August 2011

KL: ASIA’S LATEST ART HUB HANGOUTS

Tra ve l a n d L e i s u re A s i a . c o m

contents

august 2011 volume 05 : issue 08

features 136 invisible city Zaha Hadid’s high-profile new opera house aside, Guangzhou still remains a mystery to most travelers. lara day maps out the city’s fast-changing landscape. photographed by philipp engelhorn. guide and map 145

136 10 august 2011 | travelandleisureasia.com

Guangzhou’s futuristic architecture.

123 Special section World’s Best Awards 2011 Travel + Leisure’s definitive list of the top hotels, cruise lines, airlines, car-rental agencies, outfitters, cities and islands, as voted by readers, is an essential index of the places you want to go and the gold-standard companies that will take you there. edited by sarah spagnolo

philipp engelhorn

146 It remakes a village Across Italy, entrepreneurs are turning abandoned hamlets into luxury retreats. peter jon lindberg asks: Can a hotel transform a village in order to save it? photographed by martin morrell. guide 153

contents

august 2011 volume 05 : issue 08

KL: ASIA’S LATEST ART HUB HANGOUTS

Tra ve l a n d L e i s u re A s i a . c o m

08 WB awards COVEROUTLINE.indd 2

19/07/2011 10:35

On the cover

Photographed by Tom Hoops.

Photo assistant: Ami Lertpricha.

W Retreat—Koh Samui, Thailand.

33 Our annual guide to the best

websites and apps today, from

easy-to-use hotel booking tools to

smart ways to share and edit your

photos. Plus how to stay connected

on the road, Android vs. iPhone

and more. by tom samiljan

58 newsflash

44 Beijing’s hutong revival, a perfume

for bookworms and more.

insider 51 Navigator Phnom Penh is

now brimming with stylish hotels,

restaurants, shops and lounges.

by jennifer chen 56 Quick Study In Jakarta,

try your hand at creating batik,

Indonesia’s most treasured fabric. by steve mollman

58 architecture The Metropol

Parasol opens new panoramas

over Seville. by raul barreneche

60 12 august 2011 | travelandleisureasia.com

51

60 Hotels Taiwan’s capital has

become a stylish weekend getaway.

T+L picks five chic spots to

overnight. by jen lin-liu

c l o c k w i s e f r o m to p : © a n d r e a r o a d / i s to c k p h oto . c o m ; J a s o n M i c h a e l L a n g ; c o u r t e s y o f H ot e l E c l at Ta i p e i

strategies

contents

august 2011 volume 05 : issue 08

102 112

68 EAT In Cambodia, the sleepy

coastal resort town of Kep serves

up authentic Vietnamese, French

fusion and famed fresh crab.

by jennifer chen 70 Room Report Singapore sees

the first Park Regis in Southeast

Asia. by daven wu 72 FIRST LOOK Hong Kong

welcomes a new hotel icon with

a twist. by christopher dewolf

stylish 75 watches T+L’s latest picks for

keeping globe-trotters up-to-the-

minute.

76 Beauty Old-style, straight-edge

shaves are set for a comeback in

Asia. by christopher kucway 78 Fashion Packing for a weekend

break? You can’t go wrong with a

classic white shirt.

14 august 2011 | travelandleisureasia.com

journal 83 Preservation Efforts to

preserve the stately side of

Malacca have met with mixed

results, writes robyn eckhardt 90 Books It’s one thing to try to

understand a foreign country. It’s

another entirely to channel an

imaginary foreigner. Novelist

francine prose on the challenge

75

of bringing a place—and its characters—to life.

96 Obsessions No traffic, just the

sea and the smell of salt-tinged air.

bob morris on his love for ferries.

102 Food Rule Britannia: London’s

food scene is more dynamic than

ever, writes paul levy 106 Reflections peter jon lindberg considers the virtues of a good old-fashioned tour guide.

112 Portfolio The far north of

Vietnam is one of the most

stunning places on earth,

aaron joel santos discovers.

departments 16 In this issue 18 Editor’s note 22 Contributors 24 Mail 26 Best Deals 28 Ask T+L

42 Smart Traveler 152 Last Look

c l o c k w i s e f r o m to p l e f t : l a u r i e f l e tc h e r i ; a a r o n j o e l s a n to s ; J o h n L aw to n

62 Art From collage to photography

to painting, Kuala Lumpur’s

cultural scene is evolving into a

hub for contemporary art.

by naomi lindt

in this issue

Italy 146 Hohhot, Inner Mongolia 154 Guangzhou 136 Ha Giang 112 Malacca 83 Taupo 123

trip ideas

DESTINATIONS Mumbai 123 Taipei 60 Tokyo 123 Udaipur 123

Arts + Culture

58, 64, 83

Beauty

76

City

51, 136

Australia, New Zealand and The Pacific Matauri Bay, New Zealand 123 Melbourne 123 Taupo 123

Design

56

Fashion

75, 78

Food + Drink

102

Hotels + Resorts

60, 70, 72, 123, 146

Photography

112

Travel Tips

90, 96, 106

Europe Greece 68 Italy 146 London 102 Moscow 48 Seville 58 The americas Los Angeles 44

Featured Destination

Guangzhou

Away from the much-hyped Zhujiang New Town, Guangzhou has plenty of charming traditional structures. Look for the city’s distinctive qilou buildings, arcaded shop houses unique to southern China. A cross between Chinese and European influences, they hark back to the 19th century and can be found along Beijing Road, among other major streets. (See page 136 for more on Guangzhou.)

16 august 2011 | travelandleisureasia.com

philipp Engelhorn (3)

travel tip

Southeast Asia Bangkok 76, 123 Boracay 123 Chiang Mai 123 Ha Giang, Vietnam 112 Hanoi 123 Hong Kong 49, 72, 76 Jakarta 56 Luang Prabang 123 Kuala Lumpur 62 Malacca 83 Phnom Penh 51 Singapore 46, 70, 76, 123

Asia Agra 123 Beijing 47, 123 Guangzhou 136 Hohhot, Inner Mongolia 154 Jaipur 123 Jodhpur 123

editor’s note where to find me )) matt@mediatransasia.com )) matt leppard on Facebook

PICKS OF THE MONTH Up and coming—and recent—openings in Asia’s World’s Bests.

W Bangkok The funky, stylish brand extends its reach into Asia’s party city. Watch out for the opening date!

South Sathorn Rd.; starwoodhotels.com.

world’s top vacation city again, following two wins previously. Well, readers love to come here on holiday, and this is NOT a quality-ofliving survey: all you armchair (and Facebook) critics take note! Elsewhere in Southeast Asia, Bali moves up a notch since 2010 when it was placed as readers’ fourth favorite island in the world, and it remains Asia’s favorite beachy getaway. For more results, turn to page 123 or visit www.TravelandLeisureAsia.com, and while you’re there, let us know what you think about us in our own annual readers’ survey.

This being the World’s Best issue, I wanted to thank some of the stars from my recent travels: the staff whose dedication helps to take some of the sting out of a long flight, or a tricky cultural situation. First off, thanks to the guy from The Westin Resort Nusa Dua, Bali, for the much-needed assistance at the airport (with my visa running out the next day!). Thanks to all the staff at the Fairmont Peace Hotel in Shanghai and the organizers

of the International Luxury Travel Mart, who scrambled to find me a car to get to the airport when I was already in a broken-down taxi.

Hats off, too, to the engineers at the Grand Hyatt Jakarta who calmly repaired a Jacuzzi that had wildly spun out of control due to operator error (i.e., mine). And thanks to all the airline staff who work so hard to stop passengers using phones, standing up during landing, drinking too much, taking on crazily oversized carry-on luggage and so much more. The personal touch makes such a difference, in fact, that in this issue, we look at that oft-maligned creature, the tour guide (“Walk this Way,” page 96). We also lift the lid on how to make your own traditional Indonesian batik (page 56). Elsewhere, my friends will tell you, our search for Asia’s best barber (“Close Shaves,” page 76) is quite close to my heart given recent facial hair growth. Well, I am currently channeling my inner Robinson Crusoe.—m at t l e p pa r d

Shanghai Hotel Indigo For this one, you really have to take me at my word: from design to execution to the views to the F&B, this is an absolute cannotmiss. 585 Zhongshan E. 2nd Rd.; shanghai.hotelindigo. com.

Phuket Centara Grand Beach Resort This five-star beachfront resort lives up to its name. 683 Patak Rd.; centara hotelsresorts.com.

Maldives Viceroy Keep your eye on this one in case you ever win gazillions of dollars and can buy it and keep it all to yourself! Shaviyani Atoll; viceroyhotels andresorts.com.

travel + leisure 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.

18 august 2011 | travelandleisureasia.com

tom ho ops

B e f o r e a n y o f yo u c r i e s “ F i x ! ” I n e e d t o s ay, f i r s t, t h at o u r 1 6 t h T r a v e l + L e i s u r e Wo r l d ’s B e s t p o l l s e e s B a n g ko k a s t h e

Bali Courtyard

by Marriott Stunning new property in the manicured, pictureperfect Nusa Dua area. Kawasan Pariwisata Lot SW1; marriott.com.

editor-in-chief art director deputy editor features editor senior DEsigner DEsigner ASSISTANT editor/Illustrator Assistant Editor

Matt Leppard James Nvathorn Unkong Christopher Kucway Lara Day Wannapha Nawayon Sirirat Prajakthip Wasinee Chantakorn Liang Xinyi

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

chairman president publishing director

publishER director singapore / associate publisher DIGITAL MEDIA MANAGER business development managers CONSULTANT, HONG KONG/MACAU chief financial officer production manager production group circulation MANAGER circulation assistant

J.S. Uberoi Egasith Chotpakditrakul Rasina Uberoi-Bajaj

Robert Fernhout Lucas W. Krump Pichayanee Kitsanayothin Michael K. Hirsch Joey Kukielka Shea Stanley Gaurav Kumar Kanda Thanakornwongskul Supalak Krewsasaen Porames Chinwongs Yupadee Saebea

american express publishing corporation President/Chief Executive Officer Senior Vice President/Chief Marketing Officer Senior Vice President/Chief Financial Officer Senior Vice President/Editorial Director Vice President/Publisher, Travel + Leisure U.S. Executive Editor, International Publishing Director, International

Ed Kelly Mark V. Stanich Paul B. Francis Nancy Novogrod Jean-Paul Kyrillos Mark Orwoll Thomas D. Storms

travel+leisure southeast asia Vol. 5, Issue 7 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 2 368-2942–7). 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.

This edition is published by permission of AMERICAN EXPRESS PUBLISHING CORPORATION 1120 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10036 United States of America Tel. +1 212 382 5600 Online: www.amexpub.com Reproduction in whole or in part without the consent of the copyright owner is prohibited.

subscriptions Subscription enquiries: www.travelandleisuresea.com/subscribe ADVERTISING Advertising enquiries: e-mail advertising@mediatransasia.com

philipp engelhorn photographer

paul levy writer

Assignment Shot our feature on Guangzhou (“Invisible City,” page 136).

Guangzhou or Hong Kong I prefer Hong Kong, the lifestyle is much better. Odd Guangzhou The strangest thing was definitely the lines outside Guangdong Museum on a Sunday (do not go on Sunday). Guangzhou surprise The art areas were the biggest surprise for me in Guangzhou.

Best of China It’s still the Autonomous Regions: Tibet and Xinjiang. In the works My next big assignment is having a baby this month. So nothing is planned for now, because this golden child and his beautiful mother will turn my world upside down.

assignment “The Full English” (page 102). finest RESTAURANT in london Definitely Dinner by Heston Blumenthal, as much for the menu’s playfulness as for the food. touristy spot worth a visit The Royal Opera House, in Covent Garden. Great opera is at least as nourishing as great food and drink. I work as an opera critic, so I am there a lot. most memorable souvenir A bottle of the Chinese tonic Sanpien Jiu (loosely translated as “three penis wine”). mark your calendars In 2013, I am curating an exhibition on food at the Ashmolean Museum, in Oxford, England.

robyn eckhardt writer Assignment Looked into preservation in Malacca (“For Good Measure,” page 83).

In Malacca, don’t miss On Friday and Saturday nights, karaoke on the big stage at the end of Jonker Walk. Favorite place for Asian architecture Sri Lanka. I’d love to live in anything designed by architect Geoffrey Bawa.

Design-wise, your home is best described as...

Moving Carton Chic.

I recently moved and I’ve yet to fully unpack. If history is anything to go by, I never will. Best souvenir from Malacca Gula melaka: caramel-y, smoky coconut palm sugar. Next big project My partner and I are refurbishing a pre-war shop house in George Town, Penang.

TOP ROW , FROM LEFT : c o u r t e s y o f p h i l i p p e n g e l h o r n ; c o u r t e s y o f r o b y n e c k h a r d t ; NICK ATKINS PHOTOGRAPHY B OTTOM ROW , FROM LEFT : p h i l i p p e n g e l h o r n ; d a v i d h a g e r m a n ; LAURIE FLETCHER

contributors

mail

Letter of the month Making Memories

When I read your article on Java [“Among the Volcanoes,” July 2011], I was reminded of one my favorite aspects of travel: as much as the destination, it’s the local people you meet who make a trip memorable.

Seeing Java through the eyes of Anhar

Sentosa, Really

Hey, I thought Sentosa in Singapore was little more than an amusement park. So I have to thank you for the update on new places to eat there [“Serving up Sentosa,” July 2011] and why they’re worth a look. Next time I’m in Singapore, I’ll definitely make the short trek out to the island, the only problem being exactly where I’m going to eat.

—luca nagamine, denpasar Unspoilt and Loving It

I hope that you’ll include more offthe-beaten path stories like your July articles on Thailand [“Dishing

Setjadibrata gave some background that cannot come from a guidebook or a documentary. Even his travel advice—“Better you go to the village”— resounds with me. Head away from the usual—there’s a good chance you’ll be rewarded with a memorable journey.

—melissa tan, singapore

up Bangkok”] and Vietnam [“Hidden Cham”]. Where one is about a city that I’m quite familiar with, even I didn’t know too much about the Thonglor neighborhood. I’ll have to correct that on my next visit, as it sounds like a happening part of town. But I might put off that trip until I can get to the Cham Islands, which sound idyllic but not overrun with visitors. I wouldn’t even mind sleeping on the beach under the stars, something I thought I would never say! In the meantime, can you continue uncovering the unspoilt side of Southeast Asia? That’s when your magazine is at its best.

—mark stren, hong kong

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.

SEE MORE. DO MORE. SPEND LESS.

B O O K N O W A N D S AV E D U R I N G T H E G R E AT G E TAWAY.

Pack your bags and start your next adventure with The Great Getaway.

Save up to 40% when you stay by September 5 at any of the 10 distinct h o t e l b r a n d s w i t h i n t h e H i l t o n Wo r l d w i d e p o r t f o l i o . W i t h d e s t i n a t i o n s i n 82 countries you are sure to have more to remember.

B O O K BY AU G U S T 2 2 AT H H O N O R S . CO M / A PA C

©2011 Hilton HHonors Worldwide. Book between May 13, 2011 and August 22, 2011 and stay at participating hotels within the Hilton Worldwide portfolio between May 27, 2011 and September 5, 2011. Some hotels may extend offer period. Subject to availability. Full non-refundable prepayment required at time of booking. Your credit card will be charged immediately for the total amount quoted for the entire stay as reserved and refunds or credits will not be issued unless otherwise indicated by local law. Must book at least fourteen (14) days in advance of arrival. Discounts vary and range from 15% - 40% off select rates based upon days of the week a stay is consumed, geographical location of hotel and/or by brand. Blackout dates and length of stay restrictions may apply.

Additional terms and restrictions apply. Visit HHonors.com/APAC for details.

The

bestdeals

Ultimate Paradise

AFFORDABLE ASIAN TRIPS

Fusion Maia Da Nang, Vietnam.

Le Méridien Chiang Rai Resort, Thailand.

northern thai escapes Chaweng Regent Beach Resort Lying against the fine white sand of Chaweng Beach. The intimate beachfront resort allows guest to enjoy the beauty of nature and the entertainment sports, restaurants and shopping with the very best location to suit all tastes.

THAILAND Art Discovery package at Le Méridien Chiang Rai Resort (66-53/603333; lemeridien.com/chiangrai). What’s Included A stay in a Deluxe Garden

View room, upgraded to a Deluxe River View room; daily breakfast; and a guided Chiang Rai tour to the White Temple, Black House and Doi Din Dang Pottery Studio. Cost From Bt5,000 per night, double, two-night minimum, through October 31. Savings 35 percent.

THAILAND Simply Lanna package at Tamarind Village (66-53/418-896;

tamarindvillage.com) in Chiang Mai. What’s Included A three-night stay in a Lanna room; round-trip airport transfers; daily breakfast; one Northern Thai set dinner at Ruen Tamarind; one 90-minute aromatic oil massage at the Village Spa; and a halfday Lanna temple excursion. Cost From Bt15,300 (Bt5,100 per night), double, through December 20. Savings 30 percent.

Kiridara Luang Prabang, Laos.

spa indulgence

VIETNAM Hot Deal at Fusion Maia Da Nang (84-511/3967-999; fusionmaia danang.com). What’s Included A stay in a

Pool Suite villa; daily breakfast; all spa treatments; and shuttles to and from Fusion Lounge in Hoi An. Cost US$290 per night, double, through September 30. Savings 41 percent.

new on the scene

CHINA Opening offer at Hotel Pravo

(86-21/6393-8989; PreferredBoutique. com/Pravo) in Shanghai. What’s Included A two-night stay in a Perfect Studio; minibar soft drinks; and a RMB400 dining credit. Cost From RMB2,680 (RMB1,340 per night), double, through August 31. Savings 55 percent.

LAOS Opening Offer at Kiridara Luang Prabang (856-71/261-888; kiridara.com).

What’s Included A stay in a Superior

room; daily breakfast; and wireless Internet access. Cost From US$120 per night, double, through September 30.

Savings 35 percent.

deal of the month

BANGKOK SALES OFFICE: Tel: (66 2) 530 7866 till 70 Fax: (66 2) 530 7871 till 2 E-mail: bkkmkt@chawengregent.com SAMUI: 155/4 Chaweng Beach, Koh Samui, Suratthani 84320 Thailand Tel: (66 77) 230 391 till 400 Fax: (66 77) 422 222, 231 013 E-mail: admn@chawengregent.com

w w w. c h awe n g r e g e n t . c o m

HONG KONG Summer package at The Fleming (852/36072288; thefleming.com). What’s The Fleming, Included A stay in a Standard Hong Kong. room; breakfast; Internet; local calls; 10 percent off laundry; and late check-out. Cost From HK$880 per night, double, through August 31. Savings Up to 63 percent.

clockwise from top left: courtesy of Fusion Maia Da Nang; courtesy of Le Méridien Chiang Rai Resort; courtesy of Kiridara Luang Prabang; courtesy of The Fleming

Welcome to Your Own Private Paradise

askt+l At Jemby-Rinjah Eco Lodge.

Avoiding jet lag.

Can you recommend an interesting day trip out of Kota Kinabalu, in Malaysia?

—melissa warren, singapore Last month, the North Borneo Railway (60-88/263-933; northborneorailway.com.my; fares from RM120) fired up its vintage British Vulcan steam engine and five restored carriages, a train that can hold 80 passengers in total. It makes a journey along the coast that lasts several hours, starting at Tanjung Aru Station and traveling through paddy fields, mangrove swamps and forests to the coast, with stops at Kinarut and Papar. The train is one of the few functioning locomotives in the world that is fuelled by wood, so the journey itself is half the fun.

Q: I’m looking for a green break from Sydney. Any suggestions?

—lucy cheng, denpasar a: Just a two-hour drive from the

Australian city, Jemby-Rinjah Eco Lodge (61-2/4787-7622; jemby.com.au; cabins from A$185 per night) is set on seven hectares of bushland and offers one- and two-bedroom cabins, as well as eco lodges that can accommodate up to 16 people. Rainforest walks across this sandstone landscape to deep gorges and canyons are the draw here in the Blue Mountains, an area with no less than seven national parks.

Q: How can I avoid jet lag on my long-haul vacation?

—thomas cheshire, hong kong a: There is no foolproof cure to avoid

jetlag. Aside from the obvious advice of being well-rested prior to your trip and

sleeping during your flight, it’s best to adapt to the time zone you are traveling to on departure. Eat light meals at local times, and avoid caffeine and alcohol for up to four hours prior to the bedtime at the destination you are flying to. There’s also the theory that late-evening exposure to bright light helps delay sleepiness on westbound flights. In the other direction, early morning exposure to bright light is said to promote sleepiness come the late evening.

Finally, if you arrive at your destination during the daytime, get out for a walk in the sunlight. what’s your travel question?

» E-mail us at

editor@travelandleisuresea.com

» Post queries at

Facebook.com/TravelandLeisureAsia

» Follow us on Twitter at

@TravLeisureAsia (Questions may be edited for clarity and space.)

c l o c k w i s e FROM t o p LEFT : c o u r t e s y o f N o r t h B o r n e o R a i l w ay ; c o u r t e s y o f J e m b y - R i n j a h E c o l o d g e ; © J a z z IRT / i s t o c k p h o t o . c o m

Sabah by train.

SPECIAL PROMOTION

New Premier Wing and facilities bring style to Singapore

CONTEMPORARY CARLTON HITS THE CITY Carlton Hotel Singapore has gone through some major refitting and refurbishing to ensure that the highest level of satisfaction is delivered to its discerning clients. Not only does this contemporary property boast a new Premier Wing, its lobby and even F&B outlets have been given a makeover, meaning Carlton Singapore is one of the city’s most desirable places to be.

Designed by renowned hospitality interior design firm, Hirsch Bedner Associates, the Premier Wing offers superior, well-appointed accommodation, adding a staggering 287 luxuriously furnished rooms.

This means the hotel can now offer its brand of style, service and verve in a total of 915 rooms—the most comprehensive and versatile inventory of guest rooms in the city. The Premier Wing also features a Premier Club Lounge, the contemporary Gravity Bar, a new gym and a new spa.

So what’s new?

The Premier room interior seamlessly integrates innovative technology with attractive comfort. With its modern, sleek furnishings and designer furniture, each room exudes 30 AUGUST 2011 | TRAVELANDLEISUREASIA.COM

a sense of luxurious comfort and purpose. Working in the Premier Room is a stress-free affair with wireless high-speed Internet, adjustable glass-top work desk and ergonomic Herman Miller chair.

Later, guests can rejuvenate themselves under the rainshower or simply soak it all away in the full length bathtub with luxurious Molton Brown bathroom amenities. The plush 12-inch Sealy Posturepedic mattress with soft duvet covers, goose down pillows and elegant sheets will ensure a good night’s rest in ultimate comfort.

For guests staying in the Premier Club rooms, the hotel offers personalized check-in and check-out services with exclusive access to the Premier Club Lounge located on the top floor with a panoramic view of the city and harbor.

Premier Club guests enjoy complimentary breakfast, afternoon tea and evening cocktails with hors d’oeuvres in total privacy and comfort of the lounge.

Meanwhile, the larger, brighter new Lobby with its beautiful custom-made chandelier by Preciosa and four iconic chairs by Tom Dixon has a contemporary yet welcoming feel to it. Carefully chosen paintings and art pieces in the Lobby add that elegant finishing touch.

SPECIAL PROMOTION

OPPOSITE PAGE: Clockwise from left:

The Premier Club Lounge, Carlton Lobby, Swimming Pool. THIS PAGE: Premier Room, Brand-new Gym, Café Mosaic, Istana Room, Gravity Bar.

And as for food, formally known as Café Vic, the revamped Café Mosaic exudes a sense of warmth with the renovation.

A contemporary café where Asian and Western culinary favorites are brought together, giving you a taste of what the best of Singapore has to offer.

Café Mosaic now has a larger seating capacity of 290 persons, with a private room that can hold up to 30. With LED lighting, a projector and screen, the private room serves as an ideal space for business luncheons, meetings, birthday celebrations or baby showers.

Meanwhile, Gravity Bar is an oasis amid the bustling city set in the heart of Carlton. It is the perfect meeting point for a casual business discussion in the day or for the indulgence in the pleasure of high tea in the afternoons.

The tempo picks up in the evenings when live music kicks in when it is time to let your hair down, making it the place to see and be seen.

And for after all that indulgence? A brand-new gym, complete with full complement of cardiovascular and weight training equipment, will help to counter the calories.

Dedicated male and female saunas are also available in the gym.

Says GM Richard Ong: “Based on what our guests have been telling us and what we observe in the market, we believe that our new Premier Wing, together with the refurbished facilities, gives us the ability to deliver exceptional value to business and leisure travelers who know exactly what they need in a five-star product.”

The property has definitely cemented its place in the top-rated hotels in Singapore, with the new rooms and facilities. Offering pretty much everything today’s city visitor needs, it’s more than worth checking out.

And maybe even checking in!

CARLTON HOTEL SINGAPORE 76 Bras Basah Road, Singapore 189558 t: (65) 6338 8333 f: (65) 6338 3208

www.carltonhotel.sg

TRAVELANDLEISUREASIA.COM | AUGUST 2011 31

Strategies travel smarter

our annual guide to the best websites and apps, from easy-to-use hotel booking tools to smart ways to share and edit your photos. Plus how to stay connected on the road, android versus iphone and more. by tom samiljan

T+L’s

Digital Toolbox the top 80 travel apps and websites

As anyone who’s ever tried to wade through page after page of listings in the travel section of Apple’s App Store can attest, the digital landscape for travelers is both excitingly and bewilderingly expansive. In less than 17 years, we’ve gone from being able to book an airline ticket online to telling a Shanghai cabdriver the address of our hotel in perfect Mandarin via a smart-phone app. Now the question isn’t: What travel websites and apps are available?

Illustrated by Andrea Cobb

Rather, it’s: Which ones are essential? That’s where T+L comes in. We’ve spent the past few months road testing hundreds of travel sites, apps and services, both new and established—sometimes getting exactly what we needed (such as, say, that corner room with the great view) and other times finding ourselves high and dry in the dreaded last-row middle seat. Here, our picks of the travel sites and apps that will change the way you travel for the better. »

travelandleisureasia.com | august 2011 33

strategies top travel apps and websites

➜

Booking your trip

Symbol Key

look for FLIGHTS IN EUROPE Momondo CLICK FACTOR

website

plan your trip Kayak CLICK FACTOR A onestop shop for every­thing travel, Kayak’s website lets you search for airfares and hotel rates, get fare alerts and map real-time deals.

Our new favorite function?

Manage itineraries with My Trips: just forward flight, hotel and other travel confirmations to Kayak, and they’ll load onto a customized online itinerary. The apps let you search and book on the fly, access information on airports and airline fees, and receive price and fare tracker alerts. T+L Tip If your travel plans are flexible, try the Buzz feature on the app, which gives you the best fares for a particular month on a specific route.

RUNS ON Android, BlackBerry, iPhone, iPad and Windows Phone 7 RUNNERS-UP Mobissimo, Travelocity

Search for flights and hotel rooms (without the agony) Hipmunk CLICK FACTOR

­ ipmunk’s intuitive, colorH coded bar charts make it easy to scan flights by cost,

smart-phone app

tablet app

carrier, length of flight and itinerary. Results can be filtered by the usual cate­gories (price, number of stops, etc.) and also by “Agony,” which factors in flight length, number of stops and price. Hipmunk’s site offers a similar approach for finding hotel rooms, delivering results in filterable Google Maps. drawback The ­Hipmunk app searches only for flights—for the time being.

RUNS ON iPhone, iPad RUNNER-UP

InsideTrip.com

KNOW WHEN TO BUY Bing CLICK FACTOR When it comes to making reliable fare predictions, Bing’s travel section is unbeatable, using algorithms and historical data to determine whether an airfare will go up or down—and whether you should wait or jump on that ticket today, before it’s too late to save yourself some money.

DRAWBACKS There’s no dedicated Bing travel smart-phone app yet—and travel is curiously missing from Bing’s otherwise stunning iPad app.

RUNS ON iPhone RUNNERS-UP FareReport. com, Yapta.com

34 august 2011 | travelandleisureasia.com

Can’t make head or tail of your frequent-flier program? Don’t worry: The vocal travelers on FlyerTalk.com have already sorted it all out and are ready to advise you—on that and any other travel topic you can imagine.

—T+L U.S. associate editor jennifer flowers

Momondo scours more than 800 sites including Opodo, discount airlines like Ryanair and EasyJet, and even high-speed rail networks like the TGV, and delivers the results in an attractive, multicolored design with innovative filtering options. The new iPhone app searches just as many sources for flights, and lets you scroll through suppliers with the swipe of your finger.

DRAWBACK Results for flights outside Europe can be hit or miss.

RUNS ON iPhone/iPad RUNNERS-UP Dohop. com, SkyScanner.com

and simply bad. It also has reviews of different airline services, as well as quick-scan icons for such in-flight amenities as food, entertainment, in-seat power ports and Wi-Fi. DRAWBACK For accurate results, you have to know the exact departure and arrival times, since airlines tend to swap out planes depending on the time of year.

RUNNERS-UP Seat Maestro.com, SeatPlans. com, SirLikes.com

PICK THE BEST AIRPLANE SEAT

MileBlaster

SeatGuru CLICK FACTOR Never be trapped in a last-row, non-reclining middle seat.

Enter an airline and flight number and SeatGuru calls up a detailed airplane plan, indicating seats that are desirable (emergency exits, those with extra legroom, etc.), average

MAKE THE MOST OF YOUR MILES

CLICK FACTOR This Web-based service, which is optimized for mobile phones, is by far the easiest and most comprehensive way to keep track of all your frequent-flier programs (including elite ones) and make sure you use your miles before they expire.

For a one-time app fee of

US$5.99, you also get up-to-date listings, by program, of current bonus offers, plus a trip calculator, so you can see exactly how many miles you’ll earn.

RUNS ON Android, Nokia, iPhone/iPad RUNNERS-UP Traxo. com, WebFlyer.com

find A CRUISE that’s right for you CruiseCritic CLICK FACTOR

Whether you’re looking for a five-day, familyfriendly tour of the Caribbean or an intimate classical-music cruise in Europe, you’ll find the most comprehensive user and editor reviews of ships, cabins and ports of call at this website.

Cruises are searchable by a range of criteria: price, region, lifestyle (singles, gay, family, etc.).

DRAWBACK Why no mobile app?

RUNNERS-UP Cruise​ Reviews.com, iCruise.com

update major booking engines ➜ e x p e dia

The site’s recently launched location-aware Expedia Hotels iPhone app lets you find and book accommodations near you. Expedia is also now partnering with Groupon to deliver flash-sale hotel deals to subscribers, with plans to extend the service to cruises, car rentals and a range of other travel services.

➜o r b i t z

In November 2010, Orbitz launched iPhone and Android apps that offer a suite of all-in-one features: you can search and book hotels, flights and car rentals; manage and access your itineraries; check on your flight status; and find out gate and baggage information. The new iPad app covers hotels, with more functionality on the way.

➜t r a v e l o c i t y

T+L tip

A smart redesign of the home page means that you automatically get the latest deals from your local airport, as well as information on travel topics trending on Twitter. Updates to the app (for Windows Phone 7, iPhone and, coming soon, Android and iPad) include access to the site’s Top Secret Hotels feature, which offers Hotwire-style, unpublished discounts to mystery hotels that are revealed only after purchase.

»

strategies top travel apps and websites

➜

where to stay

CLICK FACTOR Nice

SCORE A PRIVATE ROOM OR ­APARTMENT

com, TravelPost.com

get THE ROOM YOU WANT

views and proximity to (or distance from) the elevator are just two of the criteria you can select on Room 77, which uses official hotel data, visitor reports and geographic coordinates to find the best accommodations for you. You’ll also find virtual room views via Google Earth and floor plans for thousands of hotels.

snag A DEAL ON A ROOM

FIND OUT WHAT A HOTEL IS REALLY LIKE

Priceline

TripAdvIsor

RUNS ON iPhone/iPad RUNNER-UP TripKick.com

CLICK FACTOR This

CLICK FACTOR With

book A LAST-MINUTE ROOM stateside

13-year-old website’s name-your-rate feature is still the best place to get a deal on rooms around the globe. Just enter your travel dates, price and credit card information, then pick the locations and quality levels you want. If your price is accepted, your reservation is made. If it isn’t, there’s no charge, and you can bid again. It works the same way for car rentals and airfare. T+L TIP You have to add or remove filters each time you place a bid within 24 hours, so start broad and then narrow down. You can hone your bidding strategy at BetterBidding.com.

DRAWBACK Unlike other travel-booking sites, it doesn’t let you accrue any miles or points.

RUNS ON Android, iPhone, iPad

update

hotel sites

36

Room 77

access the site from a computer Web browser, you won’t be able to book.

RUNS ON Android, BlackBerry, iPhone/iPad, HP WebOS

RUNNERS-UP Oyster.

more than 45 million user-submitted reviews and pictures of more than 474,000 properties around the world, the TripAdvisor site is a required stop for anyone researching hotels.

Thanks to integration with Facebook, travelers can now read reviews from Facebook friends.

The iPad app uses GPS to help you find nearby hotels, or you can enter a destination and get a ranked list, plotted for you on a Google Map. DRAWBACK As with any user-submitted setup, some reviews should be taken with a grain of salt, but you can check the veracity of a write-up by contacting the poster directly.

RUNS ON Android, iPhone, iPad, Nokia, HP WebOS, Windows Phone 7

Hotel Tonight CLICK FACTOR Ask any traveler who has been stranded at an airport in the middle of the night: finding a last-minute room can be an expensive hassle, since most hotel reservation services are closed by midnight. This new app can book you a room in the U.S. as late as 2 a.m., often at reduced rates. To make things simple, just three hotel results pop up on any given search. The app is available for 13 American cities, including Los Angeles, Chicago and New York, and more are being added every month.

DRAWBACK The service has yet to hit Asia. It’s also a mobile-only app, so while you can technically

AirBnB CLICK FACTOR Now in 181 countries, Airbnb offers 110,000 ownerrented apartments, houses and rooms—often for less than you’d pay for a hotel.

Each property gets a slideshow, and both rooms (and guests) are reviewed by users. If for any reason you’re not pleased, you can get your money back, since payment isn’t made to the host for 24 hours

t+L tip

VacationRentals—is a great first stop for group travelers. The more than 250,000 properties on offer are particularly strong in popular destinations such as Paris.

DRAWBACK City listings are uneven—a search for apartments in Tokyo yielded only 11 results.

T+L TIP HomeAway’s Carefree Rental Guarantee protects you if the property is double-booked or drastically different from what was advertised.

RUNS ON Android, iPhone RUNNER-UP FlipKey.com

TRADE YOUR HOUSE Luxe Home Swap CLICK FACTOR Exchange your place for a Dutch

I can’t get enough of DesignTripper.com.

The reviews and photos of beautifully designed hotels, inns, and houses around the world have inspired me to hit the road and rethink my aesthetic back home.

—T+L U.S. news editor Amy farley

after you check in. T+L TIP Rate hosts after each

stay—it will raise the status of your profile and make you a more attractive candidate.

RUNS ON iPhone RUNNERS-UP iStopover. com, Roomorama.com

find a PLACE FOR THe whole FAMILY HomeAway CLICK FACTOR Focused on privately owned vacation rental properties, HomeAway—along with its sister sites VRBO and

colonial villa in Galle, Sri Lanka, or a townhouse in Double Bay, Sydney.

Membership is US$159 a year for as many swaps as you’d like, and the site makes it easy for you to contact owners and confirm stays with a digital contract.

DRAWBACK You do have to swap your house in order to stay somewhere else, so be prepared to make your place guest-ready. T+L TIP Check with your home-insurance provider to make sure you’re covered for guests.

»

Travel + Leisure’s own members-only site, Vacationist.com, gives you serious discounts at luxury hotels acoss the globe. For unique, under-the-radar boutique properties, try MrandMrsSmith.com, which has just launched an iPhone app that lets you book right from your handset, with an iPad app to follow. Or, try polling fellow travelers online with Gogobot.com, a new social travel network that lets you pose questions about any destination or venue to your Facebook and Twitter friends, as well as other Gogobot members. To avoid buyer’s remorse, prescreen your hotel at Oyster.com, which provides reviews that can be quite revealing (you can compare official hotel website images with reviewers’ snapshots). Scared of bedbugs? Raveable.com now lets you search by destination for hotels that have had bedbug reports within the last 12 months.

Subject?

Background?

With The HS SYSTEM, You Don’t Have To Choose!

Count on great photos even when the light is low. The HS SYSTEM delivers sharp, precise detail in shadow and high-contrast areas – with both subject and background ideally exposed. Colors are naturally vivid, and noise is virtually eliminated. Now you don’t have to be afraid of the dark.

SOUTH & SOUTHEAST ASIA REGIONAL HEADQUARTERS CANON SINGAPORE PTE. LTD. 1 HarbourFront Avenue #04-01 Keppel Bay Tower Singapore 098632 Tel: 65-6799 8888 Fax: 65-6799 8882

www.canon-asia.com/hssystem

strategies top travel apps and websites

KEEP BUSY DURING A LONG LAYOVER iFly CLICK FACTOR The most comprehensive airport guide online offers advice on what to do while you’re waiting, whether you’re looking for dinner, a manicure or a quick tour of your locale. It also has

t+l tip

CLICK FACTOR If you’re traveling to Amsterdam, Bangkok, Tokyo, Vienna or any of the 28 global cities covered by mTrip, all you have to do is input your travel dates and lodging and what you want to see and do, and the service will instantly calculate a daily, location-appropriate itinerary, complete with reviews, directions and distances from your hotel.

(Each city has its own year). You can share app for US$5.99.) Or just itineraries with other explore your destination members and post your with the service’s itinerary on Facebook. augmented-reality app, TripIt will also integrate which uses your smart your itinerary with iCal or Google Calendar, as well as phone’s camera. dozens of other travel apps, DRAWBACK Reviews of some venues can be scant. including FlightTrack Pro RUNS ON Android, and Taxi Magic (which iPhone helps you with taxi and RUNNERS-UP limo bookings). You can Michelin, Zagat now add and amend plans

I try to use public transport, and rely on the HopStop app for directions. It works even better with the Exit Strategy NYC app, which maps all the exits in New York subway stations.

—T+L u.s. director, editorial product development, Peter J. frank parking information, ground delay updates and hotel listings for nearly 700 airports around the world.

Downloadable maps mean you don’t have to worry about accessing plans while roaming internationally.

RUNS ON Android, iPhone/iPad

mTrip

on the iPhone, iPad and Android apps.

RUNS ON Android, BlackBerry, iPhone, iPad RUNNERS-UP Kayak, Worldmate (app only)

posted on your Facebook wall.

DRAWBACKS As of now, it doesn’t play music, and draws from limited news and talk-radio sources.

RUNS ON iPhone RUNNER-UP Stitcher.com

GET TURN-BY-TURN DIRECTIONS Google Maps

Aha Radio

CLICK FACTOR Create a route traveling by car, foot, bike or public transport—all of which can be sent to others via e-mail or text message via your desktop. On the app, you can also zoom in on your directions on either a road map or with a satellite view. Maps show graphic overlays for traffic and Wikipedia entries of specific locations.

DRAWBACK On Android phones, the app works best with GPS turned on, which can run down your battery in two hours.

RUNS ON Android, BlackBerry, iPhone, iPad RUNNERS-UP Bing.com/ maps, MapQuest

CLICK FACTOR No other

Ditch the STANDALONE GPS DEVICE

Stay social while you drive

car-optimized app can read you a text-to-speech mix of news from NPR and CNN, real-time traffic information for your route, and the latest Facebook and Twitter updates. Press the mic button and record an audio message that can be

Navigon CLICK FACTOR So many navigation apps provide compelling features, but Navigon MobileNavigator stands apart, thanks to fast-rerouting, tablet-

optimized versions and easy venue searches via Google. Plus there are handy features like Speed Assistant, which gives you an audio reminder whenever you exceed the speed limit, as well as weather and traffic alerts.

Navigon’s apps, which start at US$24.99, are available for up to 70 countries, and you won’t rack up roaming charges, since the maps are downloadable.

RUNS ON Android, iPhone, iPad RUNNERS-UP MotionXGPS Drive (app only), TomTom, Waze (app only)

FIND OUT IF YOUR FLIGHT IS ON TIME FlightTrack CLICK FACTOR If you want to know if your or a friend’s plane is delayed, FlightTrack is the best way to get travel updates. Enter your flight number and receive gate information and departure times, real-time flight maps, and a delay forecast based on historical stats. Delayed passengers can also search for alternate flights—and contact the airline from the app—as well as access seat plans from SeatGuru.

It costs US$5 extra for FlightTrack Pro, which offers flight-alert and delay-prediction features.

RUNS ON Android, BlackBerry, HP WebOS, iPhone, iPad RUNNERS-UP

FlightAware.com, TravelTracker.com

update android vs. iphone/ipad

»

RUNNER-UP

GateGuru (app only)

MANAGE YOUR TRIP TripIt CLICK FACTOR Every travel-booking site worth its salt now offers the itinerary-management features that TripIt pioneered, but few include such extras as integrated frequent-flier and loyalty-point trackers (you’ll need to get the Pro version for US$49 per

When it comes to travel apps, which operating system has the edge?

38 august 2011 | travelandleisureasia.com

VS. Though Android offers more than 200,000 apps in its market, many are of the me-too variety, developed and released after an iPhone success—except, unsurprisingly, for Google apps.

On Android, the free Google Maps Navigation offers full turn-by-turn, text-to-speech directions with street names, Street View mode and walking directions (not so on the standard iPhone or iPad apps).

Apple can claim more than 400,000 apps, with most of those created first for the iPhone (including magazine and newspaper apps that still work only on the iPhone or iPad).

Exclusive video-calling apps like FaceTime ensure you can make free calls to others with iPhones or iPads, while the superb in-phone camera and camcorder apps, such as iMovie, make capturing and sharing your vacation on-the-fly easier than ever.

F ROM LE F T : COURTESY O F SAMSUNG ; COURTESY O F A P P LE INC .

➜

getting there

GET AN INSTANT ITINERARY

strategies top travel apps and websites

Find the nearest …anything Yelp CLICK FACTOR The most comprehensive of business-search sites is Yelp, which lists nearby restaurants, hotels, banks, etc., via your phone’s built-in GPS. Contributed by other users, each listing features an address, phone number, pictures, reviews, and a map with directions. Originally only for businesses in the U.S., Yelp now works in Canada and some European countries.

DRAWBACK As is the case with most crowdsourced services, Yelp is riddled with errors—it’s only as good as its users, so make sure to flag anything you find that’s incorrect.

RUNS ON Android, BlackBerry, HP WebOS, iPhone, iPad, Windows Phone 7 RUNNERS-UP Aloqa (app only), Poynt (app only), Where.com

FIND THE BEST singapore chicken rice Foodspotting CLICK FACTOR This

location-based service lets people recommend specific dishes and share images, reviews and thumbs-up or -down

Google ­Translate CLICK FACTOR If you

ratings. There’s a website, but we like the app, which sends you images of notable meals near you.

Users can also employ the service to find the best dishes at a restaurant and access guides from the likes of Anthony Bourdain.

RUNS ON Android, BlackBerry, iPhone, Windows Phone 7

speak like a local Rosetta Stone TOTALe CLICK FACTOR The renowned Rosetta Stone language-learning system is now fully online and even has an iPhone app so you can practice your phrases in more than 30 languages (Arabic, French, Russian, Turkish, etc.) while waiting in an interminable security line at the airport. Rosetta’s format skips formal grammar lessons in favor of computer-game-like repetition, in which you hear questions and answer them by clicking on pictures and responding, conversationally, into the microphone.

DRAWBACK Starting at US$179, this system isn’t cheap, and you need headphones and a microphone to make it work.

RUNS ON iPhone, iPad RUNNER-UP LiveMocha.com

40 august 2011 | travelandleisureasia.com

need to ask, say, for more towels in Turkish or Haitian Creole, just press the app’s on-screen mic button and speak a phrase.

Google Translate will deliver both a text and audio version in one of 24 languages (text-only translations are available for 34 more). Translations are surprisingly workable, especially for such basic phrases as “May I have a cup of coffee?” Best of all?

It’s completely free.

DRAWBACK The computer-simulated voices on the apps are generic, especially when compared with the various personalities available from for-pay competitors.

RUNS ON Android, iPhone/iPad

TIP PROPERLY GlobeTipping CLICK FACTOR Do you know how much to give a hotel porter in Tuvalu or a waiter in Bermuda? Don’t

worry: it’s optional, according to this app’s tipping advice for more than 200 countries, from Afghanistan to Zambia, which make it the most comprehensive of the global tip calculators.

Speaking of which, the app includes one, which will factor in tips by percentage and divide the bill by number of diners.

DRAWBACK Specific information for different types of services— housekeeping, spas, taxis, etc.—is uneven.

RUNS ON iPhone

STAY IN TOUCH Skype CLICK FACTOR This Internet telephone service lets you make unlimited free audio or video calls via your computer or mobile phone to other Skype users. You can also make inexpensive calls to outside phones—for as little as 9.2 U.S. cents per minute to landlines in India, for example.

RUNS ON Android, BlackBerry, iPhone, iPad, Windows Phone 7 RUNNERS-UP FaceTime, Tango (app only)

SHARE YOUR PICTURES Flickr CLICK FACTOR Flickr remains the easiest, quickest and most versatile way to show off your photos—and now it handles video, too. Users can share on Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr and other sites by simply clicking on the appropriate icon and adding captions and titles if they want. Other conveniences include easy uploading via a dedicated e-mail address and smart-phone apps.

T+L TIP It’s worth shelling out US$25 per year for a Pro membership to get more than the standard 300 megabytes of images or two video uploads per month.

RUNS ON iPhone, Windows Phone 7 RUNNERS-UP iPhoto, Photobucket ✚

Get the guide for trip ideas, city guides and the latest travel news, go to travelandleisure asia.com

create your own hot spot

Wi-Fi never seems to be available where you need it. The solution? Turn your smart phone or tablet into its very own hot spot

or Smart phone

tablet

Some Android and iOS phones and tablets have built-in features that allow travelers to use their devices to create hot spots for up to five gadgets. On most Android phones and tablets, look for the 3G Mobile Hotspot setting and follow the prompts.

F ROM LE F T : COURTESY O F h t c ; COURTESY O F A P P LE INC .

➜

while youʼre there

Translate ON THE GO

smarttraveler

the ins and outs of modern travel

A Quick Guide to Alternative Therapies Reiki, Watsu, naturopathy—more and more destination spas in Asia are offering non-traditional treatments. But how do you make sure you’re getting the real deal? Jennifer Chen has the lowdown

Not so long ago, most spa resorts in Asia merely offered massages, body scrubs and facials. Then yoga and meditation classes became de rigueur. Early pioneers such as The Farm in the Philippines and Thailand’s Chiva-Som introduced full-on wellness programs that employed a team of dieticians, fitness trainers and spa therapists who promised to help you lose weight, quit smoking and destress, all during a weeklong holiday.

Now, at some resorts you can dabble in alternative therapies ranging from traditional Chinese medicine to underwater massage. At the same time, you can powwow with a life coach, get your chakras rebalanced, and have your body scanned for blocked energy channels. At the new Fivelements wellness center in Bali, guests can join in traditional Balinese pujas and “healing dances.” “Part of the reason why there’s been more interest [in alternative therapies] is that people want different sorts of holidays.

They want an educational holiday,” says Tina Horrell, 42 august 2011 | travelandleisureasia.com

an Australian naturopath who works at Bangkok’s Tria Integrative Medical Institute.

Whether or not these therapies actually work would take years—no, decades—to resolve, and there’s plenty of research that supports both sides of the debate. Rather than fuel the flames of contention, I’d like to offer these practical tips on how to approach complementary and alternative medicine for those who are interested: 1 Do your research Before you take the plunge, research what kind of therapy is best suited for the issue you want to resolve. Back problems? Acupuncture might do the trick, whereas stress-related issues might require a multi-faceted approach. “Do what feels natural or what you’re interested in,” Horrell suggests. She also adds that patients should take into account their level of commitment—some therapists might ask you to make extensive lifestyle changes.

Illustrated by Wasinee Chantakorn

Whatever therapy you pick, look into what it involves, any research that shows its efficacy, and above all, any warnings and possible side effects. Also, ask a practitioner how many treatments you need.

3 Safety first Qualifications are essential to make sure you don’t suffer any injuries in any therapies. If something doesn’t feel right, stop immediately. When it comes to acupuncture, it’s vital that disposable needles are used.

2 Check out your practitioner’s qualifications In the West, naturopaths are required to

4 Let your doctor know Some alternative therapy practitioners would disagree with this point, claiming long-standing prejudices makes most doctors skeptical.

Conversely, some in the alternative medical world have a chip on their shoulders when it comes to conventional medicine, convinced that their methods are the one true path. Still, attitudes among mainstream medical circles are slowly changing, and your doctor might be better informed and more open to alternative therapies than you think. If you’re on medication, tell your doctor that you’re exploring alternative therapies to make sure there are no adverse reactions. “Even diet changes could have an impact,” warns Scasni. Think of both your doctor and therapist as part of your healthcare team—for a team to work smoothly, it’s best that all sides know what’s going on. ✚

register with a governing body and masseurs are required to obtain licenses. But in Asia, only traditional Chinese medicine is rigorously regulated. (Trust this coming from someone who’s endured too many amateur massages.)

“Unfortunately, there are a lot of unqualified people out there passing themselves off as experts,” admits Emma Scasni, a naturopath at Kamalaya wellness resort on Koh Samui. Take Hong Kong, where naturopaths regularly style themselves as “Doctor,” despite not having a doctorate.

Don’t be shy about asking for qualifications and experience. Honest practitioners will be upfront—Horrell points out that she has her degrees printed on her business cards to reassure patients. It’s also worth noting that well-established resorts—such as Kamalaya and Chiva-Som—will only hire therapists and counselors with proper qualifications.

Get the guide for more ideas and recommendations on wellness trips in southeast asia, go to travelandleisureasia.com

newsflash your global guide to what’s happening right now...

hotel

A Bellini with your room key? That’s a given at the just-opened Mr. C Beverly Hills. After all, that’s C as in Cipriani—known for legendary restaurants and cocktail lounges around the world. Brothers Ignazio and Maggio created a hotel in the former Loews Tower that is true to their Italian roots, with Old Hollywood touches: a travertine-and-rosewood-clad lobby, decked out with Eames loungers and Egg chairs, gives way not to a check-in desk (which is hidden from view) but to a swank, Jazz Age–style bar and Italian restaurant serving freshly baked pizzas and house-made pastas. An updated 1930’s ocean-liner glamour defines the 138 rooms—vintage black-and-white photos and burgundy Chesterfield sofas line the neutral-toned walls—while private balconies overlook the teak pool deck. In a city where dramatic entrances are de rigueur, Mr. C has just made his. 1224 Beverwil Dr., Beverly Hills; 1-310/277-2800; cipriani.com; doubles from US$349.— dav i d a . k e e ps

44 august 2011 | travelandleisureasia.com

J ESSICA SAM P LE

l.a.’s next act

From Barefoot Simplicity To Grand Elegance Dream Weddings Become A Reality At The Racha

WWW.THERACHA.COM

weddings@theracha.com 42/12-13 Moo 5, Rawai, Muang, Phuket 83130, Thailand Tel: +66 76 355 455

newsflash Q&A

CAUGHT ON FILM

For his new documentary, Life in a Day, director Kevin Macdonald (The Last King of Scotland) teamed up with YouTube users to create a crowd-sourced 90-minute snapshot of 24 hours around the world. T+L checks in.—d a v i d a . k e e p s

beauty

storied scent Bibliophile fashionistas, take note.

Cult Paris fashion label Zadig & Voltaire has launched a unisex perfume called TOME 1 La Pureté, blending the essences of jasmine tea, almond, milk and orange blossom, among others, all smartly packaged in a monochrome white book. The pages are pure and blank, save for an inscription by Thomas à Kempis, a medieval German mystic who was born—where else?—in the Diocese of Cologne. The Shoppes at Marina Bay Sands, #B2-71/72, 2 Bayfront Ave.; 65/6688-7155; zadig-et-voltaire.com; S$155.— c a r o l t s e

editor’s pick

global art Looking to put your stamp on the world?

California-based artist Wendy Gold’s ImagineNations (from US$150; artonglobes.com) are decoupaged with old hotel stickers, travel sayings, and whimsical maps studded with everything from butterflies to superheroes. And yes, she also takes custom orders. — je s si e b a nd y 46 august 2011 | travelandleisureasia.com

people’s existences in different places.

Instead of the Pyramids, you see a graveyard in Cairo, where people actually live.

Q: Did any of the videos make you want to travel?

A: There’s footage from Angola of

women singing as they grind corn.

I would go just to hear that music.

Q: Which customs did you find the most fascinating?

A: In Germany, people smash

crockery before a wedding.

Q: You’re Scottish. What do you miss most from your native land?

A: The southern part of Loch Lomond.

From there, you can canoe out to Inchmurrin Island, which is incredibly romantic.

Q: In the film, people reveal the contents of their pockets.

What do you take with you?

A: I’m a be-prepared-for-anything

person—I pack shorts for Germany in December. And I always carry a tiny Canon camera in my back pocket.

c l o c kw i s e f r o m t o p l e f t : c o u r t e s y o f TOME 1 L a P u r e t é ; I a n G a v a n / GETTY IMAGES EURO P E / G e t t y I m a g e s /A F P ; COURTESY O F NATIONAL GEOGRA P H IC ENTERTAINMENT ( 4 ) ; F i l m s t r i p : © J u l i a n S t a r z y ń s k i | D r e a m s t i m e . c o m ; COURTESY O F IMAGINENATIONS

Q: Why did you make the film?

A: To look at the nuanced details of

on our radar

HUTONG spotlight

CLOC K W ISE F ROM TOp : © P e r s e o m e d u s a / D r e a m s t i m e . c o m ; c o u r t e s y o f u l l e n s c e n t e r f o r c o n t e m p o r a r y a r t ( 2 ) ; courtesy of triple-major; courtesy of the orchid hotel

In Beijing, four new ways to experience the capital’s courtyard culture.—l a r a d a y 1. Drink It The mellow house-made meizi jiu, or plum-infused Chinese wine, at Zajia Lab (23 Doufuchi Hutong, behind the Bell Tower, Jiugulou Dajie, Dongcheng district; 86-10/8404-9141; drinks for two RMB80), a new bohemian bar in a converted Taoist temple.

2. See It Conceptual artist Song Dong’s site-specific solo exhibition at the Ullens Center for Contemporary Art (798 Art District, No. 4 Jiuxianqiao Rd., Chaoyang district; ucca.org.cn; through September 8), exploring life in Beijing’s old alleyways through multiple installations.

3. Book It One of 10 minimalist, light-filled rooms at The Orchid (65 Baochao Hutong, Guloudong Rd., Dongcheng district; theorchidbeijing.com; doubles from RMB900), a restored siheyuan home with custom-designed wood furniture and

traditional Chinese roofs.

Our favorite space: Yang, with a terrace overlooking the city’s ancient Drum and Bell Towers.

4. Buy It A reimagined white designer T-shirt at TripleMajor (81 Baochao Hutong, Dongcheng district; 8610/8402-0763), a new concept store owned by Hong Kong transplant Ritchie Chan. Also in stock: avant-garde brands from Asia and beyond, including Singapore’s depression and Korean label ffiXXed.

china redux Clockwise from top: A Beijing hutong; an installation by Song Dong, on show at the Ullens Center for Contemporary Art; outside the Ullens; concept store Triple-Major; The Orchid, a new 10-room boutique hotel.

the soul of Bali in the heart of Ubud

newsflash on the map

from russia, with love Set on an island in the heart of Moscow, the once-abandoned warehouses of the old Red October chocolate factory now house some of the city’s hippest galleries, restaurants and rooftop bars.— j a y c h e s h e s

3 Dome

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“The resort itself was also very special, with delicious food and ambience. One of the best things about Komaneka is the staff, they are so friendly and welcoming and genuinely strive to make your holiday the best it can be”.

– KY. Perth – Australia

KOMANEKA

Monkey Forest | Tanggayuda | Bisma Your home address in Ubud +62 361 976090 sales@komaneka.com www.komaneka.com

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2 With its ­spacious roof deck and ­innovative tapas (bocconcini and chile fritters), Bar Strelka—atop the Strelka design institute— draws a mix of local ­artists, intellectuals and scenesters. 14 Bersenevskaya Nab.; 7-495/ 771-7437; drinks for two RUB700.

6 Take in realist artworks from the Soviet era at the new ­Lumière ­Brothers Center of Photography. 3 Bolotnaya Nab.; 7-495/223-1387.

5 Dine on thincrust Neapolitan pies alongside digital s­ culptures

by Russian ­design collective Eletroboutique at the hybrid restaurant, gallery and nightspot Art Academiya.

6 Bersenevskaya Nab.; 7-495/7717446; dinner for two RUB2,260.

3 At the cinemathemed bar Dome, drinks are served in a screening room that plays Russian art-house films and Hollywood classics. There’s also a separate cocktail lounge.

3/10 Bersenevskiy Per.; 7-499/7886524; drinks for two RUB790.

4 The boutique Russian Street stocks fashion-forward pieces by dozens of up-and-coming local designers. 8 Bersenevskaya Nab.; 7-495/771-0614.

MOSCO W , CLOC K W ISE F ROM t o p RIG H T : COURTESY O F DOME ; MARIA P ATSYU K ( 2 ) ; COURTESY O F LUMI è RE B ROT H ERS c e n t e r o f ph o t o g r a ph y ; COURTESY O F B AR STREL K A ( 2 ) ; MARIA P ATSYU K

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1 For classic ­ ucina italiana, c check out ­Bontempi, a new locanda from ­Lombardy-born chef ­Valentino Bontempi. 12 Bersenevskaya Nab.; 7-495/2231387; dinner for two RUB3,900.

making news Clockwise, from left: The News Room, in Hong Kong; a platter of charcuterie; the Nixon Sour.

restaurant update

courtesy of the news room (3)

VIVE LA CONVERSATION Want to rub elbows with Hong Kong’s creatives? Now, every third Thursday of the month, the newly opened News Room—a stylish bar-restaurant courtesy of the city’s hugely successful The Press Room Group—will hold Liberation Conversation, an after-work music and networking night set to draw the SAR’s media-and-design set. Come between 4 p.m and 8 p.m. and order a Nixon sour, paired with a starter of Louisiana chili crab cakes, or help yourself to wine from the oenomatic dispensers and nibble on French charcuterie. Not in town for the event? The place also does a mean brunch. 33 Tong Chong St., Quarry Bay; 852/2562-3444; drinks and snacks for two HK$220.— carol tse

Three and five night summer family packages available Valid June – 31st August 2011, inclusive Vietnam’s newest island destination, Con Dao, is just a 40 minute flight from Ho Chi Minh City. Six Senses Con Dao is a unique eco-friendly luxury resort with 35 hotel villas and 15 three to four bedroom residential villas, each featuring private infinity pools and panoramic ocean views.

Villas are now available for sale, with a custom tailored rental program and guaranteed returns.

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For villa sales: T: +84 83 910 4855 E: condaosales@sothebysrealty.com.vn www.condaoresidence.com

For hotel bookings: T: +84 64 3831 222 E: reservations-condao@sixsenses.com www.sixsenses.com

insider

Cambodia on the Rise.

At work at Yumi, an izakaya-inspired restaurant.

Phnom Penh—long a mere stopover for travelers to Angkor— is now brimming with stylish new hotels, restaurants, shops and lounges.

BY Jennifer Chen

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destinations trends restaurants + more

CAMBODIA

Phnom Penh

FOOD Cambodians are re-embracing their culinary traditions—dormant for years following the Khmer Rouge regime—at upscale restaurants including Villa Khmer (No. 21B St. 294; 855/92500917; lunch for two US$20), where you can sample northern dishes such as green-mango salad with smoked fish. But there’s plenty of creativity in Phnom Penh’s kitchens, too. With its all-white interior, the Blue Pumpkin (No. 245 Sisowath Quay; 855-23/998-153; lunch for two US$15) is the ideal escape from the midday heat. Highlights include fish amok pasta, subtly spiced steamed fish in tender ravioli doused with a coconut sauce, along with house-made ice creams such as ginger-black-­ sesame and honey-star-anise. Meanwhile, expat chefs are adding an international dimension to the food scene. Among them is 28-year-old Londoner Caspar von ­Hofmannsthal, who serves izakayainspired dishes (pumpkin-filled gyoza and sushi rolls with tempura prawns) at Yumi (No. 29A St. 288; 855/9216-3903; dinner for two US$34), near »

.5 mi (.8 km)

Photographed by Jason Michael Lang

travelandleisureasia.com | august 2011 51

insider trip navigator frenetic Monivong Boulevard. At Tepui at Chinese House (No. 45 Sisowath Quay; 855-23/991-514; dinner for two US$25), Venezuelan chef Gisela Salazar ­Golding draws diplomats and monied residents with South American dishes such as salpicón de mariscos, cilantro-and-chili-infused seafood.

The setting alone—a 1903 mansion decorated with Chinese antiques—is worth the visit.

SHOPS The city’s best boutiques converge on Street 240 near the Royal Palace. New York–based Elizabeth ­Kiester, a former Jane magazine editor, brings her breezy cotton tunics, ­dresses and bags to the capital with a new branch of Wanderlust (21 St. 240; 855-23/221-982). Stock up on wicker bangles and bright krama (Cambodia’s ubiquitous checked scarves). The voile kaftans and dresses at nearby Bliss (No. 29 St. 240; 855-23/215-754) are a perfect match for the city’s steamy climate, and a

khmer flair

Clockwise from right: Yumi’s chili-salt squid with sweet chili sauce; silk pillows on display at handicrafts shop Tendance Khmer; the boutique’s bright interior.

10-room spa specializing in herbal treatments offers a welcome mid-shopping respite. For candy-­ colored, hand-loomed silks made into quilts, swing

by Tendance Khmer (4A St. 278; 855/1258-4661) in the Wat Langka neighborhood. Around the corner is Smateria (No. 8 Eo St. 57; 855-23/211-701), an Italian company that creates messenger bags and totes from recycled materials. Artisans d’Angkor (No. 12 St. 13; 855-23/992-409) trains young Khmers in traditional crafts such as stone-carving and silversmithing; the group’s new two-story shop across from the central post office sells pumpkinshaped bronze boxes and lacquered rice bowls.

Cambodia-based designer Eric Raisina (28 Sihanouk Blvd.; 855-23/997-590), a native of Madagascar, opened his namesake boutique in June to showcase his light-as-air cocktail dresses and scarves made with ­Cambodian silk. Looking to hone your bargaining skills? Stop at the Russian Market (St. 320) on the city’s south side. You’ll find mountains of silk and cotton krama; stall No. 810–811 has stylish clutches and wallets made from Vietnamese rice bags. Also worth a stop: the lively Central Market (St. 53), located in an Art Deco building and filled with goldsmiths and trinket sellers.

SCENE Stylish lounges and art galleries are adding a new energy to the city’s nightlife. On Street 240, wine shop Red Apron (Nos. 15-17 St. 240; 855-23/990-951; drinks for two US$12) turns into a swank lounge at night, with adventurous wine-food pairings such as South » 52 august 2011 | travelandleisureasia.com

insider trip navigator more than a decade— T+L TIP signaled a U.S. dollars new era for are accepted in Cambodia— Phnom Penh. make sure you All 201 rooms have plenty are classically of singles and no bills bigger designed (marblethan US$20. top tables; ceiling Change is made in riel, though fans), while the lobby at upscale evokes colonial grandeur with marble floors and establishments, you can ask for an outsize chandelier. On especially warm days, dollars. guests can cool off at one of the two large outdoor swimming pools on the four-hectare grounds.

Along the city’s riverfront, three-year-old GREAT VALUE Quay (No. 277 Sisowath Quay; 855-23/ 224-894; thequayhotel.com; doubles from US$85) is a stylish alternative, with its Modernist décor and panoramic views of the Tonle Sap and Mekong rivers. Guest rooms have Arne Jacobsen Egg chairs and granite-clad bathtubs—be sure to ask for one of eight facing the river. A short stroll away, GREAT VALUE River 108 (No. 2 St. 108; 855-23/218785; river108.com; doubles from US$85) is the most recent addition to the city’s burgeoning boutique African Pinot with foie gras and lychees. Purple hotel scene. Silver velvet chaise longues add a walls and armchairs pay homage to the grape at Le glamorous touch to the 12 spacious Sauvignon Wine Bar (6B St. 302; 855/1290-5856; guest rooms, several of which have drinks for two US$7), an intimate spot near the phnom penh chic Clockwise from private terraces. Coming in Independence Monument with a cellar of 200 top left: The Red December: the GREAT VALUE wines. Rooftop bars are popping up all over the Apron, a wine shop and lounge; city, and the best among them is the riverside Plantation (No. 28 St. 184; the Sofitel Phnom theplantation.asia; doubles from US$60, Le Moon ­Terrace Bar (Amanjaya Pancam Hotel, Penh Phokeethra’s reception; poolside including breakfast), in a colonial-era No. 1 Sisowath Quay; 855-23/214-747; drinks for at the hotel. building behind the Royal ­Palace. ✚ two US$12), where a sophisticated set gathers at sundown for gin and tonics and Angkor beer. To get a glimpse of the nascent art scene, head to Meta House Phnom Penh (No. 37 Sothearos Blvd.; 855-10/312-333; meta-house.com), a gallery-­cafécinema run by a German film­maker that exhibits regional and international artists, and the cuttingedge jGallery (56 Sihanouk Blvd.; 855-23/997-522; javaarts.org), which focuses on the work of emerging Cambodian talent. Don’t miss Meta House’s current show of multimedia work by artists from northern Battambang province, open through September 18.

ROOMS The December opening of GREAT VALUE

Sofitel Phnom Penh Phokeethra

(26 Old August Site, Sothearos Blvd., Sangkat Tonle Bassac; 855-23/999-200; sofitel.com; doubles from US$147)—the first international luxury hotel in 54 august 2011 | travelandleisureasia.com

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insider quick study

d.i.y. culture Clockwise from left: Batik making at Srihana Batik Tulis, in Jakarta; the brand’s expert creations; a canting is used to apply heated wax.

hands-on BATIK. In Jakarta, try your hand at making Indonesia’s most treasured fabric. Story and photographs by Steve Mollman

M

New to batik? Cantings are the tools of the trade.

HOW TO BOOK The school holds sessions from 10 a.m. to 3 p.m. on Mondays and Saturdays (go on Saturday to avoid traffic).

Call ahead for appointments.

any visitors to Indonesia shop for batik, but few try to create it themselves. Yet nothing helps you appreciate this exquisite craft quite like spilling hot wax on your fingers. In a charming residential area of south Jakarta, a house– gallery for the distinguished label Srihana Batik Tulis becomes a makeshift school a few days a week. Founded nearly 40 years ago by the late batik enthusiast Anneke Idham, at a time when few boutiques featured traditional Indonesian clothing, the business is now one of Jakarta’s most thriving and teaches students to design patterns, dye materials, and apply and remove wax. It all sounds pretty straightforward—that is, until you try it yourself.

Sitting on a leafy outdoor patio or around a round wooden indoor dining table, you first apply wax using a canting, a dipping tool with a handle and a tiny spouted hot-wax container. You dip the container into a pot of slowly heated wax then apply it following a pattern you’ve penciled onto a piece of cotton or silk. Each canting has a different spout size.

56 august 2011 | travelandleisureasia.com

Smaller spouts create fine lines or dots, bigger spouts thick ones. So far, so good.

But the canting is a clunky instrument: Wax dribbles out less smoothly than you’d hope, or it gets stuck in the spout, in which case you melt it out by holding the canting to the flame.

If you forget to hold the canting at just the right angle (hint: pretend you’re writing on a whiteboard) the wax spills onto your hand. A lotion for burns is kept nearby. After the wax is applied to the pattern—on both sides of cloth, in exactly the same way—you dip the material into a dye bath for coloring. Every part of the cloth not covered in wax gets colored. Next, you boil the cloth in hot water to remove the wax, and now you have a two-colored item.

As a beginner struggling with this painstaking process, it can seem inconceivable that the gorgeous handmade batik shirts and blouses (kebaya) for sale in the house’s foyer were crafted using these same methods. But don’t lose heart. In the end, your batik creation may not be perfect, but you’ve earned the right to feel proud of it. Even if you leave the course with slightly scalded fingers, you’ll never look at batik the same way again.

Jln. K.H. Muhasyim Buntu No. 12, Tarogong, Cilandak Barat; 62-81/2934-4993; half-day courses from Rp150,000. ✚

Spanish twist.

The metropol parasol, a vanguard architectural arabesque, opens new panoramas over Seville, spain.

BY Raul Barreneche

Seville’s Metropol Parasol.

58 august 2011 | travelandleisureasia.com

Bilbao and Valencia may have put Spain on the contemporary architecture map, but now Seville, distinguished by its magnificent cathedral and the Giralda bell tower, is not far behind. Thanks to a striking architectural landmark, the Metropol Parasol, travelers and Sevillanos alike are flocking to the Plaza de la Encarnación, in the city’s medieval center. Six giant sculptural sunshades soar 28 meters above the plaza and resemble, depending on whom you ask, a cluster of giant mushrooms, roiling clouds or gargantuan waffle chips.

The Parasol’s designer, Berlinbased architect Jürgen Mayer H., was inspired by the neighborhood’s stately trees and the soaring vaults of the cathedral.

The high-tech-meetsGothic canopy, a gridded web of interlocking timber blades coated in rainproof polyurethane, provides shade from the blazing ­A ndalusian sun, filling the public space with shadows in constantly changing patterns. It also houses a lively market where you can shop for the city’s best jamón ibérico, an elevated space for open-air concerts and flamenco ­festivals, and, by year’s end, cafés and tapas bars. An elevator ride up through the trunks of the treelike parasols takes you to observation decks with 360-degree views of the city.

Below, glass bridges let you peer down on the excavated foundations of a first-century Roman enclave (including wellpreserved mosaic floors) and the remains of a 13th-century Moorish house. As Mayer H. says of his creation, “It’s about the past, the present and the future.” ✚

© a n d r e a r o a d / i s t o c kph o t o . c o m

insider architecture

insider hotels urban flair From top:

Outside Hotel Éclat, in Taipei’s Da’an district; the lobby at Palais de Chine; Quube bar, at Le Méridien Taipei.

Le Méridien bed, while the marble bathrooms come with sweet-smelling L’Occitane products.

T+L Tip Use your keycard, designed by Taiwanese artist Michael Lin, to visit the Taipei Museum of Contemporary Art for free.

38 Songren Rd., Xinyi district; 886-2/6622-8000; lemeridien-taipei.com; doubles from NT$10,900.

or too long, high-end hoteliers have ignored Taipei, lavishing their attention on booming mainland China. But a recent spate of upscale hotels, some boutique-driven, are giving travelers plenty of stylish options, from the über-trendy and splashy to the intimate and discreet. Below, five swish spots to overnight.

The splashy W Taipei blends the feel of a relaxing resort with a smooth, urban vibe.

Guests can wind down at the 25-meter pool and poolside Wet Bar, or rub elbows with the city’s power brokers at Yen, the top-floor Cantonese restaurant with views onto Taipei 101. The 405 spacious rooms feature plush beds, energetic green and orange accents, sturdy business desks, sofas perched next to floor-to-ceiling windows, Japanese toilets, spacious bathtubs, iPod docks and Bose stereos. In step with the W brand, whimsical art pieces punctuate the hotel, including flying metal shards by Japanese artist Sawada. T+L Tip Look out for Temporary Printing Machine, an artwork

by London-based design company rANDOM International, that prints images of the guest standing before it—a perfect expression of our narcissist, blogger era. 10 Zhongxiao East Rd., Section 5, Xinyi district; 886-2/7703-8840; wtaipei. com; doubles from NT$9,500.

LE MÉRIDIEN TAIPEI

HOTEL QUOTE

Contemporary art is at the forefront of Le Méridien Taipei, the hotel group’s first Taiwan property. Pieces from the collection of its owner, wealthy local entrepreneur Tsai ChenYang, pervade the hotel: in the public areas, you’ll find works such as Yang Yongliang’s Artificial Paradise No. 1, a modern take on a Chinese oil painting that replaces mountains with skyscrapers and electric lines, while in the rooms, black-and-white X-rays of flowers

by British artist Nick Veassey accentuate the expansive, silver-and-gray-toned interiors.

Creature comforts aren’t forgotten: each room has a Nespresso machine and an ultra-comfy

So discreet and understated is Hotel Quote that you barely know you’ve stepped into a hotel when you enter its darkened lobby, which doubles as a hip bar and casual restaurant with DJ turntables and tin walls reminiscent of an Indian metal box. Close to plenty of high-end shopping and dining, the 64-room boutique stay feels more like an exclusive apartment building, with a private lounge area equipped with Wi-Fi-ready Macs, soft drinks and snacks available 24 hours a day. The guest rooms, decked out in pastels, blond wood and browns, are the work of Taiwanese interior decorator Ray Chen. T+L Tip Some Standard rooms are

TAIPEI’S NEW GROOVE. A swathe

of recent hotel openings has turned Taiwan’s capital into one of the region’s most stylish weekend getaways. here, T+L picks five chic stays. BY JEN LIN-LIU

F

60 august 2011 | travelandleisureasia.com

f r o m t o p : c o u r t e s y o f H o t e l E c l a t T a i p e i ; c o u r t e s y o f P a l a i s d e Ch i n e H o t e l ; c o u r t e s y o f L e M e r i d i e n T a i p e i

W TAIPEI

f r o m t o p : c o u r t e s y o f H OTEL Q UOTE T a i p e i ; c o u r t e s y o f W T a i p e i

windowless—upgrade to the U-Balcony room for extra light and space. 333 Nanjing East Rd., Section 3, Songshan district; 886-2/2175-5588; hotel-quote.com; doubles from NT$5,500.

PALAIS DE CHINE

Courtesy of Hotel Quote decorator Ray Chen, Palais de Chine’s interior transports you from its rather utilitarian Taipei Main Station location to a castle in the French countryside, complete with stone and wood-paneled walls and iron-wrought chandeliers. While Quote is geared toward a younger crowd, the lowlit Palais de Chine feels more sophisticated: the public areas verge on outré with their European Renaissance décor, though that doesn’t bother the overseas Chinese and Japanese guests who flock here. The 286 rooms in grays, browns and purples are a welcome retreat from the city’s bustle. T+L Tip Don’t miss a soak in the round bathtub. 3 Chengde Rd., Section 1; 886-2/2181-9999; palaisdechinehotel. com; doubles from NT$6,000.

HOTEL ÉCLAT

If there were ever a definition for a boutique hotel, Hotel Éclat would be it. Not only does it have 60 plush, comfortable guest quarters in blond wood and white tones outfitted with Philippe Starck furniture, Bang & Olufsen speakers and Molton Brown amenities, but it’s also the best value of the bunch. Outside of the rooms, the hotel seems to relish in eclecticism: take Cantonese restaurant Ming Yuen, an exercise in pure whimsy, where stuffed ferrets hang from the ceiling, and an assortment of antique armchairs and giant exaggerated statues are strewn around the dining area. It’s no wonder the design is innovative—the owners are a pair of art collectors from mainland China and Taiwan. T+L Tip Stop for afternoon tea in the European-styled lobby—a steal at NT320 per person. 370 Dunhua South Rd., Section 1, Da’an district; 886-2/2784-8888; eclathotels.com/taipei; doubles from NT$5,150. ✚

taipei transformed

From top: 333 Restaurant & Bar, at Hotel Quote; a room at the W Taipei.

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AYANA Resort and Spa Bali Jl. Karang Mas Sejahtera Jimbaran, Bali 80364 T.+(62)361 702222 | reservation@ayanaresort.com www.ayanaresort.com

insider art

kl contemporary From left: Wei-Ling Gallery’s flagship space; inside Galeri Chandan.

culture CAPITAL. From collage to

quilting, photography to performance, Kuala Lumpur is emerging as a hub for contemporary art. T+L picks five spaces to check out. BY NAOMI LINDT

“There is some very serious art being made in Malaysia by Malaysians,” says Lim Wei-Ling, who runs two of KL’s premier spots for quality, locally made work. “We aim to make art more accessible to the general public and take away the fallacy that art is intimidating.” Artists at both galleries—Wei-Ling Contemporary, in the Gardens Mall, accessed though Peranakan antique doors, is just a few months old, while the museum-like Wei-Ling Gallery, in a pre-war heritage building, is the nine-year old flagship—tend to be mid-career locals with whom Lim has worked for a number of years. Monthly shows range from paintings to sculpture, photography to installations, by wellknown artists like Ivan Lam and Anurendra Jegadeva. 8 Jln. Scott, Brickfields; The Gardens Mall; 60-3/2260-1106; weiling-gallery.com. n Valentine Willie Fine Art

With outlets in Singapore, Yogyakarta, Manila and Kuala Lumpur, the Malaysian-owned Valentine Willie Fine Art galleries are some of the region’s best spots to see an intriguing roster of contemporary art. The KL location » 62 august 2011 | travelandleisureasia.com

f r o m l e f t : C o u r t e s y o f W e i - L i n g G a l l e r y ; C o u r t e s y o f G a l e r i Ch a n d a n

n Wei-Ling Gallery and Wei-Ling Contemporary

insider art

Clockwise from top: Galeri Chandan directors Mohammad Nazli Abdul Aziz and Mohamad Faizal Ghazali; designer and gallerist Richard Koh; his exhibit space; an installation by artist David Chan at the gallery.

n Richard Koh Fine Art

Monthly shows at this Bangsar gallery, founded

by Malaysian designer Richard Koh, might feature experimental Indonesian, Indian or

64 august 2011 | travelandleisureasia.com

n Galeri Chandan Mohammad Nazli Abdul Aziz and Mohamad Faizal Ghazali opened the 400-squaremeter Galeri Chandan three years ago to support the growth of Malaysian artists and foster art that links Malaysian heritage with contemporary culture. Housed on the ground floor of a two-story bungalow in Damansara Heights, shows have included works by local artists like Abu Bakar Idris, known for his naturalistic works on paper, glassworker Raja Azhar Idris, and oils, acrylics and wood prints by Raduan Man. Exhibitions change monthly; openings take place on Saturdays. 15 Jln. Gelenggang, Damansara Heights; 60-3/20955360; galerichandan.com. »

c l o c kw i s e F r o m t o p : c o u r t e s y o f G a l e r i Ch a n d a n ; c o u r t e s y o f R i c h a r d K o h F i n e A r t ( 3 )

malay pulse

organizes shows that range from historically important artists like painter Chong Siew Ying to cuttingedge work by young, emerging artists like Yee I-Lann and Jumaldi Alfi.

With roughly 20 annual shows, expect to see everything from paintings and new media to installations and performance; the Wednesday night openings lure KL’s most influential local and international collectors.

VWFA’s library, open to the public, holds an impressive collection of art books, journals, magazines and catalogues on Asian contemporary art. 17 Jln. Telawi 3, first floor, Bangsar; 60-3/2284-2348; vwfa.net.

Chinese artists, or art by local creatives such as T+L TIP Chang Yoong Chia, who To keep up with works in everything from contemporary art news in quilts to installations.

KL, check out “We’re working to not arterimalaysia. com and only promote emerging kakiseni.com, Malaysian artists, but along with also to expose the public magazines Time Out KL and Art to different forms of Malaysia. media,” says gallery manager Michael Low. Low and Koh also run a vintage furniture shop next door with lovingly restored and refinished pieces, like Midcentury wood and leather loungers and petite velour couches. Bangsar Village II, Lot 2F-3, 2 Jln. Telawi, Bangsar Baru; 60-3/2283-3677; rkfineart.com.

insider art

malaysian art uncovered for more of kuala lumpur’s best art galleries, go to travelandleisureasia.com

KL’s newest arts initiative is MAP @ Publika, which seeks to foster an arts-and-design community within the newly opened mall Publika at the multi-use Solaris Dutamas complex. The project launched last year with a 560-square-meter gallery, White Box, a 250seat theater, Black Box, and a planned four additional contemporary art galleries over the next three months. In addition to roughly 15 exhibitions annually, theater and musical performances (such as a gig by Gruff Rhys of Welsh indie band Super Furry Animals), stand-up comedy acts and talks are also being organized. “Our goal is to have the average citizen comfortable with art and culture of all types. We want to help people become active producers of culture rather than passive consumers,” says MAP manager Alex Yong.

Level G2-01, Block A5, 1 Jln. Dutamas 1; 60-3/ 6207-9732; mapkl.org. ✚

city scene

Clockwise from above: Kuala Lumpur’s new MAP @ Publika hosts lively art events; artwork at Richard Koh Fine Art; local art at Wei-Ling Contemporary.

who’s been collecting and curating for some 20 years, talks to T+L about the state of Malaysia’s art scene.

Valentine Willie.

Art pioneer Cosmopolitan Malaysian gallerist Valentine Willie, an art-world veteran

FROM MAINSTREAM TO AVANT-GARDE “In the last five years, I’d say KL has been bitten by the contemporary art bug. We’re not just seeing traditional three-dimensional work these days, but much more in the way of photography, performance art and

66 august 2011 | travelandleisureasia.com

video installations.

It’s getting less mainstream.”

HUNGER FOR ART “Historically, art schools in Malaysia have been geared toward commercial arts—fashion, interior design, applied arts.

A lot of people who were becoming graphic designers wanted to be artists in the first place, but there just wasn’t enough demand. Now, there are more spaces,

and more buyers.

People are coming back and working as artists. There certainly is some momentum.”

URBAN SHIFTS “There is lots of great art being made here and in the region that explores the exciting, interesting tension between the old and new. In Malaysia, urbanization is becoming a huge issue and changing our value system.”

CULTURE SPOTLIGHT Willie’s favorite places to see art in the Malaysian capital: • National Art Gallery Malaysia 2 Jln. Temerloh; 60-3/4025 4990; artgallery. gov.my. • Galeri Petronas Level 3, Suria KLCC Petronas Twin Towers; 60-3/20517770; galeripetronas. com.my. • Malaysian Institute of Art 294– 299 Jln. Bandar 11; 60-3/4108-8100; mia. edu.my.

c l o c kw i s e f r o m t o p l e f t : c o u r t e s y o f MA P @ P u b l i k a ; c o u r t e s y o f R i c h a r d K o h F i n e A r t ; C o u r t e s y o f Va l e n t i n e W i l l i e ; c o u r t e s y o f W e i - L i n g G a l l e r y

n Map @ Publika

insider eat

WHERE TO EAT NOW IN KEP.

Famed for its fresh crab, this sleepy resort town in Cambodia also offers authentic Vietnamese, French fusion and much more. By Jennifer Chen

restaurant serves spot-on Vietnamese and French fare. Sit upstairs on the orchidbedecked balcony. Super-fresh spring rolls make a good light lunch. At night, opt for the magret de canard, pan-seared duck breast served with hearty helpings of sautéed vegetables and mashed potatoes. Near Kep Beach; 855/12-301017; dinner for two US$20.

This seaside spot is the closest Kep has to a bar­–lounge. Come at night and grab one of the salas or the daybed, and sup on oysters, grilled seafood or fusion-inspired dishes such as udon noodles with minced chicken or a Khmer fish wrap. Live music lures residents and visitors, making a lively scene. On the main road, past the Provincial Hall; 855/97-675-9072; dinner for two US$25.

coastal flavors

From top: Sailing Club serves up seafood and ocean views; at Breezes, a lively bar–lounge.

Kim Ly

It’s hard to distinguish the row of lookalike modest alfresco restaurants at the famed crab market, but locals and expats alike claim this spot stands out. Fried crab with green pepper from nearby Kampot is a must, as is the squid served in an aromatic sauce of lemongrass, ginger and coconut milk. Dishes come with an addictive lime–black pepper sauce. Crab Market; 855/12-345-753; lunch for two US$18.

Brise de Kep

Located in an unpromising strip mall near the public beach, this nearly two-year-old 68 august 2011 | travelandleisureasia.com

Sailing Club

Sky-blue walls set the tone for this nauticalthemed, stylish restaurant-cum–cocktail bar next to the luxurious Knai Bang Chatt hotel.

Formerly a fisherman’s home, it has a verandah and pier, both perfect for sundowners. Order the generous seafood platter or, if you’re feeling indulgent, the KBC burger with Emmenthal.

Next to Knai Bang Chatt; 855-78/888-556; dinner for two US$20. ✚

from top: courtesy of sailing club; courtesy of breezes

Breezes

PHUKET’S ONE STOP PLEASURE AND LUXURY SHOP

Hilton Phuket Arcadia Resort & Spa, 333 Patak Road, Karon Beach, Muang, Phuket 83100.

Tel: +66 (0)7639 6433 | Fax: +66 (0)76 396 136 Email: phuket.sales@hilton.com www.phuketarcadia.hilton.com

For families and couples alike there’s no more complete luxury and pleasure escape on Phuket Island than the gorgeous Hilton Arcadia Resort and Spa. Set within its own huge 75 acres of lush tropical gardens beside the sands of magnificent west-facing Karon Beach, the resort offers every facility and amenity that discerning hedonists could desire. Adults and kiddies alike revel in the space and tranquility while relaxing amid the soft golden sands, the swaying palms, the chirping birds and kaleidoscope of colorful flowers.

Indulge in no less than five swimming pools with waterfalls and slides. Join the water activities and games and of course there are refreshment outlets at every pool! Hit the fitness center, grab a game of squash or golf, take a free scuba diving lesson, go sailing or game fishing, play tennis, try out the putting green, or visit the beauty salon.…

Really, the options are almost endless! Relax among the coconut groves in the Spa and indulge in Equilibrium Therapy using wild mint oil and Thai herbs, specially designed to put back the balance that frenetic modern life can take away.

Or unwind together with a synchronized couples’ massage. Kids love their own Kidz Paradise Club with its playground and highly trained staff and baby sitters to look after them.

Or they can go horse riding nearby, or join an evening excursion to the world-famous FantaSea theme park and show. Nine food and beverage outlets cater for every taste and occasion.

Savor fresh local seafood and award-winning cocktails at “Sails” by the poolside, or join Phuket’s best Sunday brunch there with cool jazz and wandering clowns for the kiddies.

Enjoy fabulous local fare at the romantic Thai Thai restaurant. And don’t miss the Ocean Beach Club with its laid-back ambience, wood decking, sandy inland beach and sunset cocktails overlooking Karon Beach which so easily segue into relaxed fine dining suppers with a bottle of excellent wine from the cellar.

The Hilton Arcadia Resort is located at the heart of Phuket’s many attractions. It’s close to the famous dining and nightlife action in Patong; the natural beauty of Prom Thep Cape; the SinoPortuguese old town; street markets; traditional Chalong Temple and to Chalong Pier, the gateway to so many maritime adventures.

All in all there’s little doubt that Hilton Arcadia Resort and Spa in Phuket is one of the most comprehensive pleasure and luxury destinations in Asia.

insider room report

SINGAPORE SLICK. The first

Park Regis in Southeast Asia offers comfort and convenience aplenty. But is it all business?

T+L checks in. By Daven Wu

Clockwise from top left: An open-plan room at the Park Regis; the hotel strives for an urban-resort feel; Splash, the poolside bar. Opposite page, from top: One of the standard rooms; private dining at Asian-Australian themed Suite 23.

THE OVERVIEW

Owned by the Australia-based StayWell Hospitality Group, the 203-room, four-star Park Regis is the brand’s first Asian property as it embarks on a global expansion. Though it’s presented as a city resort and draws a fair number of leisure guests, the hotel’s location—a brisk five-minute cab ride to the Raffles Place CBD—means it’s firmly aimed at the business market with no superfluous small touches. And, in case it’s not entirely clear, the hotel has no association with either the Park Hyatt or the St. Regis groups. 23 Merchant Rd., Singapore; 65/6818-8888; parkregissingapore.com; doubles from S$280.

THE AREA

The hotel is impeccably located on Merchant Road. The entertainment quarter of Clarke Quay is across the road; for everything else, the Clarke Quay MRT subway station connects quickly to key parts of Singapore. Because the hotel entrance is actually off Havelock Road 70 august 2011 | travelandleisureasia.com

on New Market Road, taxi drivers often have a difficult time getting there. Tip: Pick up a business-card-size map from the concierge.

THE DESIGN

Australian architectural and interior design firm Woodhead, responsible for decorating Changi airport’s terminals 1 and 3, have stayed true to the hotel’s raison d’être. Corporate chic runs through the interior design with a neutral, brown and beige color palette; a discreet nod is given to the tropical setting with subtle motifs of flowers and branches.

THE SERVICE

Overall, the service lacks the polish you’d find in, say, a Ritz-Carlton, but this is generally made up for with a friendly smile and an obliging attitude. That said, a request for a second room key was met with a stern “May I ask where the first key is?” We also had to give our birth-dates as a security check to the same receptionist who’d just checked us in.

c o u r t e sy o f Pa r k R e g i s S i n g a p o r e ( 3 )

heart of the city

c o u r t e sy o f Pa r k R e g i s S i n g a p o r e ( 2 )

THE MERCHANT ROOM

THE BATHROOM

The property’s bright and airy rooms—four categories vary in view and size—start from a cosy 22 square meters. All are laid out in an open plan, with no separate bathroom, though strategically placed mirrors and clever storage solutions—the bar fridge and teamaking facilities are tucked away into the sink console—help create the illusion of space. In our Merchant room, the décor steered toward a warm, comfortable palette of ocher, gray and dark brown shades with bright silk bed throws and rugs to soften the acoustics. The day bed along the window was a lovely spot to sit with a book, while double-layered curtains kept out the morning light—perfect for a lie-in. The best rooms all face the 25-meter outdoor lap pool framed by a waterfall feature—the higher floors have the additional advantage of looking over Clark Quay and the river. The Quay rooms open out directly onto the pool, though their location means these can be a little noisy.

The bathroom is, in fact, a bath area with a generously proportioned sink unit that divides the bedroom from the adjoining frostedglass shower and toilet. This presents some privacy challenges for room sharing by office colleagues. Toiletries are by London-outfit the White Company. None of the rooms have a bathtub.

THE AMENITIES

For a business hotel, it’s surprising that there is no Wi-Fi in the rooms; your iPad and other wireless devices will only work in the lobby.

In-room Internet charges range from S$6 for half an hour to an eye-watering S$30 for 24 hours; the business center has two free iMac stations available to guests. The restaurant, Suite 23, serves Australian and local Asian fare. Road warriors can stay fighting fit with the small but well-equipped gym. Pity, though, that there is no spa. ✚

insider first look

CHECK-IN: HONG KONG.

GRAND ambitions From top: Hong Kong’s Hotel ICON; at the lobby café-bar GREEN, designed by Terence Conran; the vertical garden in the lobby.

72 august 2011 | travelandleisureasia.com

H

ong Kong’s newest stay is no ordinary place to overnight.

For one thing, the striking, contemporary glass-curtain façade was designed by leading architect Rocco Yim. For another, the interior, which relies heavily on natural elements, comes courtesy of design luminaries Sir Terence Conran and William Lim. The staff uniforms—casual slacks and tops in low-key olives and browns—were created by Hong Kong fashion darling Barney Cheng. And inside the vast lobby atrium is a three-story vertical garden, designed by pioneering French botanist Patrick Blanc. To top it off, local contemporary art permeates the hotel, from the elevators to the 262 guest suites, thanks to visionary curator Freeman Lau. This is Hotel ICON, a study in modern, location-inspired style. “We are proud of the hotel and its link to local culture,” says general manager

Richard Hatter, a hotel industry veteran who worked for Shangri-La Hotels for almost two decades.

But there’s more to ICON than meets the eye. The property is also a teaching facility. Behind the scenes, more than 2,000 students at Hong Kong Polytechnic University are set to use the property for research and training at the institution’s School of Hotel & Tourism Management, sited in the hotel’s basement. Every semester, 100 students will work alongside the 300 full-time staff, learning the tricks of the hospitality trade.

That explains why the hotel punches above its weight in terms of services and amenities. There’s the Angsana Spa, which serves as a training facility for Banyan Tree Hotels & Resorts. Jetlagged travellers who arrive before check-in can shower, snack and relax in Timeless, a quiet lounge. The spacious gym and outdoor swimming pool offer harbor views.

There are also three restaurants: top-

co u rt e sy o f h ot e l i co n h o n g ko n g ( 3 )

the city’s latest iconic property? It’s not the one you think.

Christopher DeWolf previews a headturning hotel with a difference

floor Above & Beyond, which serves up Cantonese cuisine and sweeping city views; the Market, a casual, lively food hall with a large outdoor terrace; and GREEN, a lobby café and tapas bar set below Blanc’s vertical sweep of green.

Throughout, the place has an unmistakably Hong Kong air, from lighting fixtures inspired by local market lamps and a traditional metal gate in the lobby made by one of the city’s last surviving craftsmen.

One thing that’s atypical of Hong Kong is room sizes: ranging from 36 to 80 square meters, they’re exceptionally generous by local standards. Still, they offer all the comforts you’d expect: each comes with a 40-inch flatscreen TV, a free mini-bar, iPod dock, free Wi-Fi and custom-designed furniture.

Our advice? Check in now. No. 17 Science Museum Rd., Tsim Sha Tsui East, Kowloon; 852/3400-1000; hotel-icon.com; doubles from HK$1,500. ✚

BEHIND THE SCENES Barney Cheng DESIGNED: THE STAFF UNIFORM Muted colors and fluid silhouettes, in fabrics from jersey to guipure lace, create a sleek, modern look for hotel staff.

Freeman Lau CURATED: THE ARTWORKS Around 100 pieces of contemporary art showcase Hong Kong talents such as Kan Tai-keung, John Fung and Pauline Lam.

Patrick Blanc DESIGNED: THE VERTICAL GARDEN Inside the soaring lobby, Asia’s largest vertical garden spans 230 square meters and features 75 plant species.

co u rt e sy o f h ot e l i co n h o n g ko n g ( 1 2 )

William Lim DESIGNED: THE INTERIORS The 262 guest rooms foreground clean lines and comfort, while the smart communal spaces stay deliberately flexible.

Terence Conran DESIGNED: THE RESTAURANTS Curio-lined bookshelves give Above & Beyond a private-member’s-club feel, while the Market’s intimate dining spaces spoke from a central courtyard.

Vivienne Tam DESIGNED: THE VT SUITE Set to open in late September, Tam’s cornerstone suite will boast 80 square meters and offer views of Victoria Harbour.

Rocco Yim DESIGNED: THE ARCHITECTURE ICON’s blocky form makes the most of city and sea views, while a hole in the middle allows air to flow through the property.

stylish traveler

[st ]

watches

time to go

here, T+l’s latest picks for keeping globe-trotters up-to-the-minute.

Styled by Mimi Lombardo

prop stylist: richie owings, halley resources

facing off Clockwise from top left: Ceramic-andtitanium Chromatic, chanel; waterresistant goldplated steel watch with leather strap, bulova accutron; stainless-steel Indy 500 Centennial limited edition, tag heuer; Swiss quartz chronograph with rubber strap, ebel; dual-time automatic with alligator bracelet, david yurman; satin-finished steel chronograph, baume & mercier.

Photographed by John Lawton

travelandleisureasia.com | august 2011 75

[st] beauty A shave at The Mandarin Barber.

ASIA’s Oldstyle SHAVes • The Mandarin Barber Mandarin Oriental Hong Kong, 5 Connaught Rd., Central, Hong Kong; 852/2825-4088; Mandarin shave HK$380.

• The Barber Shop Classic wet shaves using products from Taylor of Old Bond Street. Conrad Hotel, 87 Wireless Rd., Bangkok; 66-2/690-9395; hot towel shave Bt600.

• Blue Harbour Trendy new barbershop with a retro vibe and nautical theme. 2F K Village, Sukhumvit Soi 26, Bangkok; 66-2/661-2901; shave Bt300.

• Mano Ravi Indian Barbershop An old-style, no-nonsense Indian barber with a brisk attitude—you want a shave or not? Blk. 399, Yung Sheng Rd., #0154 Taman Jurong Shopping Centre, Singapore; 65/62624228; shave S$8 during the week, S$10 on weekends.

CLOSE SHAVES

Gentlemen, take note: old-style, straight-edge shaves are set for a comeback in Asia.

Christopher Kucway sits down for some retro pampering

Old-time but not out of style.

76 august 2011 | travelandleisureasia.com

Steven Wan has hands that know faces.

This much I realize as soon as he tilts me back in his vintage barber chair and molds my mug in a hot towel. After a few minutes, off comes the towel and, my skin amply warmed, his deft touch applies a layer of gel to my face and then brushes on shaving soap. Steven’s thumbs pull my aging dermis taut—I’m a few calendars past the astonishing 44 years he has worked at the Mandarin Oriental Hong Kong’s barbershop, a more-than-comfortable throwback of dark wood and Chinese screen-printed glass, with an espresso or glass of Scotch at the ready—and the straight-edge razor glides through day-old growth.

Carefully Wan tilts my jaw, scraping my neck, his thumb lathering any spot that needs further attention, and, just when I think he’s finished, he begins shaving my face again, this time in a different direction. In a contradictory, inexplicable manner, that smooth scrape of a straight-edge blade on my skin makes me drift off better than a glass of warm milk. Once my shave is finished, those hands wrap my face in a cold towel. A gentle shoulder massage revives me, then, as if a coup de grace were needed, Steven brushes my hair in a style I never have. And I love it. I feel a new man in this, the most retro of barbershops. ✚

smooth operators

From top: Sit back, relax and enjoy the shave; tools of the trade.

Photographed by Philipp Engelhorn

[st] fashion

the white shirt

whether you’re packing for a business trip or a weekend BREAK, you can’t go wrong with this classic look.

Styled by Mimi Lombardo

Clean Cut

stylist: richie owings, halley resources

Cotton shirts, clockwise from top left: thomas pink; prada; carolina herrera; theory.

78 august 2011 | travelandleisureasia.com

Photographed by John Lawton

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journal

travel topics in depth, vivid visuals and more

At Malacca’s Cheng Hoon Teng Temple.

For Good Measure

Efforts to preserve the stately side of Malacca have met with mixed results but, as Robyn Eckhardt discovers, there are still quiet, historical pockets worth exploring. photographed by david hagerman travelandleisureasia.com | August 2011 83

journal Preservation

living history Clockwise from below: Details at

Kampung Kling Mosque; strolling along Jonker Street; the Malacca River reflects a church; Grace Wong and Hoe Kok-Yong at Malaqa House.

A

t sunset, Malacca’s old town echoes with the cries of birds. From the rooftop of one guesthouse on Jalan Hang Jebat I watch them flit against an overcast sky seeping pink at the horizon, over a sea of red clay tile roofs, around Kampung Kling Mosque’s minaret and the spires of St. Peter’s church. I crane my neck to the right and a smidgeon of the Straits of Malacca comes into view. I could swear there’s a hint of sea salt on the breeze. Below, fairy lights twinkle, welcoming shoppers to the trinket stalls on Jonker Walk.

I last visited Malacca in 2008, just months before unesco named it a World Heritage Site. In places like Luang Prabang, Hoi An and Lijiang, the coveted award has been a double-edged sword, kick-starting conservation efforts and drawing tourist dollars on the one hand while attracting investment and spurring development that undermine conservation efforts on the other.

Just shy of the third anniversary of Malacca’s unesco listing, I’ve returned to see how it’s coping. From three stories above Jonker’s Walk, I’m charmed. The city’s historic 84 August 2011 | travelandleisureasia.com

center looks largely intact, its centuries-old gabled skyline minimally marred by the concrete boxes favored by modern Malaysia’s urban planners.

But the next day exploring at street level I’m dismayed by blight on a townscape that unesco describes as “without parallel anywhere in East and South Asia.” Facades are marred by bulky signage, enormous red plastic arches erected over intersections shout ads for noodles and life insurance and a hulking grey shopping arcade spoils one bank of the Malacca River.

And those birds so strikingly silhouetted against last night’s twilit sky, I later learn from native Malaccan Josephine Chua, pose a serious threat to the city’s architecture. Chua, one of the town’s most outspoken conservationists, has offered to show me her Malacca. We meet on Jalan Tun Tan Cheng Lock (formerly Hereen Street), the old town’s main thoroughfare and a showcase for the built remnants of Malacca’s especially rich pedigree.

Said to have been founded in the 14th century by a Sumatran prince, Malacca sits at the mouth of a river near the southwestern tip of the Malaysian peninsula and was a key port on the Southeast Asian trade route ruled, successively, by the Malaccan Sultanate and Portuguese, Dutch and British colonizers. Over centuries settlers arrived

including breeding swiftlets for their nests. Boarded-up windows, termite-eaten shutters and holes bored into walls mark the “bird houses,” where breeders mimic the birds’ naturally wet habitat with interior sprinklers. Over time, the moisture causes structural damage.

Malacca’s joint unesco designee George Town, in Penang, has been called to task by the organization for allowing bird houses to proliferate within the World Heritage Site. In a lane behind Hereen Street, Chua points out an extension a breeder has built onto a house. The addition violates conservation guidelines, and is done in plain sight of those charged with protecting what earned Malacca its unesco designation in the first place.

T

in waves from India, China, Indonesia, Europe and elsewhere, giving birth to a multi-ethnic, multi-religious population whose cultures find expression in everything from raucous religious festivals to unique foods. The city’s history as a cosmopolis is physically embodied in a cache of architectural treasures including plain Dutch shop houses and ornately embellished Peranakan mansions, stately government buildings and open squares, beautiful Chinese and Indian temples, mosques and churches.

Hereen—the Dutch term for gentleman—fronted the sea until Malacca began building into the Straits in the 1980’s and was the address of choice for the wealthy merchant class. Chua was born in number 56 and knows each house like a sister. As we walk she describes the typical Malaccan floor plan—long and narrow, a response to Dutch levies on building frontage, with a rear courtyard and interior airwells open to the sky—and contrasts the austere Dutch facades, with their wide iron-hinged shutters and stable doors, with Peranakan houses adorned with painted ceramic figures and plaques above windows bearing lucky couplets.

These days, few Hereen houses are homes. Chua estimates that 90 per cent are given over to pure commerce,

he next morning finds me down the street at Malaqa House, an antiques and furnishings store occupying a rambling refurbished Peranakan mansion. There I speak with owner Grace Wong, a pretty, petite Malaccan dwarfed by her office’s soaring beamed ceilings, and her partner Hoe KokYong. As conversations with anyone fond of Malacca tend to do, ours turns to the subject of what’s been lost.

Hoe turns on his computer and brings up a slideshow of photographs of Malacca’s disappeared port. Not so long ago the Malacca River teemed with activity. The black-andwhite images, taken by a friend, show magnificent old warehouses lining its banks, porters straining under the weight of crates of chickens, sacks of garlic and net bags of charcoal, gnarled feet on gangplanks bridging the gap between dock and the decks of old wooden schooners.

Back then fishing boats came and went along the river with the tides, ferrying their catches to market by water.

The port was closed in 2000 but Wong, Hoe and other concerned Malaccans lobbied the government to reconsider a plan to demolish its godowns. Their efforts came to naught; the structures were torn down in 2006 to make way for a promenade, hotel and serviced apartments. “We call this place Malacca Port, but we didn’t keep one bit of this history,” Wong says, shaking her head.

In contrast to George Town, where millions of ringgit are being spent conserving and restoring that city, planners in Malacca have been mostly concerned with building. Tourists tired of heritage can ride a new 1.5-kilometer monorail, view Malacca from the revolving 110-meter tall Taming Sari, pose for photos in front of a wooden water wheel or take a cruise on the Malacca River—a body of water that technically ceased being a river when its mouth was filled in as part of a beautification project.

“Not in tune with what our city is about” is how Malaccans like Colin Goh, the manager of 8 Hereen Street, a restored late 18th-century Dutch shop house that is » travelandleisureasia.com | august 2011 85

journal Preservation

GUIDE to malacca

Restored shop houses. Inside Cheng Hoon Teng temple, right.

open to the public, view such projects. “There is a fine balance between seeking the tourist dollar and maintaining our charms, which are slowly being lost through development,” he says. “The question now is whether Malacca will be turned into Disneyland.”

Undertakings like 8 Hereen are a possible answer to what appears to be a shortage of official initiative in the realm of restoration works within Malacca’s core. A project spearheaded by Badan Warisan Malaysia (the Heritage of Malaysia Trust) with additional funding from the U.S. State Department and the Ford Foundation, 8 Hereen serves as a model for other restorations and an illustration of Malacca’s one-of-a-kind stature among World Heritage Sites. As Goh walks me through its few rooms, drawing my attention here and there to details—gaps between clay roof tiles that provide ventilation, walls plastered and washed with lime that allows them to breathe in Malacca’s humid climate, a well at the base of the internal airwell—and describing the house’s original situation at the curve of the Malacca River, the city’s long, fascinating story comes to life right before my eyes.

Happily, Malacca has a few other such repositories of living heritage worth visiting. After leaving 8 Hereen I stop in at 54-56, refurbished with contemporary touches by the National University of Singapore’s Department of Architecture and host to rotating exhibitions on architecture, conservation and history. A 20-minute walk along the river leads to the Malay village of Kampung Morten, which is home to Villa Sentosa, a still-occupied Malay wooden stilt house maintained with visitor donations where the gregarious owner explains the structure’s layout and shares family photos. Looping back to the center of town, I stop in at bustling Cheng Hoon Teng temple, cited by unesco for the authenticity of its own restoration, which was funded by donations.

“Malacca is overflowing with history and richness and culture,” Chua makes sure I understand. “We don’t have to create anything.” » 86 August 2011 | travelandleisureasia.com

Stay Musang Lena Residences These two sleek properties in Malacca’s old town include The Stable (Jln. Hang Kasturi; thestablemalacca.com; from RM300), a cozy cottagelike unit for two; and the two-bed/two-bath 45 Lekiu (45 Lekiu; 45lekiu. com; from RM999), which has a lap pool, roof deck and an outdoor soaking tub, not to mention well-stocked kitchenettes that include espresso machines.

The Snail House Each of the two airy bedrooms (book ahead, only one is rented at a time except for groups) here boast gleaming wood floors, crisp white linens and separate sitting areas and come with breakfast and your choice of fascinating walking tours. No phone, TV or luxe toiletries—just charming MalaysianBelgian owners and loads of character. 76 Jln. Tun Tan Cheng Lock; 60-6/ 286-8598; thesnailhouse@yahoo.com; no website; doubles RM440.

Courtyard @ Hereen Individually designed rooms stylishly mix Peranakan and contemporary elements. Comfy beds, rain showers and Wi-Fi are standard; the 35square-meter executive suites have Jacuzzi tubs and private balconies. 91 Jln. Tun Tan Cheng Lock;

60-6/281-0088; courtyard@hereen.com; doubles from RM200.

Casa Rio Melaka Recently opened, this hotel boasts an infinity-edge pool with a river view, Balinesetrained masseuses in the spa and a bar and two restaurants. Even standard rooms feature baths with separate shower and tub, and balconies; décor runs to warm-hued textiles that complement the timber floors. 88 Jln. Kota Laksamana; 60-6/289-6888; casadelrio-melaka.com; doubles from RM500.

Eat and Drink Kocik Kitchen serves Malacca-style Nyonya specialties. Try the fish curry and the ayam pongteh, chicken cooked with a mushroom-like black nut. No. 100 Jln. Tan Tun Cheng Lock; no phone; lunch or dinner for two RM60.

Limau-Limau Café whips up deliciously reviving iced smoothies (try the pineapple-passion fruit), light breakfasts, salads and sandwiches. 9 Jln. Hang Lekiu; no phone; lunch for two RM 40.

Sri Kaveri This unpretentious eatery serves up southern Indian dishes with rice and excellent idli, thosai and roti. 115 Lorong Hang Jebat; 60-6/286-0344; meal for two RM15.

»

journal Preservation

I

ronically, it’s the Malaccans who most lament what’s become of their city who lead me to its treasures. “Walk in the back lanes, and look up,” Goh advises. So I do, and see stunning rooflines and unusual adornments—like plaster banana leaves decorating walls in a house on Kampung Jawa—and stumble across the back door to an Indian kitchen where cooks invite me in as they prepare turmeric-tinted vegetables and fragrant mutton stew in giant kettles set over gas rings on the tiled floor.

“Malacca is best early in the morning or late in the afternoon,” Chua tells me. Then she leads me, when the air is fresh and cool and the streets are free of traffic, past pork butchers operating from tiny shopfronts, a dim sum parlor heaving with regulars and an ancient barber shop where the reed-thin proprietor moves his scissors over the head of a carnation-pink-bibbed patron, to observe trades like tinsmithing and wooden bucket making being practiced as they have for decades. And that evening, wandering by myself on Kampung Jawa, I discover a little 80-year-old bar where the founder’s great-grandson and his wife pour shots of Chinese lychee-flavored rice wine from dram measures dented from use.

“Be here on a Sunday evening,” recommends Hoe. On weekends, the crush is unbearable. Tour groups dodge cars and trucks careening down narrow Hereen Street, buses belch exhaust in front of former town hall and governor’s residence Stadhuys and seats are scarce at favored cendol stop Donald and Lily’s. Then all of a sudden, around 4 p.m. on Sunday, the crowds vanish. Stillness descends on the city. Just as Hoe described, the lines of buildings come into relief, and so does the river. And Malacca is still beautiful. ✚

Chinese wine.

Malacca shop houses still in use, right.

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GUIDE to malacca

(continued)

60-12/211-2378; pleinair22.com.

Baboon House Cool off with a beer at this friendly bar cum café cum boutique in an achingly atmospheric mansion in various states of repair.

89 Jln. Tun Tan Cheng Lock; 60-6/283-1635.

Teo Soon Loong Chan Teo Chew Seafood Restaurant Reservations are a must at this six-table restaurant. The oyster noodles, bitter gourd with pork and yam pudding dessert are show-stoppers. 55 Jln. Hang Kasturi; 60-6/282-2353.

Shop Kim’s Fine Art Ceramics, wood sculptures and oil on large canvases. 140 Jln. Tun Tan Cheng Lock; 60-6/286-0809; weekends and by appointment.

Malaqa House Even if you’re not tempted by the antiques and fine furnishings in this shop you’ll want to have a look at its classic Malaccan interior. 70 Jln. Tun Tan Cheng Lock; 60-6/2814770; no website.

Plein Air 22 The gallery showcases evocative depictions of Malaccan street scenes by Welsh painter Tim Parry. 5 Lorong Jambatan;

Do 8 Hereen Street An authentically restored Dutch shop house, is a model example of proper conservation techniques.

8 Tun Tan Cheng Lock; 60-6/281-1507; open 11 a.m.-4 p.m.

54-56 A good spot for exhibitions on architecture, urbanism and conservation. 54-56 Jln. Tun Tan Cheng Lock; arch.nus.edu.sg/ttcl.

The Chitty Museum tells the story of Malacca’s small community of Chitty, descendents of marriages between early southern Indian immigrants to Malacca and local Malay and Chinese women. Jln. Gajah Berang; no phone; no website; Tuesday-Sunday 9 a.m.-1 p.m. and 2-5 p.m.

Read Lovingly co-written and photographed by two architects—one Malaysian, the other Portuguese— Voices From the Street documents Malacca street-by-street, painting a poignant picture of the city and its losses.

journal books

Novel Travel

E

ven the most confident and seasoned travelers may experience a shiver of unease when they arrive in a foreign country and the official who stamps their passport asks, “What is the purpose of your visit? Are you here for business or pleasure?”

“Pleasure!” we say. “Vacation!” hearing our voices rise, as if—though we are telling the truth—we might be suspected of lying. Perhaps it’s the fact of the uniform, or the effects of a long voyage, or the border guard who may seem intimidating but is probably just bored.

In any case, this moment is far more complex and fraught when the traveler is a writer who has come to do background research for a novel. Is that purpose business?

Not exactly. Pleasure? If the writer were to tell the truth, it might sound something like,

90 August 2011 | travelandleisureasia.com

I l l u s t r at e d b y B r i a n S ta u f f e r

It’s one thing to try to understand a foreign country. It’s another entirely to channel the voice, thoughts and perspective of an imaginary foreigner. Novelist Francine Prose on the challenge of bringing a destination—and its characters—to life

“Well, since you ask, the purpose of my visit is to see your country and your culture through the eyes of an imaginary person—a character I invented.”

By and large, it works out better for everyone if we just say, “Vacation. I am here as a tourist.”

That initial white lie at the border is just one indication of the essential strangeness of the project: Going somewhere to observe and try to understand a place with a very real landscape, with its own very particular physical and social geography, only so that you can invent something that never happened there, or anywhere, to someone who never existed. In fact it’s not like traveling for pleasure, with its pure openness to the thrill of new experience; nor is it like travel writing, journeys on which that pleasure may be partly compromised by the need to find the perfect opening sentence. In fact, it’s like no other form of travel, for the simple reason that the person who’s traveling isn’t exactly you.

Sometimes, reading a literary classic or a contemporary novel that features a strong sense

of place, I’ll find myself pausing to wonder: Did Thomas Mann look at the Lido from the point of view of the doomed, lovesick Gustav von Aschenbach, whose unrequited passion leads to the tragedy at the center of Death in Venice? At which point did Diane Johnson decide to introduce her readers to Paris through the sensibility of the bright young Californian heroine of Le Divorce?

How did E. M. Forster transform himself into Lucy Honeychurch, exulting in the beauty of Florence in A Room with a View?

Over the years, I’ve had all sorts of travel experiences that have eventually found their way into novels and stories. Something occurs that lodges in my mind until a character and a plot collect around this kernel and begin to take on the peculiar life of fiction.

Visiting the former Yugoslavia in the late 1980’s, I attended a literary conference at which I had no idea what anyone was talking about: a heated controversy that turned out to involve the return of Croatian exiles. One of the speakers was a »

.

.

journal books

Traveling to research a novel is in many ways the same as traveling for pleasure.

What stays with you are the surprises, the REVELATIONS, the experience of the new flamboyantly theatrical Hungarian poet who, almost a decade later, suddenly appeared (as if under his own volition) in a story I was writing about a young woman who found herself fascinated and terrified by a Hungarian poet’s intense aura of romance and high drama. On one trip to Paris, I noticed that every evening, when I turned on the TV at my hotel, the station was airing a documentary in which a peasant couple was slaughtering a pig at their farm; each night a different couple, a different pig, a different region of France. And this somewhat bizarre and memorable encounter with French TV gave me 92 August 2011 | travelandleisureasia.com

the inspiration and the title for a novella—Three Pigs in Five Days—that was published in 1997.

It’s been more rare that I’ve traveled specifically for the purpose of researching a fictional character or plot, but that was certainly the case with my most recent novel, My New American Life. Forty pages or so into a rough draft, I had an inconvenient realization: Either my heroine, Lula—a young Albanian immigrant working as a nanny in the northern New Jersey suburbs—was going to have to come from somewhere other than Albania, or else I was going to have to go to Albania to see where she’d come from. I’d read everything I could about the country and practically memorized the one guidebook I was able to locate.

But ultimately I discovered that I simply couldn’t imagine or invent Albania without some firsthand experience. I wanted my heroine to have grown up not only in a former Communist dictatorship, but in the most isolated and extreme Eastern bloc nation.

Besides, in order to see the United States through Lula’s eyes, I had to know more about the place that she was comparing it with. I needed to eat the food and smell the smells she had known as a child, to watch the play of light and darkness in the sky over her home, to see how her neighbors walked and talked and inhabited their city, to find out how heavily the legacy of their painful history still affected their daily lives.

And so, in May 2009, I spent two weeks in Tirana, the capital of Albania. I made a short trip to Kruja, the site of a historically important castle, and to Berat, a small and very beautiful city. Along the way, I not only observed enough to make Lula a credible character but also recorded all sorts of marvelous details that I was able to use in the novel—details that I could never have invented.

One man told me that a neighbor had been taken by the secret police because her son put a forbidden radio antenna on the roof so he could listen to a chesty Italian pop singer he had a crush on. A young woman explained that when foreign TV, prohibited for so long in the country, was finally permitted, her generation learned English from SpongeBob SquarePants.

I’d read that the dictator, Enver Hoxha, had built 700,000 concrete bunkers but I hadn’t really understood the role that these structures, resembling indestructible cement cow pies with eyes, played in the landscape and the culture. I passed the George W. Bush café in Kruja, and ate »

journal books at a Tex-Mex restaurant in Tirana where the only other customers were Methodist missionaries from the United States. I noticed that everyone who could afford it drove a Mercedes of uncertain provenance, the vehicle best designed to survive the country’s lethal potholes and frequent collisions. I crossed the shaggy lawns of the university, with its touchingly neglected science museum, deserted except for the boy who worked there and two friends—guys who could have gone to college with Lula.

I came to love the beauty of the countryside, its stark medieval hill towns, its ancient churches and mosques. I understood why Albanians are so fiercely attached to their native land, and also how its attractions would measure up, in the mind of a restless, unmarried 26-year-old girl, to what she hoped to find in New York City. As much as I adored Albania, I knew, by the time I Ieft, how Lula would answer the question of why she’d moved to New York: “Who would choose Tirana over a city where half-naked fashion models and their

stockbroker boyfriends drink mojitos from pitchers decorated with dancing monkeys?”

The trip to Albania gave me everything I required in order to understand my heroine. But one reward of travel (whether the journey is just for fun, or for work of any sort) is that it gives you so much more than what you wanted and needed— more than you ever suspected you desired.

Perhaps I could tell the border guards that: traveling to research a novel is in many ways exactly the same as traveling for pleasure. What stays with you are the surprises, the revelations, the experience of the new, the joy of meeting interesting people and encountering unfamiliar sights and sounds, flavors and smells—all things that I could never have constructed from the raw material of my imagination.

But that would definitely be more information than any border guard could process. For the present and future, it’s probably better for everyone if I just continue saying, “Vacation!

I’m here as a tourist.” ✚

Reading list: Transporting fiction Francine Prose picks eight novels where the setting is always in the spotlight.

Death in Venice

The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle

Le Divorce

Swamplandia!

A Room with a View

Gryphon

GraceLand

by Charles Dickens Granted, London has changed a lot since Dickens’s time, but whenever I go there I feel I’ve re-entered one of his novels.

by Diane Johnson Reading this smart, delightful comic novel provides all the fun of a week in Paris without having to leave the house.

by E. M. Forster Read it to find out how little the splendor of Florence has changed—and how much people have.

by Chris Abani The sights and sounds of Lagos, Nigeria pulse through this vibrant novel.

94 August 2011 | travelandleisureasia.com

by Haruki Murakami My favorite of Murakami’s books reveals all sorts of familiar—and hidden—aspects of Tokyo.

by Karen Russell This imaginative first novel is set in an alligator theme park that could exist only in southwestern Florida.

by Charles Baxter The American Midwest reveals itself as a place of great beauty and strangeness in Baxter’s eloquent fictions.

Bleak House

D av i d a l e x a n d e r a r n o l d

by Thomas Mann Nothing has ever captured so well the beauty and the pulse-racing creepiness of this gorgeous city.

journal reflections

Walk this way

Peter Jon Lindberg considers the unsung virtues of a good old-fashioned tour guide

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Š Jeremy Richards | Dreamstime.com

The bewildering ghats in Varanasi.

S

ome travelers—you, perhaps—are averse to the very premise of a guided tour. No selfassumed so­phisticate wants to be led around by someone holding a whistle and a PingPong paddle with a number on it. I certainly never did, in my indie-traveler youth. Instead I relied on books, on my own wits, and on friends and local contacts, who’d point me to the underground galleries and unsung sites that I believed told the real story of a place. In hindsight, I was poring over footnotes and ignoring the main text.

This error first struck me on a visit to Varanasi, India. At the time I was still naive enough to think I knew everything, or that I could at least figure it out on my own. So I spent three days walking the banks of the Ganges, watching the most bewildering scenes drift by. The experience was undeniably visceral, yet ultimately unsatisfying—like a Hindi movie with the subtitles off. On my fourth morning I met a local professor at a teahouse who offered to show me around in exchange for lunch. We spent the afternoon retracing my earlier steps, with my guide explaining everything I’d missed: not just the what and the who, but the how and the why.

India, of course, begs for interpretation, which is why seasoned travelers will hire a guide in Varanasi or Delhi or Mumbai when they wouldn’t consider it in Rome or Paris or London. But even the latter cities come to new life—even after your umpteenth visit—when seen with a skilled guide.

Indeed, some of my most memorable tours took me not to obscure or exotic sites but around plac­es I’d considered familiar: the Tower of London, midtown Manhattan, the heart of ancient Rome. A good tour guide can bring you to those coveted under-the-radar spots, get you into private collec­tions your friends have never seen. But a great tour guide can steer you back onto the beaten path and help you see the celebrated sites as if for the first time.

“People often tell me, ‘We’ve done the Pantheon—show us something new,’” says Frank Dabell, one of Rome’s top tour guides. “My response is, ‘Well, yes, but would you listen to your favorite piece of music only once?’”

Did you know that Rome’s Palatine Hill gave us the word palace? Were you aware that czar and kaiser both derive from Caesar? Did you know that when the Pantheon was completed, the surround­ing piazza was five meters lower than it is today, so someone standing outside would have seen not a rectangular box topped with a dome but the im­plied outline of a perfect sphere?

Maybe you knew all that. I did not, until I spent an afternoon with Dabell. Raised in Rome by French and British parents, he attended Oxford University and studied at London’s Cortauld Institute of Art, and now teaches at Temple University’s Rome campus. In his spare time he

leads walking tours, which ostensibly focus on art and architecture but touch on pretty much any­thing you can think of, from Italian politics to ancient plumbing.

Dabell wears bright-red socks, speaks with a charming British accent, and is madly in love with art, with storytelling, and with Rome itself. He’ll visit the Pantheon twice a day, just to watch the shifting play of sunlight on the interior walls. Ev­ery April 6, Raphael’s birthday, Dabell stops to lay a flower on the master’s tomb. He can gracefully recite both the original Latin and the English trans­lation of the famous epigraph above it: Living, great Nature fear’d he might outvie her works And dying, fears herself may die.

“Raphael knew the pleasure of looking and thinking,” Dabell says. “Something that’s sorely lacking these days.”

We met through Casa Manni, a one-suite hotel located 180 meters from the Pantheon. Designed by Adam Tihany, the apartment is owned and run by olive oil maker Armando Manni, who opens his black book to connect guests with Rome insiders. Dabell is Casa Manni’s art expert. (He also free­lances with Context Travel, which offers tours in a dozen cities around Europe and North America.)

We had only to walk within an eight-block ra­dius of Casa Manni to explore one of the world’s finest open-air museums: the Pantheon, Piazza Navona, Piazza Colonna, the Trevi Fountain. Through the neighborhood runs a path, marked with inlays in the pavement, that forms a literal tourist trail. We were not charting unknown ter­rain. I had walked this route countless times myself and believed I had a decent understanding of Rome and its heritage. But Dabell proved me wrong. I hadn’t been looking and thinking.

G

uiding may be the one instance where you generally don’t want a veteran professional.

“People who are primarily experts in their subject usually make better guides than those for whom it’s a full-time job,” notes Maureen B. Fant, an American writ­er and Rome-based expat who coordinates tours for Casa Manni. After too long in the field, she notes, even the most inspired guides default to a tape loop.

Savvy tour leaders read their audience as well as they read the city, staying ever attuned to the ebb and flow of engagement. (The ideal candidate not only has a Ph.D. but also moonlights in an improv troupe.) Such skills are essential, since there is no “typical” tour client, according to Fant: some are scholars themselves; others have barely cracked a guidebook. She recalls a couple who signed up for a tour of ancient Rome. The husband had no interest in art or museums, but happened to be in the bathroom-supply business: “He wound up asking a zillion questions about the fountains—how they worked, how water moved through the city. They became the basis of our walk.” » travelandleisureasia.com | august 2011 97

journal reflections

98 August 2011 | travelandleisureasia.com

“Sometimes you just have to step out of the way and let the art sing for itself,” he said as we gazed into Vigevano’s mournful eyes. “This is something we nev­er make the time to do—just to stop, and look, without speaking.”

And so we did. ✚

T+L’s Favorite Guides Here, nine experts who will change your perspective on a city: MANILA Carlos Celdran Unravels the history of Manila in a way few can.

Walk This Way; 63-2/4844945; celdrantours@hotmail. com; group tours from P900 per person.

Mumbai Rashida Anees The go-to private guide for travel outfitters, she leads walks with a focus on off-the-beaten-path stops. 91-98/20228225; rashidaanees@hotmail. com; full-day tours from R6,700 per person.

Tokyo Charlie Spreckley This British expat and former editor of the city’s Metropolis magazine knows all the right addresses in this everchanging city. Bespoke Tokyo; 81-3/3797-1141; charlie@bespoketokyo.jp; four-hour tours from ¥16,000 per person.

Rome Frank Davell He’s available through Casa Manni or Context Travel 215/240-4347; contexttravel. com; three-hour group tours from €62 per person.

Madrid Mencia GonzálezBarros A fashion designer, she’ll take you through the

city’s most stylish quar­ters.

34/67-996-9647; arquitecturahumana@gmail.com; four-hour tours from €83 per person.

Prague Milos Curik His excellent music- and artthemed tours are infused with 32 years of guiding experience. 420/603-475754; arts.music@volny.cz; four-hour tours from CZK3,000 per person.

London Karen PierceGoulding A former journalist, she excels at bring­ing the city’s history alive. London Walks; 44-20/7624-3978; walks.com; two-hour tours from £8 per person.

New York City Francis Morrone This architectural historian covers everywhere from Brownstone Brooklyn to the storied Plaza Hotel.

Municipal Art Soci­ety; 1-212/ 935-3960; mas.org; tours from US$15 per person.

Istanbul Sinan Yalcin Specializes in bibli­cal and Islamic city tours; he was one of Pope Benedict XVI’s Istanbul guides of choice during his visit. Sea Song Tours; 90-21/2292-8555; seasong.com; full-day tours from TRY400 per person.

Get to know Tokyo’s Shibuya with a guide.

© I r fa n n u r d | D r e a m s t i m e . c o m

Standout guides also manage to tran­scend the job’s inherently awkward premise, which is to herd adults around like school­children. In Dabell’s company, my wife and I felt less like two out-of-town rubes being led by a guide and more like three friends engrossed in conversation during a stroll across town. That conversation veered fre­quently from the topic at hand—to Libyan politics, New York City restaurants, the Beatles, pistachio ice cream. (A stop at Ciuri Ciuri, Dabell’s favorite gelato shop, proved a worthy detour.)

In the end it was the odd tangents and digressions that we remembered best. Dabell took as much delight in seeming asides as he drew from his primary subjects: seen through his eyes, a door hinge was as sublime as the Pantheon’s dome; a chipped tile remnant as compelling as any Caravaggio. Standing before Sansovino’s otherwise solemn sculpture of Mary, Jesus and Saint Anne in the church of Sant’Agostino, Dabell directed our gaze to Anne’s fingers, which were subtly tickling the infant’s foot.

“Such an intimate gesture, and so moving,” he murmured.

Who’d have thought we could spend 50 rapt minutes just circling Bernini’s Fontana dei Quattro Fiumi while Dabell pointed out unnoticed details? “Look at that palm tree, leaning in the breeze. Astonishing!” he swooned as we took in the fountain’s twisting swells. “Water, light, sound, sculpture, architecture, theater—it’s the first complete artwork,” Dabell continued. “When this fountain was switched on in 1651, Bernini essentially invented the cinema.”

I figured I’d seen the best of Bernini over the years, but until Dabell brought me to it, I’d never encountered what is now among my favorite of his works: a haunting memo­rial bust of Giovanni Vigevano, a 17th-century gentleman, inside the church of Santa Maria Sopra Minerva. There’s noth­ing monumental about the likeness—rather an uncanny softness and vulnerability that belies the stone. “Bernini believed the best time to sculpt is just before the subject speaks or just after,” Dabell told us, and this was clearly the case with Vigevano. Bearded and frail with old age, he seems poised to utter a parting word; his head tilts almost imperceptibly forward, as if nodding in wel­come to his own mourners. The bluish tint of the marble eerily suggests blood beneath skin, making the stone appear translucent. It is the most lifelike depiction of near-death I have ever seen. Yet there it was, virtually unnoticed by the throngs of passersby.

“Scholars know the Vigevano bust, but it’s not celebrated,” Dabell explained. “Encountering these busts of seventeenth-century characters no one’s ever heard of—it’s like meeting the people themselves.”

Seeing Rome on my own and then with Dabell was like the difference between scanning a piece of sheet music and hear­ing a choir sing it. Suddenly the arc of the melody, the grace of the counter­point, the thrust of the lyric all become clear. When I told Dabell this, he humbly demurred.

journal food

The Full English Rule Britannia: London’s food scene is morei dynamic—and more varied—than ever, writes Paul Levy.i photographed by laurie fletcheri

Fattoush salad with tomato, cucumber, radish and pita at Dock Kitchen, Stevie Parle’s new restaurant on the Grand Union Canal in West London.

102 August 2011 | travelandleisureasia.com

L

ondon is a fickle food city—if French is up, Italian is down; as Sichuanese soars, Cantonese runs aground. I’ve been eating out professionally in the British capital since the 1960’s, the dawn of Foodie London. Today, my adopted hometown has become one of the world’s most genuinely exciting places to eat. Ambitious young chefs positively pulse with energy and ideas. Obsessed with the quality of their ingredients, they are rediscovering the connection between nurture and nature, which they now know counts for as much as their culinary skills and the appeal of the spaces in which they serve their creations.

As one of the first restaurant critics for a newspaper in the U.K., I remember championing the Swiss chef Anton Mosimann when his Dorchester Hotel restaurant was the only high-stakes game in town. In

Guess who’s coming to dinner From left: “Meat fruit,”

a playful presentation of chicken-liver parfait, at Dinner

by Heston Blumenthal; the Mandarin Oriental Hyde Park, in Knightsbridge; chef Heston Blumenthal.

the early 1980’s, if you wanted a fancy meal, you automatically thought of a hotel. Oddly enough, there’s a trend back to hotel dining rooms. But that’s not all. Last year’s “pop-up” phenomena have morphed into brick-and-mortar sensations. And the cult of the ingredient, having moved on from French chefs smuggling foie gras in their suitcases, migrated to Italian restaurants and is now once again leaning toward Paris.

This year’s biggest news is in Knightsbridge. At the Mandarin Oriental Hyde Park you’ll find an unexpected hybrid: Heston Blumenthal’s Michelin-three-starred Fat Duck at Bray crossed with a traditional restaurant. A meal at the Fat Duck is many things—entertainment, art, magic— but dinner it isn’t. The gastro-wizard has made his intentions clear. At Dinner by Heston Blumenthal you can eat a meal—in the normal three-course sense—at a surprisingly gentle price.

The twist comes from the menu, for which Blumenthal did extensive historical research and reconstruction. The “meat fruit” starter (circa 1500) is a chicken-liver parfait coated in a simulated “orange” skin so that it looks, tastes and smells like a tangerine. Salamagundy (circa 1720) is not the undisciplined mess of poultry and vegetables found in old cookery books but a wonderful salad incorporating chicken oysters, bone marrow and horseradish cream. Many main courses rely on sous vide preparation, so that “beef royal” (circa 1720) is Angus short ribs of beef, cooked in a low temperature water bath for 72 hours, served with smoked anchovy and onion purée and slivers of ox tongue, and has the un-chewy texture of filet—which I dislike.

Though the beef flavor was rich and intense, the mouthfeel of “powdered duck” (circa 1670), crisp confit-lacquered duck legs with silky meat served on a smoky fennel purée, was more my style. But nobody could fault the fantastic desserts: tipsy cake (circa 1810) is more a cream-filled brioche with a

caramelize top, served with slices of the pineapple we saw grilling on a giant spit roast, installed at a cost of some £260,000. The interiors of Dinner (like those of Bar Boulud) are by Adam Tihany, who has given expression to Blumenthal’s fancies—the giant clockwork that turns the spits, the jellymold lighting fixtures, the Tudor rose–shaped wooden chandeliers—with luxuriously far-apart tables and views over Hyde Park. Daniel Boulud has an in-house charcutier (courtesy of Gilles Vérot in Paris) that makes this spacious ground-floor eating-place with its separate street entrance and long zinc bar feel more like a rambling Lyonnais bouchon than a London nosh-house. Petite aioli, with its quail eggs and prawns, like the small charcuterie board, was an adequately delicious lunch serving for me, whereas the justly much-acclaimed burgers needed deconstruction to eat politely.

In scuzzy-for-generations Leicester Square, nose-to-tail champion Fergus Henderson has created St. John Hotel, whose dining room is a smaller, more austere version of his cult spot near Smithfield Market. This new offshoot, in the beating heart of London’s theater-land, is open from breakfast to 2 a.m. At early supper my wife and I had small, sweet native oysters; superbly fresh langoustines; a dish of tiny brown shrimp with globe artichoke sections and a perfect soft-boiled egg; and slices of veal tongue and mustardy potato salad. Our favorite main course was a slice of rare beef roasted with caramelized onions and creamy horseradish sauce, followed by a wibbly-wobbly blood-orange jelly and a rich prune burned custard.

The most senior pop-up chef of all, Pierre Koffmann, so enjoyed his sojourn in a tent on the roof of Selfridge’s department store back in 2009 (yes, really) that he has opened a permanent restaurant in the very hotel where he once ran a Michelin-three-starred kitchen, the Berkeley. At Koffmann’s, I lunched on grilled mussels, cassoulet, tripe » travelandleisureasia.com | august 2011 103

journal food

Jolly good Clockwise from top left: Octopus braised with basil and peas at Bocca di Lupo; Bocca di Lupo’s sculpted-brick façade; a raspberry-and-rosewater macaron at Les Deux Salons; the bar at Les Deux Salons.

The team at Dock Kitchen prepares for service.

104 August 2011 | travelandleisureasia.com

à la mode de Caen and dark chocolate tart, all as Frenchly traditional as you can imagine, as delicious and refined as these agrestic recipes allow.

Farther afield, in Clerkenwell, after eight years in Australia, Bruno Loubet has opened his curved, 85-seater, Russell Sage–designed Bistrot Bruno Loubet in the chic, modern Zetter Hotel. The food is robustly classic, but playful: “revised Lyonnaise salad and Beaujolais dressing” means batons of golden, deep-fried, sticky, piggy bits—hints of trotters, tails and ears—with rashers of crisp pancetta, curls of pork rind, a poached egg and some crunchy plus bitter salad leaves on the side. Main courses included a hearty hare concoction as well as artichoke barigoule.

If you can find the tricky entrance to the circular Park Plaza Westminster Bridge London hotel, then you’ll have no trouble navigating to its Brasserie Joël, where Joël Antunes is another returning Frenchman, this time from Atlanta. In a dark wood room with pretty red and white table linens, the food exemplifies the new heartiness—a warm salad of tender octopus tentacles; a substantial Devon crab salad; main courses of pork cheeks with crisp, fried pig’s tail and lentils; a generous helping of suckling pig shoulder from the wood-fired grill; and stupendous desserts of whiskey millefeuille and popcorn custard.

On the other hand, if you’re looking for classic British food (with a cheeky twist), in Soho, opposite the Groucho Club (London’s hangout for media folk, writers, artists and the more intellectual sort of actor), is the Dean Street Townhouse Dining Room. Red-leather banquettes and a louche atmosphere remind you that in the 1930’s the building used to be the Matisse-decorated Gargoyle Club. The menu includes brawn with piccalilli (headcheese with a cooked vegetable relish); fish-and-chips with mushy peas; pan-fried ray with capers, parsley and lemon; nicely moist roast chicken; and Welsh rarebit, as well as steamed suet puddings such as jam roly-poly.

With Dock Kitchen, another pop-up prince, Stevie Parle, has settled down. On the Grand Union Canal in West London, this well-traveled alumnus of the River Café thrives on the tension between keeping his food seasonal, simple and generous, and the respect he has for the authenticity of foreign cuisines. A lunch menu might include an AngloIndian fish moilee of meaty Cornish brill with coconut, tomato and curry leaf, or a Persian barberry-, pine-nutand rice-stuffed Kent Down shoulder of lamb, perfumed with rosewater and dried limes. Dinner is a themed set menu such as an exquisite grand aioli with all the Provençal requisites—salt cod, artichokes and fennel, with a bonus of wild asparagus or hop shoots; or a menu from Sri Lanka, Karnataka or Oaxaca.

You have to be a bit lucky—or plan well in advance—to book a place at the 16-seat communal (and sole) dining table

at the Loft Project, an East London Friday and Saturday night experimental restaurant (in Kingsland Road, London’s Little Saigon). Run by Portuguese chef Nuno Mendes and his partner, Clarise Faria, like an art gallery with constantly changing exhibitions, Mendes gives the kitchen over to a single chef or sometimes a chefs’ collective, like the (all-British and headed for fame) Young Turks last April (sample menu: razor clam and sorrel, pheasant egg, ramps and snails, beetroot and goat’s milk, sea kale and crab, chicken and grains, lemon and bergamot). Samuel Miller, an engaging young Brit who works with René Redzepi at Noma, in Copenhagen, cooked my dinner, which consisted of dishes with sci-fi looks, a few foraged ingredients and intense flavors.

Ingredients are front and center at Bocca di Lupo, in Soho, where Jacob Kenedy turns out gutsy, regional Italian small plates meant for sharing. I loved his Roman artichokes alla giudea, huge olives from Le Marche, unusual pastas and house-made luganega, thin sausages from Veneto spiced with nutmeg, cinnamon and cloves. Nearby, Hix serves quintessential Brit food, and there’s a great bar that makes it a natural hangout for local chefs and their mates.

A few streets away in Mayfair, the foodie set is making a beeline for the brand-new Pollen Street Social. Jason Atherton may have an orthodox pedigree (a stint at El Bulli; protégé of Gordon Ramsay) but he’s turned the white-tablecloth experience on its head at his new establishment, which, he insists, is the sort of restaurant he wants to eat in himself. At the 45-seat bar, have just a drink and order from the menu. There are eight small-plate appetizers (we loved the full English breakfast: a soft orange-yolked egg with micro-bacon and mushroom bits) and the same number of main courses (flaking halibut with paella, flavored with smoked paprika, is a must). Diners are encouraged to mix and match dishes to create a personalized menu.

Of two French-inspired favorites, the first has the ideal location to match my own interests. Around the corner from the English National Opera’s Coliseum, in Covent Garden, Will Smith and Anthony Demetre preside over their stunning re-creation of a Paris brasserie, Les Deux Salons, where standouts include warm salt-cod brandade with sauté of squid and parsley kromeski; a slice of British rose veal wrapped, ravioli-fashion, around fresh goat’s-milk curd; and a gorgeous bavette of Scottish beef from the charcoal grill.

And in Spitalfields, at Galvin La Chapelle, Jeff Galvin turns out thoughtful French food made with British and French ingredients, so that the Mediterranean fish soup has its rouille, Gruyère and croutons, but fish from British waters.

My really hot tip, though, is Zucca. There’s little else to take a visitor to Bermondsey, south of the Thames, but this modestly priced, serious modern Italian restaurant takes you back to the first days of the River Café (the chef’s yet

another graduate of that kitchen) in its foodie enthusiasm: carefully cooked zucca fritti, puntarelle salad, cardoons, pasta, cima di rapa, game in season and vast veal chop (still a rarity in London). The 17th-century diarist Samuel Pepys ventured as far as Bermondsey in 1664 and wrote in his journals that, when he left it, he was “singing finely.” Order one of the sensibly priced fine Italian wines from Zucca’s list, and you might well feel the same. ✚

Chef Fergus Henderson’s offal-centric St. John Hotel, in Leicester Square, offers such dishes as snails with pig cheek and lovage.

address book Bar Boulud 66 Knightsbridge; 44-20/7201-3849; dinner for two £93.

Galvin La Chapelle 35 Spital Square; 44-20/7299-0400; dinner for two £93.

Bistrot Bruno Loubet 86–88 Clerkenwell Rd.; 44-20/73244455; dinner for two £66.

Hix 66-70 Brewer St.; 44-20/7292-3518; dinner for two £70.

Bocca di Lupo 12 Archer St.; 44-20/7734-2223; dinner for two £72.

Koffmann’s Wilton Place; 44-20/7235-1010; dinner for two £93.

Brasserie Joël Park Plaza Westminster Bridge London; 44-20/7620-7272; dinner for two £88.

Les Deux Salons 40–42 William IV St.; 44-20/74202050; dinner for two £82.

Dean Street Townhouse Dining Room 69-71 Dean St.; 44-20/7434-1775; dinner for two £82.

Dinner by Heston Blumenthal 66 Knightsbridge; 44-20/7201-3833; dinner for two £102.

Dock Kitchen 344 Ladbroke Grove; 44-20/8962-1610; dinner for two £72.

Loft Project 315 Kingsland Rd.; 44-79/5620-5005; dinner for two £250.

Pollen Street Social 8-13 Pollen St.; 44-20/7290-7600; dinner for two £77.

St. John Hotel 1 Leicester St.; 44-20/3301-8069; dinner for two £62.

Zucca 184 Bermondsey St.; 44-20/7378-6809; dinner for two £42.

travelandleisureasia.com | august 2011 105

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journal obsessions

Ferry Tales

No traffic, no security lines, no cramped seating— just the gentle sway of the sea and the smell of salttinged air. Bob Morris reflects on his enduring love for ferries. Illustrated by Guy Billout travelandleisureasia.com | august 2011 107

journal obsessions

S

ome people take ferries to work. Others take them to Capri or Nantucket. I took one the spring before last to an opera about plastic surgery in Copenhagen. As part of its expanding mass-transit boat system, the city runs yellow “harbor buses” for opera goers, and they’re a big hit.

As we sped across the inner harbor, passing antique galleons and the spires of the royal palace, the Opera House (a stunning modern orb that could be a distant cousin to a disco ball) appeared through the mist. With wellheeled locals, also late for curtain, I jumped off, ran up the dock into the lobby and took a glass elevator up to my balcony seat.

The opera, Skin Deep, by Armando Iannucci and David Sawer, was in English. Unless you like dissonant music and a libretto that rhymes infection with Botox injection, it wasn’t pleasant.

But it hardly mattered. I was already looking forward to my ride home after the show.

What can I say? I’m a ferry aficionado.

Whether the ride is urban or rural, minutes or

hours, something about it lifts the spirit and clears the mind. In her memoir The Gastronomical Me, M. F. K. Fisher describes boat passengers with “faces full of contentment never to be found elsewhere.” That’s pretty much me on every ferry ride I’ve ever taken, whether in British Columbia, Brazil or India. Even the workaday Port Jefferson–to-Bridgeport ferry route that I often use to bypass traffic on the Long Island Expressway is a tonic for the toxicity of life in a busy metropolitan area. One passenger, Bob Sciascia, must have known that when he hopped onto the ferry years ago after a fight with his girlfriend. He ended up a bartender on the boat for 13 years, entertaining customers in a shirt with martini epaulets until the day he died. He even published a book, Ferry Tales, which is a collection of passenger wit and wisdom. “A ferry ride is a kind of timeout,” he wrote. “There’s nothing you can do until you get to the other side.” Except, he claims, relax.

To be practical, any public form of transportation that saves hours of driving and keeps cars and buses off the roads is good news.

Sydney, Hong Kong, Istanbul and Seattle move millions around by ferry every day. In watery New York City, the trip to Staten Island is the city’s one public ferry route, but it still transports 65,000 riders a day. In Walt Whitman’s day, there were teeming masses commuting by boat from Brooklyn to Manhattan for him to describe in his poems. Now, sadly, the crowds are stuck on subways, causing a recent New York Times column to declare the city’s extensive waterfront a big growth opportunity. And incidentally, once you’ve discovered the ferry from Boston to Provincetown, you’ll never want to drive again. That said, the truth is that ferries are as much about poetry, and seeing life on land from a different perspective, as about practicality.

E

dna St. Vincent Millay captured it perfectly in Recuerdo. “We were very tired, we were very merry,” she wrote about the Staten Island boat. “We had gone back and forth all night on the ferry.”

Years ago, I did the same thing with a college roommate. We had nowhere else to sleep, and

108 August 2011 | travelandleisureasia.com

In Kerala, I paid two rupees to a ferryman who sang as he rowed across the black esturial waters, just like the one who let Hermann Hesseʼs Siddhartha ride for FREE

so we dozed and stumbled on the empty decks with Lady Liberty to the west and lower Manhattan’s canyons ahead, as “the wind came cold, and the sun rose dripping, a bucketful of gold,” just like Millay described it.

In northern Brazil, I took a public ferry to the canal communities near the city of Belém, where people keep tarantulas as pets, and to a nearby island called Algodoal, where the Amazon pours into the Atlantic. In Kerala, in southern India, I paid two rupees to a ferryman who sang as he rowed across the black estuarial waters, just like the ferryman who let Hermann Hesse’s Siddhartha ride for free in his youth.

(Better him than Charon, the mythical Greek figure who ferries souls across the River Styx to Hades.) An hour or so west of the modern ills of Cancún, Mexico, I took a ferry to an island without cars called Holbox, and from a village in Croatia, I ferried to the resort island of Hvar, where a Balkan brass band was playing in the harbor. Some crossings were more dramatic than others. I once hid from another passenger (we were feuding) on the small Fishers Island ferry to New London, Connecticut. And imagine my delight one spring, after a hectic week of traveling, to find a little ferry right outside my hotel in Stockholm. Docking at various spots in the city, it gave me a satisfying command of a maritime capital.

“This is where the rich people live,” a crew member named Igor told me out of the blue and in perfect English as we docked in the Östermalm neighborhood. “And over there is the church where our Princess Victoria’s wedding will be. She’s marrying her personal trainer, so one day he’ll be king. Isn’t that great?” Not the kind of remark you would expect from a taciturn Swede. But then, since

you have nothing to do but look out at the world as you cruise slowly along in the open air, ferries provoke conversation.

“I hear it’s very modern,” my Copenhagen ferry captain remarked about the plasticsurgery opera I’d just seen. The boat was full as it left the opera behind, and I noticed that the passengers, whose faces had looked crimped moments before, were relaxing into the ride.

This ferryman, whose first name was Henning, had been at his post for years but had not yet seen an opera performance.

“But from what I hear,” he said, “it takes too long for Carmen to die.”

I nodded in agreement, and took it with a grain of sea salt. ✚

MORE FERRIES Blue Star Ferries Greece View the country’s islands and inlets, from Santorini to the lesser-known Amorgos. bluestarferries.gr.

Manly Ferry Sydney This half-hour cruise sails past Fort Denison, Harbour Bridge and the glowing Sydney Opera House. sydneyferries.info.

Star Ferry Hong Kong Take in unobstructed vistas of the city’s sprawling skyline between Kowloon and Hong Kong. starferry. com.hk.

Golden Horn Ferry Istanbul Highlights on this one-hour cruise along the Bosporus include the Eyüp Sulta Mosque and the 19th-century cultural center Feshane. sehirhatlari.com.tr.

Ferry Services Kerala These commuter ships travel scenic routes around the palm-fringed lakes and islands of the Indian state’s canal network. kerala.gov.in.

travelandleisureasia.com | august 2011 109

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journal P0rtfolio

mountain song Vietnam’s northernmost province is one of the most stunning, otherworldly places on earth, photographer Aaron Joel Santos discovers

H

a Giang is possibly one of the most beautiful places on earth. Among the Vietnamese, it’s spoken of with an awe and reverie usually reserved for stargazing and best-laid plans. It’s the nation’s great escape, a virtually untouched expanse of land where majestic mountains and scattered valleys beckon visitors. To me, it embodies why I fell in love with Vietnam: it’s wild and friendly, confusing and otherworldly.

It doesn’t help you out much along the way, but it smiles and hands you a cold beer once you get there. Ha Giang doesn’t throw obstacles at you; it is an obstacle. English is nearly nonexistent and many of the ethnic tribes here speak a slurred Vietnamese that proves difficult to hear. And it’s far away. From everything. Ha Giang town is a 300-kilometer overnight bus ride from Hanoi, and from there the journey hasn’t even begun. I wanted to capture the timelessness of the province in the feel of the images as much as in their content. Two friends and I stalked through the markets of Dong Van and Xa Phin, wandered down muddy footpaths to remote villages, and sat for beers and local moonshine at makeshift roadside bars. We’d drink and stand and look around, still not quite believing that a place like this could exist anywhere in the world, much less so close to home. I’ll be back soon. ✚

112 August 2011 | travelandleisureasia.com

The trek up a path to a village outside of Dong Van.

travelandleisureasia.com | august 2011 113

journal P0rtfolio

Textiles for sale at the weekend market in Dong Van, which attracts ethnic tribes from the surrounding hills.

114 August 2011 | travelandleisureasia.com

Drinking is a large part of market culture in Ha Giang. Here, ethnic minorities drink Chinese beer out of small bowls in the Xa Phin market.

Local men compare their caged birds on the streets of Dong Van.

travelandleisureasia.com | august 2011 115

journal P0rtfolio

116 August 2011 | travelandleisureasia.com

Above the town of Quan Ba.

travelandleisureasia.com | august 2011 117

journal P0rtfolio

A winding mountain pass in Ha Giang, an area known for its epic landscapes, surreal rock formations and unsurpassed beauty.

A spice and grain seller displays her simple wares at the Xa Phin market.

118 August 2011 | travelandleisureasia.com

Hmong men gather at the Xa Phin market to sell cattle and horses.

travelandleisureasia.com | august 2011 119

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TRAVELANDLEISURE.COM MONTH travelandleisure.com month 2010 00

bangkok

N o. 1

city overall

Top Cities 1. Bangkok 9 0.49 2. Florence 89.92 3. Rome 8 8.45 4. New York city 8 8.40 5. Istanbul 88.18 6. Cape Town 88.06 7. Siem Reap Cambodia 87.90 8. Sydney 87.84 9. Barcelona 87.83 10. Paris 87.78

Asia 1. Bangkok 90.49 2. Siem Reap Cambodia 87.90 3. Kyoto Japan 87.22 4. Hong Kong 86.18 5. Tokyo 8 4.75 6. Shanghai 84.29 7. Ho Chi Minh City Vietnam 84.09 8. Beijing 8 3.51 9. Hanoi Vietnam 83.48 10. Singapore 83.44

Denotes a World’s Best debut

Australia, New Zealand and the South Pacific

city asia

1. Sydney 87.84 2. Melbourne 85.03 3. Queenstown N ew Zealand 84.31 4. Christchurch N ew Zealand 82.38 5. Auckland N ew Zealand 81.64

United States and Canada 1. New York city 8 8.40 2. Charleston South Carolina 87.41 3. Chicago 87.27 4. San Francisco 87.17 5. Santa Fe New Mexico 86.07 6. New Orleans 85.66 7. Savannah Georgia 85.63 8. Vancouver 85.46 9. Victoria British Columbia 84.43 10. Quebec City 84.20

Europe 1. Florence 89.92 2. Rome 88.45 3. Istanbul 88.18 4. Barcelona 87.83

5. Paris 87.78 6. Vienna 86.45 7. Venice 86.41 8. Madrid 85.98 9. Siena Italy 85.88 10. Seville Spain 85.80

Africa and the Middle East 1. Cape Town 88.06 2. Jerusalem 87.77 3. Tel Aviv 84.38 4. Cairo 78.66 5. Dubai United Arab Emirates 76.84

Mexico and Central and South America 1. Buenos Aires 87.77 2. Cuzco Peru 85.70 3. Mexico City 84.56 4. Rio de Janeiro 82.93 5. Santiago Chile 79.41 6. Lima Peru 78.84 7. Playa del Carmen Mexico 77.84 8. Puerto Vallarta Mexico 77.55 9. Panama City 74.87 10. Cancún Mexico 74.37

© enviromantic / istockphoto.com

Overall

N o. 1

Top Islands Overall 1. Santorini Greece 90.61 2. Bali 9 0.45 3. Cape Breton Nova Scotia 89.91 4. Boracay Philippines 89.83 5. Great Barrier Reef Australia 89.68 6. Sicily Italy 89.51 7. Hawaii, the Big Island 89.11 8. Kauai 88.99 9. Maui 88.59 10. Galápagos 88.22

Asia 1. Bali 90.45 2. Boracay Philippines 89.83 3. Koh Samui Thailand 85.33 4. Phuket Thailand 84.68 5. Maldives 82.40

Australia, New Zealand and the South Pacific 1. Great Barrier Reef Australia 89.68 2. Moorea French Polynesia 87.51 3. Bora-Bora French Polynesia 87.27 4. Fiji 86.94 5. Cook Islands 86.67

Continental United States and Canada

The Caribbean, Bermuda and the Bahamas

1. Cape Breton Nova Scotia 89.91 2. Vancouver Island

British Columbia 87.66 3. Nantucket Massachusetts 85.77 4. San Juan Islands Washington 84.73 5. Mackinac Island Michigan 82.4

1. Cuba 84.97 2. The Abacos Bahamas 84.80 3. St. John U.S. Virgin Islands 83.59 4. Virgin Gorda

British Virgin Islands 82.83 5. The Grenadines St. Vincent and

the Grenadines 82.73

Europe

Mexico and Central and South America

1. Santorini Greece 90.61 2. Sicily Italy 89.51 3. Capri Italy 87.92 4. Majorca Spain 87.65 5. Mykonos Greece 87.28

Hawaii 1. Hawaii, the Big Island 89.11 2. Kauai 88.99 3. Maui 8 8.59 4. Oahu 8 5.50 5. Lanai 81.54

1. Galápagos 88.22 2. Ambergris Cay Belize 86.04 3. Roatán Honduras 81.48 4. Isla Mujeres Mexico 81.00 5. Cozumel Mexico 76.20

Denotes a World’s Best debut

bali

N o. 1

© Artykov / istockphoto.com

island asia

seabourn

N o. 1

small ship cruise line

Top Cruise Lines Large-Ship Cruise Lines

1. Crystal Cruises 92.45 2. Regent Seven Seas Cruises 90.14 3. Oceania Cruises 86.42 4. Disney Cruise Line 85.70 5. Cunard LINE 84.27 6. Azamara CLUB Cruises 82.51 7. Celebrity Cruises 81.92 8. Holland America Line 81.29 9. Royal Caribbean International 80.28 10. Princess Cruises 79.81

Small-Ship Cruise Lines

1. Seabourn 93.30 2. Silversea Cruises 90.03 3. Lindblad Expeditions 89.25 4. SeaDream Yacht Club 88.33 5. Windstar Cruises 85.63

River Cruise Lines 1. Tauck 90.06 2. Uniworld Boutique River Cruise Collection 88.70 3. Viking River Cruises 86.76 4. Amawaterways 85.23 5. Avalon Waterways 84.27

C o u r t e s y o f S e ab o u r n

Top Tour Operators Top International and Safari Outfitters Airlines 1. Micato Safaris 97.04 2. Ker & Downey 96.85 3. Explore, inc. 96.33 4. Wilderness Safaris 95.05 5. Austin-Lehman Adventures 94.85 6. Cox & Kings 94.24 7. Costa Rica Expeditions 93.84 8. Travcoa 93.62 9. &Beyond 93.56 10. Asia Transpacific Journeys 93.33 11. Classic Journeys 92.86 12. Butterfield & Robinson 92.82 13. VBT Bicycling & Walking Vacations 92.45 14. African Travel 91.89 15. Adventures by Disney 91.67 16. Country Walkers 91.62 17. Backroads 91.50 18. Tauck 91.38 19. Odysseys Unlimited 91.23 20. Kensington Tours 90.46 21. Absolute Travel 90.00 22. Abercrombie & Kent 89.61 23. Natural Habitat Adventures 89.29 24. Mountain Travel Sobek 88.89 25. big five Tours & expeditions 88.17

co u rt esy o f s i n ga p o r e a i r l i n es

Denotes a World’s Best debut

1. Singapore Airlines 89.86 2. Emirates 88.75 3. Etihad Airways 87.58 4. Air New Zealand 86.81 5. Virgin Atlantic Airways 86.63 6. Cathay Pacific Airways 85.82 7. ANA (All Nippon Airways) 85.58 8. Korean Air 85.00 9. Thai Airways International 84.49 10. Qatar Airways 84.15

Top Car-Rental Agencies 1. ZipCar 82.05 2. Hertz rent-a-car 80.18 3. Autoeurope 79.43 4. National Car Rental 78.45 5. Enterprise Rent-A-Car 78.25 6. Sixt Rent a Car 77.04 7. Avis Rent a Car 76.40 8. Alamo Rent A Car 75.26 9. Budget rent a Car 73.18 10. Europcar 72.32

singapore airlines

N o. 1

inter national airline

singita grumeti reserves

The Top 100

N o. 1

Hotels

overall

N o. 1

resort and lodge africa

1. Singita Grumeti Reserves (Sasakwa Lodge, Sabora Tented

Camp, Faru Faru Lodge) Serengeti National Park, Tanzania 98.44 2. Singita Sabi Sand at Sabi Sand Private Game Reserve (Ebony Lodge,Boulders Lodge, Castleton Camp) Kruger National Park, South Africa 97.95 3. Royal Malewane Kruger National Park, South Africa 97.88

4. Ol Donyo Lodge Mbirikani Group Ranch, Kenya 97.71

5. Oberoi Udaivilas Udaipur, India 97.70 6. Triple Creek Ranch Darby, Montana 97.10 7. Mandarin Oriental dhara dhevi Chiang Mai, Thailand 97.00 8. Oberoi Rajvilas Jaipur, India 96.92

9. Kirawira Luxury Tented Camp Serengeti National Park, Tanzania 96.71

10. Serengeti Migration Camp Serengeti National Park, Tanzania 96.50 11. Lodge at Kauri Cliffs Matauri Bay, New Zealand 96.25 12. Fairmont Mount Kenya Safari Club Nanyuki, Kenya 95.64 14. Oberoi Amarvilas Agra, India 95.33

Overall Winners a test a m e n t to t h e wa n d e r l u st o f

Travel + Leisure readers: a total of 20 hotels are located across Asia-Pacific, with half of those in India. Asia’s highest ranked—Oberoi Udaivilas in Udaipur, India—came fifth overall, while the Mandarin Oriental Dhara Dhevi in Chiang Mai, Thailand was seventh in the world. Six of this year’s top 10 hotels overall are safari lodges in Africa, including the No. 1 winner, Singita Grumeti Reserves, an eco-resort in northern Tanzania that’s made a blazing return to the World’s Best Awards.

15. Nisbet Plantation Beach Club Nevis 95.24 16. La Résidence Phou Vao Luang Prabang, Laos 95.20 16. Four Seasons Resort Carmelo, Uruguay 95.20 18. Ngorongoro Crater Lodge Tanzania 95.14 19. Palacio Duhau – Park Hyatt Buenos Aires 94.97 20. Mombo & Little Mombo Camps Okavango Delta, Botswana 94.82 21. Hotel Caruso Ravello, Italy 94.75 22. Little Palm Island Resort & Spa Little Torch Key, Florida 94.56 23. Mandarin Oriental Bangkok 94.49 24. Blackberry Farm Walland, Tennessee 94.40 24. Stafford london by kempinski 94.40 26. Couples Tower Isle St. Mary, Jamaica 94.33 27. Stein Eriksen Lodge Park City, Utah 94.32 28. Four Seasons Resort hualalai Hawaii, the Big Island 94.04 29. Ritz-Carlton beijing, financial street 94.00 30. Turnberry resort, a luxury ­collection hotel Scotland 93.88 3 1 . Olissippo lapa Palace Lisbon 93.87

Throughout the World’s Best Awards, scores shown have been rounded to the nearest hundredth of a point; in the event of a true tie, properties, companies, or destinations share the same ranking.

32. San Ysidro Ranch, A Rosewood Resort Santa Barbara, California 93.86 33. Le Quartier Français Franschhoek, South Africa 93.82 34. Hotel Villa Cipriani Asolo, Italy 93.75

Denotes a Great Value (rate of US$250 or less)

35. hôtel Plaza Athénée Paris 93.63

Denotes a debut on the World’s Best Awards list

36. Four Seasons Resort Jackson Hole, Wyoming 93.60 37. InterContinental Bora Bora Resort & Thalasso Spa French Polynesia 93.56 38. Sofitel legend Metropole hanoi Vietnam 93.51

00 month 2010 travelandleisure.com

C o u r t e s y o f S i n g i ta G r u m e t i R e s e r v e s . O p p o s i t e , F r o m T o p : C o u r t e s y o f S i n g i t a Ga m e R e s e r v e s ; C o u r t e s y o f R o y a l Ma l Ewa n e

13. Posada de Mike Rapu, explora en rapa nui Easter Island 95.47

world’s best

39. Singita Kruger National Park (lebombo lodge, sweni lodge) South Africa 93.50 40. the Peninsula Bangkok 93.49 41. Eliot Hotel Boston 93.47 41. Inkaterra Machu Picchu Pueblo Hotel Peru 93.47 43. Taj Lake Palace Udaipur, India 93.43 44. The Peninsula Chicago 93.42 45. Londolozi Game Reserve Sabi Sands Wildtuin, South Africa 93.39 46. Hotel Splendido Portofino, Italy 93.33 46. Mandarin Oriental Tokyo 93.33 48. One&Only Palmilla Los Cabos, Mexico 93.22 49. Four Seasons Resort Chiang Mai, Thailand 93.14 49. Stephanie Inn Cannon Beach, Oregon 93.14 51. Katikies Hotel Santorini, Greece 93.07 52. Park Hyatt Milan, Italy 93.05 53. Brenners Park-Hotel & Spa Baden-Baden, Germany 93.00 54. Palazzo Sasso Ravello, Italy 92.96 55. Discovery Shores Boracay, Philippines 92.93 56. Couples Swept Away Negril, Jamaica 92.93 57. Four Seasons Hotel Gresham Palace Budapest 92.90 58. Resort at Pelican Hill Newport Coast, California 92.83 58. Ritz-Carlton New York, Central park 92.83 60. Inn at Palmetto Bluff, an Auberge resort Bluffton, South Carolina 92.80 61. Villa d’Este Cernobbio, Italy 92.75 62. Omni Bedford Springs Resort Bedford, Pennsylvania 92.71 63. Halekulani Oahu, Hawaii 92.69 64. Le Sirenuse Positano, Italy 92.68 65. Chanler at Cliff Walk Newport, Rhode Island 92.67 66. Alvear Palace Hotel Buenos Aires 92.58 67. fairmont Mara Safari Club Masai Mara, Kenya 92.57 67. Hotel Saint-Barth Isle de France St. Bart’s 92.57 67. Huka Lodge Taupo, New Zealand 92.57 70. Ritz-Carlton Naples, Florida 92.56 71. Crosby Street Hotel New York City 92.53

singita sabi sand

N o. 2

overall

71. St. Regis Deer Valley Park City, Utah 92.53 73. Stowe Mountain Lodge Vermont 92.46 74. Kichwa Tembo tented camp Masai Mara, Kenya 92.46 75. Taj Mahal Palace Mumbai 92.42 76. Couples Sans Souci St. Mary, Jamaica 92.41

royal malewane

N o. 3

overall

77. Willows Lodge Woodinville, Washington 92.36 78. Milestone hotel London 92.35 79. Cape Grace Cape Town 92.35 80. Rambagh Palace Jaipur, India 92.34 81. the Langham London 92.32 82. Cloister at Sea Island Georgia 92.32 83. Ladera resort St. Lucia 92.30 84. Auberge du Soleil Rutherford, California 92.29 85. Hôtel de Paris Monte-carlo Monaco 92.29 86. Elysian hotel Chicago 92.25 87. the peninsula Tokyo 92.24 87. umaid bhawan palace Jodhpur, India 92.24 89. Ritz-Carlton, bachelor gulch Beaver Creek, Colorado 92.23 90. Inn at Spanish Bay Pebble Beach, California 92.23 91. St. Regis Singapore 92.23 92. Esperanza, an Auberge resort Los Cabos, Mexico 92.21 92. Park Hotel kenmare County Kerry, Ireland 92.21 94. Victoria House Ambergris Cay, Belize 92.17 95. Four Seasons Resort Maui at Wailea Hawaii 92.15 96. Trump International Hotel & Tower Chicago 92.13 97. Sanctuary at kiawah ­island golf resort South Carolina 92.10 98. Four Seasons Hotel George V Paris 92.09 99. Eden Rock-st. barths St. Bart’s 92.00 99. Emirates Palace Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates 92.00 99. Four Seasons Hotel mexico, d.f. Mexico City 92.00 99. Four Seasons Hotel Ritz Lisbon 92.00 99. Hyatt Regency Coconut Point Resort & Spa Bonita Springs, Florida 92.00 99. Regent Palms Turks and Caicos 92.00 99. Rosewood Mansion on Turtle Creek Dallas 92.00 99. Sundance Resort Utah 92.00 travelandleisure.com month 2010 00

mandarin oriental bangkok

N o. 1

city hotel asia

Asia Resorts

City Hotels 1. Mandarin Oriental Bangkok 94.49 2. Ritz-Carlton Beijing, Financial Street 94.00 3. Sofitel legend Metropole Hanoi, Vietnam 93.51 4. the Peninsula Bangkok 93.49 5. Mandarin Oriental Tokyo 93.33 6. Taj Mahal Palace Mumbai 92.42 7. The Peninsula Tokyo 92.24

1. Oberoi Udaivilas Udaipur, India 97.70

8. St. Regis Singapore 92.23

2. Mandarin Oriental Dhara Dhevi Chiang Mai, Thailand 97.00

9. The Imperial New Delhi 91.77

3. Oberoi Rajvilas Jaipur, India 96.92

1 0. Park Hyatt saigon Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam 91.74

4. Oberoi Amarvilas Agra, India 95.33

11. Makati Shangri-La Manila 91.56

5. La Résidence Phou Vao Luang Prabang, Laos 95.20

12. Taj Mahal Hotel New Delhi 91.50

6. Taj Lake Palace Udaipur, India 93.43

13. Mandarin Oriental Singapore 91.48

7. Four Seasons Resort Chiang Mai, Thailand 93.14

14. The Oberoi Mumbai 91.27

8. Discovery Shores Boracay, Philippines 92.93

15. Mandarin Oriental Hong Kong 91.02

9. Rambagh Palace Jaipur, India 92.34

1 6. Mandarin Oriental Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia 90.95

10. Umaid Bhawan Palace Jodhpur, India 92.24

17. THE Peninsula Manila 90.86

11. Dusit Thani Laguna Phuket, Thailand 91.47

18. Ritz-Carlton Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia 90.80

12. Uma Paro Bhutan 90.93

19. Shangri-La Hotel Bangkok 90.77

13. Pangkor Laut Resort Pangkor Laut Island, Malaysia 90.00

20. The Peninsula Hong Kong 90.70

14. Amandari Bali 89.87

21. The Oberoi New Delhi 90.59

15. Anantara Golden Triangle resort & spa Chiang Rai, Thailand 89.71

2 2. Royal Orchid Sheraton Hotel & Towers

Bangkok 89.76

2 3. Grand Hyatt Seoul 89.65 24. island Shangri-La Hong Kong 89.57 25. Four seasons hotel Singapore 89.50

00 month 2010 travelandleisure.com

C o u r t e s y o f m a n d a r i n o r i e n t a l ba n g k o k

both india and thailand continue to dominate the awards in Asia, with Rajasthan resorts looming large in the voting. Other favorites include Chiang Mai, Luang Prabang, Bali, Boracay and Pangkor Laut. City hotels—including the Mandarin Oriental Bangkok (in the No. 1 spot)—in Asia are still global favorites, with every major center offering a stellar address or two.

world’s best

Australia, New Zealand and the South Pacific Lodges and Resorts

City Hotels 1. Cape Grace Cape Town 92.35 2. Emirates Palace Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates 92.00 3. Four Seasons Hotel Cairo at Nile Plaza 91.77 4. Four Seasons Hotel Cairo at The First Residence 91.74

1. Lodge at Kauri Cliffs Matauri Bay, New Zealand 96.25

5. Saxon boutique hotel, Villas & Spa Johannesburg, South Africa 91.54

2. InterContinental bora bora Resort & Thalasso Spa

6. Mount Nelson Hotel Cape Town 91.12

French Polynesia 93.56

7. Four Seasons Hotel Amman, Jordan 90.00

3. Huka Lodge Taupo, New Zealand 92.57

8. Mena House Oberoi Cairo 89.48

4. Lilianfels Blue Mountains Resort & Spa Australia 89.87

9. Burj Al Arab Dubai, United Arab Emirates 88.97

5. Reef House resort & Spa (formerly Sebel Reef House & Spa)

1 0. One&Only Cape Town 88.91

Palm Cove, Australia 85.07

City Hotels 1. The Langham Melbourne 90.55 2. Park Hyatt Melbourne 90.29 3. InterContinental Sydney 88.53

11. King David Hotel Jerusalem 88.45 12. Table Bay Cape Town 88.00 12. Westcliff Hotel Johannesburg, South Africa 88.00 14. Grand Hyatt Dubai, United Arab Emirates 87.77 15. Four Seasons Hotel Alexandria at San Stefano Egypt 87.73

4. Park Hyatt Sydney (reopening in November 2011) 88.00 5. Sofitel queenstown Hotel & Spa New Zealand 87.33 6. Four Seasons Hotel Sydney 86.87 7. Sydney Harbour Marriott Hotel at Circular Quay 86.84 8. The Westin Sydney 86.18 9. The George Christchurch, New Zealand 86.13

C o u r t e s y o f T h e La n g h a m M e l b o u r n e

10. The Westin Melbourne 85.65

Mexico Resorts 1. One&Only Palmilla Los Cabos 93.22 2. Esperanza, an Auberge resort Los Cabos 92.21 3. Las Ventanas al Paraíso, A Rosewood Resort Los Cabos 91.77

Africa and the Middle East Lodges and Resorts 1. Singita Grumeti Reserves (Sasakwa Lodge, Sabora

Tented Camp, Faru Faru Lodge) Serengeti National Park, Tanzania 98.44

2. Singita Sabi Sand at Sabi Sand Private Game Reserve

(Ebony Lodge, Boulders Lodge, Castleton Camp)

Kruger National Park, South Africa 97.95

3. Royal Malewane Kruger National Park, South Africa 97.88 4. Ol Donyo Lodge Mbirikani Group Ranch, Kenya 97.71 5. Kirawira luxury Tented Camp Serengeti National Park, Tanzania 96.71 6. Serengeti Migration Camp Serengeti National Park, Tanzania 96.50 7. Fairmont Mount Kenya Safari Club Nanyuki, Kenya 95.64 8. Ngorongoro Crater Lodge Tanzania 95.14

4. Ritz-Carlton Cancún 90.80 5. Excellence Riviera Cancún Riviera Maya 90.67 6. La Casa Que Canta Zihuatanejo 90.53 7. Royal Cancún 90.35 8. Maroma Resort & Spa Riviera Maya 90.22 9. Four Seasons Resort Punta Mita 89.94 10. Casa Dorada Los Cabos Resort & Spa 88.21 11. Royal Hideaway Playacar Riviera Maya 87.50 12. Las Brisas Acapulco 87.06 13. Dreams Puerto Vallarta Resort & Spa 87.04 14. Fiesta Americana Grand Coral Beach CAncún Resort & Spa 85.91 15. Fairmont Acapulco Princess 85.56 15. Pueblo Bonito Pacifica Resort & Spa Los Cabos 85.56 17. Presidente InterContinental Cozumel Resort & Spa 85.41 18. Le Méridien Cancún Resort & Spa 85.33 18. Meliá Cabo Real Los Cabos 85.33 20. Dreams Cancún Resort & Spa 85.25

9. Mombo & Little Mombo Camps Okavango Delta, Botswana 94.82

City Hotels

10. Le Quartier FranÇais Franschhoek, South Africa 93.82

1. Four Seasons Hotel México, D.F. Mexico City 92.00

11. Singita Kruger National Park (Lebombo Lodge, Sweni Lodge) South Africa 93.50

3. W Mexico City 80.50

2. Casa de Sierra Nevada San Miguel de Allende 90.13

12. Londolozi Game Reserve Sabi Sands Wildtuin, South Africa 93.39 13. fairmont Mara Safari Club Masai Mara, Kenya 92.57 14. Kichwa Tembo tented camp Masai Mara, Kenya 92.46 15. Sabi Sabi bush lodge Sabi Sands Reserve, South Africa 91.73 1 6. Eagle Island Camp Okavango Delta, Botswana 91.40 17. Kempinski Hotel Ishtar Dead Sea, Jordan 91.20 18. Governor’s Camp Masai Mara, Kenya 90.75 19. MalaMala Game Reserve Kruger National Park, South Africa 90.20 20. Serengeti Sopa Lodge Serengeti National Park, Tanzania 90.10 the langham melbourne

N o. 1

city hotels , australia, new zealand and the south pacific

travelandleisure.com month 2010 00

blackberry farm

N o. 1

resort u . s . and canada

Resorts (40 rooms or more)

1. Blackberry Farm Walland, Tennessee 94.40 2. Stein Eriksen Lodge Park City, Utah 94.32 3. San Ysidro Ranch, A Rosewood Resort Santa Barbara, California 93.86 4. Four Seasons Resort Jackson Hole, Wyoming 93.60 5. Stephanie Inn Cannon Beach, Oregon 93.14 6. Resort at Pelican Hill Newport Coast, California 92.83

7. Inn at Palmetto Bluff, an Auberge resort Bluffton, South Carolina 92.80 8. Omni Bedford Springs Resort Bedford, Pennsylvania 92.71 9. Ritz-Carlton Naples, Florida 92.56 10. St. Regis Deer valley Park City, Utah 92.53 11. Stowe Mountain Lodge Vermont 92.46 12. Willows Lodge Woodinville, Washington 92.36 13. Cloister at Sea Island Georgia 92.32 14. Auberge du Soleil Rutherford, California 92.29 15. Inn at Spanish Bay Pebble Beach, California 92.23 15. Ritz-Carlton, Bachelor Gulch Beaver Creek, Colorado 92.23 17. Sanctuary at Kiawah island golf Resort South Carolina 92.10 18. Hyatt Regency Coconut Point Resort & Spa Bonita Springs, Florida 92.00 18. Sundance Resort Utah 92.00 20. Little Nell Aspen, Colorado 91.85 21. The Broadmoor Colorado Springs 91.80 2 2. Four Seasons resort The Biltmore Santa Barbara, California 91.79

Continental U.S. and Canada the re s o r t c ate g o r y s aw a s h a ke - u p i n 2011 :

Tennessee’s culinary retreat, Blackberry Farm, rose from No. 12 to the winning spot, while 30 standout properties in the American West—including the perennial winner in the Inns category, Montana’s Triple Creek Ranch—comprised half of the World’s Best Resorts and Inns in the U.S. and Canada. The Large City Hotel list is once again topped by a Windy City skyscraper (the Peninsula Chicago has nabbed the No. 1 spot in the region a record four times), but among Small City Hotels, a New York property made a splashy debut: the new 86-room Crosby Street Hotel (No. 2) is the first Manhattan hotel to break into the list.

Denotes a Great Value

Denotes a World’s Best debut

00 month 2010 travelandleisure.com

2 3. Tides Inn Irvington, Virginia 91.73 24. Wickaninnish Inn Tofino, British Columbia 91.67 2 5. Four Seasons Resort Whistler, British Columbia 91.47 2 6. Ritz-Carlton Amelia Island, Florida 91.15 27. Lodge at Pebble Beach California 91.14 2 8. Inn on Biltmore Estate Asheville, North Carolina 90.97 2 9. Villagio Inn & Spa Yountville, California 90.90 30. The Greenbrier White Sulphur Springs, West Virginia 90.64 31. LaPlaya Beach & Golf Resort Naples, Florida 90.44 31. Sanderling Resort & Spa Duck, North Carolina 90.44 33. Ritz-Carlton Golf Resort Naples, Florida 90.40 33. Ventana Inn & Spa Big Sur, California 90.40 35. Sanctuary on Camelback Mountain Paradise Valley, Arizona 90.27 3 6. Meadowood Napa Valley St. Helena, California 90.20 3 6. Montage Laguna Beach, California 90.20 3 8. Topnotch Resort & Spa Stowe, Vermont 90.12 39. Four Seasons Resort Scottsdale at Troon North Arizona 90.03 40. Fairmont Chateau Lake Louise Alberta 89.95 41. Grand Hotel Mackinac Island, Michigan 89.85 42. Surf & Sand Resort Laguna Beach, California 89.77 43. Sagamore resort Adirondacks, New York 89.75 4. Enchantment Resort Sedona, Arizona 89.73 4 45. Solage Calistoga California 89.71 46. Fairmont Turnberry Isle Miami 89.68 47. Ritz-Carlton Half Moon Bay, California 89.42 4 8. Encantado, an auberge resort Santa Fe, New Mexico 89.33 4 8. Royal Palms Resort & Spa Phoenix 89.33 50. Hotel Healdsburg California 89.30

world’s best Large City Hotels (100 rooms or more) 1.

2.

3.

4.

5.

6.

7.

8.

9.

10.

10.

12.

The Peninsula Chicago 93.42 Ritz-Carlton New york, Central Park 92.83 Elysian hotel Chicago 92.25 Trump International Hotel & Tower Chicago 92.13 Rosewood Mansion on Turtle Creek Dallas 92.00 Windsor Court Hotel New Orleans 91.70 Boston Harbor Hotel 91.56 Shutters on the Beach Santa Monica, California 91.27 Setai south beach Miami Beach 91.20 Fairmont Vancouver Airport 91.11 Umstead Hotel & Spa Cary, North Carolina 91.11 Waldorf Astoria Orlando, Florida 91.03

13.

14.

15.

16.

17.

18.

19.

Roosevelt New Orleans, a Waldorf astoria Hotel 90.96 Four Seasons Hotel Seattle 90.71 Hotel 1000 Seattle 90.67 the Peninsula New York City 90.63 Ritz-Carlton chicago, A Four Seasons hotel 90.62 Four Seasons Hotel New York City 90.37 Four Seasons Hotel Boston 90.35

20. Wynn Las Vegas 90.12

the

­p eninsula , chicago

F r o m T o p : C o u r t e s y o f T h e P e n i n s u l a , C h i c a g o ; c o u r t e s y o f e l i o t h o t e l . O p p o s i t e : Ca r o l i n e A l l i s o n

N o. 1

large city hotel u . s . and canada eliot hotel

N o. 1

small city hotel u . s . and canada

21.

22.

23.

24.

25.

26.

27.

28.

29.

30.

The Palazzo Las Vegas 90.02 Montage Beverly Hills, California 90.00 Encore Las Vegas 89.97 The Plaza New York City 89.96 The Peninsula Beverly Hills, California 89.96 Charleston Place hotel South Carolina 89.87 L’Ermitage Beverly Hills, California 89.76 Hermitage Hotel Nashville 89.70 St. Regis New York City 89.61 Hotel Teatro Denver 89.50

31.

32.

32.

34.

35.

36.

37.

38.

38.

40.

41.

42.

43.

44.

45.

46.

Raphael Hotel Kansas City, Missouri 89.38 grand america hotel Salt Lake City 89.33 trump soho New York City 89.33 St. Regis Washington, D.C. 89.27 hÔtel plaza Athénée New York City 89.17 Fairmont Olympic Hotel Seattle 89.16 Mandarin Oriental Las Vegas 89.09 mandarin oriental New York City 89.06 Taj campton place San Francisco 89.06 Trump International Hotel & Tower New York City 89.04 Four Seasons Hotel Washington, D.C. 89.00 The Carlyle, A Rosewood hotel New York City 88.90 St. Regis San Francisco 88.83 St. Regis Houston 88.80 Park Hyatt Chicago 88.70 Four Seasons Hotel Philadelphia 88.69

47. Hyatt at the Bellevue Philadelphia 88.67 48. The Hay-Adams Washington, D.C. 88.59 49. Loews New Orleans Hotel 88.57 50. Townsend Hotel Birmingham, Michigan 88.57

Small City Hotels (Fewer than 100 rooms) 1.

2.

3.

4.

5.

Eliot Hotel Boston 93.47 Crosby Street Hotel New York City 92.53 XV Beacon Boston 91.82 Mokara Hotel & Spa (formerly the Watermark Hotel & Spa) San Antonio, Texas 91.60 Rittenhouse Hotel Philadelphia 91.50

6. 21C Museum Hotel Louisville, Kentucky 89.43 7. The Jefferson Washington, D.C. 89.29 8. rosewood Inn of the Anasazi Santa Fe, New Mexico 89.17 9. Arizona Inn Tucson 89.04 10. planters inn Charleston, South Carolina 88.75

Inns (Fewer than 40 rooms) 1.

2.

3.

4.

5.

6.

7.

Triple Creek Ranch Darby, Montana 97.10 Little Palm Island Resort & Spa Little Torch Key, Florida 94.56 Chanler at Cliff Walk Newport, Rhode Island 92.67 Lake Placid Lodge New York 91.56 Post Ranch Inn Big Sur, California 90.99 White Barn Inn & Spa Kennebunk Beach, Maine 90.97 The Wauwinet Nantucket, Massachusetts 90.67

8. Rabbit Hill Inn Lower Waterford, Vermont 90.44 9. Marquesa Hotel Key West, Florida 89.90 1 0. Mayflower Inn & Spa Washington, Connecticut 89.88 travelandleisure.com month 2010 00

world’s best

Hawaii Resorts 1. Four Seasons Resort Hualalai Hawaii, the Big Island 94.04 2. Halekulani Oahu 92.69 3. Four Seasons Resort Maui at Wailea 92.15 4. Four Seasons Resort lanai, The Lodge at Koele 91.82 5. Travaasa Hana (formerly Hotel hana-Maui & Honua Spa)

Maui 91.53

6. Hapuna Beach Prince Hotel Hawaii, the Big Island 89.75 7. Mauna Kea Beach Hotel Hawaii, the Big Island 89.19 8. Ritz-Carlton Kapalua Maui 88.63 9. St. Regis Princeville Resort Kauai 88.47 10. Fairmont Kea Lani Maui 88.26 11. Mauna Lani Bay Hotel & Bungalows Hawaii, the Big Island 88.22 12. Hyatt Regency Maui Resort & Spa 88.20 13. Grand Hyatt Kauai Resort & Spa 87.96 14. Four Seasons Resort Lanai at Manele Bay 87.74 15. Fairmont Orchid Hawaii, the Big Island 87.72 16. Royal Hawaiian, A LUXURY COLLECTION RESORT Oahu 87.39 17. Grand Wailea Maui 87.13 18. Kahala Hotel & Resort Oahu 86.86 19. Wailea Beach Marriott Resort & Spa Maui 86.22 20. Sheraton Maui Resort & Spa 86.21 21. JW Marriott Ihilani Resort & Spa Oahu 86.00 22. Embassy Suites – Waikiki Beach Walk Oahu 85.29 2 3. Moana Surfrider, a Westin Resort & Spa Oahu 84.94

nisbet plantation beach club

24. Kauai Marriott Resort on Kalapaki Beach (formerly the Kauai

Marriott Resort & Beach Club) 84.54

2 5. Hyatt Regency Waikiki Beach Resort & Spa Oahu 84.50

N o. 1

The Caribbean, Bermuda and the Bahamas

resort caribbean

Resorts

Central and South America

1. Nisbet Plantation Beach Club Nevis 95.24 2. Couples Tower Isle St. Mary, Jamaica 94.33 3. Couples Swept Away Negril, Jamaica 92.93 4. Hotel Saint-Barth Isle de France St. Bart’s 92.57 5. Couples Sans Souci St. Mary, Jamaica 92.41

Resorts

6. Ladera Resort St. Lucia 92.30

1. Posada de Mike Rapu, Explora en Rapa Nui Easter Island 95.47

7. Eden Rock-St. Barths St. Bart’s 92.00

2. Four Seasons Resort Carmelo, Uruguay 95.20

7. Regent Palms Turks and Caicos 92.00

3. Inkaterra Machu Picchu Pueblo Hotel Peru 93.47

9. Curtain Bluff resort Antigua 91.29

4. Victoria House Ambergris Cay, Belize 92.17

10. Couples Negril Jamaica 91.21

5. Four Seasons Resort Costa Rica

11. Jade Mountain St. Lucia 90.49

12. Jalousie Plantation, sugar beach St. Lucia 90.25

at Peninsula Papagayo 89.68

13. Malliouhana Hotel & Spa Anguilla 90.18

6. Llao Llao Hotel & Resort, Golf-Spa

14. Ritz-Carlton Grand Cayman, Cayman Islands 89.76

San Carlos de Bariloche, Argentina 88.25

15. One&Only Ocean Club Paradise Island, Bahamas 88.98

7. JW Marriott Guanacaste Resort & Spa Costa Rica 88.17

16. Sandy Lane Barbados 88.88

8. Hotel Atitlán Sololá, Guatemala 87.24 9. Los Sueños Marriott Ocean & Golf Resort Playa Herradura, Costa Rica 86.19 10. Lodge at Chaa Creek San Ignacio, Belize 85.75

17. CuisinArt Resort & Spa Anguilla 88.29 18. Anse Chastanet St. Lucia 88.25 19. Rockhouse Hotel Negril, Jamaica 88.19 20. Jumby Bay, A rosewood resort Antigua 88.17

1. Palacio Duhau – Park Hyatt Buenos Aires 94.97 2. Alvear Palace Hotel Buenos Aires 92.58 3. Hotel Monasterio Cuzco, Peru 91.78 4. Park Hyatt Mendoza, Argentina 91.43

21. Grace Bay Club Turks and Caicos 88.08 2 2. Amanyara Turks and Caicos 88.00 2 3. The Reefs Bermuda 87.93 24. Ritz-Carlton St. Thomas, U.S. Virgin Islands 87.90 2 5. Parrot Cay Turks and Caicos 87.85

5. Four Seasons Hotel Buenos Aires 90.50 6. Hotel Casa Santo Domingo Antigua, Guatemala 90.36 7. Sofitel Cartagena Santa Clara, Colombia 88.47 8. Ritz-Carlton Santiago, Chile 88.11 9. JW Marriott Hotel Lima, Peru 87.68 1 0. Grand Hyatt Santiago, Chile 87.27

Denotes a Great Value

Denotes a World’s Best debut

p e t e r f r a n k e d wa r d s

City Hotels

hotel caruso

N o. 1

resort europe

london dominates the europe lists (both the Stafford and the Milestone Hotel captured No. 1 spots),

g e n i v s l o c i / © c a r u s o r av e l l o / c o u r t e s y o f h o t e l c a r u s o

p e t e r f r a n k e d wa r d s

but properties in Paris saw the biggest gain, with three more winners than last year. Across the board, Italy still ranks highly, whether staying in a large hotel or a small country inn, while rural France also registers in this year’s vote. Other favorite stops include Germany, Ireland and Scotland.

Resorts (40 rooms or more)

Small City Hotels (Fewer than 100 rooms)

1. Hotel Caruso Ravello, Italy 94.75 2. Turnberry Resort, a luxury collection hotel Scotland 93.88

3. Hotel Splendido Portofino, Italy 93.33 4. Palazzo Sasso Ravello, Italy 92.96 5. Villa d’Este Cernobbio, Italy 92.75 6. Le Sirenuse Positano, Italy 92.68 7. Park Hotel Kenmare County Kerry, Ireland 92.21 8. Old Course Hotel, Golf Resort & Spa St. Andrews, Scotland 91.58

9. Grand Hotel Quisisana Capri, Italy 90.86 1 0. Il San Pietro Positano, Italy 90.58

1. Milestone hotel London 92.35 2. The Lanesborough London 91.62 3. Mandarin Oriental Munich 91.50 4. Hôtel Le Bristol Paris 91.00 5. Hôtel Lancaster Paris 90.35 6. The Goring London 90.18 7. Four Seasons Hotel Istanbul at Sultanahmet 90.00 8. Hotel Cipriani Venice 89.88 9. Hotel D’Angleterre Copenhagen (reopening in spring 2012) 89.87 10. hotel hassler roma Rome 88.86

Large City Hotels (100 rooms or more)

Inns and Small Country Hotels (Fewer than 40 rooms)

1. Stafford london by kempinski 94.40 2. Olissippo Lapa Palace Lisbon 93.87 3. hôtel Plaza Athénée Paris 93.63 4. Park Hyatt Milan, Italy 93.05 5. Brenners Park-Hotel & Spa Baden-Baden, Germany 93.00 6. Four Seasons Hotel Gresham Palace Budapest 92.90 7. The Langham London 92.32 8. Hôtel de Paris Monte-carlo Monaco 92.29 9. Four Seasons Hotel George V Paris 92.09 1 0. Four Seasons Hotel Ritz Lisbon 92.00 11. Hôtel de Crillon Paris 91.91 12. Four Seasons Hotel firenze Florence 91.51 13. Hotel Imperial, A LUXURY COLLECTION HOTEL Vienna 91.50 14. Ritz Paris 91.15 15. hotel de russie Rome 91.11

1. Hotel Villa Cipriani Asolo, Italy 93.75 2. Katikies Hotel Santorini, Greece 93.07 3. Château Eza Èze Village, France 91.20 4. Domaine des Hauts de Loire Onzain, France 91.05 5. Les Crayères Reims, France 88.73 6. Château de la Chèvre d’Or Èze Village, France 88.33 7. La Colombe d’Or St.-Paul-de-Vence, France 87.73 8. Relais Il Falconiere Cortona, Italy 86.22 9. Le Prieuré Villeneuve-lès-Avignon, France 86.13 10. L’Oustau de Baumanière Les-Baux-de-Provence, France 85.40

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Guangzhou Opera House, by Iraqi-British architect Zaha Hadid. Opposite, clockwise from top left: Redtory, one of Guangzhou’s many art hubs; a man sells terrapins on the street; inside Benshop, an independent boutique; Shamian Island’s colonial architecture; fine dining at the Sofitel Sunrich Guangzhou; Guangdong Museum, by architect Rocco Yim, faces Canton Tower.

Invisible City blockbuster architecture. the 2010 asian games. even with high-profile draws, guangzhou still remains a mystery to most travelers. Lara Day maps out the guangdong capital’s fast-changing landscape. Photographed by Philipp Engelhorn

’m trying to find my hotel, but no one believes it exists. Its name sounds bells of echoing ignorance. The address doesn’t work in Cantonese or Putonghua.

The tiny map on the hotel business card only serves to confound the taxi drivers I hand it to: “What? What is this? My eyes are no good!” My blunt, bilingually delivered descriptions—it’s very tall (houh goou-ahh!; hen gao de!); it’s very new (houh saan-gah!; hen xin de!)—don’t fare much better. Only when we roll onto its street, a giant multilane thoroughfare that splices the city in two, do cabbies concede that yes, the glittering, fan-like edifice is in fact reality. “Thanks,” I say, in Cantonese, as I’m deposited in front of the Wynn-casino-style fountain that erupts in a riot of water and refracted light.“Yinggoi, yinggoi,” replies the cabbie, who mere seconds ago was bemoaning my dubious demands. “Of course, of course,” he’s saying. Naturally.

The new Sofitel is hardly wallowing in obscurity: by night its 31-story façade is a blinking, blinging behemoth; by day the property dazzles in steel and glass. But this is Guangzhou, the 138 august 2011 | travelandleisureasia.com

capital of China’s flourishing southeastern province of Guangdong, where so much has changed in recent years that losing your bearings is part of the deal. Perched on the Pearl River, this is the third largest city in China, with a population that in just four years has exploded by 6.3 million people, mostly rural migrants, bringing the total to 14 million. Last year, Guangzhou hosted the 16th Asian Games, and like its 2008 Olympic counterpart, Beijing, it transformed its topography in the event’s runup, rapidly steamrolling through a 139-squarekilometer swathe in the city’s east to create Tianhe CBD, better known as Zhujiang New Town, or Pearl River New City. Here, new buildings—five-star hotels, blockbuster architectural projects—have mushroomed as if overnight, with a plethora of developments still under construction. In the midst of all this, it’s understandable that even locals feel a little bit lost.

As for me, I’ve come for music: I want to see a band called Silver Apples, an avant-garde electronic-music act from the 1960’s whose last surviving member—a 73-year-old man—is in China to play a three-city tour that includes Beijing and Shanghai. I’ve also been lured by the year-old Guangzhou Opera House, one of the most widely hailed buildings of the 21st century, by celebrated Iraqi-British architect Zaha Hadid. Beyond that, though, I want to explore what lies within Guangzhou.

But where to begin? Language and topography issues aside, it’s inordinately challenging to navigate the city. I’ve been hoping for something, anything, to help me find my way around, but information is thin on the ground. I’ve failed to locate a Guangzhou guidebook, let alone a map, before arriving. And while the Internet helps, when I ask people for suggestions on what to do in the city, precious little comes back. A few mention art museums. I hear a cliché about eating dogs. Most frequently, though, my inquiries draw a blank stare.

In the end, I arm myself with two phrasebooks: one for Mandarin, the other for Cantonese. I’m not sure which I’ll need more, but both come in handy. In a conversation, polite Mandarin will flit to animated Cantonese and back again; questions posed in Cantonese have a 50–50 chance of being answered in Putonghua. Locals will converse in the PRC government’s prescribed tongue but happily revert to dialect, while new inhabitants are rendered speechless if addressed in anything but the official language. As for English, it’s rarely heard or spoken, though the wealth of books you find on arriving at Guangzhou East Rail Station suggests otherwise: Secretary English, Hotel English, Business English, Financial English; Study Vocabularies By Funny Ways; Does English Vocabulary Drive You Crazy?

At least there I find a decent English–Chinese map.

S

ome parts of the city, I know well,” says Amyrock Ju, an independent Beijing-based curator who spent four years living and working in Guangzhou.

“Now, when I come back, some parts are unrecognizable.” Ju has returned for her wedding; she and her Guangzhou-born husband relocated to the capital for its flourishing arts scene. “It’s very laid-back here,” she says. “People just want to shop and eat. We were worried about losing our ambition.”

We’re in a cha chaan teng in the old part of town, where locals slurp soup noodles, drink tea and play games of Chinese poker. It’s like a more relaxed version of Hong Kong, just 174 kilometers due south. Yet ambition is a quality Guangzhou has in plentiful supply. Just look at the abundance of government prestige projects. Ju is clearly fond of Guangzhou, but her affection has little to do with state-driven aspirations. Its charm, she says, lies in the city’s old neighborhoods. Outside the restaurant, I step onto a shady, low-rise street forked with small alleyways lined with hanging laundry. A shop stocked with dahn taat streams Cantopop, while grannies and young women buy sweet biscuits by the bagful. Stores sell budgies and goldfish, and a man hawks pears, bananas and roses blooming in yellow, purple and pink from the back of an old bicycle. Incense wafts from a hidden Taoist shrine. A man guangzhou in flux From top: Designer plays a wooden flute close by.

Ben Lee, owner of It’s the tension between old and new that makes the metropolis so Benshop; inside compelling. Gleaming skyscrapers soar above ancient banyan trees. A Zhujiang New Town; a stroll in Liuhua Park. man with authentic teeth slugs baijiu outside a shop selling Napa Opposite: The city under construction.

Valley vintages. PLA soldiers eat lunch from styrofoam boxes, while » travelandleisureasia.com | august 2011 139

young women with frilly parasols stroll along streets fringed with shrubbery and trees. Fine dining restaurants for every taste—French, Indonesian, Turkish—draw as many customers and hole-in-the-walls selling handpulled lanzhou mian. Modern buses advertising everything from last year’s Asian Paralympics to healthcare for men (if you have male problems please come to male hospital of guangzhou) glide past wedding studios and banks. It may not be a picture-postcard idyll, but it is a living, breathing city.

“It’s always a challenge in China,” says Rocco Yim, the architect behind Guangzhou’s Chinese lacquer box–inspired Guangdong Museum, from his Hong Kong office. His firm landed the commission for the museum in 2004, just as the plans for Tianhe CBD were taking form. “They always start out in a new town where there’s nothing, there’s no context, there’s nothing you could really relate to or get a feel of…. In China it’s always just characterless. It’s lucky that Zaha Hadid had already designed Guangzhou Opera House, so there was already an object to relate to and make a story out of.” As for the city itself? Yim smiles. “Of course there are the Guangzhou people, their habits, the way they live,” he says. “Guangzhou people like to relax in the street, so beneath the museum there’s an open-air garden with shade.”

I’m reminded of Yim at Guangzhou’s Vitamin Creative Space, an art gallery improbably located above an Internet café in a market selling fresh fruit, electronics, cheap clothes, and

‘how can you keep the traditional and make it fashionable?’ asks ben lee, a local designer. ‘We don’t need all modern. All modern is not Guangzhou’ household pots and pans. When I visit, the gallery happens to be testing out its video system with Space Is Process, a documentary by Icelandic conceptual artist Olafur Eliasson. “What makes a space challenging and hospitable and tolerant?” Eliasson asks, as he emerges from a blank white screen. He could be responding directly to Yim. “The space is not neutral, like an empty canvas. It is already charged with meaning and intentionalities.”

Those intentionalities are difficult to discern in Zhujiang New Town’s cultural district, where queues of mainland tourists in matching Day-Glo outfits brandish umbrellas to shield them from the sun. The area has four main buildings, all somewhat dwarfed by the surrounding gleaming towers: Guangdong Museum, the Second Children’s Palace, Guangzhou Library and, of course, Guangzhou Opera House. It all looks convincing from afar: the museum’s cubist form, fringed by palm trees and bamboo; the science-fiction‑worthy opera house, which could be a gleaming pebble from another world; the needle-like Canton Tower that protrudes from the Pearl River’s south bank; the expansive Haixinsha square, the site of the opening and closing ceremonies for the 2010 Asian Games.

Aside from Yim’s lacquer box, however, this could be anywhere in the world. What’s more, on close inspection, the various elements don’t quite add up. The paved ground below me isn’t quite flat. A hulking sculpture of the city’s symbol, five rams—celestial goats whose beneficence is believed to protect the city from famine—looks imposing until a gardener spatters water on it from a hose. It’s made of hollow fiberglass. At the opera house, the RMB1.38 billion structure that anchors the project, the building’s stunning, enigmatic design is compromised by flaws in construction. The signage is messily laid; some metal letters are missing, others seep with rust. There are gaps between concrete, and pencil markings creative capital From haven’t been erased. Fingerprints and dust mar the interiors, while a top: Renwei Temple, in old town; botched white-paint job bleeds into a grey carpet. And, inexplicably, Guangzhou’s artwork at Redtory; tacky reproductions of melodramatic Giacometti sculptures are Canton Tower, lit up at night. Opposite from strewn outside, detracting from the sense of grandeur created by the top: Concept store Goelia 225, housed in structure’s multiple sweeping entryways. Could Zaha Hadid really a traditional qilou have signed off on this when she came to its official opening ceremobuilding; money talks at 53 Art Museum. ny early this year? » 140 august 2011 | travelandleisureasia.com

And yet I can’t bring myself to dismiss it out of hand. Something about this place—the names behind it; the vast sums spent—makes me want to give it a chance. I buy a ticket for the one performance during my stay: the Camerata Salzburg. It’s random, but why not?

A

way from the New Town, I meet Shane Qin, a Guangzhou native who manages the local edition of city lifestyle magazine That’s PRD, an excellent English-language resource for what’s going on in the Pearl River Delta. She is thoughtful about her hometown’s place in China, and the world. “Guangzhou is not a cultural center,” she tells me over coffee close to her office. “It’s a trading city, though it has a very rich, ancient culture.” She adds: “People here are very low profile. Not like Beijing or Shanghai, where they tend to speak out more, think they are the best, that they know everything.”

And yet, creativity exists in abundance here: not in Guangzhou’s government-developed “creative zones”—poorly conceived, half-empty warehouse parks that succeed neither in fostering creativity nor promoting the commerce that can drive it—but in small, hidden pockets scattered across the city. At Redtory, a smaller, friendlier version of Beijing’s over-commercialized 798, there’s a show of contemporary Chinese photography featuring intense close-up

in a painting of zhujiang new town, an airship explodes with confetti. It’s a cross-section, it’s a map. It’s a party, it’s the future, it’s the apocalypse shots of people lost in crowds. Librería Borges, a blue-painted wooden house emblazoned with artful neon signs in French—faire l’amour; autoportrait (à l’étranger)—is a bastion of fierce intellectualism, publishing translations of philosophical works by John Barth and offering a lending library of original editions of books like Susan Sontag’s The Volcano Lover and Bernard-Henri Lévy’s Le Siècle de Sartre. Over at 53 Art Space, where a red cargo-container conversion is signposted by a yellow upside-down m à la McDonald’s, an exhibition features a painting called Zhujiang Tower, a searing commentary on the development taking place next door. one way: do not enter, it warns as an airship explodes with confetti and smoke, and naked women fall with balloons in hand alongside plummeting chefs and men in bowler hats.

It’s a cross-section, it’s a map, it’s Bladerunner. It’s a party, it’s the future, it’s the apocalypse.

And that’s just art. In other creative fields, too, the city is flexing its muscles, without the steroid injection of state funding. Ben Lee, a creative polymath, is the owner of Benshop, on trendy Jianshe 6 Road, the perfect expression of his own personality. The split-level industrial space carries everything from Thailand-sourced design products to picture books by local illustrators, as well as tin-toy robots, art magazines and old cameras. It also brews a mean coffee. “These are all my favorite products,” Lee says. “This shop is a platform for me to communicate with all kinds of people and designers.”

Lee is behind the design of Goelia 225, an exuberant concept store in a 1948 qilou building close to tourist-trammeled Beijing Road. The fashion brand takes its inspiration from travel— the owners have dedicated a room to a recent trip to Sicily, complete with limoncello and multicolored peppercorns—and the space has a flower shop, an exhibition space, a permanent display of the original owner (a photographer who captured canton redux From Chow Yun-fat in his San Francisco heyday) and, on the top floor, top: A mural lines the staircase of Goelia another Benshop branch with pieces like a Ming dynasty–style bed 225; fried noodles at sawn into two sofa benches. Throughout the renovation, old and new UNCLE, a Hong Kong–style café; at coexist beautifully: the building’s wooden staircase, enlivened with a the fashion boutique dynamic mural by local artist Popol, still gives access to the store’s Noisy. Opposite from top: At Ping Pong different levels, while original wooden door frames both divide and bar; Guangzhou open up the building’s manifold spaces. » Opera House. travelandleisureasia.com | august 2011 143

In addition to Lee’s other talents, he’s a renowned restaurant critic. We head for dinner in Shamian, Guangzhou’s history-laden river-sandbank “island” connected by old Chinese bridges. Shamian stands as testament to Guangzhou’s colonial European past: these days, charming stone mansions built by the city’s various foreign concessions—the U.K., Italy, France—reluctantly share space with new 7-Elevens and tacky T-shirt stands. Its biggest claim to fame, though, may be the White Swan Hotel, host to diplomats as well as American parents-to-be coming to meet their newly adopted children from China.

Lee’s restaurant of choice is J. M. Chef, an old-fashioned dining room whose kitchen rolls out superb roasted meats—pigeon, quail—as well as savory pork congee, silky and tender beef ho fahn and fresh choy sum stir-fried in garlic. “At Goelia, we have the traditional,” he tells me.

“But how can you keep the traditional and make it fashionable?” He points out the irony of the government clearing away old walking streets to make way for new ones; the new streets merely replicate the original streets’ style and function. “We don’t need all modern,” says Lee. “All modern is not Guangzhou.”

Spending time with Lee makes me think of Hong Kong, where I grew up. In fact, where that city’s British colonial heritage is its most ballyhooed attribute, I wonder if it shouldn't look more to its Cantonese roots. The atmosphere in Guangzhou’s history-steeped streets is certainly beguiling: take Jiaoyu Road, a side alley with circular courtyard doorways and prettily tiled sidewalks, where thick-trunked trees give shade to oldies playing cards and checkers.

It’s like walking onto a movie set for a period drama about old Canton.

But to my surprise, Lee looks to Hong Kong as a mainstay for Cantonese heritage.

“Because of the Cultural Revolution, we lost our traditions,” he says. “We broke them and built up new rules for China, so we lost the traditional lifestyle.” He describes going to Hong Kong for a wedding and experiencing the nuptial practice of guo dai lai, the groom’s formal betrothal gift, including a dowry, to the bride’s family. “I’d never heard of that. It’s a shame.”

T

he sun is setting and I’m late for the Silver Apples gig. It’s taking place inside a leafy sculpture park close to Baiyun Mountain, Guangzhou’s green heart, and though it’s disorientingly dark, a series of blue flashing lights materialize to point me in the right direction. To a soundtrack of chirping crickets, I negotiate the gloomy shapes of obelisks and giant hands. Suddenly I’m in a high-school gym–like space with a crowd of 50-odd hipster types: some sport goatees and thick black glasses, others half-shaved purple hair.

“It’s my naptime,” jokes the septuaganarian Silver Apples, a.k.a. Simeon Coxe iii, as the audience calls out song suggestions with fanatical devoteeism. Coxe launches into a fuzzy psychedelic number, and the place comes to life. Afterward, fans go on stage to take pictures of his equipment, a mishmash of pedals and synthesizers and Discmans. The night’s highlight, though, happens on the other side of town, when after a protracted search along a nameless side street, I arrive at Ping Pong, a bar whose dramatically curtained entrance reveals a hip, French-run warehouse conversion where patrons speak Mandarin, Spanish and Dutch, and a DJ streams ambient house music from a Macbook Pro. Against an exposed-brick wall, two glowing red neon signs say ping and pong in Chinese characters; above, a wire globe filled with white polystyrene hard drives hovers next to stainless-steel pendant laps. It’s an arty, underground, steampunk alternative to some of the city’s garishly overlit club and KTV strips (here’s looking at you, Changdi Road). I feel right at home.

Finally, my last night rolls round. “New, I don’t know,” my cabbie says, almost forlornly, when I tell him my destination. “Not new, I know.” I arrive at Guangzhou Opera House, now suffused with a soft, otherwordly glow that seems to airbrush the imperfections of daylight.

In the central, 1,804-seat concert hall, the orchestra plays a Mozart guangdong modern From top: 53 Art piano concerto in E flat major. A lustrous sheen bounces off the walls’ a room at the moulded asymmetrical curves, studded with thousands of starlike Museum; Sofitel Guangzhou Sunrich; the Times LED lights. The sound of instruments swells and fades, enveloped in Museum, by Rem the hall’s sculptural, off-peach nooks and folds. It’s like being inside Koolhaas, sits atop a tall apartment block. an oyster: the music is a pearl, scintillating in secret.

144 august 2011 | travelandleisureasia.com

Aside from a handful of well-dressed foreigners—they could be graphic designers from Barcelona—most of the audience is local. The energy is raw and palpable. At one point, a mobile phone goes off. Two people leave early, trampling their way out of the hall like scampering pandas. Applause breaks out abruptly, then halts. At the end, there is a standing ovation. The audience lacks polish, but its excitement is giddy, and infectious.

After the concert, I stroll along the Pearl River. The bridges are lit like rainbows. Boats float on the water like swans. Canton Tower shimmies in purple, blue and pink. A skyscraper glitters with diamond-patterned light. The streets are strangely empty.

I’ve come to Guangzhou for music. I’ve given the city a chance. A lone blonde in an impractical outfit—a suit jacket, skirt and heels—hails a taxi, but when she gets in it doesn’t move. Maybe the driver doesn’t know where her hotel is, either. Meanwhile, the lights have gone out at the opera house. The building is dark and silent, like a spaceship lying in wait. ✚

GUIDE TO GUANGZHOU GETTING THERE A two-hour train ride (HK$190 each way) from Hong Kong’s Hung Hom station takes you to Guangzhou’s East Railway Station, located close to Zhujiang New Town. There are plenty of direct flights to Guangzhou Baiyun International Airport from around Asia, including Singapore (Singapore Airlines, Tiger Airways), Kuala Lumpur (Malaysian Airlines, AirAsia), Hanoi (Vietnam Airlines) and Hong Kong (Dragonair, China Southern Airlines).

STAY

GREAT VALUE Sofitel Sunrich Guangzhou 988 Guangzhou Middle Ave., Tianhe district; 86-20/3883-8888; sofitel.com; doubles from RMB1,200.

White Swan Hotel 1 Shamian South St., Liwan; 86-20/81886968; whiteswanhotel.com; doubles from RMB1,500.

The Ritz-Carlton Guangzhou 351 plush rooms and views of the Pearl River. 3 Xing’an Rd., Tianhe district; 86-20/3813-6688; ritz-carlton.com; doubles from RMB1,650.

Garden Hotel With 828 rooms, this is a traditional but pleasant stay in a bustling business district.

Official host to the 16th Asian Games. 368 Huanshi E. Rd.; 8620/8333-8989; thegardenhotel. com.cn; doubles from RMB888.

Four Seasons Guangzhou Opening late 2011, the 344-room hotel will occupy the top third of the 103-story IFC Guangzhou.

Look out for a restaurant by Japanese chef Kazumi Sawada, from Tokyo’s one-Michelin-star Banrekiryukodo. 5 Zhujiang W. Rd., Pearl River New City, Tianhe

district; fourseasons.com/ guangzhou.

W Hotel Guangzhou Whimsical Rocco Yim–designed hotel, set to open in 2013. Xiancun Rd., Zhujiang New Town; starwoodhotels.com.

EAT AND DRINK UNCLE The Redtory branch of the cha chaan teng chain has a pretty alfresco terrace and a dining room inspired by 1960’s Hong Kong. 128 Yuancun 4th Cross Rd., entrance off Linjiang Ave., Zhujiang New Town, Tianhe district; lunch for two RMB45.

2 on 988 The Sofitel’s great-value lunch buffet features French pastries and Cantonese fare. 988 Guangzhou Middle Ave., Tianhe district; 86-20/3883-8888; sofitel. com; doubles from RMB1,200.

Liuhua Congee House Roundthe-clock juk, or congee, and dim sum served outdoors on a garden terrace. Liuhua Park, 903 Renmin N. Rd.; 86-20/8668-0108; dinner for two RMB150.

Yiyuan Meishi Knife-cut noodles and lanzhou mian in simple, airconditioned surroundings. Corner of Jinxi Rd. and Yile Rd., near Fuli Qianxi Garden; 86-20/3406-1520; lunch for two RMB20.

Lai Wan Market Old-style dim sum in a setting reminiscent of old Canton’s waterfront. Garden Hotel, 2nd floor, 368 Huanshi E. Rd.; 86-20/8333-8989; dim sum for two RMB120.

Ping Pong An underground drinking hole that’s hard to find but worth it for the live music and eclectic vibe. 60 Xianlie E. Cross Rd., behind Xinghai Conservatory of Music; no phone; drinks for two RMB120.

Yes No Café A cozy purple-walled space where you can drink caffeinated beverages and play UNO while listening to oldies.

95 Yile Rd.; 86-20/84190-9920; coffee for two RMB60.

SEE AND DO Beyond Zhujiang New Town’s high-profile architectural projects by the Pearl River—Guangdong Museum; Guangzhou Opera House—smaller art spaces abound. Try the following: Times Museum Breathtaking Rem Koolhaas–designed space atop a 19-story apartment block. Times Rose Garden, Huangbian N. Rd., Baiyun Ave. N.; 86-20/2627-2363; timesmuseum.org.

53 Art Museum Guangzhou’s first private contemporary art museum. 17–21 Huiyuan Main St., Guangyuan Express Highway; 86-20/2213-1500.

Redtory 128 Yuancun 4th Cross Rd., entrance off Linjiang Ave., Zhujiang New Town, Tianhe district; 86-20/8557-4346; redtory.com.cn.

Vitamin Creative Space Print out the maps on the website; you’ll need them. Third floor, 29 Hengyi

St., Chigang W. Rd.; 86-20/84296760; vitamincreativespace.com.

Muma Art Space Vibrant gallery, bar and café. 12 Zishan Main St., Jiangnan W. Rd., Haizhu district; 86-20/8423-8275.

SHOP Benshop No. 10 Jianshe 6 Rd., 2nd floor; 86-20/8382-7821; benshop.net.

Noisy Soft leather jackets, smart urban dresses and comfortable monochrome knits. Just below Benshop. No. 10 Jianshe 6 Rd., ground floor; no phone.

Goelia 225 225 Beijing Rd.; 8620/8336-0050; 225goelia.com.cn.

United Nude Rem Koolhaas– designed store for the famed Dutch shoe brand. Designs range from practical to architectural.

Shop 2035, 2nd floor, China Plaza Shopping Mall, 33 Zhongshan 3 Rd.; 86-20/8303-6606.

Gazer On a trendy strip of shops close to the Garden Hotel, Edward Chen’s minimalist boutique stands out for its delicate knits, shrugs and woven tops, asymmetrical embroidered necklines and diaphanous shift dresses. 66 Huale Rd.; no phone.

travelandleisureasia.com | august 2011 145

It Remakes a

Across the Italian countryside, entrepreneurs are turning abandoned hamlets into luxury retreats. Peter Jon Lindberg asks: Can a hotel transform a village in order to save it?

P h o t o graphe d b y M ar t i n M o rrell

Village Sunset at Borgo Finocchieto, in Tuscany. Opposite: The view from a pool at Castel Monastero, in the Ombrone Valley of Chianti.

J

ohn Phillips was only looking for a villa.

That he wound up with a village says something about the scale of his enthusiasms, his impetuous streak and the curious state of the Italian countryside at the beginning of the 21st century. But, he insists: he never intended to buy the whole town.

For two years, Phillips, a prominent Washington, D.C., lawyer, had been scouting for a house in Tuscany. He’d begun his search in Chianti, but found little that suited his needs. Finally he turned his sights to the Val d’Orcia, due south of Siena.

There, in August 2000—on three overlooked and overgrown hectares that one might call the middle of nowhere, were not the famed wine town of Montalcino just 15 minutes away—Phillips came upon the tiny medieval hamlet of Finocchieto.

For two generations the hilltop farming village (whose name means “fennel fields”) had lain abandoned and forlorn.

At its pre–World War II peak Finocchieto counted 60 residents, mostly sharecroppers who worked the fields along the hillside.

But postwar industrialization, coupled with agriculture’s de-

Finocchieto was, in short cline, led to a rural exodus across Italy, as farmers sought new work in larger towns and cities. Finocchieto’s last holdouts moved away in the 1960’s.

What they left behind looked not so different from what their ancestors had known seven centuries earlier: a cluster of tiled-roof houses and farming sheds, connected by meandering footpaths, with a modest green and a courtyard at its heart.

From the edge of the green the views stretched out for kilometers, across cypress-fringed pastures and vineyards and undulating hills. Finocchieto was, in short, an archetypal Tuscan village, or borgo, one in severe disrepair. By 2000 the footpaths were choked with weeds. Roofs had collapsed; the chapel was filled with rotting hay. Starlings nested in the 500-year-old oven where residents once gathered to bake the daily bread.

Phillips was undeterred. “The whole place was dilapidated, but there was such tranquillity,” he says. “I’d never heard quiet like that. You could see it had amazing potential.”

As was often the arrangement in rural villages, the former residents of Finocchieto did not own their property but rented from a landlord. The current owner was a wealthy signor who still lived in a castle just up the hill. Phillips made inquiries and learned that the man was prepared to sell—but he refused to break up the village. It was the whole borgo or nothing.

“So on my final day in Tuscany, in a fit of irrational exuberance, I decided to buy the entire thing,” Phillips says, » 148 august 2011 | travelandleisureasia.com

The Galileo Room at Borgo Finocchieto. Clockwise from top left: Guests in the Castel Monastero piazza; a fruit salad of berries, persimmon and grapes at Castel Monastero; the vineyards of Hotel Borgo San Felice, in Chianti; owner John Phillips at Borgo Finocchieto; a carved-stone detail at Castel Monastero.

an archetypal Tuscan village

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sounding bemused by his decision still. His wife, Linda Douglass, did not share this exuberance. “When Linda first came to see the borgo, she began to cry,” Phillips recalls. “Not tears of joy, but tears of ‘What the hell were you thinking?’”

But the deal was done, and now the question was what to do with the property. They certainly did not require an entire 28,000-square-meter village for a vacation home. Phillips began to conceive a different and grander role for Finocchieto: something between a private retreat and a hotel. he idea of transforming derelict towns into lodgings is not new in Italy. In fact it was pioneered here some 30 years ago, by a tourism consultant named Giancarlo Dall’Ara, as a means of rehabilitating a struggling village in Friuli.

Dall’Ara’s notion was to convert the village’s empty apartments and houses into B&B-style lodgings, independently owned but managed as a collective. Guests would eat their meals in town, interact with residents—some villagers did remain—and play out the traveler’s fantasy of living like a local. Dall’Ara called the concept an albergo diffuso—a “diffuse” or “scattered” hotel.

Since then, scores of abandoned or near-abandoned ­Italian towns have been reimagined as village hotels. The Associazione Nazionale Alberghi Diffusi, of which Dall’Ara is president, now counts 48 properties across the country, with dozens more currently taking shape. Meanwhile, the ­Swedish-Italian hotelier and ­philanthropist Daniele Kihlgren has raised the bar with his Sextantio brand, creating hardcore-authentic alberghi diffusi out of a 15th-century mountain village in Abruzzo and, even more impressive, inside the Sassi di Matera cave dwellings in Basilicata. (Kihlgren has acquired nine more sites across southern Italy, which await similar transformations.)

Ironically, the economic stagnation that nearly decimated so many Italian villages in the 20th century wound up saving them for the 21st. Mired in poverty, passed over by modern development, they were essentially suspended in time.

And the albergo diffuso turns out to be a sustainable model for both development and preservation. Repurposing existing structures costs less, and has a much smaller carbon footprint, than constructing new hotels. Alberghi diffusi create jobs for area residents and, if they source products locally, help sustain traditional crafts and trades. Furthermore, they pass along

Passed over by development, these

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much of the cost of preservation to a demographic that strongly benefits from it: travelers. That last part is crucial. Tourism is so often blamed, sometimes accurately, for reckless and degrading development. But under the albergo diffuso rubric, tourism becomes an agent for preservation, providing both the catalyst and the capital. And hotels, rather than overwhelming the historic fabric, can form an integral part of it. hat’s remarkable is how many of these ghost villages still exist in Italy, ripe for the taking and remaking—untold hundreds, emptied out by rural flight and barely touched, or even much noticed, in the decades since. This, in one of the most well-charted and tourist-trafficked landscapes on earth.

The secret is out. More wealthy buyers are acquiring defunct villages as their own private vanity fiefdoms. Not surprisingly, many of these latter-day doges—call them the borgolomaniacs—are from overseas: Americans, Koreans, Russians, Japanese. But borgo fever has swept the home country as well. Rare is the Italian designer who hasn’t accessorized

with a village. Massimo Ferragamo has spent four years—and untold millions—turning the medieval borgo of Castiglion del Bosco into an extravagant resort and residential complex.

Ferragamo’s is the latest and most over-the-top entry in a variant breed of village hotel, which takes the same humble setting and rusticated trappings but ramps up the luxury quotient. Examples can be found across the Continent: from Castelnau des Fieumarcon, a fortified Gascogne village that became a 33-bedroom retreat, to Aman Sveti Stefan, a Montenegrin hamlet turned hotel care of Amanresorts.

Still, Italy is the nexus of the alberghi diffusi movement, and a good number of them are in Tuscany. One of the high-end pioneers of the trend—and among the most convincing—was ­Hotel Borgo San Felice, which occupies a 1,300-year-old church and settlement in Chianti, 21 kilometers northeast of Siena. Converted to a hotel in 1979, and now a Relais & Châteaux property, it makes clever (re)use of original details: street names and address numbers were left intact, while ­restaurants and shops are marked with old-fashioned signage.

A short drive away, in the Ombrone Valley, the two-year-old Castel Monastero resort was carved out of a medieval borgo »

villages were suspended in time

The piazza of Castel Monastero. Opposite: The property’s pool overlooking Montalcino.

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Chef Luigi Ricci making fettuccine at Borgo ­ inocchieto. From right: Crossing courtyard at in F the village; a torta d’arancia at Borgo Finocchieto.

that began life in A.D. 1050 as a monastery. Developers retrofitted the 13 original buildings with 75 guest rooms, a private villa, a wellness center and spa, an art gallery, and—apparently just because they could—a Gordon Ramsay restaurant. ­Rubelli fabrics, rough-hewn timber beams, worn terra-cotta floors and faded 19th-century frescoes set a mood of carefully rusticated opulence. Of course, Castel Monastero and its ilk are missing a key component of the traditional alberghi diffusi: actual villagers. Giancarlo Dell’Ara’s original model in Friuli was set in a still functioning (if struggling) village, with which it was and remains interdependent. Other properties continue to follow that example. Physically speaking, the best alberghi diffusi may retain the integrity of their traditional townscapes and historical details. But without their original residents— without giving guests the sense of being in a community, surrounded by everyday people and not just hotel staff—a village hotel risks feeling like a conventional resort.

The other risk is that they wind up fetishizing the rural life, selling a sanitized brand of peasant chic. A genuine village stay, after all, would not be nearly so restorative: those crumbling stone floors wouldn’t be swept and polished just-so, the bathwater might be only lukewarm, and nonna’s handwoven blankets might not be so artfully arranged on the bed. But for certain upscale travelers, the implication of authenticity is still preferable to none at all. And few things can make a worldweary mogul feel better about himself than a week spent pretending he’s a 13th-century shepherd. Especially if he still gets turndown service.

F

or John Phillips, it took two full years of negotiations with Italian authorities before he could begin to restore Finocchieto. The renovation itself, overseen by a local architect (with Phillips flying in every few months), took another five years. Strict local preservation laws forbade changes to the footprint or contour of the buildings—all exterior walls and fenestrations had to remain as they were. Where structures had deterio-

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rated or collapsed, they were rebuilt according to the original plans, which are kept on archive at the local preservation office.

Certain interior adjustments were allowed. “The second story of the main house was on all different levels, so we had to raise and lower floors and ceilings,” Phillips says. “Here and there we reconfigured staircases, shored up ceiling beams, and unbricked archways to increase flow and light.” Ultimately, 22 bedrooms would occupy the borgo’s five buildings: nine in the main house, five in the smaller house, four in the chapel and two in each of the former storage sheds. Bathrooms were updated, but not overly so. (The guest directory devotes two whole pages to plumbing instructions.) Each of the four outbuildings has its own kitchen, dining and living room; in the main house are two dining rooms, a parlor, a library with a vaulted ceiling, a cantina for wine tastings, a banquet and conference hall, and a brand-new, retro-modern kitchen.

From the outside, however, the borgo looks pretty much as it does in the sepia-toned photographs displayed in the library—albeit with tidier lawns. Footpaths were relaid with flagstones; flowerbeds were planted with lavender, rosemary, sage and thyme, which perfume the breeze that slips over the hills. All the functional anachronisms—the air-­conditioning system, the 18-car garage—have been concealed underground.

A gym and spa were cleverly tucked into the hillside behind a three-meter wall of glass, out of the sight lines of the village above. The swimming pool and tennis courts are likewise hidden down the hill. Stand on that manicured green, squint, and you might believe this was still a working village.

Borgo Finocchieto officially opened in spring 2008, and has since operated by word of mouth. Word passed quickly. The exuberantly social Phillips knows about half the population of Washington, D.C., and Douglass, a former news correspondent and traveling press secretary on the Obama campaign, likely knows the rest. In one hallway is a framed note from Teddy and Vicky Kennedy, who visited the borgo in 2006, in the midst of renovations. Alice Waters, another friend of Phillips, is Finocchieto’s unofficial culinary consultant.

A painted headboard in the Galileo Room of Borgo Finocchieto. From right: A dinner of zucchini frittata and roasted vegetables at Borgo Finocchieto; the door to the Hotel Borgo San Felice chapel.

While it has the polish of a luxury resort, including a fulltime staff of nine, Borgo Finocchieto is not a conventional hotel. The target clientele is not so much independent travelers (though individual bookings are welcome) but groups, who might book a single house or even the entire village.

That was certainly the case during my visit. The borgo was near-full, giving it the lively air of a proper village. At traditional country resorts, one’s instinct is to seek out a private corner and keep to oneself, but at Finocchieto an easy communal feeling prevailed. For all the time and money spent on renovations, the borgo maintains a remarkably unpretentious, even homey, feel; there’s a softness, a worn-ness to the place that can only come from centuries of everyday use. The crowd that weekend was a balance of hotel guests and a few old friends of Phillips. We all lingered long over breakfasts on the

terrace—oven-warm cornetti, prosciutto di Parma with melon from the garden—then went our separate ways in the afternoons, biking, touring wineries, visiting Siena or Montalcino.

At sundown we reassembled for communal dinners in the main house, under ceiling beams the size of tree trunks. Luigi Ricci, the borgo’s chef, who spent 20 years working with Paul Bocuse, conjured great feasts of Cinta Senese, Chianina steaks, luscious housemade mozzarella and pappardelle with rabbit ragù.

Alice Waters happened to be at the borgo that weekend. On our final Sunday she was inspired to clear the cobwebs from the 500-year-old oven, gather some olive-wood kindling, and fire up some note-perfect crostini with ricotta and honey. We devoured it while sitting on the lawn, gazing out over the shimmering fields of the Val d’Orcia, then settled in for one last postprandial round of bocce. There are worse afternoons. ✚

Guide to European Village Hotels france GREAT VALUE Castelnau

des Fieumarcon Gascony; 33-5/62-68-99-30; gascony.org; doubles from €152 per night, including breakfast; houses from €1,263 weekly. italy GREAT VALUE Albergo Diffuso di Comeglians Comeglians, Udine; 39-0433/619-002; albergodiffuso.it; doubles from €29.

Borgo Finocchieto Bibbiano, Siena; 1-202/ 657-6828; borgofinocchieto.com; suites from €732 per night, including breakfast, with a threenight minimum.

Castel Monastero ­Monastero d’Ombrone, Siena; ​39-0577/570-001; castelmonastero.com; doubles from €449, including breakfast.

The enoteca at Hotel Borgo San Felice.

Galatone, Lecce: 39-3336/784170; albergodiffuso lagalatea.com; doubles from €101.

Castiglion del Bosco Montalcino, Siena; 390577/191-3001; castiglion delbosco.it; doubles from €560, including breakfast.

Sextantio Via Principe Umberto, Santo Stefano di Sessanio, L’Aquila; 39-0862/899-112; sextantio.it; doubles from €203, including breakfast.

Hotel Borgo San Felice Castelnuovo Berardenga, Siena; 39-0577/3964; borgosanfelice.it; doubles from €367, including breakfast.

Sextantio Le Grotte della Civita 28 Via Civita, ­Matera; 39-083/533-2744; sassidimatera.com; doubles from €253.

GREAT VALUE La Galatea In the historical center of a small Apulian town only a few kilometers from the Ionian Sea.

montenegro Aman Sveti Stefan Sveti Stefan; 382/33420000; amanresorts.com; doubles from €709.

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lastlook

Dazhao Lamasery, Inner Mongolia “It was late afternoon at the start of winter. I’d spent a few hours wandering the few remaining streets of Hohhot’s old town, west of the temple. The city owes its existence to the Dazhao Lamasery. When it was first constructed, the city grew around Dazhao, radiating out from its walls, creating life on the edge of the steppe. Now, as in most cities across China, redevelopment and gentrification run rampant and the old quarter has suffered accordingly. The old town, Guihuacheng, is fast disappearing. I’d reached Dazhao just before the sun dipped below the horizon. Here, the courtyards revealed ornate pavilions with the occasional monk flitting through a courtyard, lost in thought. Other monks chatted among themselves, savoring the last of the sunshine. I was captured by the rooflines on the pavilions. The prayer flags, caught in the stillness, made a colorful addition to the composition, the cloudless brilliant blue sky a perfect backdrop.” ✚ p h o t o g r a p h e r p h i l i p g o st e l ow • interviewed by christopher kucway 154 august 2011 | travelandleisureasia.com

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