only I could tear myself away from watching the brightly lit party boats floating by on the Huangpu below.

Feng is a fashion designer, an artist, a costume designer, a consultant for opera and film, and, if you are lucky enough to fall briefly into her orbit, a curator of perfect Shanghai moments. “Join me later at Yongfoo Élite,” she texts me the night we are scheduled to meet. She apologizes that dinner’s gone late, explaining that she’s still out with friends but that they’re all headed for a nightcap and I should join. So I take a taxi through the dark, plane-tree–lined streets of the old French Concession and am delivered to the gate of a mansion that an

once served as the British consulate. I walk to the private bar in back and am about to introduce myself to her when a very familiar-looking man shakes my hand avidly and asks me if I’d like some of his wine. Han Feng forgot to mention that her dinner companion was Jackie Chan. The actor and martialarts legend holds court with a gang of his movie pals. Han Feng, it turns out, designed the wardrobe for his Karate Kid remake. My glass is refilled several times and Chan worries that I am not eating enough peanuts. A few days later, Han Feng invites me to see her atelier at Grosvenor House, an elegant 1934 residential building now part of the Jin Jiang Hotel. As I enter the hotel’s gardens from the streets of the French Concession, the temperature seems to drop 10 degrees. The evening air turns sweet, the frantic pace of the city fades. Han Feng started her career in New York and was at first reluctant to move back to China. She tells me about a group of women who’d come in to shop earlier that day. They were businesswomen— publishers, restaurant owners and TV writers. What was interesting about this group, Han Feng said, wasn’t just their sophistication or willingness to spend but that they were specifically interested in a homegrown aesthetic rather than global brands. “One of the women said, ‘We never left »

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in shanghai, on the right night, China; China changed. We’ve tripled our salaries, we have better taste now, and we want to support Chinese designers.’ That wouldn’t have happened five years ago.” Later that evening at Lynn, a dark, Deco-y Shanghainese restaurant, we wrap roast duck in mantou buns; eat kao fu, a warm, brown, bready, tofu-like ricegluten substance that is very comforting; and pick the sticky flesh off a steamed fish head. We then make our way to an excellent new cocktail bar called El Cóctel and talk about Mad Men. If there were a Shanghai-based Mad Men, this would be a good bar to film it in. “I want to learn to sing jazz!” Han Feng says, apropos of pretty much nothing. In Shanghai, on the right night, in the right weather, in the right company, pretty much anything can sound like a good idea.

ou can still catch it

sometimes,” Paul French says, meaning the spectral traces of the city’s romantic past. “There are streets, alleys, buildings in Frenchtown—if you catch them at the right time of day you can recapture a bit of it. But it’s going. Bits of it disappear every night.” Originally from London, French came to Shanghai in his twenties to study and stayed on, moving around China and writing for the Economist Intelligence Unit before starting a business consultancy and trying his hand at books. “I try to live as much as possible in 1936,” says the reluctant blogger, who recently finished a kind of A-to-Z guide to the city that uses its old street names and map. The Shanghai he writes about in his blog, China Rhyming, is the libertine city of tycoons and coolies, tea dances and opium dens, of gangland kidnappings and hidden gardens. One of the tricky things about the past is that not everyone sees it in the same light. “Take the old Canidrome,” he says, mentioning a grand dog-racing and leisure complex. Built in 1928 by the Frenchman Félix Bouvier, it could hold 50,000 people. “For me it’s all jazz and jai alai and boxing. It’s where Buck Clayton and his Harlem Gentlemen played. But for the Chinese of a certain generation, that’s where all the big denunciation sessions were held during the Cultural

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Shanghai-based fashion designer Han Feng at her atelier in Grosvenor House, in the French Concession.

Revolution—a place where people were executed. For them it’s full of ghosts.” French is, to put it mildly, not a fan of the current forces of skyward expansion and plowing under of the past. Still, as we walk around, he allows that there’s much to like about his adopted home. As long as you know where and how to look. “That’s the Russian Embassy,” he says. “When I first got here, the ambassador used to put his washing line out and you’d see Madame Ambassador’s massive Soviet knickers, flapping like flags, shocking the tourists on the Bund.” For him, he says, even after all the change, Shanghai remains “a perfect city because it’s a perfect wandering city. You tell people, ‘Turn left, turn right, get lost up an alley, you’ll find something.’ ” Shanghai sometimes feels like an overproduced musical, the kind with an exclamation point at the end of the title, with waterworks and choreographed flying machines and the latest pyrotechnics. A mythic city, caught between being and

anything sounds like a good idea becoming. But I like the quieter numbers. The unrehearsed moments when the city just is: a morning walk down Jianguo Road, in the French Concession, where neighbors are shopping for food for the day’s cooking, a yellow birdcage hangs from a tree, and a man is disemboweling a sofa in the middle of the street. One day, bored with the foot traffic on the Bund, I turn onto Hankou Road and walk a block and a half down a quiet street. I stop in a convenience store with a pink sign that says buddies and fall into a lengthy conversation with a spry old man that consists of one word: eggs. I’d gone in for an ice cream bar (I was hooked by then) and innocently asked him about the slow cooker full of cracked tea eggs by the register. He asks me to write down the English word and

then we repeat it to each other 20 times. Eggs, eggs, eggs. A quiet bit of sweet, strange human connection, just off the main tourist thoroughfare. On my last afternoon in the city, I wander the streets around Guangxi Road, another centrally located block with a lot of food stalls. I’m nosily peeking into the cramped back lanes that lead off these already small roads when a white-capped porter from the Peninsula appears. For a minute the two abstractions of the city overlap and I am struck by the sight of this man in a crisp uniform far from his post. I follow him, wondering if I can catch up with him and ask about life on this side of Shanghai. There is too much space between us. In a moment he is gone, lost in the crowd. ✚

guide to shanghai WHEN TO GO Spring and fall — when the weather is ideal — are optimal for exploring the city on foot. WHERE TO STAY Fairmont Peace Hotel 20 Nanjing Rd. E., The Bund; 8621/6321-6888; fairmont.com; doubles from RMB2,600. Number 9 A quiet B&B in a lane house in the French Concession. 9 Lane 355, Jianguo Rd. W., Xuhui; 8621/6471-9950; doubles from RMB800. GREAT VALUE

Park Hyatt Shanghai 100 Century Ave., Pudong; 8621/6888-1234; park.hyatt.com; doubles from RMB3,600. The Peninsula 32 The Bund; 86-21/2327-2888; peninsula.com; doubles from RMB3,500. Ritz-Carlton Shanghai, Pudong 8 Century Ave., Pudong; 8621/2020-1888; ritzcarlton.com; doubles from RMB3,300. GREAT Waterhouse at South VALUE Bund 1—3 Maojiayuan Rd., Shiliupu; 86-21/6080-2988; waterhouseshanghai.com; doubles from RMB1,200.

WHERE TO EAT AND DRINK Din Tai Fung Ubiquitous chain with English menus and solid xiao long bao. Various locations, including Xintiandi, 123 Xingye Rd., second floor, Luwan; 86-

21/6385-8378; lunch for two RMB230.

Hua

Suzhou Creek

Flair The bar on the 58th floor of the Ritz-Carlton Shanghai, Pudong, with great views. 8 Century Ave., Pudong; 8621/2020-1888; drinks for two RMB175.

The Bund

pudong

french concession 0

n g p u R i ve r

financial district

Rockbund

Fu 1039 Classic Shanghainese food in a French Concession villa. 1039 Yuyuan Rd., Jingan; 8621/5237-1878; dinner for two RMB400. Jia Jia Tang Bao 90 Huanghe Rd., Huangpu; 86-21/6327-6878; lunch for two RMB67.

hongkou

El Cóctel 47 Yongfu Rd., Xuhui; 86-21/6433-6511; drinks for two RMB135.

1 km

china

Beijing

Shanghai

East China Sea

Lynn 99 Xikang Rd., Jingan; 86-21/6247-0101; dinner for two RMB600.

Concession street. 30 Donghu Rd., Xuhui; 86-21/5404-1235; dinner for two RMB300.

and furniture boutique. 88 Yuqing Rd., Xuhui; 86-21/60823788.

Monkey Lounge Semisecret cocktail bar off a grungy alley with a fun, well-heeled crowd. 22 Lane 56, Donghu Rd., Xuhui; 86-150/218-5992; drinks for two RMB140.

Yongfoo Élite 200 Yongfu Rd., Xuhui; 86-21/5466-2727; dinner for two RMB1,600.

Plum Gallery Café/gallery in Jingan Villa. No. 37, 1025 Nanjing Rd. W., Jingan; 86-21/5213-6565.

One Hundred Families, One Thousand Tastes 818 Nanjing Rd. W., Jingan; 86-21/6217-7793; lunch for two RMB235.

Rockbund Art Museum New contemporary art museum steps from the Bund. 20 Huqiu Rd., Huangpu; 86-21/3310-9985. Shanghai Urban Planning Exhibition Hall 100 Renmin Ave., People’s Square; 86-21/63284477; supec.org.

Shouning Road Night Food Market Luwan; dinner for two RMB140.

WHAT TO SEE AND DO Around Space Gallery Art and photography space hidden away in an old mansion turned industrial building. Bldgs. 9 & 11, 696 Weihai Rd., Jingan; 86138/0174-3061.

Sichuan Citizen Fiery Sichuan food on a packed French

Design Republic Lyndon Neri and Rossana Hu’s modern design

Mr. & Mrs. Bund Chef Paul Pairet’s lively, modern French restaurant offers all-day people-watching. 18 The Bund; 86-21/6323-9898; dinner for two RMB782.

Spin You’ll be tempted to bring everything from this stylish ceramics shop home with you. Bldg. 3, 758 Julu Rd., Jingan; 86-21/6279-2545.

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(My Favorite Place) Jimmy Ong, right. Below: Pearl’s Hill City Park.

singapore

Singapore’s the stream that seemed to sprout out of my imaginary castle on a hill. Chinatown, there’s a small nature Whenever I’m in need of solitude, the reserve called Pearl’s Hill City Park, right behind where I went to primary park is only five minutes’ walk from my grandmother’s place in bustling Chinatown. school. I first discovered it as a boy of 10. Thanks to the uphill climb, it remains Every Saturday I would go there after relatively untouched, with the same winding finishing my extracurricular activities, and take the seemingly endless flight of steps that stepped paths amid the old trees that used leads up to what looks like a forbidding stone to fill me with wonder as a boy. Nowadays, wall; it actually holds a reservoir. I remember the pond has been spruced up and a railed bridge has replaced the stone boulders I the old casuarina trees towering over it, and I always felt like I was on an adventure going used as a child. But I recently found a large to this stone “castle” after school. Of course, parasol palm there, whose slow growth I never really found out what was behind the seems to defy the very city that it has chosen to thrive in. To me, the reservoir wall still wall. Instead, I would lose myself for hours holds its secrets. ✚ at a pond just outside it, catching guppies in Jimmy Ong’s exhibition “SGD,” on Singapore’s socio-economic transformation, is on show at the Singapore Tyler Print Institute through November 27 as part of the Singapore Sun Festival, an annual festival of arts, culture, lifestyle and wellness. For more information, see singaporesunfestival.com. 154

n a hidden corner of

nove m b e r 2 0 1 0 | t r a v e l a n d l e i s u r e a s i a . c o m

Jimmy Ong’s Favorites l Take a stroll through Lunuganga (lunuganga. com; open 9 a.m. to 5 p.m.), Geoffrey Bawa’s garden in Bentota, Sri Lanka. It’s like looking into the late master’s mind as he carves the rooms and vistas out of an overgrown rubber plantation.

Don’t miss drinks on the terrace of M on the Bund (mrestaurantgroup.com; drinks for two RMB250), in Shanghai. You’ll get a view of 1930’s opulence straddling time across a 21st century skyline over the Bund. l

Go for a drive through the Shires of Vermont (theshiresofvermont.com), in the U.S., during leafpeeping season. The Green Mountains look like broccoli dusted in paprika and mustard. It’s a gentle reminder of the Earth’s generosity and renewal.

from left : courtesy of national parks board of singapore ; courtesy of joyce wye ho

New York–based Singaporean contemporary artist Jimmy Ong tells T+L about a secret corner of Singapore’s Chinatown. By LARA DAY