April 2017

Southeast asia

April 2017

Cruising up the Mekong Sri Lanka’s Stylish South

An Insider’s Guide to Shopping the Globe

Singapore S$7.90 / Hong Kong HK$43 Thailand THB175 / Indonesia IDR50,000 Malaysia MYR18 / Vietnam VND85,000 Macau MOP44 / Philippines PHP240 Burma MMK35 / Cambodia KHR22,000 Brunei BND7.90 / Laos LAK52,000

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April

ON THE COVER Sunset over the Mekong outside Luang Prabang.

Photographer: Joakim Leroy/Getty Images.

features 70

c l o c k w i s e F R O M t o p LE F T: m a r t i n m o rr e l l ; n i c k b a l l o n ; c o u r t e s y o f c h e n a h u t s b y u g a e s c a p e s ; c o u r t e s y o f pa n d aw r i v e r e x p e d i t i o n s

Against the Current A new four-country Mekong cruise aims to reopen the river way to China. For Joe Cummings, raging rapids and fiery chilies spice up a serene upstream sailing.

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88 98 70 80

The Tropical Spirit Southern Sri Lanka’s newest wave of hotels carries on the spirit of Ceylon’s most famous native son, architect Geoffrey Bawa. By Jeninne Lee-St. John.

Photographed by Leo McHugh

88

Bordeaux Nouveau From the city to the grand old châteaux, France’s premier wine-making region is showing a fresh face to the world. By Elaine Sciolino. Photographed

by Martin Morrell

98

Peace in the Valley High in the Peruvian Andes lies the Sacred Valley that gave rise to the Incan empire and remains a place of divine communion.

By Stephanie Danler.

Photographed by Nick Ballon

t r a v e l a n d l e i s u r e a s i a . c o m / a p r i l 2 0 1 7

7

In Every Issue

T+L Digital 10 Editor’s Note 12 The Conversation 14 Deals 66 Wish You Were Here 106

departments

28 Click Here, Calm Down Allay

those pre-flight jitters with an arsenal of apps geared to soothe your fear of flying.

17 Flights of Fashion Clothing

designer, artist and tastemaker Somchai Songwattana sets the pace in Bangkok.

20 My Fabulous World Indian

Delhi to Bangkok are making

30 Spice World Chefs from New Indian cuisine the latest darling of the global dining scene.

author Anita Nair talks about the journeys that inspire her writing.

21 Safari in Style The Four

Seasons Tented Camp Golden Triangle has debuted a spacious new lodge—no canvas in sight.

Restaurant in Rangoon pushes

26 Old and New The Strand

culinary boundaries but maintains its vintage charm.

The Guide 49 Shopping What you bring back

from a trip can be as important as the vacation itself. Our international guide to retail has curated shopping tours and the best specialty shops for obsession-worthy finds.

33 Off the Chain Counter-culture urban artists are bringing Vientiane the hottest in-thing: freedom of expression.

38 The Possibilities of an Island Off the coast of Croatia is a retreat that mixes rowdy good times with fervent self-improvement.

Upgrade 61 Breaking the Ice A savvy

traveler’s playbook to meeting new people while on the road.

Traditional English country-

42 To the Manor Reborn

33

8

arepas, olé! The City of Light has a new flavor—and it speaks with a Spanish accent.

Beyond

22 The Rise Of The Design District Hip neighborhoods keep cropping up around the globe. We discuss what it takes to craft a cool scene, from Johannesburg to Singapore to Sydney.

46 Paris Caliente Tango, tacos,

april 2017 / t r av el andleisure asia .com

house hotels are trading their stiffness for an informal vibe.

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26

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F R O M LE F T: m i c k s h i p p e n ; c h r i s t o p h e r k u c way; c o u r t e s y o f t h e s t r a n d ; A o p D i va h o l i c / c o u r t e s y o f Or n a m e n t s & L’ O R

Here & Now

+

t+l digital

Lookout

How to Up Your Tr avel Photogr aphy Game We asked the experts for tips on how to take better travel photos, no fancy camera required.

Bali’s Holistic Healers In Ubud, shamans still practice mystical arts to help restore body, mind and soul.

We visit the source to find out if there is truth to the legends.

Chiang Mai’s Burgeoning Art Scene A spate of gallery openings is drawing attention to this once under-the-radar creative community.

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april 2017 / t r av el andleisure asia .com

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fr o m l e f t: fr a n c i s c o G u e rr e r o ; l a u r y n i s h a k ; c e d r i c a r n o l d

this month on tr avelandleisureasia.com

Melbourne’s coolest boutique rooms are rooftop Airstream trailers; Bangkok’s new luxe river cruise; shopping Southeast Asia with fashion curator Lauren Yates; our ultimate guide to budget hotels; the latest travel deals and more.

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THAILAND

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MALDIVES

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QATAR

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SRI LANKA

·

VIETNAM

editor’s note

|

april 2017

Asia is home to more than its fair share of dream trips,

@CKucway chrisk@mediatransasia.com

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a p r i l 2 0 1 7 / t r av e l a n d l e i s u r e a s i a . c o m

From My Travels

A morning swim makes for a memorable date— especially when the dip is in the river that divides Thailand from Burma, and the lady in question is an 11-year-old rescued elephant named Srinuan. I was at the Four Seasons Tented Camp Golden Triangle at the top of Thailand getting my elephant driver’s license when the unexpected happened: she gave me kiss on the lips. If a 2.5-tonne pachyderm corners you, saying no is not an option.

fr o m l e f t: t h a n a k o r n c h o m n awa n g ; c h r i s t o p h e r k u c way

longer journeys through a cross-section of the continent, itineraries that take in both past glories and modern advances, sometimes in the same day. Writer Joe Cummings embarked on just such a trip for this issue, aboard a small cruise ship up the Mekong River with stops in four countries (“Against the Current,” page 70). One day finds him meeting Lao and Hmong villagers, the next staring at a contemporary kilometer-wide dam. A two-week cruise is not too long, he writes, for the pace allows time to catch up and chill out, to appreciate Asia’s constant change without missing a beat of the Mekong’s natural beauty or culinary offerings. About the only one moving more slowly than the cruise passengers on this trip is a Thai monk who has walked more than 500 kilometers to a Lao temple, a dream journey if there ever was one.

The mere mention of Rangoon evokes memories of a bygone era, and while it’s hard to find a more classic address there than The Strand, its restaurant has put a new spin on its menu (“Old and New,” page 26). Twenty years ago, I recall having a fantastic chicken curry there, but today expect tortellini filled with duck consommé—not a bad progression for what remains one of Asia’s hottest destinations.

1-15

16-30

The most toxic 31-45

46-60

61-75

76-90

91-105

106-120

121-135

No data

Vino views in Hong Kong.

By @nicolettemewing.

Mandala mimosas in Bali.

By @travellingbartenders.

Cheers to a good view of Singapore. By @tinytottravels.

Happy hour to end the day in Manila. By @wandergirlana.

Correction: In the March 2017 design special “Taking Shape,” Jason Pomeroy should have been idenitified as British. Additionally, Pomeroy Studio’s website should have been listed as pomeroystudio.sg.

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Share an Instagram photo by using the #TLAsia hashtag, and it may be featured in an upcoming issue. Follow @travelandleisureasia

i l l u s t r at i o n b y A u t c h a r a pa n p h a i

The least toxic

It’s five o’clock somewhere, and this month readers are raising a glass to relaxing vacations and perfectly crafted drinks.

The world’s most toxic countries, according to data obtained from the International Energy Agency and World Health Organization by renewable energy firm The Eco Experts, are largely those from the Middle East, while the cleanest are found in Sub-Saharan Africa. In Asia, Mongolia takes the cake for most toxic, while in the lead for least toxic on the continent and seventh cleanest in the world is Indonesia— despite being home to infamously traffic-heavy Jakarta.

Each country’s performance takes into account: • Air pollution • Energy consumption • Renewable energy production

#TLASIA

the conversation

editor-in-chief art director Deput y editor senior editor senior DEsigner DEsigner assistant EDITOR

Christopher Kucway Wannapha Nawayon Jeninne Lee-St. John Merritt Gurley Chotika Sopitarchasak Autchara Panphai Veronica Inveen

Regul ar contributors / photogr aphers Cedric Arnold, Kit Yeng Chan, Helen Dalley, Philipp Engelhorn, Marco Ferrarese, Duncan Forgan, Diana Hubbell, Lauryn Ishak, Mark Lean, Melanie Lee, Ian Lloyd Neubauer, Morgan Ommer, Aaron Joel Santos, Stephanie Zubiri chairman president publishing director publishER digital media manager TRAFFIC MANAGER /deput y DIGITAL media manager sales director business de velopment managers chief financial officer production manager production group circul ation MANAGER circul ation assistant

J.S. Uberoi Egasith Chotpakditrakul Rasina Uberoi-Bajaj Robert Fernhout Pichayanee Kitsanayothin Varin Kongmeng Joey Kukielka David Bell Leigha Proctor Gaurav Kumar Kanda Thanakornwongskul Natchanan Kaewsasaen Porames Sirivejabandhu Yupadee Saebea

TR AVEL+LEISURE (USA) Editor-in-Chief Senior Vice President / Publishing Director Publisher

Nathan Lump Steven DeLuca Joseph Messer

TIME INC. INTERNATIONAL LICENSING & DEVELOPMENT (syndication@timeinc.com) Senior Director, Business De velopment E xecutive Editor / International

Jennifer Savage Jack Livings

TIME INC. Chief E xecutive Officer Chief Content Officer

Joseph Ripp Norman Pearlstine

tr avel+leisure southeast asia Vol. 11, Issue 4 Travel+Leisure Southeast Asia is published monthly by Media Transasia Limited, 1603, 16/F, Island Place Tower, 510 King’s Road, North Point, Hong Kong.

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This edition is published by permission of Time Inc. Affluent Media Group 1271 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10020 Tel. 1-212/522-1212 Online: www.timeinc.com Reproduction in whole or in part without consent of the copyright owner is prohibited. subscriptions Enquiries: www.travelandleisuresea.com/subscribe ADVERTISING offices General enquiries: advertising@mediatransasia.com Singapore: 65/9029 0749; joey@mediatransasia.com Japan: Shinano Co., Ltd. 81-3/3584-6420; kazujt@bunkoh.com Korea: YJP & Valued Media Co., Ltd. 82-2/3789-6888; hi@yjpvm.kr

N e ws + t r e n d s + d i sc o v e r i e s

introducing

Flights of Fashion Clothing designer, artist and all-around taste-maker, Somchai Songwattana is setting the pace in Bangkok’s breakneck design evolution.

Photogr aph by Cedric Arnold.

A founding father of

fashion in Thailand, Somchai Songwattana keeps pushing the boundaries. Since launching his first clothing label in 1983, Flynow (flynowbangkok.com; dresses from Bt3,000)—which is still trendsetting today with a new pink- and rose-hued collection of bold silhouettes accented by his signature appliqués and frills—he has rolled out eight other brands, including a leather label and a cool-girl streetwear line. Songwattana is also a founder of Thailand

P h oto C r e d i t T e e k ay

Creative and Design Center

Songwattana at ChangChui, his new art space set to open in May.

(tcdc.or.th), and his latest project to nurture the country’s budding talent is even more grandiose. Next month he is unveiling ChangChui, a two-hectare art space in Bangkok’s Thonburi district that will reinstate a cultural capital west of the Chao Phraya River with its galleries, concert venue, library and collection of bars and restaurants, including a five-star eatery inside an abandoned plane. The aircraft doesn’t fly, but there are other ways to elevate.

—veronica inveen

t r a v e l a n d l e i s u r e a s i a . c o m / a p r i l 2 0 1 7

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/ here&now / clockwise from far left:

Atlas stocks more than 1,000 bottles of gin; the bar’s signature martini; Parkview Square looms.

After Dark

Atlas Chugged Gin lovers and

champagne sippers, time to get your Gatsby on at Atlas Grand Lobby and Bar. This stylish gin joint has opened in Singapore’s Parkview Square, which many locals call “the Gotham building” due to its imposing stature and Batman-esque Art Deco style. The bar is right at home in this glitzy high-rise, channeling the era’s roaring glamour in everything from its marble

countertops to the rosegold champagne room lined in many a rare bottle of bubbly, including singular vintages plucked from the private collection of local powerhouse family the Hwangs, who developed Parkview Square and own Atlas.

The centerpiece of the bar is a 25-meter-tall, ceiling-high bronze tower displaying the bar’s gin collection, which at more than 1,000 bottles is one of

Greater Gotham

A new museum in Parkview Square is saving the ocean one sketch and sculpture at a time.

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a p r i l 2 0 1 7 / t r a v e l a n d l e i s u r e a s i a . c o m

the most robust in the region. This anthology, curated by master of gin Jason Williams, will be at the heart of Juniper Society, an educational club for gin enthusiasts that Atlas is launching later in the year. Head bartender Roman Foltan, who worked at Artesian in London’s The Langham, is bringing his European panache to the cocktail menu, with old-timey classics like the Florentine

Negroni, made with a 1920s Florentine London dry gin, 1930s Italian vermouth and vintage Campari, harkening back to the golden age of drinking. Teetotalers need not despair: there is also all-day dining and an espresso bar. If you feel like you have the weight of the world on your shoulders, this is just the place to lighten up. atlasbar.sg; cocktails S$22–$50.

It may come as no surprise that the developers behind a 24-story Art Deco tower are a little bit obsessed with art. Parkview Arts Action, the group’s charitable arm, also opened Parkview Museum in the Gotham building last month, so after downing a few martinis at Atlas you can use that liquid confidence to coax out your inner creative connoisseur. Art with heart, it is the museum’s mission to raise awareness of environmental issues. The first show, On Sharks and Humanity, on display through June, is a traveling multidisciplinary collection of thought-provoking artwork focusing on shark protection and ocean conservation, which showcases pieces by 26 artists from countries all over the world, including the U.S., Singapore and Hong Kong. Later in the year, expect to see a rotating line-up of group and solo shows, along with pieces from the Hwang family collection. parkviewartsaction.com; admission is free. — Mav is Teo

fr o m t o p : c o u r t e s y o f at l a s b a r ( 3 ) ; c o u r t e s y o f pa r k v i e w m u s e u m

This new bar in Singapore brings Art Deco glamour to the fine art of drinking. By Merritt Gurley

exotic & idyllic retreat ...where life is a private celebration

Noticed

Cathay Gets Crafty Hong Kong’s flagship carrier has developed the first craft beer designed for high altitude.

c o u r t e s y o f c at h ay pa c i f i c

Cathay Pacific cabin crew with Betsy Beer.

It isn’t your imagination: beer does taste weird on airplanes. The brews weren’t developed to withstand the hurdles of high-altitude consumption, but Cathay Pacific is swooping in to the rescue. Riding the wave of Hong Kong’s craft-beer craze, the airline recently launched Betsy Beer, named after their first aircraft, a Douglas DC-3 that flew in the 1940s and 1950s.

“We know that when you fly, your sense of taste changes,” says Julian Lyden of Cathay Pacific. “Airlines address this for food but nobody has ever tried to improve the taste of beer at altitude.”

According to the airline, the combination of dryness and low pressure dulls your sense of taste by up to 30 percent when you fly, so it was important to create a brew with a bold flavor profile.

In the quest for a recipe that would cut through the sensory din, Cathay enlisted the help of a tasting panel of experts that included Toby Cooper, founder and chairman of the Hong Kong Craft Beer Association, and May Chow, owner of Little Bao in Hong Kong and Bangkok.

The resulting beer, brewed in collaboration with Hong Kong Beer Co., was designed around the parameters of a cabin. It has a wheat base to combat bitterness, 10-percent higher carbonation

than sea-level beers for better mouthfeel, and it is unfiltered to retain vitamin B, which is supposed keep you feeling plucky. The ingredients selected—honey from Wing Wo Bee Farm in Sha Tin, longan fruit from local Hong Kong markets, and UK-sourced fuggle hops—deliver booming layers of flavor.

“We went for a hand-crafted ale because of the quality of ingredients and production process,” says Priscilla Chok, Cathay Pacific digital marketing manager.

“There’s a lot of attention from the brew master due to its smaller production.”

The ale is available on a trial basis to first- and business-class passengers traveling between Hong Kong and the United Kingdom until April 30.

Beer-drinkers looking to get their hands on a bottle without boarding a plane can find Betsy in several Swire-owned restaurants and bars in Hong Kong including Sugar, Mr and Mrs Fox, and Café Gray Deluxe, or purchase it online at Deli-delight (deli-delight.com) for HK$38. If Betsy Beer does take off, Chok says other craft ales that capture local specialties along different routes could follow. The future of Betsy Beer depends on its reception—it could become a global phenomenon or this could be its final flight. —M.G.

Sanur I Ubud I Nusa Dua I Jimbaran

P. 62 361 705 777 F. 62 361 705 101 E. experience@kayumanis.com

kayumanis

kayumanisresort

kayumanisresort

/ here&now / Tough Love

Making Moments

I grew up in a small town in Kerala, so when I visited New York when I was 24 it was like a punch to the head. That trip began to shape the kind of writer that I am now. I saw that I didn’t want to write about sunsets and museums, but more about the personal connection between me and the place that I’m visiting.

If I go to a museum it is to see one particular piece of art. I spent hours looking at the David in Florence.

What I remember the most is the little finger of David’s hand.

My Fabulous World

Anita Nair

The Indian author talks about the journeys that have inspired her writing.

When I wrote Idris, Keeper of the Light set in 17th century Galle, I had not been to Sri Lanka before.

But I went this year, attending the Fairway Galle Literary Festival, and I enjoyed staying at Tamarind Hill

(tamarindhill.lk; doubles from US$280).

Italian Flavor

Food plays an important part in my books. The food that I eat when I travel is a little mini journey inside my mouth. I really love Italian gelato and granita, from southern Italy.

My best restaurant experience was at

Paracucchi Locanda Dell’Angelo

(paracucchi​ locanda.it) near Sarzana, in Italy. from left: Nair

melts for the gelato of south Italy; Tamarind Hill, a hotel in an 1800’s Galle manor; Kolam art, drawn using dyed rice, is popular in Madras; Nair spent hours admiring the David in Florence.

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Scents of Place

I travel quite extensively and every trip changes me and my perspective.

Maybe I go 50 kilometers from my house in Bangalore, but even that can make a difference. I like details. In a railway station, or in a private road, or in a house the mixture of smells is very different and indicative of that place.

— As told to Alessandra Gesuelli

c lo c k w i s e fr o m to p l e f t : c o u rt esy o f H a r p e rC o l l i n s P u b l i s h e r s I n d i a ; c o u rt esy o f a n i ta n a i r ; F r a n c o Or i g l i a / St r i n g e r / g e t t y i m ag es ; S u p e rSto c k / g e t t y i m ag es ; F e l i x H u g / g e t t y i m ag es ; Sto c k Fo o d / g e t t y i m ag es ; c o u rt esy o f ta m a r i n d h i l l

Life and Art

Then and Now

In Madras you have the old-fashioned India and the new one together, not separated. You see it during the big cultural month, from midDecember to mid-January, when you have the concerts of Madras Music Season and the Kolam competition. I love that beautiful juxtaposition of tradition and modernity happening at the same time—you don’t have to sacrifice one for the other.

/ here&now / All quiet on the elephant front.

Reboot

c h r i s t o p h e r k u c way

Safari in Style

The Four Seasons Tented Camp Golden Triangle has revealed a spacious new lodge, and there is not a stitch of canvas in sight, writes Christopher Kucway.

If this is camping, then sign me up.

While no stay at the Four Seasons Tented Camp Golden Triangle would be considered roughing it, the northern Thai resort has taken comfort to a new level with its two-bedroom Explorer’s Lodge.

A king-sized room and a twin room— both with en suite bathrooms—are bisected by a private pool that drops off into the dense, green valley that separates Thailand from Burma. The first room on the property that isn’t a tent, it can fit six people into a 232-square-meter space, but four would

be better, or two, if complete solitude is your aim. At the far end of what already is a secluded resort, it’s walking distance to the stars of the show, the rescued elephants. As much as the pachyderms—beautifully human in their reactions, their eye contact and their varying personalities—occupy every waking moment here, staff admit to a new concern: lodge occupants rarely want to leave the spacious outdoor deck and pool. It’s easy to see why. fourseasons.com; minimum two-night stays from Bt200,000 per night.

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/ here&now / Vortex, a mural in the Miami Design District by the New York–based Studio 2x4.

cities

The Rise Of The Design District

Hip neighborhoods keep cropping up, sometimes by accident, sometimes as the product of elaborate strategy. From Johannesburg’s Maboneng to Sydney’s Surry Hills, Thomas De Monchaux ruminates on what it takes to craft a cool scene.

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april 2017 / t r av el andleisure asia .com

CLOCKWISE F R O M TOP LE F T: c o u r t e s y o f s t r e at n i k . c o m ; c o u r t e s y o f m i a m i d e s i g n d i s t r i c t; c o u r t e s y o f c o mm o n s .w i k i m e d i a . o r g . o p p o s i t e : R OLANDO DIA Z

One fine morning a year or two ago, at an open-air counter in the Maboneng precinct of Johannesburg, South Africa, an elegant lady served me one of the world’s more perfect cappuccinos. In the willfully sentimental way of travelers in search of stories, I imagined a whole biography for her—maybe she’d brought her family’s La Marzocco machine all the way from Rome in a steamer trunk. With its dour fortified compounds, Brutalist skyscrapers and acrid mine-tailing hills, Johannesburg doesn’t beguile the visitor like its relentlessly picturesque counterpart, Cape Town. So in Maboneng I was glad to find galleries, food trucks, sidewalk cafés, street art, cool cars, an artisanal craft market, the David Adjaye–designed Hallmark House hotel and the Museum of African Design (located in a former auto-body shop). A sign bearing the name of the neighborhood swung in a graceful catenary curve, exactly like the famous one in Venice Beach, California. Feeling caffeinated and expansive, I remarked to the coffee lady on Maboneng’s charm. Thank you, she said, because her son had developed pretty much all of it. Some days she liked to sit at the coffee stand just to keep an eye on things.

Maboneng is what has increasingly come to be known as a design district—a contemporary destination neighborhood that is often driven by a private property developer (or a publicprivate partnership). Typically, such enclaves result from concerted efforts to reanimate historic but moribund industrial areas around the idea of design, to the theoretical delight of visitors and investors alike. Their precursors are the so-called festival marketplaces of the 1960s, 70s and 80s, exemplified by San Francisco’s Ghirardelli Square, Boston’s Faneuil Hall and New York City’s South Street Seaport—redevelopment projects that brought fern bars and knickknack emporiums to 18th- and 19th-century port and industrial buildings, and new life to urban centers that had emptied out in the previous decades. A more bottom-up precedent for such adaptive reuse is New York City’s SoHo, whose good architectural bones inspired 1970s artists to pioneer a new kind of urban homesteading—unleashing the kind of gentrification that turns taxi garages into art galleries into luxury boutiques.

Clockwise from top left: A mural

What’s with the design in design district? The phrase comes from the name given in the 1980s to a section of Miami’s Buena Vista neighborhood. By the 90s, this precinct of furniture and home-décor showrooms and warehouses had grown desolate, while the more picturesque strip of Art Deco hotels and residences along nearby Ocean Drive was undergoing a revival. It became what we now know as the Miami Design District in 2005, when the developer Craig Robins bought up buildings across a two-squareblock area, persuaded purveyors of upscale furniture and housewares to open stores there, and helped establish Design Miami, a decorative-arts sideshow to the annual Art Basel Miami art fair. This

Maboneng, Johannesburg; an installation of R. Buckminster Fuller’s Fly’s Eye Dome in the Miami Design District; the Secret Garden, a temporary installation by Zaha Hadid and Paola Navone in Milan’s Brera District, one of the earliest design neighborhoods.

t r a v e l a n d l e i s u r e a s i a . c o m / a p r i l 2 0 1 7

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from top: A sculpture of Le Corbusier by Xavier Veilhan in the Miami Design District; furniture and tableware at Mjölk, a shop in Toronto’s Junction neighborhood.

cultural curatorship transformed the area into a fashionable hangout with round-the-clock street life. More recently, it has become a deluxe shopping zone with boutiques from Bulgari to Berluti, Céline to Cartier, many built by noteworthy architects like Sou Fujimoto, and pedigreed installations like a reproduction of the Fly’s Eye Dome by the mid-20th century design visionary R. Buckminster Fuller.

Variations on this model—sometimes consisting of little more than the word design dropped onto a map—have since been applied to the development of scruffy-to-chic precincts around the world, from the Junction in Toronto and Surry Hills in Sydney to Shoreditch in London and the once-unpromising blocks between the railroad tracks and the river in Dallas. A few years ago, when Buenos

Aires needed something to do with its old fish market at the edge of town, the city renamed it the Metropolitan Design Center— turning the stalls into incubator spaces for start-ups in fashion, graphics and related fields, and deciding that the gritty surrounding neighborhood of Barracas would now be known as the Distrito de Diseño.

When Miami’s Design District got its name, the word design wasn’t yet all that glamorous: it still connoted the service professions of the decorative arts, the technical tedium of civil engineering, the solemn expertise of architecture and urbanism.

But today we often say design as a more substantial-feeling substitute for style. Now, design gets deployed to connote a certain kind of in-the-know cool, in which “creative” is a noun and “influencer” is a job. It offers a reassuringly tasteful curatorial sensibility, with all the seeming cleverness of the art world, minus the arcane impenetrability and aura of madness.

To the traveler, the design district offers both delights and dilemmas. At best, it gets you off the beaten path, offering a kind of to-the-trade look at the studios and showrooms where creative people aren’t trying to sell you on anything, but are busy selling—and inspiring—one another. At worst, it leaves you stuck in style—in a global Brooklyn where the same hipsterish aesthetic is always available for purchase—wondering whether you’ve left one bubble for another.

Carrying my cooling cappuccino in its smartly branded paper cup along Maboneng’s main drag, I thought it over. The precinct’s revival might have been wholly strategized, and commercially as well as culturally driven, but its effect was real and inspiring, animating the lives of locals, not just tourists. Next to the stuff you could find anywhere was stuff you could find only there— especially fashions and fabrics with their own regional vision and vernacular heritage. On the neighborhood map, the district’s boundaries appear sharply drawn, but as I walked along them, I found something more open-ended. Certain features, like the private security services so visible throughout much of Johannesburg, faded out a little, but the perimeter was also full of lively businesses and crowded sidewalks that weren’t necessarily part of anyone’s master plan. The district had catalyzed more than just aesthetic expression. Design, unlike style, isn’t a matter of perfect visualization and control: it’s a choreography between planned and unplanned, invention and discovery, top-down and bottom-up, synthetic and organic. Walking the edges of Maboneng is a reminder that it’s at the complicated border of any design district that the real work of urban design begins.

FOUR FAST-CHANGING GLOBAL DESIGN HUBS 1 / LONDON In 2007, Brompton became the first of several London neighborhoods to rechristen itself as a design district. Mint (mintshop.co.uk) sells housewares from emerging talents, while 10 Thurloe Place hosts pop-up exhibitions.

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2 / SINGAPORE The government established the DesignSingapore Council in 2003 to develop the city’s design sector.

They succeeded. Now it teems with high-design festivals, galleries, shops and eateries; there’s even an app (museum. red-dot.sg) to help travelers navigate the design district.

april 2017 / t r av el andleisure asia .com

3 / CHRISTCHURCH Rather than rush to rebuild after the devastating 2011 earthquake, the Kiwi city (christchurchnz.com) installed a rainbow of shipping containers to reboot businesses, and architects have been turning it into a pedestrian, low-rise hub of innovative structural engineering and cutting-edge design.

4 / DUBAI The D3 district was purpose-built in 2015 at the behest of the sheikh as a place for creative businesses. Snag home goods at the Lighthouse (thelighthouse.ae) or colorful, embroidered clothing at Mochi (allthingsmochi.com).

F R O M TOP : c o u r t e s y o f m i a m i d e s i g n d i s t r i c t; M ICHAEL G R AYDON AND NIKOLE HE R R IOTT

/ here&now /

/ here&now / the dish

Old and New

Chef Christian Martena at The Strand Restaurant.

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“Are you ready?” my server asks, before simultaneously pouring dry champagne and liquid nitrogen into a silver bowl. With flourish, he whisks it until the bubbly morphs into a sorbet the color and consistency of fresh snow. While most palatecleansers are little more than an afterthought, this one comes close to upstaging the blush-pink quail robed in a tawny, toasted coffee sauce that follows. For all the theatricality of its presentation, there’s something pure about a dish that contains only two ingredients and tastes of a crisp grand cru.

That balance between the classic and contemporary, between the fanciest of frills and utter simplicity, is what makes The Strand Restaurant sing. It took more than seven months to bring new life to the crown jewel of Rangoon’s grande dame. To accompany the refurbishment, the hotel chose to embrace a new chef and a daring new dining direction.

“What’s great about what we’ve done with the new décor is that we’ve kept that sense of place. We’ve kept the bones, if you will, of this beautiful lady,” says chef Christian Martena with a gesture at sleek black-andwhite space dotted with crimson roses and lit by chandeliers. “The designer added a contemporary touch without sacrificing the authenticity of the place, which is what I’ve tried to do with my cuisine.

I’m trying to get the classic dishes, but presented in my own way, with my own touch.”

Born in Puglia, the fertile heel of Italy’s boot, and a veteran of the Bangkok fine-dining scene, Martena was initially reluctant to dive into hotel restaurants. He grew up helping out in his family’s eateries and was wary of the “factory food” churned out by some giant

c o u rt esy o f t h e st r a n d

Situated in Rangoon’s grandest of dames, The Strand Restaurant manages to push culinary boundaries without sacrificing its vintage charm. By Diana Hubbell

fr o m to p : c o u rt esy o f t h e st r a n d ( 2 ) ; d i a n a h u b b e l l

hospitality restaurants. With just 31 suites, though, The Strand maintains an air of intimacy and as the general manager assured him that they wanted to create a restaurant with enough soul to stand on its own, he grew bolder.

“Before I came up with the menu, I read all about the history of The Strand,” he says. Sure, dishes like seared foie gras with silky potato mousseline and tortellini filled with duck consommé and foie gras velouté might not have been familiar to the hotel’s founders more than a century ago, but they have a timeless elegance that almost certainly would have appealed to them. “All of my dishes have some sort of memories hidden in them. My homeland, my travels are all protagonists.”

In the months leading up to the restaurant’s grand reopening in December, Martena prepped the public with a series of pop-up dinners at nearby Inya Lake Hotel called La Table du Strand in honor of the immense teakwood table upon which they were served. “My general manager and I passed by these big pieces of teak just lying around and the first thing that came into our minds was that we could have a really beautiful table. These days, most of the teakwood forests are gone and it’s very difficult to find wood like this, especially from a tree so large,” he says. He runs a hand over the smooth, chestnut-brown finish. “I had some people come up to me the other day and they said, ‘Oh, chef, your table has a very sexy touch.’”

Understated and with ancient roots, it serves as a fitting centerpiece for the restaurant. At the pop-up, “People would always share a surprise six-course menu together at this table. They would meet at the restaurant for the first time, so it was always an interesting crowd,” he says fondly. “I’d like to have a communal table here as well, so that people can meet and share the experience. For me, that’s what food is all about.” hotelthestrand.com; four-course tasting menu US$58 per person.

FROM top: A blend of classic and contemporary design at The Strand Restaurant; try Martena’s slow-cooked quail.

Hot Toddy

Another Rangoon icon is rolling out a new concept, and this one may leave you reeling, if you know what to order.

When Rangoon Tea House, a hipster haunt with a menu encompassing everything from biryanis to baos, announced that it would move, there was an initial outcry, until word came out that the restaurant’s new incarnation would feature a slick cocktail bar upstairs. Named for the sweet palm wine fermented at toddy plantations, The Toddy Bar is already packing in guests with locally inspired tipples like a Jasmine Gin & Tonic, with jasmine tea–infused gin.

“The Toddy Bar was set up almost as an older sister to Rangoon Tea House. If the latter felt like it had one foot in the past and one in the future, so does The The Toddy Bar,” says cofounder Htet Myet Oo. And here you’ll find the same fastidious attention to detail that has made Rangoon Tea House’s revamped curries such a hit.

For instance, mixologists boil water to make crystal-clear cubes and spheres of ice unmarred by any pesky bubbles.

“Both the restaurant and bar combine nostalgia, minimalism and a sophisticated take on local culture,” Htet says.

The menu is classy but cheeky.

“Burmese humor is big on one-liners.

The Youk-Kha-Ma-rtini is a play on mother-in-law jokes,” Htet says.

“Obviously the drink had to be highly potent.” Or, as the menu describes it, “unforgiving.” It may be the one time to look forward to an evening with your mother-in-law. fb.com/ TheToddyBar; drinks for two K12,000.

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/ here&now / Tech

Click Here, Calm Down

Allay those pre-flight jitters with an arsenal of apps geared to soothe even the most nervous Nellies. By veronica inveen

Am I Going Down?

The answer: no, probably not.

Need proof? This app presents you with the cold, hard facts.

Enter your journey details and this flight-risk calculator will provide you with the statistical likelihood of something catastrophic happening onboard based on the plane model, airline and departure and arrival ports. For example, it could tell you that your flight from Singapore to Sydney on an Airbus A330 via Qantas Airlines has a one in 5,308,023 chance of crashing and if you took the flight every day you’d expect to last 15,542 years before you went down. The odds are definitely in your favor. vanillapixel.com/ amigoingdown.html; iOS.

SOAR Former U.S. Air Force captain and neurolinguist Tom Bunn founded fearofflying.com as a catch-all community for those who dread plane travel, offering stats, soothing words, exercises and even one-on-one therapy.

His offshoot app SOAR, which is an acronym of Seminars on Aeroanxiety Relief, channels his expertise into an on-the-go fear-reliever. Along with a plethora of flight knowledge, such the sounds you should expect to hear throughout your ride, the app also comes equipped with a letter written

by Bunn himself, which asks captains to meet anxious

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passengers. The hope is that seeing the person behind the mysterious mechanical voice controlling your destiny might help you recline a bit better in your seat. fearofflying.com; iOS and Android.

Turbcast Perhaps the scariest part about turbulence is not knowing what is making the 400-tonne metal tube you’re in shake so vigorously. This app educates you about the causes of turbulence—changing wind speeds, thermal currents, and thunderstorms among them— and offers the reassurance that most airborne disturbances are harmless. It also forecasts the turbulence on specific routes so you’ll be prepared. fearofflyingapps.com; iOS.

Headspace If you start feeling anxious mid-air, this app will help you meditate through the jitters.

The mindfulness sessions, narrated by founder Andy Puddicombe, are designed to teach you to observe your thoughts without identifying with them so strongly. Any of the sessions, which range from 10 to 60 minutes, are likely to put you in a more Zen mindset, but the fear-of-flying package is tailored to helping you stay centered during flights. So breathe in, breathe out, and loosen that white-knuckle grip on the armrest. You’ll be at your destination in no time. headspace.com; iOS and Android; 10 downloads are free but the fear-of-flying package requires a subscription, which costs US$6–$13 per month.

Ph r e oto t o u cCh re d ip t hToeteo ks ayb y: a u t c h a r a pa n p h a i . s o u r c e p h o t o : c o u r t e s y o f p e x e l s . c o m ; a u t c h a r a pa n p h a i ( M o b i l e s c r e e n )

as soon as the plane leaves the gate? This collection of apps will help ease your flying fears, so you can relax and enjoy the ride.

Get butterflies

/ here&now / T+L picks

Spice World Chefs from New Delhi to San Francisco are reimagining the culinary mainstays of the Subcontinent, experimenting with cross-cultural mash-ups, and making Indian cuisine the latest darling of the global dining scene. By PRIYA KRISHNa and veronica inveen

BANGKOK

SINGAPORE

SAN FRANCISCO

NEW DELHI

CAIRO

Kebabs take center stage, with melt-inyour-mouth meats, veggies and paneer served in a bright, modern setting. Eat all you can at their smart Sunday brunch, or come at night to try their India-inspired cocktails, crafted to complement the flavors of the tandoor.

This stylish restaurant in Clarke Quay takes an innovative, playful approach to regional cooking, with dishes like wok-fried paneer tacos and bhatti murgh tikkas served in Mexican style quesadillas.

At his newest spot, Punjabi native Jessi Singh serves up many of the dishes that made the N.Y.C. original a hit. His cheeky riffs on street food—such as “unauthentic” butter chicken and crispy Colonel Tso’s cauliflower—are as visually striking as they are delicious.

Chef Manish Mehrotra turns Indian comfort food into haute cuisine.

His menu is often fusion-y (fluffy kulcha breads come stuffed with bacon or Camembert) but in a way that’s creative, not gimmicky.

Just a stone’s throw from the Pyramids in Giza’s legendary Mena House Hotel, Moghul Room offers rich, aromatic stews from northern India that don’t hold back on the heat. Cool your palate with the buttery, pillow-soft garlic naan—it’s a scenestealer.

MUST-TRY DISH

The sikandar ki raan, a whole leg of mutton, braised with malt vinegar, cinnamon and chili paste. charcoalbkk.com; mains Bt290–1,050.

Maziga

MUST-TRY DISH

The galouti kebab burger, a juicy lamb patty tenderized in green papaya pulp and served in a fluffy maska pav bun, with fries and garlic chutney. maziga.com.sg; mains S$17–25.

Murgh angaar, or tandoor-cooked chili chicken, at Charcoal in Bangkok.

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Babu Ji

MUST-TRY DISH

Kulfi, India’s version of ice cream, in the signature chai-biscuit flavor. babujisf.com; mains US$14–26.

Indian Accent

MUST-TRY DISH

The meetha aachar spare ribs, braised in coconut milk until tender, then fried and slathered in an addictive, sticky-sweet mango-pickle sauce. indianaccent.com; mains Rs668–1,402.

Moghul Room

MUST-TRY DISH

The laal maas, a garlicky Rajasthani curry with red chiles and tender hunks of lamb. menahousehotel.com; mains US$12–18.

Mo c IKEY u r t PO esy Z AoRfIKC h a r c o a l ta n d o o r g r i l l & m i x o l o g y

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Indeed, the country is heaven for those who appreciate history, heritage, culture and food.

Siem Reap is synonymous with Angkor Wat, but Angkor Thom, the last great city of the Khmer empire, and its enigmatic centerpiece, Bayon Temple, are also must-sees. Downtown, visitors can shop the central market or party hard on vibrant Pub Street. And not far away, the sunken mangrove forest at Kampong Phluk by the tranquil waters of Tonle Sap Lake is a natural gem.

A bit west, Battambang has its own dynamism. Phare Circus was first established here and nightly shows at the big top are as vibrant as ever. Outside town, riding the famous “bamboo train” or biking around villages and lush landscapes both offer an idyllic glimpse into rural life.

Cambodia’s coastline stakes its claim as an option for a blissful break. Sihanoukville has great beaches, delicious seafood and a busy nightlife. It’s also the hop-off point for boats to nearby paradise islands such as Koh Rong.

Circle back to Phnom Penh, where sophisticated new restaurants and bars have changed the face of the capital’s entertainment scene, while towering skyscrapers are altering its skyline. Nevertheless, the city’s rich—and often tragic—history can still be witnessed at its ornate Royal Palace and at Tuol Sleng genocide museum.

With its location in the heart of Southeast Asia making it a breeze to get to, the time is ripe to discover Cambodia.

LET’S CONNECT w w w.tr avel andleisureasia.com

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l aos | croati a | f r a nce + mor e

The Scene

Off the Chain Counter-culture urban artists are bringing the Laos capital the hottest in-thing: freedom of expression. Holly Robertson talks to the cool kids in Vientiane to find out

how they are flipping the script.

Photogr aphed by MicK SHIPPEN

Freerunners take a break on the steps of Chao Anouvong monument.

t r a v e l a n d l e i s u r e a s i a . c o m / a p r i l 2 0 1 7

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/ beyond /t h e s c e n e It’s 5 p.m. on a Sunday, and Vientiane’s languid pace is being broken by a series of flips, jumps and tricks: members of the Lao freerunning club are training along the capital’s riverfront.

Anouxay Chanthanong, 16, takes the lead, performing a daring leap over the steps to the majestic Chao Anouvong monument, before tumbling artfully to the pavement and rolling to a stand. “I saw some older freerunners and I wanted to do it,” he says through a translator, explaining that he now trains up to four hours a day, five days a week, to perfect his moves.

Symbolic of the social changes now underway in the capital of this communist state, freerunning—an energetic form of parkour, which emerged in Paris in the late 1980s—is a paragon of self-expression. And while Vientiane may be trailing behind Paris, it is having a moment. New international flights are easing access to the city and major hotel brands are springing up, including a Crowne Plaza and The President by Akaryn.

As the capital gains momentum, overseas-educated children of Lao refugees are returning and more travelers are visiting, a combination that has flooded the city with fresh influences. The urge to experiment with different art forms, some of which long-dwindled in popularity in the West, is intoxicating in its newness.

Alternative art, cinema and dance scenes are emerging,

from left: Cold-brew coffee

at The Coffee Bar by Lao Derm; freerunner Anouxay Chanthanong in motion; artist Ole Viravong Scovill shows off her art until death tattoo.

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fueled by impassioned artists who are quickening Vientiane’s gait to match the modern stride “When you do freerunning you have to be ready. If you’re fifty-fifty about what you’re going to do, then you will fail,” says 22-year-old Dalavong “Pao” Thongmanyla, something of an elder statesman in the group, which was started three years ago after one of its members discovered the sport on YouTube. The video site also exposed Pao to his current obsession: hip-hop. Influenced by the work of Logic, J. Cole and Kendrick Lamar, Pao and his friend Chankarak “Neung” Xaysongkham started a rap group, churning out music videos with Pao filming and Neung busting flows as his alter-ego Nxist.

It wasn’t until the early aughts that the government started relaxing restrictions on contemporary music, and Neung says hip-hop gives him an outlet to tackle social issues. “I want Lao people to know more about music, more about art,” he says. “This may be a communist country, but I still want people to think outside the box, because its 2017 already.”

clockwise from left: Anysay Keola of Lao New Wave Cinema; lemongrass stuffed with pork and herbs at Doi Ka Noi restaurant; Chankarak Xaysongkham performs hip-hop under the stage-name Nxist; a banana-andmango waffle from Coco & Co; upside-down at the new vegan restaurant Coco & Co.

Phay viboune Silimoungkhoun , known as C-Lil, spins rapidly on his hands, his legs bent at the knees in the air like an inverted insect, with Vientiane’s Patuxai Monument providing an ancient backdrop to this modern pursuit. He is warming up before a video shoot later in the day for Sting, an energy drink company that sponsors him in the hopes of reaching his young fans; he has about 22,000 on Facebook. For C-Lil, breakdancing not only provided a path out of poverty, it also introduced him to new ways of looking at the world. “It’s a really eyeopening experience being able to witness different cultures,” he says.

Breakdancing first started gaining popularity in Laos soon after foreign music began flooding into the country.

Today, C-Lil is a fixture on the international b-boying

circuit and regularly travels the world to take part in competitions. “In the very beginning, we had a lot of problems with authorities,” says Tommy “Tomizuka” Ditthavong, one of Laos’s earliest converts to breakdancing. Now, he says, officials at the airport often stop them to chat about upcoming b-boying events. “I think, over the years, they understood that it’s just dancing, we’re not harming anyone.”

Many, although not all, of those involved in Vientiane’s budding creative scenes have spent some time abroad.

Anysay Keola, who co-founded the Lao New Wave Cinema collective, studied in Thailand and Australia before returning home and challenging censors with his 2011 film At the Horizon, an exploration of Vientiane’s increasing wealth gap that pitted a rich hothead against a poor mechanic. Cinema had been tightly controlled since the Pathet Lao took over in 1975, and it took several rounds of negotiations before a less-violent version of the film was released in Laos.

Getting the movie out was a major step forward. As the country’s first crime thriller, it broke the cycle of propaganda and melodramas that had dominated cinema and allowed other filmmakers to begin testing the boundaries. “There is still a line for us to push, and for them to push back. For now, there’s not really a clear guideline or definition of what can and what cannot [appear on screen],” Keola says. t r a v e l a n d l e i s u r e a s i a . c o m / a p r i l 2 0 1 7

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The country’s only female film director, Mattie Do, has produced two movies to date, 2012’s Chanthaly and Dearest Sister, released last year. Do, who was born in Los Angeles to Lao and Vietnamese parents, says she wanted to depict the realities of life in this country and smash objectifying stereotypes about “submissive” Lao women.

“I really hate that when people make a film in Laos they want to exoticize our people,” she says. “I don’t want to do that. I want people to see that the real Laos is so different from that.”

By presenting multi-layered female characters she challenges out-dated notions of society. Chanthaly was the country’s first women-driven film, and Dearest Sister tells the story of Nok, who has trouble adjusting to life in Vientiane after moving from her small village in southern Laos to care for her wealthy cousin. The parable provides a snapshot of how quickly life is changing in contemporary Vientiane.

That’s an evolution glaringly apparent to any returning native daughter or son. “It was a shock coming back,” Manoi Ophaso tells me over crispy fried pork belly, pad Thai and red curry at Pintoh, her casual eatery here that serves a blend of Lao and Thai flavors. She spent more than 15 years working as a chef in New York before coming home and opening the restaurant a year ago.

“Everything had changed drastically. I thought I wasn’t in Laos.”

Though at times jarring, this transformation is part and parcel of the city’s artistic growth, and many of the new establishments that are cropping up both cater to and promote the creative cliques. Take Baan Tonmali Cake, owned by filmmaker Phanumad Disattha and his wife Kanlayanee, with its delectable sweet creations and movie screenings, and Patisserie Jeremy Herzog, with its local art proudly on show. The mainstream may still be clockwise from top left:

Paintings of monks by the owner’s nephew and enamel trays adorn the walls at Pintoh; filmmaker Mattie Do; brewing a hot cuppa at The Coffee Bar by Lao Derm; pad Thai at Pintoh; canopy beds lend a tropical ease to the Ansara Hotel suites.

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room: courtesy of Ansar a hotel

/ beyond /t h e s c e n e

dedicated to traditional expressions of art, but these spots laud the fringe.

Leading the vanguard is Laos-native Ole Viravong Scovill, one of a handful of artists experimenting with form, creating expressive paintings, performance art and installations that typically combine bright colors with darker themes, often in a meditation on women’s rights. The female form is central to her works, an attimes controversial move in a country where nudity can’t be depicted in public spaces. She is currently working on an installation that will show a pregnant woman surrounded by naked dolls, their heads dipped in paint.

She hopes that, in time, the Lao government will ease the rules and that new styles will flourish. “I want to see more new art [by] the Lao people. I know it will take time,” she says, adding, “I want to see how the Lao artists are doing ten years from now.”

Whether it is paint on canvas or rubber on concrete, these movements show a city ready to share its story in new and interesting ways. As the sun dips below the horizon, freerunner Anouxay launches into a vertiginous flip over a railing. It is a risky maneuver, but he doesn’t hesitate—he gives it 100 percent and lands deftly on his feet. Fortune favors the bold.

the details Cafes Baan Tonmali Cake Delectable cakes from just LAK15,000 in a hip café catering to Vientiane’s cool young set. fb.com/ BaantonmaliCake.

The Coffee Bar by Lao Derm With its black-and-white floors offset by high archways, this sleek new venue is the spot for iced drip coffees on muggy days. fb.com/TheCoffeeBar.LaoDerm.

Naked Espresso The purveyors of the best coffee in a city awash with cafés now have two venues. fb.com/Naked-Espresso.

Restaurants Coco & Co Vientiane’s first vegetarian and vegan Europeanstyle restaurant in a charming downtown location. 856-30/9621704; mains LAK25,000–42,000.

Doi Ka Noi Delightful chef-owner Noi serves up a menu of inspired authentic Lao cuisine that changes daily. fb.com/DoiKaNoi; mains LAK30,000–50,000.

Pintoh With painted enamel platters adorning the walls and dishes served in pintoh, or tiffin boxes, this Lao-Thai fusion joint has a sweet old-school vibe. fb.com/PintohVTE01; mains LAK20,000–30,000.

Shops + galleries Birds Follow Spring From carefully crafted reclaimed wood furniture to chic textiles and Lao tea from Kinnari, this concept store has style in spades. fb.com/ birdsfollowspring.

I:cat Gallery Opened in 2009 by Australian Catherine O’Brien to showcase expat and local artists, including a recent display from Ole Viravong Scovill. fb.com/ icatgallery.

T’Shop lai Gallery An upstairs gallery displays the work of Lao and international artists, while the downstairs shop sells fragrant local soaps and balms, and furniture from salvage- and natural-handicrafts collectives.

856-21/223-178; laococo.com. hotels Ansara Hotel In a tranquil location down a quiet lane in the historic center of the capital, this sophisticated boutique offers elegance in a relaxed setting. ansarahotel.com; doubles from US$168.

Crowne Plaza A bright new hotel next to Chao Fa Ngum Park, with pastel-toned rooms, a spa and a large infinity pool. ihg.com; doubles from US$113.

from top: B-boy C-Lil busts a move in front of Patu Xai; a wooden stool from Birds Follow Spring; a sweet slice of strawberry sponge cake from Baan Tonmali Cake; Catherine O’Brien, the curator at I:cat gallery, which displays works by local artists.

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/ beyond /d i s c o v e r y

The Possibilities of an Island

A guest makes use of a stone diving platform, an artifact of Obonjan’s previous life as a camp for Croatian boy scouts.

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As the ferryboat chugged west from the Croatian port of Šibenik, a narrow stretch of land came into view.

Rising from the Adriatic Sea, it looked like the proverbial desert island that city people have in mind when they talk about running away to one, with lush, overgrown greenery framed by undisturbed pebble beaches. Docking at Obonjan, however, was a bit like discovering a busy ant colony in what looked like virgin field grass—if that ant colony were made up of millennials in bathing suits working on laptops, all swaying to the faint but steady thump of electronic music. Upon arrival, I was handed a cocktail and an hour-by-hour itinerary of “fun” science talks and a yoga class named after a Nirvana song (“Come as You Are”). A redhead named Lorna was excited about a training session with a man named Chakabars Clarke.

“Chakabars is, like, super famous for his philosophy on veganism,” she said. “And he’s really big on social media.”

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Until very recently, Obonjan truly was uninhabited. Developed in the 1970s as a camp for Croatian boy scouts, it had been sitting abandoned until 2015, when Sound Channel, a British music-festival organizer, began turning it into a summer resort. Swimming and sunbathing are part of the draw, but Obonjan also offers talks about technology and philanthropy, Reiki, hypnosis, meditation, tarot readings and stargazing. The goal is to attract that certain multitasking young professional who, having tired of debauched hazy weekends, now prefers to let loose with green juice,

Ju sT i n Gard n e r/ C o urtesy of O bon ja n

Obonjan, a summer resort on a tiny speck off the coast of Croatia, is part of a wave of seasonal retreats that mix rowdy good times with fervent self-improvement. Irina Aleksander tries her hand at both.

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Docking at Obonjan was like discovering a busy ant colony in what looked like virgin field grass decided to try Mindful Drawing. My classmates included a project manager, an art student and two storklike Hungarian women. “I’m Lisa,” said our instructor. “I teach yoga, and I’m also a textile designer.” Lisa had the friendly manner of a schoolteacher, except that she wore sparkly blue eye shadow and a bikini. After handing out colored pencils, Lisa led a brief meditation and then told us to draw with our eyes shut. “Let the breath guide your hand,” she said.

Most of us ended up with childlike doodles, but that wasn’t the point. The activities are less about productivity than about connecting with people. “Weren’t you in my Mindful Drawing class?” one of the Hungarians, U’dyt, asked when she saw me eating alone later. She and her friend Kati invited me to watch the sunset, and I joined them that evening on the island’s southern tip. Kati, a model, manages an Airbnb apartment in Budapest. U’dyt designs a line of clothing and objects called Contentment.

“The idea is to feel content all the time, which is a little less abstract than happiness,” she explained.

Nearby, a few dozen people were crawling around with their eyes closed as part of Wild Fitness, a workout based on primal movement. “I like the concept here,” U’dyt told me. “I can be on holiday but also be useful. Plus, I wanted to try glamping.”

In the evenings, there is always music, which during my visit was provided by European DJs I’d never heard of and the Hot 8 Brass Band, flown in from New Orleans to perform in the stone amphitheater. Some came to the Hot

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Ju sT i n Gard n e r/ C o urtesy of O bon ja n ( 2 )

yoga and a healthy dose of self-improvement.

Obonjan belongs to a new breed of seasonal resorts that are to “vacation” what co-working spaces are to “job.” In Ibiza, hotelier Claus Sendlinger opened La Granja, a members-only farmhouse with Slow Food workshops, full-moon rituals and artist roundtables. Utah’s Summit Powder Mountain, a “nextgeneration alpine town,” hosts lectures, cooking classes and flyfishing excursions. You could think of these gatherings as part summer camp, part networking event.

Cofounder Dan Blackledge talks about Obonjan with the earnestness of a start-up CEO. “You can come and just swing in a hammock,” he said.

“Or you can use the platform to try to better yourself.”

The 55-hectare island is an unlikely locale for such a venture.

With its imposing pine trees, gravel roads and swarms of overzealous Slavic bees, it resembles a forgotten Eastern European village. Under Blackledge’s supervision, it has become a kind of modish utopia, its hand-built stone structures repurposed into farm-to-table restaurants and the Zen Den, a tea bar and wellness center.

Accommodation for 700 guests—who can stay for days or months—is in eco-friendly bell tents and lodges with real beds, macramé wall hangings and Turkish towels that double as blankets and sarongs during the day. The tents have no soap or bottled water, but there are iPhone chargers above the beds.

Instead of money, visitors wear watchlike bracelets that serve as credit cards. That most attendees are experienced festivalgoers (and also British) gives Obonjan the feel of Glastonbury crossbred with a 1970s Catskills colony.

Much of the programming has the inspirational whiff of a TED talk, with titles like Ecstasy and the Art of Losing Control, Applied Yogic Science and Technology, and Best Lessons from Buddhist Monks. My first day, I

A session of sunset yoga gets under way at Obonjan’s western harbor.

opposite:

Accommodations include bell tents, which sleep up to four guests.

8 concert after attending a talk by members of Love Specs, a Malawi-based charitable organization whose initiatives include selling heart-shaped sunglasses to aid African farmers. “I think I’m going to volunteer in Malawi!” I heard a young woman in a peasant skirt announce while the band launched into a blend of 90s hip-hop and funk.

As the concert turned into a boozy dance party, I left to catch Thinking Outside the Love Box, a workshop on “conscious relationships.” Most talks take place at the Pavilion, an open-air structure with a wall of potted succulents and seating made of recycled crates. At the front was Jason Chan, a London psychologist. “Personally, I’m a bit of a junkie for anything having to do with personal growth,” Chan said, by way of an icebreaker.

Chan suggested we introduce ourselves by naming our favorite foods and our relationship challenges. “My favorite food is avocado,” Chan began, “and what I find challenging is the feeling of being trapped.”

“My favorite food is broccoli, and I really struggle letting anyone in,” said a woman named Sophie.

A young woman in the back practically whispered: “My favorite food is hummus, and I’m very insecure.”

While Chan doled out the basic tenets of attachment theory, the class grew from six to 30—including the glamorous British model Poppy Okotcha and her boyfriend, architect Toby Burgess, who once delivered a TEDx talk at Burning Man entitled “The Architecture of Joy.” At times, Obonjan reminded me of a cruise ship.

Sequestered at sea, I would see the same people during breakfast at Bok, one of the restaurants, that I would see later at the Zen Den. Some evenings everyone gathered at the Pavilion for movie nights and stand-up acts, including a British comedian who riffed on kitchen appliances like NutriBullet and SpiraLife. “People are dying,” he joked, “and I’m turning my carrots into noodles.”

If there’s any discord at Obonjan, it is between those who come for the wellness and those who come for the

music, which often blares into the wee hours. Fern Ross, a yoga teacher from London, told me she relied on sleeping pills and earplugs to get up for her morning classes. Asking her neighbors to keep it down proved unproductive. “Why don’t you go find yourself?” one told her.

Blackledge, who has hired experts to study the island’s acoustics, promised to resolve such kinks by the 2017 season. He also hopes to add artist residencies, conservation projects and tree houses.

My favorite discovery at Obonjan was a man named Mirko, the island’s superintendent and once its sole inhabitant. With his leathery skin, thick mustache and scraggly dog Jimmy by his side, Mirko looks like a reclusive fisherman. When I asked if he minded his new neighbors, Mirko shook his head. “I like to be alone,” he said, sipping one of Bok’s macchiatos, the foam coating his mustache. “But I learn to be alone with people.”

On my last day, I caught a talk by Zoe Cormier, the author of a scientific exploration of hedonism called Sex, Drugs, and Rock ’n’ Roll. Cormier’s lectures had been drawing impressive crowds that chose to forgo prime beach hours in favor of ogling diagrams of the clitoris and videos of dancing cockatoos— proving, perhaps, that Obonjan’s organizers were correct in their bet that the new generation of travelers is as interested in learning about pleasure-seeking as in the act itself.

By evening, I had decided to skip the rest of the itinerary and finally go to the beach. It was empty except for a few Croatian women, and the wind had picked up, whipping the pines and sending Obonjan’s crickets into a frenzied chorus. As the sun slowly dipped below the horizon, I lay wrapped in one of U’dyt’s blankets, a large white flannel sheet stamped with the word contentment, and did absolutely nothing.

Obonjan’s 2017 season runs from June 23 to September 3. obonjan-island. com; doubles from €136.

/ beyond /t r e n d i n g

To the Manor Reborn Traditional English country-house hotels are trading their stiffness for an increasingly informal vibe.

Clive Aslet checks in.

Sibton Park, a manor house built in 1827, is one of the most inviting lodgings of Wilderness Reserve, in Suffolk, England.

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fr o m t o p : c o u r t e s y o f w i l d e r n e s s r e s e r v e ; c o u r t e s y o f H o l k h a m E s tat e ; courtesy of wilderness reserve. opposite: courtesy of wilderness reserve

With its thatched roof and a portico with wooden columns made from actual knobbly tree trunks, the charmingly humble Hex Cottage, on the edge of a forest in Suffolk, would have appealed to Hansel and Gretel.

Inside, the décor is appropriately rustic, with roughhewn tables and chairs, unpainted plaster walls, broad brick floors and a wood-fired range that you have to keep lit if you want to have hot water. When I arrived, I felt beside the door for a light switch, only to realize that there wasn’t one. I fought a moment of panic when I realized there would also be no power supply for my laptop or cell phone.

Welcome to the new breed of English country-house hotel. In the 1980s, both Britain and the U.S. fell hard for the rural-aristocratic look, following the successes of Brideshead Revisited on television and the “Treasure Houses of Britain” exhibition at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. In response, owners of traditional English estates—many of which, like the fictional one in Downton Abbey, had been battered by history—began restoring their properties to their former splendor and opening them to guests. That trend has shown no sign of subsiding in the decades since, but properties like Hex Cottage—part of Wilderness Reserve, a collection of cottages, farmhouses and manor houses on 2,000 pristine hectares—reflect a shift toward quirky, laid-back country-house experiences. At the new Soho Farmhouse in Great Tew, in the Cotswolds, guests stay in a group of 40 cozy cabins by a stream. Likewise, the effortlessly cool Pig hotels have turned historic buildings throughout southern England into rustically stylish inns centered around hyper-local, often foraged food. In Cornwall, Sir Ferrers Vyvyan has turned a cluster of old cottages on Trelowarren, his family’s 15thcentury estate, into eco-friendly lodgings. In Yorkshire, Lord Masham has reimagined Swinton Park, his ancestral castle, as a hotel and cooking school, with luxury camping in yurts and tree houses on the grounds.

The owner of Wilderness Reserve is billionaire businessman Jon Hunt, who uses the financial return

from top: A canopy

bed is the centerpiece of the single bedroom at Hex Cottage, at Wilderness Reserve; rump of lamb with spring onion and parsley mash and fine beans at Victoria’s restaurant; Moat Cottage, a property at Wilderness Reserve accessed by a private drawbridge.

from renting out the traditional buildings to subsidize conservation efforts such as planting trees, installing nesting boxes and creating ponds for wetland birds.

There are 10 clever dwellings for guests to choose from.

These include the Gate Lodges, a pair of bijou 18thcentury gatehouses connected by an ultramodern underground living space you’d never guess was there. A gardener’s bothy has been converted into the partially glassed-in, eight-bedroom Walled Garden, inspired by the estate’s original vegetable garden. Moat Cottage, a Tudor farm-house, really does have its own moat.

All of the properties offer optional butler service, and some, like Hex Cottage, come provisioned with local delicacies. Good pubs, castles, churches, seaside villages, bird sanctuaries and the Snape Maltings Concert Hall can all be found a short car ride away. But the best course of action is to borrow one of the Pashley bicycles and roam the estate.

At the center of Wilderness Reserve is Heveningham Hall, whose history illustrates the vicissitudes that have struck so many English country houses. Built in the late 18th century, it was once a swaggeringly glamorous mansion, but by the 1980s it had fallen into disrepair thanks to a series of disasters, including a fire that gutted the east wing. Hunt purchased it in 1994 as a family home and spent years restoring it to its former glory, while executing a never-realized plan by Lancelot “Capability” Brown, one of the great English landscape architects of the 18th century, on the surrounding t r a v e l a n d l e i s u r e a s i a . c o m / a p r i l 2 0 1 7

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from top: The Victoria

Inn at Holkham; Tudor farm-house charm at Moat Cottage; the drawing room at Sibton Park, a manor on Wilderness Reserve opposite, from top:

The Ancient House, part of the Victoria Inn; Holkham National Nature Reserve spans 3,700 hectares.

erected in 1837 on one of the main drives, into a charming boutique hotel. It was such a hit, particularly with affluent Londoners, that it almost single-handedly turned North Norfolk into a phenomenon. Now they have transformed it once again, into an estate hotel like the ones that were common in previous centuries, when many landed estates ran inns to provide quality accommodations to visiting farmers, businessmen, families and tourists. The Victoria’s restaurant is now a step up from a classic pub (a back bar serves delicious Adnams bitter, made with malted barley from Holkham), without the froufrou accouterments of a high-end dining establishment. “Don’t expect an amuse-bouche with dinner,” said Holkham’s estates director, David HortonFawkes. Many ingredients come from the grounds, including venison and other game in season (Holkham has a celebrated wild-bird shoot). Much of the waitstaff is made up of young people who come from nearby villages.

Dogs are welcome.

fr o m t o p : c o u r t e s y o f H o l k h a m E s tat e ; c o u r t e s y o f w i l d e r n e s s r e s e r v e ( 2 ) . o p p o s i t e : c o u r t e s y o f H o l k h a m E s tat e ( 2 )

grounds. Though it remains a private residence, it hosts several public events, including an annual fair.

I found a similar tale of transformation at Holkham estate, on North Norfolk’s coast. It is home to Holkham Hall, one of the grandest of all English country houses, which was famous in the Georgian age as the home of Thomas Coke, first Earl of Leicester, one of England’s great politicians and agricultural reformers.

Surrounding the imposing Palladian mansion, which is approached by avenues of stupendous length, is an Arcadian landscape where fallow deer graze beside obelisks and temples. The grounds were designed by William Kent, another great English landscape architect of the 18th century. The interior has just as much power to amaze, beginning with Marble Hall, a soaring space ringed by ancient Roman statuary and columns of Raspberry Ripple–like alabaster. The richness and scale made me nearly quail to enter. I felt like a pygmy treading in the footsteps of giants.

Today, the family of the eighth Earl of Leicester owns Holkham. Early in the last decade, Lord and Lady Leicester transformed the Victoria Inn, a lodging house

Surrounding the imposing Palladian mansion is an Arcadian landscape where fallow deer graze “Very flat, Norfolk,” observed Amanda in Noël Coward’s Private Lives. This makes Holkham, like Wilderness Reserve, ideal for biking. You can ride to the 3,700-hectare Holkham National Nature Reserve, one of the largest in England, where you will find marshes, sand dunes and beaches. If you’d rather stroll, you can wander through Venetian gates into the Walled Garden.

Once, its produce fed the big house, providing luxuries, such as grapes and peaches, never tasted by the masses.

Holkham Hall itself is open to the public, which is welcome to peruse its paintings, tapestries, furniture and textiles. One of the courtyard buildings houses a museum celebrating Holkham’s long-standing association with farming. Next to it is an excellent, recently revamped shop and café. But who wants to stay indoors? On fine days, the park is crowded with walkers and bicyclists. What you can’t do, however, is tour the estate by automobile, as cars are mostly banned. The combustion engine doesn’t belong to the world of places like Holkham and Wilderness Reserve. When visiting, we know we’ll have to return to the tempo of modern life.

But time seems suspended in these private kingdoms, where for a brief, precious moment, nature and beauty transcend electronic gizmos and infernal machines.

the details accommodations Victoria Inn at Holkham A renovated inn on the 10,100hectare estate of Holkham Hall, one of the most famous country houses in England. Explore the pastoral property, which is largely offlimits to cars, by bicycle or on foot. Wells-nextthe-Sea; holkham.co.uk; doubles from £135.

Wilderness Reserve Choose from a collection of cottages, farmhouses and manor houses on 3,700 hectares in Suffolk. Hex Cottage, the property’s romantic hut, sleeps two and has a thatched

roof and columns made from tree trunks. Sibton; wilderness​reserve.com; cottage from £231, two-night minimum. activities Blakeney National Nature Reserve This park is the spot for animal lovers: watch seal pups, go crabbing or bird-watch along the Blakeney Freshes, a 160-hectare grazing marsh. Morston; national​trust.org.uk.

Holkham National Nature Reserve One of England’s largest nature reserves, occupying 3,700 hectares of dunes, salt marsh and grazing

marsh beside the sea.

Wells-next-the-Sea; holkham.co.uk.

Houghton Hall Built in the 1720s for Great Britain’s first prime minister, this is one of England’s most spectacular stately homes. It’s surrounded by a magnificent park and has a collection of contemporary sculptures. King’s Lynn; houghton​hall.com.

Orford Castle A 12th-century castle in Suffolk where visitors can explore the many passages and halls.

Don’t miss the display of Roman brooches and coins in the Upper Hall. english-heritage.org.uk.

Orford Ness National Nature Reserve The place to explore the U.K.’s military history. A stroll along the trails will bring you to multiple military structures, from old administrative bases to atomic test sites. nationaltrust.org.uk.

Snape Maltings Developed as a music center by composer Benjamin Britten, this complex of Victorian buildings was retrofitted to also include galleries, shops, restaurants and a concert hall on the edge of the marshes. It holds many shows throughout the year. snape​maltings.co.uk.

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Paris Caliente

Tango, tacos, arepas, olé! The City of Light has a new flavor—and it speaks with a Spanish accent.

BY EL AINE SCIOLINO

The salsa and tango dancers

who liven up the banks of the Seine on summer evenings will be back in June. But in the meantime, you can feel the Latin mood in Paris yearround, thanks to a boom in Latin American, Spanish and Portuguese food. Now these restaurants are among the hottest places in town, where you can rub shoulders with in-the-know locals (and take a break from the French food). There was a time when Latin restaurants were practically nonexistent in Paris.

Then a few years ago the taqueria Candelaria (quixotic-projects.com) opened in the Marais with a small

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counter and four tables. In a room hidden behind the kitchen is a bar and lounge that has become an insider hangout for drinks and dancing. (Colin Field—the legendary bartender at the Hemingway Bar who was on leave from the Ritz during its renovation—mixed drinks there one night.)

Since then, a host of Latin spots have opened all over town. You’ll see a particular concentration in the Ninth Arrondissement. Les Grands d’Espagne (lesgrandsdespagne.fr) is a Spanish fine-foods store that sells charcuterie, wine, paella rice, Manzanilla olive oil and exceptional

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pata negra ham (it’s better than the jambon de Bayonne at the French place down the block).

On Rue Notre-Dame de Lorette sits Ají Dulce (ajidulce.fr; arepas €6– €9), a Venezuelan restaurant that opened last August with a façade painted bright lime green. It specializes in arepas, the thick, cornmeal-based pancakes stuffed with meat or vegetables. Chefowners Luis Alfredo Machado and Daniela Baland Aldrey started their business cooking on a food truck in a working-class Paris suburb. Now their counter and handful of seats are almost always full; those not

Neil Goodwin/500px

Tango dancers take to the streets near the Eiffel Tower in summer.

lucky enough to find a spot line up patiently to get their arepas to go.

La Compagnie du Café

c o u r t e s y o f n o s s a C h u rr a s q u e i r a ( 2 )

(lacompagnieducafe.com) opened next door that same month; it roasts, grinds and serves coffee from Mexico, Honduras and El Salvador. And on Rue Henry Monnier, nearby in getting-chicer all-the-time SoPi (for South of Pigalle) is the restaurant and wine bar Luz Verde (luzverde.fr; mains €5–€56). Opened by two veterans of the popular bistro Frenchie, it serves tuna ceviche; tacos with lamb, chicken, pork, chorizo or vegetables; and frozen margaritas and orange-and-lime-based sangritas. It’s always packed, so diners who can’t get in might try the empanadas at the adjacent Clasico Argentino (clasico-argentino.com), the restaurant that brought the South American specialty to Paris.

(There are now more than a dozen empanada joints in the city.)

For a shopping detour, head to Tienda Esquipulas (esquipulas.fr) on Rue Houdon, a few blocks away.

Owner Ana Carrillo brings in a delightful assortment of items from Mexico and Guatemala, including bandannas, colorful plastic tote

from above: The Nossa team at the restaurant; a quarter chicken with Nossa spicy sauce and a glass of green wine from Portugal.

bags, earrings with portraits of Frida Kahlo and notebooks with vintage images of Lotería, the popular Mexican card game.

Elsewhere in the city, you’ll find El Nopal (3 Rue Eugène Varlin; mains €3–€8), a hole-in-the-wall Mexican takeout place on the edge of the Canal St.-Martin that’s popular with the hipsters of the 10th Arrondissement. In the Latin Quarter, Nossa Churrasqueira (nossa-paris.com), a Portuguese rotisserie, might just sell the best churrasco-style grilled chicken in the city, and its pastel de nata, a traditional Lisboan egg tart, melts in the mouth.

Down the street from the French National Assembly, on the Boulevard St.-Germain, the Maison de l’Amérique Latine (mal 217.org) is where Latin American culture, gastronomy, politics and diplomacy come together in two 18th-century mansions. It hosts art exhibitions, films and lectures on a range of subjects. But its best-kept secret is the cozy bar (mains €9–€14). It offers a range of traditional dishes, including quesadillas, Argentinean steak grilled a la plancha and a fine selection of Chilean wines— something that’s hard to find in most Parisian shops. The place doesn’t advertise, and there is no sign for the restaurant at the entrance. You just have to know.

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Ornaments & L'or uses Thai silk to craft jewelry.

SHOPPING

A o p D i va h o l i c / c o u r t e s y o f Or n a m e n t s & L’ O R

T+L’s Global Guide to

What you bring back from a trip is often just as important as the trip itself.

In this international guide to retail nirvana, you’ll find curated, expert-led shopping tours of cities from Tokyo and Florence to Marrakesh and Singapore, along with the best specialty shops for jewelry, records and other obsessionworthy finds.

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brands TO SHOP IN ...

Bangkok Small labels are packing big style into susustainable designs.

Iconic

This bohemian womenswear line by designer Akrawut Panthumvanich is certified fresh. Their Cairo Snow collection lit up the catwalk last fall with pop-art spins on Egyptian iconography, like Nefertiti wearing shades. iconic.co.th.

the geometric veins of a banana leaf. The result is a zero-waste, highly versatile line of purses and totes. bolonalab.com.

Aprilpoolday

In a country where it is summer yearround, there’s a high demand for swimwear.

Bolana Lab

An oldie but a goodie, this leathergood brand has been churning out beautiful handbags for the past 30 years.

Their new collection is called Baitong, the Thai word for banana leaf, and leverages their ample experience experimenting with leather in a fringing technique that mimics

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Founded by Lilanan Ronakiat, Aprilpoolday is all about minimalist throw-back shapes, like full-bottomed one-pieces and highwaisted bikinis, in single colors or twotone—no prints. All of their offerings are a winning combination of flattering and classic,

and the conservative cuts make it easy to pair with shorts or a skirt. aprilpoolday.com.

the beech boxes and woven trays are totally Thai. fb.com/Thxful.

Ornaments & L'or

All peekaboo backs and plunging necklines, Vickteerut’s new Villa Egerton collection offers old-school glamour to the modern socialite. vickteerut. com. — merritt gurley

Up-and-coming designer Supatchana Limwongse uses Thai silk to craft jewelry that is modern and eye-catching, with Thai hill-tribe nuances.

She just launched this brand last year, but she's already established a signature style: conversationstarters with a wink of whimsy. ornamentsand-lor.com.

Vickteerut

Thxful for Small Mercies

Home furnishings and décor carved from local wood, this brand stands out for its interesting weaving and hand-carving woodwork. Some of the designs have a Scandinavian feel, like the lean, long-legged side tables that fit into compact spaces, while

clockwise from top left:

A canvas bag by Bolona converts into a beach blanket; Aprilpoolday's new ruffled swimwear line; Iconic rocks a nouveau Nefertiti; hand-carved light fixtures by Thxful; necklace

by Ornaments & L'or.

c l o c k w i s e fr o m t o p l e f t: c o u r t e s y o f B o l o n a ( 2 ) ; c o u r t e s y o f A p r i l p o o l d ay; c o u r t e s y o f i CON i c ; c o u r t e s y o f T h x F u l ; c o u r t e s y o f Or n a m e n t s & l' o r

/ shopping /

For cool little boutiques, take a stroll in the Sheung Wan district. It always presents unexpected surprises.

The statement eyewear brand Reve makes the coolest sunglasses. revebyrene.com.

c l o c k w i s e fr o m t o p : c o u r t e s y o f r e v e ; c o u r t e s y o f m o i s e l l e ; A n d i A n d r e a s / g e t t y i m a g e s ; c o u r t e s y o f pa r i b aw g a ; © P i n d i yat h 1 0 0 / Dr e a m s t i m e . c o m ; c o u r t e s y o f f e i p i n g c h a n g

I am all about the homegrown luxury brand Moiselle, which showcases unique craftsmanship and inspired designs. Last winter, I bought a decadent hot water bottle covered in mink here. It has kept me luxuriously warm during some of Hong Kong's colder nights. moiselle. com.hk.

Paribawga Collection and Paribawga Bespoke, the contemporary Burmese furniture brands founded by my friend Ivan Pun, just opened a new showroom in Hong Kong in collaboration with McNamara Art Projects (mcnartprojects. com). The gallery shows a constant rotation of curated exhibitions alongside the pieces of furniture. paribawga. com.

Feiping Chang’s

Hong Kong

We turn to Chang, arbiter of all things stylish and the lady behind the fashion, food and travel website xoxofei.com, for tips on how to mine Hong Kong’s shopping scene.

I love how each area of the city has its own flavor. For arts and crafts, make the trip to Sham Shui Po, which has endless little shops full of everything imaginable. I often gift custom neon signs made by old craftsmen here; they seem like something out of the Wong Kar-Wai film In The Mood For Love.

— mark le an

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New Delhi

A slew of homegrown fashion labels is redefining Delhi’s shopping scene, putting a contemporary spin on classic weaves and traditional crafts.

Anomaly

Designer Medha Khosla believes in “celebrating Indian textiles” and uses only natural fabrics— handloomed linens, textured Gujarati cottons, Assamese eri silk—to create sophisticated workwear essentials that translate easily from day to night.

With seasonless separates in a neutral color palette, the boxy

clockwise from top: Handloomed

and dyed cotton T-shirt with netting detail by Bias; a fun and voluminous prickly pear party dress by Olio; pack your travel essentials into Nicobar's Travel Bug pouch; Anomaly specializes in modern workwear; shop Nimai for the Time And Space pendant

by Absynthe Designs.

Bias

Bias was born out of designers Mridu Mehra’s and Shruti Bhardwaj’s need for sustainably made, versatile clothing that is, quite simply, not boring. These summer staples in breathable fabrics, such as cotton mesh, with anti-fit silhouettes (loose at the top and gradually tightening down the the leg) take you easily from beach to bar. Following ethical methods, they avoid water-intensive chemical dyeing processes, relying instead on recycled plastic yarn and korra cotton gauze. Bias’s basics are designed to be layered, lived in and loved. wearbias. com; Shahpur Jat, by appointment only.

Nicobar

With an aesthetic reminiscent of farflung islands in the Indian Ocean, Nicobar’s eclectic homeware, clothing and travel essentials draw in tones of the sea, the earth and all that’s lush in the world.

Neat freaks and packing geeks, make a beeline for their minimalistic pouches and pochettes, so

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you always have your baubles within easy reach. nicobar.com.

Nimai

Every centimeter of Nimai’s 280-squaremeter space is strung with covet-worthy pieces of wearable art, carefully curated from nearly 70 independent jewelry labels. Founder Pooja Roy Yadav says, “Designers nowadays marry their newfound respect for Indian crafts and prints with modern design sensibilities.” The result? Contemporary, handcrafted pieces inspired by Indian landscapes, architecture, dance and mythology.

Don a piece of your Himalayan holiday with Baby Baniya’s whimsical neckpieces, featuring resin-inset photographs of mountain scenes. shopnimai.com.

Olio

Every day is easy with Olio’s breezy, holidayand-food-inspired range of clothing. Slip into one of their billowy cotton dresses for a languid breakfast— eggs sunny side up and iced lattes, please — followed by a lazy walk in the park. Dynamic duo Aashna Singh and Sneha Saksena are generous with the geometric patterns and splotches of color, fanciful motifs such as cacti and fried eggs, and relaxed silhouettes in khadi and pure cotton to lend a fun, tropical vibe to their collections. theoliostories.com.

— mal av ik a bhattacharya

c l o c k w i s e fr o m t o p l e f t: c o u r t e s y o f B i a s ; c o u r t e s y o f O l i o ; c o u r t e s y o f N i c o b a r ; c o u r t e s y o f A n o m a ly; c o u r t e s y o f N i m a i

WHERE TO SHOP IN ...

shirts, minimalistic midi dresses and relaxed pleated pants are tailored to the fuss-free woman.

Their silk blouses incorporate details like contrast piping and flirty bow ties. shopanomaly.in.

clockwise from top left: Find

handcrafted homeware at Wise Wise; a razor-sharp Japanese blade at Kamata; the welcoming Found Muji shop in Omotesando; ceramic bowls from Japan Traditional Craft Center.

WHERE TO SHOP IN ...

Tokyo

Hand-made arts and crafts bring the Japanese capital’s past to life and solve your souvenir goals in one go.

Japan Traditional Craft Center

Think of this slightly out-of-the-way store in Akasaka as a one-stop shop for Japanese lacquer, ceramics, paper, kimonos and stonework. The center also holds demonstrations by local craftspeople. kougeihin.jp.

c h r i s t o p h e r k u c way (4 )

Wise Wise

Handcrafted bamboo homeware, vivid stone jewelry, elaborate noren dividers and even finely carved wooden greeting cards, this posh shop offers a rotating collection of practical hand-made Japanese goods. wisewise.com.

Kamata

If you’re the type who knows that there are left-handed knives or forged blades

specifically for root vegetables, then this Kappabashi shop is for you. It’s been in business since 1923 and has enough razorsharp cutlery to make your head spin. kapkam.com.

Ryusei-kan

By private appointment only, this samurai dojo is a glimpse into Edo’s past, the center of attention—aside from the serious sensei—being a blade that dates back to 1540. In addition to the wisdom of the samurai, the master here has antique blade handles for sale priced from Y20,000.

Contact Naomi Mano at luxurique.com to set up a private visit.

spin-off aims for all things organic, from bath salts to yukata to Japanese sweets.

The two-floor shop in Omotesando is worth a peek. muji.com.

Graniph

A T-shirt may be standard tourist fare, but many you’ll find here meld historic

Japan with modern pop-culture. There’s also a broader crosssection of diverse designs, so head to the Harajuku store for the widest and wildest selection. graniph.com.

Maruzen

Sure, the Englishlanguage selection is small, but the main

store in Marunounchi more than makes up for it with quality titles. There are some brilliant fiction and non-fiction accounts of Japan, so check your luggage weight limit because you're sure to walk away with books you've purchased on a whim. maruzen.com.

— christopher kucway

Found Muji

By now, everyone has marveled at the goods in their local Muji. This

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JEWELRY The boutiques and markets that aficionados always hit.

Victoria Beckham’s

London

Where the fashion maven takes her children shopping in the British capital.

Harrods (harrods.com) is such a great store for the children, particularly at Christmastime. And I like the mix of clothes and shoes at Caramel (caramel-shop.uk).

Their housewares and toys are always tastefully chosen.

I have always loved Bonpoint, because it’s so quintessentially French. They make chic clothes that aren’t overly fussy for kids.

And the detail is really beautiful. bonpoint.com.

Wear It Like Beckham

Victoria Beckham shares her favorite looks from her new kids' clothing line for Target.

For my daughter, Harper, I especially like the collared Clever Bunny dresses in the new Target line. The silhouette is so signature to my VVB collection, and it’s fun to see it reinvented. target.com.

— FRANK E VERET T, DIRECTOR OF SALES FOR JEWELRY AT SOTHEBY’S

“When I go home to New Mexico, I seek out vintage turquoise and silver jewelry, as well as contemporary artists like Estevan Castillo and Jasper Nelson. Castillo’s shop, El Rincón (114 Kit Carson Rd., 1-575/758-9188), is the oldest trading post in Taos.”

— ANNA SHEFFIELD, FOUNDER AND CREATIVE DIRECTOR OF ANNA SHEFFIELD JEWELRY

“A must for Art Deco jewels and objets is La Galerie Parisienne, in Paris (lagalerieparisienne.com).

London has the best Victorian jewelry—A.R. Ullmann (arullmann.com) is my go-to source, and I’ve discovered many of my favorite finds at Byworth & Nowell (byworthandnowell. com), in Somerset, England.”

— JARED KLUSNER, COFOUNDER OF ERST WHILE JEWELERS

fr o m t o p : N e i l S e t c h f i e l d / g e t t y i m a g e s ; J a m e s D e va n e y/ GC Im a g e s / g e t t y i m a g e s ; C o u r t e s y o f b o n p o i n t; V i s i t Br i ta i n / Br i ta i n o n V i e w/ g e t t y i m a g e s ; C o u r t e s y o f Ta r g e t ( 2 )

Daunt Books is the most wonderful bookshop. There’s one at the end of my road, and I often walk down there with the kids and we each browse our own section. dauntbooks.co.uk.

“Attilio Codognato (attiliocodognato.it) is a must in Venice. Their jewels are stunning, and rarely appear at auction. I could spend days at Belperron (belperron.com) in New York. And the Grand Bazaar (grand bazaaristanbul.org) in Istanbul has more gold than anyone could view in one visit.”

MARRAKSHI LIFE WHERE TO SHOP IN ...

MARRAKESH

Design-savvy shop owners in Morocco have turned traditional wares into collectibles.

TOPOLINA

c l o c k w i s e fr o m t o p : T e rr y M u n s o n ; C o u r t e s y o f C h a b i C h i c ; S a a d A l a m i / E l F e n n ; T e rr y M u n s o n

The French-born designer Isabelle Topolina combines her love of color and prints with her couture skills to create whimsical pieces—think Marni in the medina. There are A-line coats with wax prints from Benin, smock dresses made from hand-dyed fabrics from the Sahara, and patterned, tasseled loafers. The atelier also has a jaunty menswear collection

by Topolina’s son, with tropical print shorts and bow ties. 134 Dar El Bacha, in the medina.

EL FENN

The riad El Fenn has always attracted a fashion-forward crowd, so for its boutique, owner Vanessa Branson (sister of Richard) enlisted an industry insider. Former New York casting agent Paul Rowland (who launched Kate Moss) helped create a handsome shop within the hotel’s restaurant, with custom-made leather djellabas, vintage Berber jewelry and handwoven blankets. el-fenn.com.

33 RUE MAJORELLE

Located opposite Yves Saint Laurent’s Jardin Majorelle, this concept shop showcases designers who offer a spin on traditional craftwork. You’ll find babouche slippers in

handsome jacquard prints, tribal-design rugs made from hemp and denim, and the ubiquitous Moroccan tea set rendered in elegant recycled glass. There are also coffee-table books, an exhibition space featuring Moroccan artists and a café and juice bar. fb.com/33ruemajorelle.

ARTC FASHION

It’s no surprise that Artsi Ifrach’s theatrical designs—ornately embroidered tunics, coats reworked from vintage Berber carpets—have been shown at Paris couture week. Although his prices are steep, it’s worth a trip to his atelier in the Gueliz district just to marvel at the creations of this self-taught master. artc-fashion.com.

Fashion photographer Randall Bachner left New York City in 2013 to open a tiny men’s shop deep in the medina. Working with local weavers and tailors, he gives a breezy surfer vibe to standard caftans, oxford shirts and linen babouches. There’s also a selection of women’s clothing and accessories in the casually decorated store. fb.com/ marrakshilife.

CHABI CHIC

Call it Marrakesh’s answer to Sur La Table—this housewares shop is full of modern updates on Moroccan pottery.

Instead of arabesque patterns, you’ll find graphic stripes on tagines, cups and serving platters.

There are also Berber

baskets, olive-wood kitchen utensils and bags of herbs, from mint tea to harirasoup kits. There are two locations in the city, but the best selection is at the warehouse-size space in Sidi Ghanem, the city’s evergentrifying industrial zone. chabichic.com.

— MAURA EGAN

Clockwise from top: A statement lamp

from 33 Rue Majorelle; a collection of baskets from Chabi Chic; the wellstocked El Fenn boutique; a printed dress

by Isabelle Topolina.

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WHERE TO SHOP IN ...

SINGAPORE

The city typifies the best of Asian style and combines artisanal crafts and international influences.

EDIT LIFESTYLE

This four-room space on Tanglin Road run by interior designer Florence Lim is beautifully styled and gratifying to shop in.

Niche brands like Lisa Marie Fernandez and jeweler Ileana Makri mix with fragrances from Carthusia in Capri, a smattering of tabletop curios, beaded ornaments from South Africa, and Alba, Lim’s resortwear line. editlifestyle.com.

STRANGELETS

This shop in the Tiong Bahru neighborhood has been at the forefront of Singapore style since it opened

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in 2008. It essentially created a market for Balinese ceramics, introduced the Lion City to the tableware of Astier de Villatte, and it stocks leather clutches and exquisite letterpressed goods. strangelets.sg.

CLUB 21

COMO Hotels founder and style maven Christina Ong’s slick boutique brings experimental designers (like Rick Owens and Yoshio Kubo) to Orchard Road.

The meticulously curated selection and personal shopping are among the best in town. club21global.com.

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BOOKS ACTUALLY One of Singapore’s first independent bookstores has its own imprint, Math Paper Press, which publishes small poetry and photography volumes. Look out for the notebook with a very funny (and handy) guide to Singlish, the local patois, along with stationery and tote bags. booksactuallyshop.com.

SURRENDER

The Surrender collective has long catered to Singapore’s stylish men; its sleek new Orchard Road shop features designs from Thom Browne

and Alexander Wang, plus Nike’s exclusive Tier Zero sneakers. surrenderous.com.

SCENE SHANG

The golden age of 20th-century Chinese design reigns at this contemporary furniture gallery on Beach Road. Wares range from desk fans to ceramic tableware. sceneshang.com.

ATELIER ONG SHUNMUGAM

In 2008, Priscilla Shunmugam left a law career to become a designer. Last year she opened this studio and boutique in Chip Bee Gardens. Here, she

showcases her vibrant womenswear, such as her reinterpretations of the cheongsam. ongshunmugam.com.

SUPERMAMA

This gallery and boutique on Beach Road brokers projects between locals and Japanese craftspeople. Fashion accessories, porcelain and even perfumes are on display in the large, spare room; the porcelain with Star Wars–inspired motifs is one of the most original things we’ve seen in town. supermama store.com.

— MARIA SHOLLENBARGER

c l o c k w i s e fr o m t o p l e f t: c o u r t e s y o f s u p e rm a m a ; K a rm a n T s e ; C o u r t e s y o f E d i t L i f e s t y l e ( 2 ) ; A g n e s L e o n g ; C o u r t e s y o f O n g S h u n m u g a m

your Star Wars–themed porcelain needs; outside Books Actually; the airy interior at Edit Lifestyle; Matthew Williamson sunglasses from Edit Lifestyle; a cheong­sam from Ong Shunmugam; Atelier Ong Shunmugam.

INSIDER SOURCES FOR...

american VINYL

C l o c k w i s e fr o m t o p L e f t: C o u r t e s y o f F l a i r ; C o u r t e s y o f L o r e t ta C a p o n i ; J a c o p o R a u l e / g e t t y i m a g e s ; C o u r t e s y o f Off i c i n a Pr o f u m o Fa rm a c e u t i c a d i S a n ta M a r i a N o v e l l a ; B i r g i t t e Br ø n d s t e d ; C o u r t e s y o f L o r e n z o V i l l o r e s i

Flair is a store and gallery with a unique collection of design objects and furnishings, all chosen for their emotional resonance and character. It’s a space for the imagination to celebrate. flair.it.

Loretta Caponi is more than a shop—it feels like a home. The elaborate lace and embroidery, produced by Caponi’s daughter, are testaments to Italian craft. It’s among the last surviving such stores in Florence. loretta​caponi.com.

The perfumes of Lorenzo Villoresi are inspired by Renaissance-era merchants— scents of Tuscany meet the spices of the Middle East. lorenzovilloresi.it.

“Peoples Records (peoplesdetroit.com), in Detroit, is good for soul.

Record Graveyard (1-313/870-9647), in Hamtramck, Michigan, has one of the best selections of LPs anywhere. George’s Song Shop (georgessongshop. com) in Johnstown, Pennsylvania, has the biggest wall of 45s you’ll ever see.”

— MAT T “MR. FINE WINE” WEINGARDEN, RARE-VINYL ARCHIVIST AND RADIO DJ

James Ferragamo’s

Florence

For the best of Firenze, ask a man whose name is synonymous with the city.

Open since the 1930s, Luisa Via Roma is now recognized globally as a cutting-edge brand, discovering young design talent and exploring new technologies. luisa​viaroma.com.

These record collectors have discovered the LP mother lodes.

“Groove Merchant Records (groovemerchant​ records.com), in San Francisco, is one of my favorite shops in the world. In Oakland, Park Blvd Records & Tapes (parkblvdrecords.com) is a must for fans of hip-hop. Cosmos (cosmosrecords.ca), in Toronto, has everything a real rare-groove fiend could want.”

— JONATHAN SKLUTE, OWNER OF GOOD RECORDS NYC

Santa Maria Novella products are made by artisans whose skills have been handed down for generations. The smell is captivating. smnovella.com.

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VINTAGE

Veteran browsers on where they score amazing finds from the past.

Derek Lam’s

Los Angeles

For anybody who’s in love with design, JF Chen is a mecca. You feel like you’re in the most incredible flea market, but everything has a pedigree. I’ll find something from William Haines next to club chairs from Sweden that are destroyed and perfect.

You could lose several days browsing here. jfchen.com.

The designer shares a few of his regular stops for furniture and housewares.

“The Clerkenwell Vintage Fashion Fair (clerkenwellvintage fashionfair.co.uk), in London, has outstanding couture. The Manhattan Vintage Clothing Show (manhattanvintage.com) has wonderful items.

And high-end auction houses like Sotheby’s (sothebys.com) periodically offer vintage and couture.”

Lief is so refreshing, cozy and quiet. They make amazing outdoor furniture.

Go here after JF Chen—it’s a nice palate cleanser. liefalmont.com.

The pieces at Lucca Antiques are so inviting. It’s the furniture equivalent of buying the most beautiful basic T-shirt—it’s all about the proportions. luccaantiques.com.

I’m from California, so I love the laid-back L.A. vibe. I go to Galerie Half for inspiration. I like how they mix pieces. You’ll see furniture from names like Kjærholm, but they bring in rustic and ethnic pieces, too. It’s an eclectic, Midcentury style. galeriehalf.com.

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“There’s a place in Marrakesh that I love, Mustapha Blaoui (mustaphablaoui.com).

I’m always looking for patterns in every form, from mosaics to carpets to leather saddles—they have it all. In Nairobi, the Maasai Market ( fb.com/ maasaimarketnairobi) has incredible beads, both vintage and new.”

— DESIGNER STEPHANIE VON WAT ZDORF, FOUNDER OF FIGUE

“The shop I most look forward to visiting is Morita (morita-antiques. com), in Tokyo. It’s where I was introduced to boro, an indigo-dyed Japanese textile made with mended fabrics that are passed down from generation to generation.

They have an incredible beauty to them.”

— SCOT T MORRISON, FOUNDER AND CREATIVE DIRECTOR OF 3X 1

fr o m t o p : B e n E a s t e r ; V i v i e n K i l l i l e a / g e t t y i m a g e s ; C o u r t e s y o f L i e f ; S h a d e D e g g e s ; C o u r t e s y o f L u c c a a n t i q u e s

— MADELEINE KIRSH, OWNER OF C. MADELEINE’S

neon-green eyewear from Optiqa. koncept​ story.cz.

Botas 66

Where to shop in...

Prague

Homegrown creatives and indie boutiques showcase the Czech Republic’s inimitable sense of style.

c l o ck w i s e f r o m t o p l e f t: J J J i m e n e z ; M a r i a M a k e e va ; C o u r t e s y o f L e e d a ; c o u r t e s y o f b o ta s 6 6

Page Five

Pop in to this pint-size bookstore to browse countless screen prints from local artists, most for less than €37. Look for work by Maria Makeeva, whose illustrations appear in the country’s most prominent magazines. page​five.com.

Gallery Kubista

The handmade porcelain and glass at stylish Kubista, in the Cubist House of the Black Madonna, pays homage to Prague’s 20th-century avantgarde. There’s also an excellent Czech Cubism exhibition upstairs.kubista.cz.

Papelote

A few shops around the city carry this beloved local stationery brand,

but the best selection of postcards, graphic prints and paper goods—all made with eco-friendly materials—can be found in its charming New Town studio. papelote.eu.

Garage Store

Everything about this record shop feels fresh, from its wall of windows and cool, minimalist vibe to its curated collection of vinyl, vintage hi-fis

and designer footwear. garage-store.net.

Koncept Story

A collective of designers—and a rotating series of guests—sell clothing, jewelry and housewares at this shop on Řezáčovo Square. There’s a new concept every three months; a recent tennis theme inspired sculptural metal necklaces by Kristýna Malovaná and retro

Color-blocked unisex sneakers are the foundation of this famous Czech brand, which has been making shoes in the same small town since 1949.

The synthetic-leather Tofu line brings the brightly hued tennies into the 21st century. botas66.com.

leeda

Womenswear designer Lucie Kutálková flits from conservative silhouettes to unconventional hemlines and electric palettes in her Old Town showroom.

Collaborations with artists, filmmakers and musicians keep Leeda’s aesthetic current. leeda.cz.

perfumed prague

Bespoke scents are the specialty of this unpretentious perfumery, which opened in Old Town last fall. Set aside an hour to have an expert help you build your ideal fragrance, note by note. perfumedprague.cz.

— Morgan Childs

Clockwise from top left: Page

Five, a bookstore in Holešovice; an illustration by Maria Makeeva; a wrap coat by Lucie Kutálková at Leeda; sneakers at Botas 66, in Skořepka.

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Thousands of families are healthier thanks to skilled professionals like Dr. Seuss.

Reading makes us feel good. It makes us smile. Think. Question. You could say it empowers us to be healthier human beings. Room to Read has published millions of original children’s books in more than 20 languages.

Local authors and illustrators are providing kids throughout Asia and Africa with reading material that’s relevant to their lives. Imagine a world where every child learns to read. Then imagine yourself helping us get there.

Because when books are in the picture, anyone can turn the page. Read more at roomtoread.org/asiapacific.

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Breaking the Ice

A savvy traveler’s guide to meeting new people. By Veronica Inveen

s o u r c e I l l u s t r at i o n : c o u r t e s y o f p l ay b u zz . c o m

Illustr ated by Autchar a Panphai

Approaching strangers can be daunting. Even the most intrepid travelers might not know where to start in seeking out like-minded souls on the road. But studies show that we routinely underestimate people’s interest in meeting one another, and as a result we all end up missing out. Making random connections boosts overall happiness, according to Nicholas Epley, a professor of behavioral science at the University of Chicago. From trains and planes to parks, bars and museums, opportunities to make a friend are everywhere. Here, we offer tips for overcoming apprehensions about pursuing new pals while traveling. t r a v e l a n d l e i s u r e a s i a . c o m / a p r i l 2 0 1 7

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Convivial Countries

When it comes to making pals, not all destinations are equal. Here are a few countries that are particul arly well leant to forging friendships.

New Zealand

The country’s vast landscapes may make it an ideal destination for solo travelers to do a little self-discovery but Kiwis have been lauded as the world’s friendliest population (see HSBC’s Expat Explorer Survey), meaning you may want to welcome a little socializing to your meditative retreat. Bond with another trekker over the lush forest surrounding the Milford Track, swap stories with your barista in Auckland, or chat up the oenophiles sharing your picnic table at that cellar door in Hawke’s Bay. Who knows? A question about directions could have you raising a glass with a group of new friends by the end of the day. Take the country by bus with Kiwi Experience (kiwiexperience.com; passes from NZ$365), and meet travelers from around the world, hopping off and on as you make your way around the two islands. Their bus passes are valid for 12 months so you can take your time.

You’re all but guaranteed to connect with some adventure-hungry nomads along the way.

Sri Lanka

In a compact country known for its sincerely hospitable locals, it’s no surprise that friendly holidaymakers abound in Sri Lanka as well. You can meet both riding aboard the old train lines, hiking the central highlands, strolling Galle Fort or just chilling on the beach (don’t be surprised if someone offers you their rental surfboard to catch the last waves of the day). Aside from being safe, this country full of richly layered culture is also easy to navigate. Join a wildlife tour or a yoga retreat or just set up camp at a beach bar, and you’ll be surrounded by new friends in no time.

The Barberyn Reef Ayurveda Resort (barberynresorts.com; standard single room for nine days from €1,400). in Beruwala on the island’s south coast offers retreats that specialize in Ayurveda, one of the world’s oldest holistic healing systems. Enjoy nine

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days of wholesome activity while attending lectures, cooking classes and cultural events with other guests.

Bhutan

Since entry into the country is only possible on a pre-booked tour, meeting new people in Bhutan is inevitable.

Perhaps it’s your guide you click with, a shop owner or a fellow tourist. This happy country makes finding intimate connection seem simple. And with the option to join tours focusing on everything from trekking and wildlife to spirituality and wellness, you are bound to cross paths with like-minded travelers. Visit the Tourism Council of Bhutan’s website (tourism.gov.bt) to scroll through official tour operators like Bhutan 4 Friends (bhutan4 friends.com; from US$200 per night all inclusive), whose offerings include homestays with Bhutanese families in traditional farmhouses.

s o u r c e I l l u s t r at i o n : c o u r t e s y o f p i n t e r e s t. c o m / e l g i m i n i m a n

The Philippines

If there is one place an Englishspeaker can confidently strike up a conversation with a stranger it’s the Philippines. The language is widely spoken here and many locals are eager to practice with foreigners. Combine a warm and approachable population with a destination brimming with karaoke bars, beaches and must-try street food, and you’ll be bellowing Hotel California arm-in-arm with new pals in no time. If you want to get personal with the lush nature of the archipelago, try “wwoofing”—World Wide Opportunities on Organic Farms (wwoof.ph). Help out at a vegetable garden in the mountainous province of Ifugao or a fruit farm in coastal Batangas. Not only will you make local connections by staying with farmers, but you also will meet other volunteers. T+L Tip: To avoid dangerous areas, read up on travel warnings issued by your government, like the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Singapore (mfa.gov.sg) or the U.S. Department of State (travel.state.gov), before venturing out in the country.

fr o m t o p : c o u r t e s y o f M S o c i a l S i n g a p o r e ; c o u r t e s y o f T h e B o at s h e d Wa i h e k e ; c o u r t e s y o f W H o n g K o n g ; c o u r t e s y o f L u b d pat o n g

Hotel Hangouts

While the hostel famously connects tr avelers from all over the world, we won’t hold it against you if shared bathrooms and bunk beds aren’t your st yle. Luckily, there are accommodations that help you connect with other globetrotters without sacrificing your personal space or highthread-count sheets. These hotels encour age guests to get to know each other amid more luxurious surrounds.

M Social Singapore

The biggest room at this 293room hotel is 22 square meters, meaning that although its sleek-yet-quirky design is attractive, you likely won’t want to stay cooped up for long. And that’s okay because the hotel also boasts a spacious rooftop pool, and a funky restaurant with communal seating where other guests will be relaxing and waiting for cheers. msocial. com.sg; doubles from S$225.

W Hong Kong

Aside from housing two of the city’s coolest bars—the 76thfloor pool bar, Wet Deck, and WooBar, a chic watering-hole with a mean happy hour—the hotel also hosts various events each month where guests can mingle and join in group activities like fitnessmotivated dance parties and mixology classes. w-hongkong. com; doubles from HK$2,470.

The Boatshed Waiheke, New Zealand Situated on the shores of the dreamy island Waiheke off the

east coast of Auckland, this hotel has a particularly communal vibe with a booklined living room, open kitchen, shared tables and staff that is as chatty—or quiet—as you want them to be. boatshed.co. nz; doubles from NZ$685.

Lub d Patong, Thailand

Okay, we admit it, this one considers itself a hostel, but its stylish private rooms equipped with hotel standards like a mini fridge and toiletries plus the international breakfast say otherwise. Lub D’s über successful Bangkok locations have led to the opening of their first southern venture in bustling Patong on Phuket last year. Here, potential buds are aplenty. With a co-working space, a muay Thai gym and a fun poolside bar that hosts happy-hour deals and themed parties, it’ll be tough not to mingle with other island-goers.

If all else fails, cop a jug of mojitos, concocted with local rum—as they say, sharing is caring. lubd.com; private rooms from Bt1,000.

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Online Amigos

of ten, the easiest way to avoid the anxiet yprovoking act of introducing yourself to a str anger in public is by corresponding online beforehand. Go on— check out these sites and apps to give yourself a friendly head start.

movement while in Singapore.

Meetup is your all-access pass to hundreds of free group activities organized by locals.

Whatever your niche is, there is probably an event that will strike your fancy. (Yes, there’s someone out there who loves ultimate frisbee just as much as you do). meetup.com.

Vayable

Party with a Local

You’ll never have to hit the town on your own with this aptly named app that unites partiers in more than 150 countries. Whether it’s to grab a drink, meet festivalgoers or find parties and events in town, you’ll be able to connect with both locals and foreigners looking to have a good time. Hit a speakeasy with a fellow gin dilettante or scroll through

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nearby events ranging from concerts to pool parties to underground dance blowouts. partywithalocal.com; iOS and Android.

Meetup

Attend a happy hour at a new bar in Hong Kong, join a photography workshop in Bangkok, learn about natural health in Bali or even attend a club meeting for a political

Artists, foodies, teachers, filmmakers, chefs and all the other hosts on Vayable are creating bespoke tours for travelers looking to experience local culture through trips created by passionate resident insiders. Discover the backstreets of Shanghai and share some dumplings with long-time residents as they tell stories of the neighborhoods, or fish for lobster at one of Taiwan’s popular restaurants that lets you catch and cook your own meal. Meanwhile, get chummy with your guide and enjoy having a resident connection in a new city. vayable.com.

Tripr

You have three days in Hanoi and don’t know a soul in Vietnam. By registering on Tripr you’ll be able to swipe

through other travelers who will be in the city during the same dates so you won’t have to slurp your bowl of bun thang solo. Additionally, the app lets you know which of your Facebook friends have been to the city before, and which of them live there, if any. This platform is made specifically for those looking for travel buddies, to help ensure you dodge any romantic hopefuls from the get-go. triprapp.com; available on iOS and Android.

Eat With

Think AirBnb but for dining.

Chefs and food entrepreneurs in more than 200 cities around the globe are hosting dinner parties for strangers, giving you instant local cred. For example, visit an American professor in Hong Kong for a pan-Asian feast: homemade pho, Cantonese home-cooking, fried chicken. Taste traditional Venetian cuisine in the garden of your chef, a food-loving seaman born and raised in the city of canals. Or spend the day in Tokyo with Shino, a Japanese culture lecturer who will take you to Tsukiji fish market to choose the freshest tuna for your subsequent sushi feast. eatwith.com.

Dating Apps

Safet y First

Here’s a tip for utilizing dating apps like Tinder (gotinder.com) and OkCupid (okcupid.com) : You can forgo any romantic expectation by writing a profile explaining you just want to explore the area or meet up as friends.

Try out Happn (happn.com), which presents you with users who you’ve physically crossed paths with throughout your day, or Bumble (bumble.com) — women are in charge of making the first contact and there is a “BFF” feature that allows you to browse for pals.

Meeting new people can be exciting and fulfilling, but your enthusiasm for such overtures should be matched with equal amounts of safety precautions. Stay in the know about your destination’s cultural norms, do a little digging on the person you’re linking up with beforehand, and always stick to meeting in public places. It also could be useful to learn words like “help” and “police” in the local language, just in case.

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PERSONALITY GOES A LONG WAY

Be Approachable

Take off the headphones and ease up on the angry eyes. Think about the people you’d be willing to approach: their faces probably aren’t glued to their phones, and their expressions are likely at ease. Present yourself as open to conversation and others will sense it as well.

Friendly Forays

Get involved in the communit y you are visiting with these activities, which could have you shaking your hips in Hong Kong, speaking Tagalog in Manil a or cleaning beaches in L angk awi.

s o u r c e I l l u s t r at i o n : c o u r t e s y o f B a n g k o k s w i n g

Partner dancing

If being swung around by a stranger won’t break the ice, we’re not sure what will. Perhaps the easiest way to get next-level comfortable with someone new is by joining a dance class. You’ll be forced to let loose and get to know your partner in a short period of time. A quick search for classes and events online is the best way to reveal what a city has to offer.

In Bangkok, for instance, try Bangkok Swing (bangkokswing.com), a twice-aweek social dance that brings together swing dancers of all levels, including free beginner classes. Or loosen your hips in Hong Kong at salsa fusion nights at Rula Bula (rulabula.com.hk), which take place every Sunday and include Brazilian zouk dance lessons.

Language Exchange

Take a group language class and expand your ability to communicate with the local population, or meet other folks who speak your native

tongue or favorite foreign language. In most big cities, you can find language exchange meet-ups for free via Facebook groups, Meetup or Craigslist.

Volunteering

Lend a helping hand and you may be rewarded with a new community.

There are typically countless chances to get involved as a volunteer no matter where you are in the world.

Find a local or international organization that tugs at your heartstrings and see what opportunities they have open. Not only will you get to experience the place you’re visiting in a more personal way, but contribute to it too. Check out LinkedIn for Good (linkedinforgood. linkedin.com) and browse through opportunities on their Volunteer Marketplace, or peruse VolunteerAlliance (volunteeralliance. org) for projects looking for workerbees even in the more remote corners of the world.

Stand Out

A surefire way to garner a little attention: flaunt something outlandish that will get people talking. Whether a flashy pair of shoes, a flower crown or a top hat, don something out of the ordinary and you’ll undoubtedly have admirers, skeptics and the curious approaching you to learn more.

Be Inquisitive

We can all agree that people love talking about themselves.to brag about their hometown or to reminisce about a meal they had last week. Asking a few questions of someone you’ve just met will get the ball rolling. Even offering to take a picture for a stranger might lead to an interesting conversation.

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Organic spa accoutrements at La Veranda Resort Phu Quoc.

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The lagoon pool at Nusa Dua Beach Hotel, Bali.

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courtesy of Chena huts by uga escapes

The pool at Chena Huts, in Yala National Park, Sri Lanka, page 80.

/ april 2017 / Sailing from Laos to China aboard a new Mekong

River cruise | Channeling the spirit of Geoffrey Bawa in Sri Lanka | Shedding its stuffy rep, Bourdeaux breaks out | Journey to Peru to walk above the clouds 69

Against the Current

A new four-country Mekong cruise aims to reopen the river way to China. For Joe Cumming s , raging rapids and fiery chilies spice up a serene upstream sailing.

Open double decks running the length of the RV Champa Pandaw afford sweeping views of the Mekong River.

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onshore exploration. Still, in the first three sailings of 2016 since Pandaw opened the route, the mighty river defeated all efforts by the company to make it to Jinghong. I’m hoping the fourth time is a charm.

After the obligatory welcome drink, I check into my stateroom on the lower deck, unpack and climb to the upper level to watch as the ship pushes off. It’s not long before Vientiane’s modest collection of factories, warehouses and office buildings gives way to a pastoral river valley. Long canoes moored to bamboo staves signal villages and fishing settlements along the way.

As I stroll down a winding dirt path to a Lao government jetty four kilometers northwest of Vientiane, one vessel, with its distinctively rounded bow and stern and open double decks running the entire length, stands out from all others.

I’ll be spending the next 14 days aboard this ship, the RV Champa Pandaw, as it sails from the Lao capital via the waters of Thailand, Laos and Burma to Jinghong, in China’s Yunnan province, and taking in the expansive green-roofed vision below, my trepidations about being confined to one space for two weeks dissolve and I know it’s going to be a good trip.

Belonging to a leisure fleet owned and operated by Pandaw Cruises, the 44-meter vessel is patterned on original plans from the Irrawaddy Flotilla Company, which navigated the inland waterways of British Burma from 1865 until the late 1940s and was once the finest river fleet in the world.

Our ship and its sister, the RV Laos Pandaw, that plies the same route, are engineered to tackle the fast currents and boulder-studded rapids of the upper Mekong River.

Like its paddle-wheeler counterparts in colonial Burma, the craft’s relatively shallow 1.2-meter draft means it can moor virtually anywhere, even along remote, uninhabited riverbanks where there is no pier, a boon for

I find the river’s

rippling surface endlessly fascinating, its eddies forming rich patterns around huge rock clusters jutting from the water at sharp angles.

Islets, some large enough for farming during the dry season, vie with current-sculpted sandbanks silt to challenge our Lao captain, Thao Khao, a Mekong veteran.

The first cruising day goes smoothly, and the ship pulls to the riverbank as the sun sinks into the peak-studded horizon. Navigation isn’t safe when the captain can’t scan ahead for hazards, so, for the length of the trip, we moor at night.

Sundown also signals cocktail time, an opportunity to join fellow passengers in lounge areas on the upper deck for boozy chats about life, places we’ve been, places we plan to go, and the curious things we’ve spotted along the river that day.

I soon learn that, for most of the others signed on for this trip, river travel is a passion they indulge in with regularity. I’m treated to tales of journeys down the Volga, up the Nile and across the Amazon. One Englishman with twinkly eyes and a calm, measured gait turns out to be a retired commercial ship captain who has sailed to ports all over the world. His informal observations on navigation and ship engineering are witty and informative.

Dinner is prepared by a skilled Cambodian chef, Sok Veasna, who took to the water after a career in five-star hotel kitchens. Each meal

above: Prepping for sunset cocktails on the RV Champa Pandaw. opposite: Some verdant parts of the sailing recall Emerald City.

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Shortly after we pass

Pak Lai, once a lively colonial French town processing timber from nearby teak forests, the ship encounters a powerful set of rapids, the first, it turns out, of many to come. The vessel sways from side to side, with enough intensity that as I walk the decks to get a better view of the roiling waters, I have to grab roof stanchions for support.

As the ship’s engines struggle against the current, and the captain expertly steers through and around the shoals, two Lao crew members rush to the gunwales of the lower deck along both sides to shove long bamboo staffs into the river. They shout the river’s changing depth so that the captain, at wheel and throttle in the pilothouse above them, can hear.

As Saroeung later explains to me, whenever the depth falls below two meters, there’s a risk of damaging the ship’s rudder or propellers. At

april 2017 / t r av el andleisure asia .com

that depth, the captain drops speed and if numbers continue to decline, he must consider halting the voyage.

The bouncing of the ship and the urgency of the crewmembers is thrilling, until a loud, grinding clunk comes from the stern, just as we clear the shoals. The ship continues upstream, but well before sundown we make an unscheduled stop near a village so that the crew can replace a damaged propeller.

Sai takes the opportunity to take us on a walk through a nearby village—which not even he has seen before.

While most passengers follow him to visit a rustic local school spotted near the river, I forge ahead on my own to find the heart of the village, which, as I expect, turns out to be a market and temple.

I spot an elderly lady in a faded Lao sarong squatting down, roasting handfuls of fresh red chilies in a wok over a wood fire. With each wok-ful, she adds a pinch of salt, and the smoky, pungent aroma is so irresistible, I stop and admire her technique.

When the chilies reach their wrinkly, slightly glistening, brick-red finest, she pounds them in a large clay-fired mortar. Hoping to add some zing to the ship’s menu—the food so far has been delicious and far from bland, but I’m an extreme heat addict—I offer to buy a bag of fresh-pounded chili flakes. She fills a plastic baggie with a few ounces of the precious bounty but refuses to accept my cash. Everyone on the boat seems cheered by our serendipitous stopover, the chance to tread uncharted territory—and I’m in chili-head heaven for the next two weeks and then some.

Back on ship in time for a chilled G&T, I run into Saroeung, who assures me the propeller has been replaced and we’ve only lost a couple of hours in the schedule. He explains that our vessel carries replacement parts, and the company can have additional parts sent by road to ports along the way if necessary.

“There are more rapids ahead,” he says by way of warning. “Bigger ones near the Chinese border are the ones to watch. We don’t know yet whether the ship will be able to reach Jinghong.”

A disclaimer emailed to passengers during the booking process advises those traveling in the low-water season from December to April that if the ship’s master decides the water is too low, passengers will be transferred by speedboat to Jinghong from as close to the China border as the ship can reach. We’re all praying it doesn’t come to that; we want to be aboard the first cruiser ever to make it all the way.

Most nights aboard ship, I head to my

stateroom to relax and end up falling asleep far earlier than I normally would at home in Bangkok. There’s no distracting Wi-Fi on board (an increasing anomaly in even the most remote places), and no nightlife other than drinking in the bar lounge.

Finished in teak and brass, my stateroom measures a cozy 16 square meters, and includes an en-suite bathroom, wardrobe and writing desk. Louvered French doors can be pulled open for ever-changing river views.

a l l p h o t o s i n t h i s s t o r y c o u r t e s y o f pa n d aw r i v e r e x p e d i t i o n s , e x c e p t o p p o s i t e , b o t t o m : Pr a s i t J a n g d e c h a r

Watching the world float by from a perch in southern China. opposite from top: A stop in Sagaing, Burma; Wat Rong Khun, an art installation in the form of a temple in Chiang Rai, Thailand.

offers a different set menu with three choices for the main course, and Thai, Lao, Cambodian, Chinese and Vietnamese flavor profiles guiding the way. There’s also a buffet heaving with salads, appetizers and dessert. An impressive wine list has me bouncing back and forth between France, Italy and Australia.

Every evening after dinner, purser Saroeung Em, a friendly Cambodian who has been with Pandaw since 2004, delivers a brief navigation report along with a description of the next day’s itinerary. Some evenings our Lao guide, Sai, offers short lectures on culture or geography. My favorite is the night Sai waxes nostalgic about how the streams and rivers of his childhood provided food, transport, hydration, hygiene and recreation to his family, friends and neighbors.

The ship pushes off each morning just after sunrise unless fog or heavy mist obscures the view ahead. We’re fortunate to experience this only once, on day three, when a lovely fog bank slides down from the mountains and over the Mekong. It melts away less than two hours after sunrise and we’re on our way.

It’s tempting to spend nearly all day lying in bed, watching the world float by.

During my first week on the RV Champa Pandaw, I finish writing three articles, change the strings on my neglected Breedlove acoustic guitar, and read Clothes, Clothes Clothes, Music, Music, Music, Boys, Boys, Boys, Viv Albertine’s sharply written chronicle of life in London’s 80s music scene. I rarely get the chance to read for pleasure, and I’m soon into a novel I’ve wanted to read for years. Riverboat living has its benefits.

Most days we stop in late afternoon for a hike. One brings us to a small tribal Kmu village, set back from the Mekong amidst lush jungle. Another day we visit a more cosmopolitan settlement of lowland Lao, Hmong and Kmu families. Often the villagers are surprised to see us, but we receive nothing short of warm welcomes.

On the fifth day we come upon Xayaburi Dam, a hydroelectric-generating facility standing 32 meters high and nearly a kilometer wide. Passengers and crew alike gather at deck rails to watch, spellbound, as the bulwarks of the ship pass just centimeters from the looming lock walls. Gargantuan steel doors close behind us, and our vessel is lifted 16 meters to meet the upstream flow.

At Luang Prabang, we anchor for two days and nights in order to take in Laos’s charming former royal capital at a leisurely pace. I skip the guided tour of the unescosanctioned historic district, and instead hop a local skiff across the river to hike a web of paths linking lesserknown royal temple hermitages from Wat Chomphet and Wat Long Khun, both blessedly free of large tour groups.

A highlight of my jaunt is chancing upon a lone Thai monk who has walked all the way from Phetchabun province in northern Thailand, a 500-kilometer, twoweek journey, to help restore Wat Had Siaw.

Both evenings in Luang Prabang, I dine ashore. At L’Elephant, set in a renovated early 20th-century corner villa with wooden floors, stenciled pillars and ochre walls, I enjoy one of the restaurant’s signature dishes, duck roasted with Grand Marnier and savory baelfruit. I return to the ship with an unfinished bottle of Malbec.

The second night I stop in for a drink at Icon Klub, a cozy bar tucked away off the main drag in the historic district. I ask Lisa, the engaging Hungarian owner, for dinner recommendations, and she sends me to Le Tangor, where goat cheese salad and the house ceviche—a fresh take on Lao fish larb—finish the evening nicely.

The next day, after a stop at the Buddha-filled limestone caves of Pak Ou, we’re well into our upstream voyage again. The mountains flanking the waters grow in size, the banks get steeper, and the river is looking more mischievous by the kilometer.

Ten days and two more novels

upstream we come to Huay Xai, a semi-bustling port town that functioned as a center of the opium trade during the French colonial era. After the captain returns from checking in with provincial security ashore—as

required whenever the ship enters a different province in Laos—we pass beneath the three-year-old Fourth Thai–Lao Friendship Bridge. The modern concrete span links Huay Xai with Chiang Khong, Thailand, bringing a steady flow of Chinese exports to Thailand via a road that zigzags from the Laos-China border.

North of Chiang Khong, rocks at Khon Pi Luang rapids jut out of the Mekong like the incisors of a great riverine beast. The name means “where the ghost lost its way,” and when 19th-century French explorers had to portage around them, they concluded that the Mekong would never be navigable.

It’s another thrill run, and our quavering ship makes it through with only minor damage, this time to the rudder. It doesn’t slow us down for now, but purser Saroeung explains we’ll need to repair it before we leave Laos and enter international waters between Laos and Burma en route to China.

The Chinese government would like to blast the rapids at Khon Pi Luang to make navigation easier, but resistance in Laos and Thailand has been quite strong. Warning of the effects of 500-tonne cargo ships on the native flora, fauna and way of life, as well as the destruction of fish breeding grounds by explosives, residents and environmentalists, with support from an IUCN assessment, have so far been able to block the proposed blasting.

Meanwhile, the scenery just keeps getting better as the Mekong folds in on itself with more hairpin curves and dramatic river crags.

A cultural performance steals the spotlight one night. opposite: The ship's observation deck.

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The ship stands out from local vessels in China.

opposite from top: Limestone

karsts comprise the Stone Forest of Yunnan, China; the shallow-draft cruiser awaits a guest returning from an elephant encounter in Laos.

Two days from our China crossing, the ship makes an afternoon mooring at the last Lao immigration office along the upper Mekong. The office stands alongside the Kings Roman Casino, a Hong Kong–operated private concession where gambling is legal. It’s the fanciest river landing we’ve seen so far. Gratuitously wide cement stairs lead from the pier to an octagonal building signed golden triangle international check point and topped by a huge golden dome. While we present our passports for Lao exit stamps, our luggage is taken from the ship for a perfunctory X-ray check by Lao customs.

Strolling across the parking lot on the way back to the ship, I stop for a closer glimpse of the sprawling casino complex, which has green and gold domes and a massive Europeanstyle royal crown. I’d have liked to try a round of blackjack, but we’re soon back on ship and crossing the river to Chiang Saen, where we quickly pass Thai immigration and moor for the night.

By the time we leave Thai waters the next morning, the rudder has been repaired. We’re in a kind of immigration limbo, sailing steadily up the Mekong with Laos on our right and Burma on our left, holding visas for neither country.

Jinghong is roughly 300

kilometers away, which means another two days sailing, assuming the ship conquers the remaining two

rapids. By this point in the voyage, even small villages are few and far between, and boat traffic scarce. Taking in the emerald-green slopes on either bank, I’m startled to think how large hunks of Burma and Laos along the Mekong remain completely undeveloped.

The next day we successfully pass through Da Fan Shui Shoal, under the keen eye of a veteran Chinese river captain who boarded in Chiang Saen and who will take us on into China. As the ship enters Chinese waters, I adjust my watch to Chinese time, an hour ahead of Laos, Burma and Thailand.

A few hours later, the passengers and all available crew gather at the ship’s bow on either side of the fo’c’sle to watch as the ship enters Guan Lei Shoals, the largest and most challenging of the upper Mekong rapids.

Trepidation and excitement are evident among both crew and passengers as we scan the river ahead and whisper among ourselves.

The ship sways and shudders as the captain negotiates deep whirlpools and rocky islets, pushing the twin engines to their limit in the fast-flowing water. Waves wash over the bulwarks and down the lower deck from bow to stern, bouncing off our stateroom doors.

After a half hour or so, calm waters return and everyone on deck cheers knowing our ship will be the first in the fleet to make Jinghong.

Just before sundown, we arrive at

Guan Lei, the largest and busiest port anywhere on the Mekong, and take a mooring alongside dozens of 300-tonne triple-decked Chinese cargo boats. It’s six in the evening, but Pandaw has arranged for the Chinese immigration and customs office to stay open past normal office hours so that we can clear all paperwork.

After a handful of Chinese soldiers board the ship and briefly check every stateroom and every passport to make sure everyone on the ship manifest is accounted for, we disembark and walk to the immigration and customs offices, where officials quietly stamp our passports in the eerily empty hall.

Formalities complete, the captain finds a quiet mooring away from the main harbor, where my fellow passengers and I uncork bottle after bottle to celebrate our triumphant arrival in China. A Scottish couple who are dedicated river travelers declare this to be the best river trip they’ve ever done.

The final day on the RV Champa Pandaw is something of an anti-climax as there are no more rapids to run, no more borders to cross. Mountains have given way to plains and China’s ever-expanding urban sprawl. But the novelty of entering China by waterway sustains the travel high, and by the time we dock in Jinghong I’m ready to hit the pavement running.

Pandaw Cruises: pandaw.com; 84-8/2216-0819; “The Mekong: From Laos to China” (Vientiane to Jinghong or vice versa), 14-night cruise from US$6,300 per person based on twin cabin, inclusive of guide, site entrance fees, on-board food, local beers and spirits, and soft drinks.

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Barely peeking above the trees, Chena Huts nestle in Yala National Park. opposite: Batiks by Ena De Silva fly from Geoffrey Bawa– designed rafters at Anantara Kalutara.

Tropical Spirit The

Southern Sri Lanka’s newest wave of hotels carries on the simple, sustainable and hybrid spirit of Ceylon’s most famous native son, architect Geoffrey Bawa.

By Jeninne Lee-St. John Photographed by Leo McHugh

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he grandeur of Anantara Kalutara is less likely to hit you visually than elementally. That’s not to say the enormous hollow A-frame, one of the last hotel designs by Geoffrey Bawa, inventor of the tropical modernist design school, is not stunning.

On the contrary: it is simple, regal, breathtaking. But it faces the confluence of the Kalu Ganga Estuary and the Indian Ocean, with guests arriving via the backside (and instantly becoming the grand marshal of their own welcome parade that’s led by local singers, dancers and drummers), meaning you must later head north to the hotel’s spa or pan-Asian restaurant Spice Traders and glance back to get the full picture of the building’s angular glory.

But wait. Sitting under the big top is a powerful experience. Go to the upper deck and sink into a brown, butter-leather armchair, to the murmur of billiard balls rolling across the pool table and the whoosh of the water flowing outside. It’s impossible not to be mesmerized by the gargantuan batiks floating from the rafters. This open-air yet fully protected space feels like a medieval castle-cum-equatorial beach house. That the majestic banners come from a cooperative founded by Ena De Silva, Bawa’s friend and herself Sri Lankan-design royalty, heightens the effect. The glass of premium dark rum in your hand, brought by the bartender who knows your drink, doesn’t hurt.

That cross-breeze? It’s not just the sea air. It’s the articulation of Geoffrey Bawa’s design ethos. “In many ways, the hotel conformed to the Bawa ideals of non-air-conditioned spaces open to the beautiful landscape,” says architect Channa Daswatte, who was charged with fulfilling the original vision and rounding out the rest of the hotel, which opened late last year, including 141 rooms, suites and villas. “This was [Bawa’s] belief that visitors to Sri Lanka really came to enjoy the salubrious and benign climate of the island.”

They also came to enjoy the layered culture, with which Bawa, himself the product of an English and Muslim father and German, Scottish and Sinhalese mother, understood intuitively and translated again and again into his designs over more than half a century. He opened up the traditionally stuffy colonial-style buildings prevalent in Sri Lanka to gardens and courtyards, combined local art with European antiques, meshed the masculine angles and lines of Mies with the feminine curves of frangipani and other native plants. His design philosophy, Daswatte says, “rooted in the ideas of environmental sustainability long before it was fashionable.”

Anantara Kalutara opened last year, and besides my interest in this newest release from a ghost (the incredibly prolific Bawa died in 2003, and the hotel has a lovely library dedicated to his work), I wanted to see how evolving Sri Lankan design carries on his legacy today. So, I took a swing through the south coast to visit his estate, that of his brother, Bevis, a renowned landscape designer in his own right, and a few vastly different new resorts. Not all of them originated in Geoffrey’s sketchbook but they each take the environment as inspiration, pay homage to local context, feel fresh and contemporary, and wear their commendable eco-cred lightly, just like the man himself.

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wake up in in a room that smells like Christmas, with only the haziest of memories of how I got there: Someone gently shaking me awake at the end of a long car ride and leading me off into the black night… An uphill path through low bramble... A doorway to a building that seemed tall… There was definitely a spiral staircase...

The sun is peeking into the oblong-shaped room and I wonder, Am I in a lighthouse? A push of the shades reveals a view across a lake, and a stronger scent of holiday baking. It’s only once I groggily shower and descend the, yes, spiral stairs and a natural rounded path outdoors, downhill, to the property’s

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clockwise from top left: In the

Anantara Kalutara spa; overlooking the Kalu Ganga Estuary from Anantara's upper deck; a Geoffrey Bawa-designed iron throne at Lunuganga; through the Hobbit hole at Bevis Bawa's Brief Garden; the Anantara welcome parade; a blue door echoes Dutch style at Brief Garden.

clockwise from top left, all at chena huts: Stays

are full-board, meaning all the cheesecake you can eat; the huts boast safari-luxe interiors; safari guide Vidupa Rathnayake; leopards live in Yala at the highest density on earth; a post-safari picnic on the hotel's beach.

main lounge that I understand that I have been sleeping in a water tower covered in cinnamon sticks at the center of a giant Fibonacci sequence.

Over breakfast of three hoppers (those fermented-batter bowls filled with eggs and curries that Sri Lanka does so well) nearly too pretty to eat, general manager Oliver James explains how the layout of Tri, here on the shores of Koggala Lake, in the center of southern Sri Lanka, is the golden ration writ large, a nautilus-shell hotel map on which is imprinted the current of Bawa’s tropical modernism. Just look at this indoor/outdoor sala that serves as main house, and the right angles of the cantilevered infinity pool and of the eight high-ceilinged, stand-alone villas tucked into natural breaks in the trees at the outer edge of the spiral. When I practically trip over a snail the size of a credit card after an evening rain, I’m sure it’s no coincidence.

Tri is a place where curry night brings together all guests at a communal dinner table, where 95 percent of the food comes from within a 35-kilometer radius, and where chlorine is banned from the pool and plastic from the entire property. Classes in Quantum yoga—a dynamic style conceived by Tri co-owner Laura Baumann to help achieve harmony of mind and body—are cooled by the crosswinds blowing through the open-air sala that has sightlines aligned with the teardrop pond surrounding the water tower; and trips to an island to visit a local cinnamon farmer are captained by brightsmiling Douglas, who lived on the property long before it became a resort.

The owners helped Douglas build a house, employed him as guard and driver of their electric (of course) boat, and now Douglas is the only reason Tri can sail the waters of Koggala, having personally been granted permission by the area fishermen who control the lake. It’s easy to envision this cooperative back-and-forth spiraling outward ad infinitum.

v i e w, r o o m a n d l e o pa r d : c o u r t e s y o f c h e n a h u t s

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Thirsty pachyderms have been known to sneak up to sip from the plunge pools

y jeep driver is a hero. He’s woken up before four in the morning to procure us the first entrance tickets to Yala National Park, making us the first vehicle of the day to trundle through the gates at 6 a.m.—and all the difference.

Not 10 minutes in, our guide, trained veterinarian Vidupa Rathnayake, excitedly points out a sloth bear ambling in our direction. A black-haired bear of no relation to the sloth, with elephantine ears, inwardturned feet and patches of white on his face and chest, he is heading for easy eats at a termite hill softened by the morning dew. (Though not exclusively nocturnal, they prefer to feed at night, in the early hours and after the rains because the mud hills harden to concrete in the tropical sun.) As he scoops pawfuls of the bugs into his mouth, I wonder how an animal that size—they grow to about two meters—could survive off such miniscule protein sources.

Vidupa says he must be three to four years old because though he is dining alone, he has no scars on his face to indicate past territory fights with rivals.

A second then a third jeep pull up behind us and cut their engines… but breakfast is over. As if on cue, a mongoose (a ferret-like creature not related to geese) appears next to our door and bares his spiky teeth. The bear rolls forward off his haunches and heads back to the woods. We watch his round backside slow-motion shimmy into the tree line. I’m psyched now; later I am unbearably smug to learn that we were the only three cars in the park to see a sloth bear that day. Gold stars to my early-rising driver and keen-eyed guide.

Most people visit Yala for the leopards, which live here in the highest density on earth, for the elephants and for the peacocks, and while we see all of these this morning—brother and sister cat cubs prowling around an unsuspecting bird; mama and baby pachyderms post-bath; a bizarre cooperative mating display by a peacock with his interspecies wingman mongoose—I am also pretty impressed with the menagerie at my resort.

Chena Huts by Uga Escapes is named for the structures that local farmers used to sleep in to protect their bush crops from elephants. The property, a dreamscape recently opened by one of the oldest Sri Lankan boutique hotel companies, is bordered by the ocean to the east, a saltwater estuary, and Yala. t r a v e l a n d l e i s u r e a s i a . c o m / a p r i l 2 0 1 7

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Which means that elephants may still wander by your bedroom—or meal table, as they did during my first lunch in the all-inclusive restaurant.

The 14 “huts,” connected by boardwalks, are camouflaged among the trees by their thatched domes. Inside, it’s full-tilt safari-luxe. A cloud bed with a hand-hewn, tree-trunk headboard anchors a large square that includes a living room area and a stand-alone tub, and is accented by rattan fans and faux kerosene lamps and handmade pencils and diaries for recording your thoughts. The porches beyond rounded picture windows have plunge pools, and thirsty pachyderms have been known to sneak up and sip from them.

General manager Roshan De Silva tells me of one couple who were returning sadly to the resort after a leopard-free safari in the national park, pulled into the circle at the Chena Huts entrance, and chanced upon two big cats sunning themselves next to the guard booth. This is why you’re not allowed to wander the grounds alone after dark. And it’s also a neat iteration of those principles Bawa lived by: respecting the surrounds, having the inside open out and bringing the outside in, merging ways of life.

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isit Bawa’s estate, Lunuganga, as I did during my stay at Anantara Kalutara, and all his theories fall into place. The experimental use of space—such as a gateway to the property that in fact contains a lofted bedroom; rooms that use glass, doorways and overhangs to be at once inside and out; the blackand-white checkerboard floors associated with the Dutch; emphasis on sightlines and the horizon, which you can see in both directions through the front and back doors of the main house; fidelity to topography. Bawa owned land on both sides of a village road; rather than raze or engulf it, he built a covered bridge so subtly that from a distance you can’t see the gap in the land.

It is a large plot, but he used precious little of it for buildings, sprinkling a staircase here, a mural there, coaxing the grass and the trees and the streams to seem to do much of the work on their own. In that sense, the mostly wideopen property stands in interesting contrast to that of his brother Bevis, who as a landscape designer created much more intricately manicured gardens at his estate, the Brief Garden, less than an hour away and filled with homoerotic sculptures and nooks for trysting. (“Nowadays in the tropics, an outdoor shower is a luxury,” the property’s caretaker, who was Bevis’s assistant, Dooland De Silva tells me. “Mr. Bawa had that idea 85 years ago.”)

But the homes themselves feel similar in their open plans, incorporation of the outdoors and, Dooland points out, “maximum use of breeze and light.”

They’re so inviting it comes as little surprise that one acquaintance of Bevis’s came from Australia for a quick visit and wound of staying for six years, and that Lunuganga today operates as not just museum but also hotel, as do many of the residential properties Geoffrey designed, including The Last House, a charming, open-air ochre beauty in Tangalle. The Bawa genius was conjuring a way to make spaces feel both beautiful and egalitarian, exposed yet cozy, at once rooted in and transcendent of Sri Lanka. It isn’t hard to see why this 70-year-old philosophy remains the modern ideal.

The details hotel s Anantara Kalutara St. Sebastian’s Road, Kalutara; 9434/222-0222; kalutara.anantara. com; doubles from US$280.

Chena Huts Palatupana Yala; 94-47/226-7100; ugaescapes. com; doubles from US$660 all-inclusive of meals, drinks, two game drives daily and

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national park fees.

The Last House Pubudu Mawatha, Tangalle; 94-81/ 720-1115; thelasthouse.com; doubles from US$180.

Lunuganga Dedduwa, Bentota; 94-34/428-7056; goeffreybawa.com; doubles from US$220; no kids under 12.

Tour admission fee Rs1,250;

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daily 9 a.m. to 4 p.m.

Tri Koggala Lake, Galle; 94-77/770-8177; doubles from US$270 including half-board; trilanka.com; no kids under 12.

Activities The Brief Garden Kalawila Village, Beruwala; 94-77/3509290; daily 8 a.m. to 5 p.m.

I have been sleeping at the center of a giant Fibonacci sequence

clockwise from left: Tri's cinnamon-shell water tower; Laura Baumann teaches yoga at Tri; the resort's upscale hoppers; Dooland De Silva, friend of the late Bevis Bawa and caretaker of his property; at Lunuganga, Geoffrey Bawa meshed European and Sri Lanka styles.

Bordeaux Nouveau Vineyards in St.-Émilion, one of the most venerable wine-making areas of Bordeaux. opposite: The neobistro SolÊna, one of several in the city of Bordeaux that are helping to change its staid reputation.

I t pr o d u c e s s o m e o f t h e gr e a t e s t vi n t ag e s o f a l l t im e , b u t i t ’ s n e v e r t a k e n v e r y k i n d ly t o visi t o rs — u n t i l n o w. F r o m t h e ci t y t o t h e gra n d o l d c h  t e a u X b e y o n d , Elaine Sciolino d isc o v e rs t h a t F ra n c e ’ s pr e mi e r w i n e - ma k i n g r e gi o n is s h o w i n g a fr e s h fac e t o t h e w o r l d .

Photographed by Martin Morrell

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I confess I came late to Bordeaux. My experience with wine began as a kid growing up in Buffalo in the 1950s.

My paternal grandfather, Gaetano, who emigrated from Sicily, concocted a rough-edged wine in the backyard every fall. One year red; one year white. He “aged” it for a few months in old whiskey barrels to give it a bigger bite and watered it down for me and my siblings to sample.

During my first decade living in France, I mostly avoided visiting the Bordeaux wine region. To many, the very name means old-fashioned, snobbish and unaffordable. For centuries, its winemakers have created some of the world’s most prized and expensive wines— Thomas Jefferson was famously devoted—and they devised a system of classifying them that hasn’t changed since the days of Emperor Napoleon III. I realized that I could spend my whole life sampling Bordeaux wines and never master the vast universe of

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their history and traditions. I have French friends who so revere them that they can rattle off vintages the way American baseball fans know who scored how many home runs in which World Series. Fantasizing about Bordeaux wines helped journalist Jean-Paul Kauffmann endure his ordeal as a hostage in Lebanon in the 1980s. He kept his memory in shape by reciting daily the famous 1855 classification system. He imagined the aromas and tastes of the wines from the dark and cramped dungeon where he was held chained and sometimes blindfolded.

“Sometimes in the deep dark well of reality, a miracle happened,” he wrote after the ordeal was over. “The taste of cedar and black currant from the Cabernet Sauvignon, the plummy aroma of the Merlot, returned to me.”

It was with the Bordeaux mystique in mind that early one morning, under clouds pregnant with rain, I boarded a riverboat to take me up the Garonne into the city of Bordeaux. As I made my way through the slow-moving waters, it was as if I were being ferried from the 18th century into the future: I passed rows of low, elegant limestone buildings that, in prerevolutionary times, had defined the city as a center of wealth and the most important port in France.

Then suddenly, as if the wine god Dionysus had willed it with his staff, the sun broke through. As we looped around the bend in the river, a modern structure caught the light and shone in glorious gold and silver. This was the Cité du Vin, the €80 million architectural flight of fancy that opened last June. Part museum, part visitors’

The Cité du Vin, a sweeping new complex that celebrates wine making both in France and around the world.

From far left: The city of Bordeaux; vineyards at Château Peybonhomme-lesTours.

center, part mini theme park, it was born of a collaboration among a number of players, including the city of Bordeaux, the Bordeaux Wine Council and Crédit Agricole Aquitaine bank. Its stated mission is to promote “the cultural, universal and living heritage that is wine” to visitors from around the world.

Some say the structure is poetry in motion: a thick, curved appendage representing wine swirling in a glass atop a vast round vase. Others call it a metallic whale with a funny-looking tail. Its two French architects describe it as “an evocation.” No matter. For the residents and vintners of the region, it is the symbol of Bordeaux’s quest to both revive its principal city and to shake off centuries of insularity and moribund tradition. As I traveled around the city and into the vineyards beyond, I could see efforts everywhere to turn the epicenter of old-world wine making into a more modern, global capital of wine.

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here was a time when the city of Bordeaux, much like the surrounding wine country, was an unwelcoming destination—the kind of place you got in and out of quickly. The first time I visited, years ago, I found a city of darkness with its back to the river and buildings veiled in 100 years of soot. That was before Alain Juppé, the former prime minister and presidential hopeful now in his fourth term as mayor of Bordeaux, launched a bold urban-renewal project. The city razed the abandoned warehouses along the waterfront to create a

pedestrian walkway and bike path. It cleaned the limestone façades of the Bourse, the Grand Théâtre and the main cathedral, then insisted other property owners do the same. It installed a 65-kilometer tram system and banned cars from much of the city center. In 2017, a major renovation of the central railroad station will be complete, and a new high-speed train line will cut the travel time from Paris by more than a third—to a mere two hours.

Rather than use the city as a transit point for vineyardhopping, visitors are now being encouraged to stay a day or two, as I did. Le Boutique Hotel—a wonderful 18th-century town house with unesco status as an architectural treasure—was my first choice. Bordeaux has traditionally suffered from a lack of good hotels beyond the Grand Hôtel, which I found bland. But lately, smaller properties with more character have opened. Le Boutique has a cozy wine bar with an excellent selection, along with eclectic rooms and suites that conjure the wealth and sumptuousness of this historically rich city.

Another reason to stick around Bordeaux now is a wave of neo-bistros led by young chefs—one of the most gifted of whom is Victor Ostronzec of Soléna, a small,

“ I fou n d no h i n t of the red ca rpets, v iol i n m usic, or orc h i d -f i l l e d di n i ng rooms t h at ch a r act er ize t he b e s t- k n o w n c h Ât e au x

”

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Tomato with anchovy and citrus confit at Soléna. opposite: The Harmony Room at La Grande Maison.

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stark place on Rue Chauffour that he took over last year.

Ostronzec insisted I try nearly everything, including gambas with pea purée and roasted lemon, mixed raw and cooked green and white asparagus with a pistachio vinaigrette, sea bass with cauliflower emulsion, and ris de veau with caramelized onions. I was too full for dessert.

No way, he said, serving me his specialty: a version of baba au rhum wrapped in whipped cream, with fresh berries and a quenelle of olive-oil sorbet on the side. I never order baba au rhum—it reminds me of the syrupysweet versions I had as a kid. But this baba was in another league—a gastronomic souvenir I will cherish.

My friend Jean-Claude Ribaut, a Parisian food critic, was also in town and stressed the need to balance the nouveau dining experience with classic Bordeaux cuisine at Brasserie Bordelaise, in the old city center. It is always packed with locals who come for the excellent foie gras, oysters and local sausage. In season, the must-have dish is lamprey prepared by boiling its blood down into a thick sauce with red wine, onions, leeks, cloves and lardons. I found it heavenly.

We hopped the tram for the short trip to the Chartrons quarter, where British, Flemish and Irish wine merchants once lived and traded. Lately, it has morphed into a cool, gentrified neighborhood of residential lofts, art galleries, restaurants and boutiques. Part of its charm is that it is still in the stages of becoming: some abandoned buildings stand out in their sooty blackness, while others have been scrubbed to a creamy beige.

It’s against this backdrop that the Cité du Vin makes a Guggenheim Bilbao–esque impression. Inside, what’s most striking is how much it breaks from the usual Bordeaux chauvinism by focusing on the global impact of wine in history. Latitude20 wine bar stocks 800 wines from more than 70 countries; the Belvédère is the place for a glass of non-Bordeaux; the two restaurants are a snack bar and a more upscale place with panoramic views and a modern French menu that rotates with the seasons.

At the Cité’s core is an exhibition space created by the London-based museum-design firm Casson Mann. Its entrance will dazzle: three enormous screens show helicopter footage of wine terrains from around the globe; the films flow over you as you sit. My favorite space was the slightly risqué, 18-and-over Bacchus & Vénus room, where I reclined on a red sofa, gazed up at ceiling projections of paintings lush with the sensuality of wine, and listened to wine-inspired poetry. Ringing the room are peep shows, including one containing an elaborate handblown wineglass in the shape of a penis.

For French officialdom, the museum is a celebration of the greatness of Bordeaux. President François Hollande called it “a success for France,” and Mayor Juppé praised it as “a beacon for Bordeaux.”

For the people and the winemakers of Bordeaux, the museum—with its fluid and daring design, its shiny façade that changes color with the time of day— represents even more: a feeling of optimism about the future that’s often lacking in France these days.

A baba au rhum at the restaurant at La Grande Maison hotel, in Bordeaux. Left: The hotel’s lobby. right: Inside the Cité du Vin.

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set out the next day on a vineyard tour, to see how the hopefulness of the Cité du Vin has permeated wine country itself. There are some 6,500 wineries spread across 110,000 hectares of the surrounding province.

It’s the country’s biggest designated-wine-producing region—three times larger than New Zealand’s wine territory and about the same size as Chile’s. In 2015, some 640 million bottles of Bordeaux were sold around the world, ranging from the ordinary to the excellent.

There’s a ritualized way its most prestigious bottles are sold—a process, called en primeur, that creates distance from the consumer. Every spring, the owners of the most prized châteaux invite thousands of wine merchants, experts and journalists to taste the latest harvest. Each imagines what the wine will taste like when it reaches maturity, and their predictions set its price.

Traditions like these had made Bordeaux a stuffy, oldfashioned place to visit. It was hard for a visitor without a wine pedigree to tour the most famous châteaux, and if you were able to snag an invitation, the reception could be cold and formal. I always found the smaller regions, like the Loire and Burgundy, less forbidding.

But in recent years, fierce global competition has forced Bordeaux winemakers into the 21st century. Estate owners have had to modernize their methods, rebuild their cellars, and open their doors to outsiders. A “grands crus” weekend each May gives the public the chance to taste wines from the region’s 118 top producers, while Bordeaux Fête le Vin, held every other June on the banks of

the Garonne, is touted as one of the largest wine-tastingtourism events in the world. There’s now the Urban Wine Trail through the city—a self-guiding itinerary that lets you sample Bordeaux wines at more than a dozen places.

As part of its campaign to democratize the Bordeaux wine world, the Wine Council also promotes themed wine tours of vineyards owned by women or younger vignerons or of ones that feature contemporary art or sculpture gardens. I followed its suggestion of a trip to the down-toearth Blaye region, site of the 17th-century citadel complex built by Louis XIV’s military engineer Vauban to defend Bordeaux from maritime invasions. I found no hint of the red carpets, violin music or orchid-filled dining rooms that characterize the best-known and most promoted châteaux. But I did discover Château la Grolet, where 31-year-old Rachel Hubert uses biodynamic farming methods—no pesticides—on vines set in 30 hectares of meadows and woods, and her 35-year-old brother, Guillaume, is experimenting with storing wine in terra-cotta amphorae from Italy.

“Some visitors who come to Bordeaux are label drinkers—they only want to visit the ‘greats,’ ” Allan Sichel, a Bordeaux wine distributor and president of the Wine Council, told me at one of his own vineyards. “The greats are great, and we are very proud of them, but there are so many other wines. I ask them if a wine is twenty times better just because it is twenty times more expensive. I tell them, ‘Visit at least one modest place. For very little money, you can find an excellent Bordeaux— perfect, clean, technically advanced.’ ” As worthwhile as the modest places are, much of the new Bordeaux approach is about heralding its wine making with architectural showpieces costing millions of euros. Foster & Partners, for example, designed a new production facility at Château Margaux with glass walls and a dozen white steel “trees” that act as support pillars.

I prefer the cellar designed by Jean Nouvel at the familyowned Château la Dominique vineyard, near the medieval village of St.-Émilion. The façade is clad in red stainlesssteel slats made by the same factory that produces metalwork for the artist Jeff Koons. They reflect shadows and sunlight, and evoke the tones of red wine in a glass.

La Dominique’s restaurant upstairs has floor-toceiling windows that overlook Pétrus and Château Cheval Blanc (with its white spaceship of a wine cellar), two of Bordeaux’s most celebrated wineries, and the village of Pomerol. Just outside is the terraced roof garden with a “swimming pool” that is filled not with water, but with thousands of smooth, red-glass oval pebbles. Visitors can walk on the pool and take a pebble as a souvenir. The price tag for the structure was €11 million—a dramatic upgrade from the dungeon-like cellars of old.

To learn more about the changes in the Bordeaux wine world, I called on Patrick Maroteaux and Jean-Michel Cazes, two crusaders of modernization who happen to be friends. In 1988, Maroteaux bought Château BranaireDucru and its accompanying wine domaine after a career in banking. Built in 1824, the two-story, four-bedroom château is a Neoclassical gem with perfect proportions. t r a v e l a n d l e i s u r e a s i a . c o m / a p r i l 2 0 1 7

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The orangerie, with its wood-beamed ceiling and paintings of life in the vineyards, is a particular delight.

Maroteaux is a Bordeaux visionary. He understood years before most other vintners that he needed to modernize his vineyard, mainly by creating a more affordable wine using grapes from younger vines. And while many estate owners keep their homes closed to outsiders, Maroteaux enjoys inviting them in. “For too long we shut ourselves in the ivory towers of our châteaux,” he explained, “pretending that the outside wine world did not exist.” We were meeting not in an antiseptic tasting room but in his living room, decorated in ocher and pale moss green and adorned with family photographs. When it was time for us to taste, Maroteaux himself led me through the ritual. “When I first came here, we were desperately looking for customers,” he explained. “I said to myself, ‘A tourist is a potential customer.’ So I started to accept everyone who asked to come. My wife got into the welcoming spirit—even though we had to serve breakfast to people in their pajamas. I told her, ‘Our business consists of making friends.’ ” If Maroteaux operates on a small scale, Cazes, owner of Château Lynch-Bages, in Pauillac, thinks big. He was born into a Bordeaux wine family, and his father was mayor for 44 years of Pauillac, an area in the Gironde department that is home to three of Bordeaux’s greatest wines. He showed me the tiny house with blue shutters where he was born, and the site in Pauillac where the Americans and British dropped bombs in 1944, and where 30 people died in two days. We drove across dirt roads and stopped at a field of vines so that I could touch the soil and feel how porous and moist it was.

Years ago, when Cazes needed more storage space for his wine, his architect proposed razing a large swath of the ghost-town hamlet of Bages that his family owned.

Cazes refused; he had grown up there. Instead, he created a “wine tourism village” with its own butcher shop, bakery, bistro and boutique. Bages Village became fully operational in 2007, and now draws visitors from all over.

“When I die, no one would have ever known what it was,” he told me. “This is the legacy I want to leave behind.” (On the day I visited, a group of Chinese wine merchants were there on a tour of the en primeur tastings.)

“I’m not interested in selling you a bottle of wine,” Cazes told me. “I want you to feel so welcome that you will become an ambassador for my brand. I want you to say, ‘Oh, Lynch-Bages, I’ve been there! I was very well cared for!’ ” Cazes works with Viniv, a small company that teaches clients how to create their own custom blends.

The château harvests, mashes, ages and stores the juice; the clients choose the vineyards and experiment with taste. There is a minimum commitment of one barrel for personalized wine, at an average price of €20,000. At 288 bottles in a barrel, that’s €70 a bottle. The process can be done on site or over the Internet.

My last stop in Bordeaux was a picnic with the winemakers at Château de Cérons. Since 2012 husband and wife Xavier and Caroline Perromat have struggled to revive the 25-hectare vineyard and château once owned

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The 17th-century Château de Cérons.

Opposite: The cellar at Château la Dominique, designed

by Jean Nouvel.

by Xavier’s family. Xavier’s father, who had been mayor of Cérons for decades, allowed it to fall into disrepair and accumulated debt. He was desperate. Xavier convinced his seven siblings—and the bank—to allow him to buy it.

From the moment I struck the enormous iron door knocker of the château, I was back in the late 17th century.

The wine cellar, the chimneys, the ceilings, the wall murals—everything was original. While the Perromats are slowly and painstakingly plugging leaks in the crumbling stone walls, sanding and repainting the elaborate woodwork, and updating the plumbing and electricity, they have also restructured the vineyard, pulled up old vines, replanted the best parcels, bought new barrels, and hired a young wine expert.

The couple now invites tour groups to wine picnics on the grounds, a practice that has grown every year since they started in 2013. Visitors fill up wooden baskets from provisions kept in a cupboard in the main hall; fresh seasonal produce and, of course, the château’s wine round out the menu. We dined in the orangerie, a fire blazing in its grand fireplace, on foie gras, duck rillettes, olive tapenade, potato chips made by a neighbor, and fresh tomatoes. Eventually the Perromats hope to set up a proper restaurant with a professional chef.

“We’re on an adventure to open up Bordeaux to the world,” Caroline said. “We’re a small part of it. It’s a work in progress. We’re taking our time to do it right.” The reality of this ambition is not lost on them. “We’re not twenty years old anymore, so there’s no time to lose.”

The details hotel s Château Cordeillan-Bages An exquisite hotel with a Michelin two-starred restaurant set on a two-hectare vineyard in the town of Pauillac. jmcazes.com; doubles from €240.

La Grande Maison Bernard Magrez’s elegant hotel has silk wall coverings, Carrara-marble bathrooms and a wine cellar stocked with the region’s best.

Bordeaux; lagrande​maisonbordeaux.com; doubles from €260.

Le Boutique Hôtel The rooms at this wine-themed property are named after famous local wineries. Don’t miss the beautiful interior garden centered around a wine bar. Bordeaux; hotelbordeaux centre.com; doubles from €200.

Yndo Hôtel A converted 19thcentury mansion in the heart of Bordeaux. yndohotelbordeaux. fr; doubles from €222. restaur ants Brasserie Bordelaise The go-to place for tourists and locals seeking traditional dishes, like foie gras and fresh oysters. Bordeaux;

brasserie-bordelaise.fr; mains €12–€36.

Restaurant Pierre Gagnaire Chef Pierre Gagnaire has made it his mission to turn this space into the finest restaurant in Bordeaux, with dishes like citrusrubbed veal with absinthe and quinoa. lagrandemaison-bordeaux. com; mains €65–€90.

Soléna Standouts of Victor Ostronzec’s updated French menu include perfectly cooked asparagus carefully finished with pistachio vinaigrette. 5 Rue Chauffour, Bordeaux; 33-5/57-5328-06; mains €34–€38. wineries Château Branaire-Ducru This 19th-century château is a far cry from the stuffy Bordeaux wine scene—be prepared to be welcomed as if you were family.

St.-Julien-Beychevelle; branaire.com.

Château de Cérons Caroline and Xavier Perromat offer picnic baskets full of gastronomic provisions and wine to visitors at their vineyard. It’s an intimate

experience not to be missed.

Cérons; chateaudecerons.com.

Château la Dominique This winery is hard to miss with its wonderful bright-red metallic cellar. The attached Terrasse Rouge offers meals highlighting seasonal specialties. St.-Émilion; chateau-​ladominique.com.

Château la Grolet Two young vintners produce organic wines on more than 28 hectares of land here. St.-Ciers-de-Canesse; vignobles-​hubert.com. shops L’Autre Temps One of the many quirky antiques shops in the Village Notre Dame, a covered mall located in the happening Chartrons district. Bordeaux; villagenotredame.com.

Petrusse This boutique stocks scarves and shawls in high-quality silk, wool and cotton. Bordeaux; petrusse.com.

Activities Cité du Vin The modern center sticks out on the Bordeaux skyline.

It is a must-visit to understand

the global impact of wine (from Bordeaux and other parts of the world). Plus, the wine bar, Latitude20, stocks 800 vintages from more than 70 countries. laciteduvin.com.

Musée d’Aquitaine A lovely museum taking visitors on a journey through the ages of Bordeaux and Aquitaine, with collections related to archaeology and ethnology. Bordeaux; musee-​ aquitaine-bordeaux.fr.

Musée des Arts Décoratifs et du Design This former private residence, which houses more than 30,000 works of art, offers a glimpse into what life was like in the 18th and 19th centuries.

Bordeaux; madd-bordeaux.fr.

Musée National des Douanes This hyperspecialized museum traces the history of the French customs authority, but the real draw is the magnificent landmark building in which it is housed.

Bordeaux; musee-douanes.fr.

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Peace

in the

High in the Peruvian Andes lies the Sacred Valley, the fertile paradise that gave rise to the Incan empire and, even today, remains a place of almost divine communion between the land and its people.

b y S t e p h a n i e D a n l e r photographed b y n i c k b a l l o n

Hiking the Incañan, the most demanding of the more than 20 Sacred Valley activities offered to guests by the new Explora Valle Sagrado resort.

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n our first night in the Sacred Valley, we blanketed ourselves in down and left the windows open to the chill of the andes. Near dawn, we woke to gold-flecked finches trilling in the fields. The Sacred Valley isn’t somewhere you go to sleep in. You go to watch the way the light and clouds interact, the way different peaks are shadowed, then exposed.

My boyfriend, Matt, and I had come to this storied place in the mountains of Peru for a week. We were staying first at the Explora Valle Sagrado, a resort on an old corn plantation outside the village of Urquillos that is set up to help guests get outside and experience the area as fully as possible. Our first activity, at eight that morning, was an easy bike ride along the Urubamba River.

After multiple cups of coffee and seconds on avocado toast and bowls of papaya, we met our guide, Luis, who made sure we were equipped. At reception, there were snacks— cashews, almonds, dried mango, bitter dark chocolate and “power balls” (quinoa, honey, dates, amaranth) to scoop from overflowing bowls. We were encouraged to dip into the huge containers of pasty white sunblock—SPF 100.

A bus took us to Taray, which sits just across the river from Pisac, a picturesque Andean village below a beautifully preserved Incan citadel with terraces that cascade down the mountain. From there, we pedaled for 32 relatively flat kilometers along a dirt trail. We rode past scenes of agrarian life that were so idyllic they almost looked staged: farmers working cornfields by hand or by donkey, women walking llamas. We passed crumbling manors and

Quechua perform this toast—called a challa—constantly. It’s just one of the many ways they act out their gratitude for their awe-inspiring natural surroundings.

I have a long history of hiking

corrugated-steel sheds that were exquisitely juxtaposed against summits and glaciers. The sky was so broad, the panorama so dynamic, that we kept twisting around on our bikes to see more. Every time I finished an incline, I felt the elevation: a slight vertigo that caught me by surprise.

On breaks, there was hot tea made from muña, an Andean herb similar to mint that is excellent for digestion and altitude sickness. When we finished the ride, we found a table set up with raw vegetables, avocado dip and a bucket of water and beer. This was in a quiet plaza in Urquillos. We sat under a towering pisonay tree with scarlet-red blossoms. Luis told us that the pisonay was sacred to both the Incas and their descendants, the Quechua, who have inhabited the Andes for six centuries. When the Spanish built a church, the Quechua planted a pisonay tree nearby.

“For Pachamama,” Luis said, pouring beer onto the roots of the tree before drinking some himself.

Pachamama, the benevolent fertility deity of Incan mythology, is the Mother Earth of the Andes. The

and a fondness for the remote, and I still plan trips around walks. Matt recognized this immediately, because within a month of meeting he had me winter-camping in Death Valley. I shivered and grinned in a freezing rain, got up in the pitchblack to watch the sun rise over the salt flats. And while I do cherish time in a lounge chair reading and diving in to the cuisine of a place, the truth is that when I travel I’m often seeking some holier connection. A moment of quiet that will leave its mark on me.

And that usually leads me outside.

We had arrived the day before, from Los Angeles by way of Lima and Cuzco. Most visitors don’t stay in the Sacred Valley nearly as long as we planned to. More often, they spend a night on their way to Machu Picchu, going to Pisac and Chincero on a day trip to take a few photographs and buy textiles, skipping the ruins in the hills above Ollantaytambo, the multiple unesco World Heritage sites, and the traditional farms and fields that still power this fertile center of Andean civilization.

Recently, though, elegant properties like the Explora Valle Sagrado have begun catering to active travelers like us by offering more intimate, less mediated ways to experience the region’s natural splendors.

Everyone brings up altitude sickness when you tell them you’re

visiting the Andes. Even the flight attendants warned us about it as the plane descended. But I only took it seriously with my first woozy step onto the tarmac in Cuzco, elevation 3,350 meters.

“I think I have it,” I told Matt.

“You barely slept,” he replied.

“You don’t know what you have.” He was thoroughly energized, as usual.

Whether I had it or not, I was definitely in better shape than the woman I saw in the airport bathroom leaning over the sink, heaving, her face drained of color.

Uneasily, I boarded the Explora charter shuttle. As it wound along the curvy mountain roads, I sipped from a canteen of chilled water I’d been given and studied an elegant hotel brochure, The Art of Travel, which asked pseudo-philosophical questions like, ¿Por qué exploramos? Matt, who speaks fluent Spanish, struck up a conversation with the man behind us. I heard the word arquitecto.

“Architect of what?” I whispered.

“The architect. Of all the Exploras,” Matt said.

The interior patio at the Inkaterra Hacienda Urubamba, in a traditional Andean farmhouse. above: The reception area at the Explora Valle Sagrado. opposite: A Quechua woman follows the route of the Explora Valle Sagrado’s Incañan hike.

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The design of the Explora Valle Sagrado maximizes guests’ experience of the surrounding mountains. opposite: Beet gnocchi with Brazil-nut sauce and jamón serrano at the Inkaterra Hacienda Urubamba, a dish made from produce grown on the property’s organic farm.

The man was José Cruz Ovalle, who has worked for Explora since 1993, when the company opened its first property in Torres del Paine National Park in Chilean Patagonia.

He designs his buildings, he told Matt, to be in conversation with nature, to enhance and expand the outside rather than insulate guests from it. Explora applies the same ethic to the overall experience, offering guests unique itineraries that often follow new trails and reach remote parts of the countryside.

Our shuttle stopped high on a hill, allowing us to approach the hotel on foot. Bridges spanning terraces linked us to a low building. I tried to follow Cruz Ovalle and Matt’s conversation about the 15th-century cornfield the hotel sits beside. Corn

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was akin to gold for the Incas, Cruz Ovalle explained, and this heirloom variety of paraqay sara, a large, white-kerneled corn also called the “giant white maize of Cuzco,” is still regarded as the best in Peru. The jade of the corn leaves was a color I’d never seen before. Rimming the field were purple-flowering quinoa plants that twitched with birds. Jagged, snowcapped mountains loomed beyond. The sky was dusky, as if stained by the purple of the flowers.

That evening set the pattern for

our nights at the Explora Valle Sagrado. We ordered pisco sours at the bar, which came accompanied by endless trays of Andean bar snacks that I couldn’t stop eating: crunchy

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plantains, fava beans, corn kernels, some the size of tiny raindrops, some as fat as a knuckle. Then, in the lounge, a guide found us to sort out our explorations for the next day.

What’s your activity level at home?

How are you feeling? The hyperpersonalized interaction with an expert makes you feel like you can accomplish anything.

Still, I had second thoughts when Matt announced what he wanted us to do: a hike called Incañan that is the pinnacle of all Explora activities. It is 18 kilometers long and climbs more than 915 meters, reaching an elevation of 4,572 meters. It features three distinct topographies, passing glaciers, remote Quechuan villages, and Mount Sawasiray, which soars to a 5,818 meters. It is supposed to require three to four days of acclimation. We’d had one. Matt seemed not to care at all.

“It’s against our policy,” our new guide, Bruno, said carefully. He was beloved by the English-speaking guests because he had perfected the language while living in New York.

“We can do it,” Matt said.

“Well, you seem fit,” he said, “but, you know, I had these Americans earlier this month—just like you, city people—and we let them go after three days of acclimation. It took us almost ten hours on the trail and the lady was throwing up the whole time.

I think she was fairly… unhappy.”

Visions of myself a whitish green, vomiting in front of a group of strangers. Visions of rain and snow and wet socks. I turned to Matt. “No way. I do not want to be unhappy.”

“We hike all the time,” he said. “It only goes up to fifteen thousand [feet].

You hiked fourteeners when you lived in Colorado.”

“What is this ‘all the time’? And I was sixteen years old!” Bruno was amused. I grabbed the map.

“Cinco Lagunas sounds pretty.

Five lakes. Doesn’t that sound pretty?” I reviewed the options.

“What’s comparable to Incañan?”

“Nothing,” Bruno shrugged. “But there’s some nice hikes.”

“Babe.” Matt was about to utter the phrase that is always the nail in my coffin when we travel together.

i was i n r h y t h m w i t h m y br eat h and the wind “How many times are we going to get this opportunity?”

It was pouring rain when we got

up in darkness at 5 a.m. It bent the quinoa plants, pounded the leaves of the corn. “Pouring,” I said, glaring, as we stuffed our backpacks.

We met Bruno and another guide, Moises, as well as two fellow guests who would be joining us. Everyone wore head-to-toe rain gear. “Do you have pants?” Bruno asked about my SoulCycle leggings. “These are pants,” I said, gritting my teeth.

It was a long drive to the trailhead.

The rain stopped, the hills greened and I lost my angst. I began to feel a nauseated excitement, though it could have just been the altitude.

I stubbornly took the lead as we hit the trail. It only took a few minutes in that bracing air before the muscle memory kicked in. It was an emotional muscle memory of going into a space where the only noise is wind. Already above the tree line, we climbed to a high alpine meadow laced with streams and carpeted with moss and wildflowers. Alpacas, llamas and herding dogs dotted the valley floor, tended by women in bright-red woven skirts and bowler hats. We passed diminutive stone cottages with thatched roofs, shelters actively used by herding families. I saw stacks of dried animal dung that, Moises said, the Quechua use for fuel for cooking. Waste converted to energy: another way these people find harmony with their landscape.

As I struggled with the ascent, Moises mentioned that the children who live in these houses hike an hour and a half each way to school. I noticed that rather than following a well-marked trail, we were

ascending the contour lines of the hillside. All of the Explora guides had trained for at least five months prior to its opening, so Bruno and Moises knew every footstep of these mountains, in every kind of weather.

They also knew when to offer up the bag of coca leaves. Coca was a divine plant to the Incas, and even today, chewing coca leaves is a mark of the Quechua’s connection to the earth. The leaves are a cure for altitude sickness and a mild stimulant on par with a cup of coffee, but because they are also used to produce cocaine, they have long been controversial. A United Nations ban in the 1960s, since relaxed, outlawed their use, but they have remained an integral part of Quechuan culture. As a lover of all things bitter, I was happy to chew them as we hit the final, steepest section of the ascent.

I was soon overcome by two realizations: The first was that I was feeling quite ill. My head hurt. I was nauseated. If I didn’t focus intensely on my breathing, my chest would tighten as if in panic. The second was

that I was going to be the first up the mountain, even ahead of Bruno. Not because I’m proud, or particularly fit.

I was just in a rhythm with my breath, my steps, my arms, the wind and I wasn’t going to break it until I hit the pass. I had achieved both the sickness I feared and the meditative state I desired. I should have known they would come together.

We could only celebrate at the top for a moment, toasting with muña tea in the fierce wind before heading into another valley and skirting turquoise glacial lakes, until we found a rocky outcropping large enough to shield us. Lunch—a velvety spinach soup, smoked trout and quinoa salad—felt well-earned.

We spent the rest of the day on the downhill, our knees aching. When we reached the hamlet of Cancha Cancha, we all splashed river water on our faces. Only then did I see other hikers, walking past us in the opposite direction.

“They can’t be starting now,” I said to Bruno. The sun had already passed beyond a ridge.

“Oh no, they are camping,” he said. Donkeys followed them, loaded with equipment. The guides, chewing coca leaves, called out to Bruno and Moises.

“They do it in three days,” Bruno said, gesturing back at the pass we’d just conquered. “We do it in one.

Because we’re badass.”

I laughed, but he wasn’t joking. I looked back at the peak of Sawasiray,

shrouded in a mist that moved like exhalations. I imagined what it must feel like to be as well-adapted as those highland children: the thin, pure air stabilizing me, walking these mountains being an act as natural as breathing.

Although the Incas never had a

written language (which blew my mind when I found out), they are legendary for their myriad accomplishments prior to their culture’s swift and bloody collapse at the hands of Spanish conquistadors.

At their peak, the Incas controlled a region twice the size of the Holy Roman Empire. Their engineering feats were unmatched by peers of their era. Their religious practices involved complex mummification and burial processes. Their knowledge of astronomy and agriculture allowed them to become brilliant farmers.

The van took us on rutted dirt roads to Moray, an Incan archaeological site above the town of

Salt evaporation ponds outside the town of Maras that date from Incan times.

Maras that consists of elaborate terraces in concentric circles. There is a more direct route in, but we entered above the ruins on a trail that started in a small village called Misminay, where children walked alongside us and giggled shyly before running back to their games. At first, Moray recalled an amphitheater, making me think of the frequent comparisons between the Incas and the Romans. But Moray wasn’t built for sport. It is thought that the Incas’ goal was to create microclimates for growing crops, like coca leaves or tobacco, that weren’t adapted to the harsh conditions of the highlands above the Sacred Valley.

As we began hiking out of the ruins, another spectacular twilight descended and the mountains’ aura of mystery deepened. I was struck by how little we could know of a culture that didn’t write its own stories. For generations, the Quechua theorized about how Moray got its crater-like shape—our guide told us it was the result of an asteroid strike—though

scientists have determined that it was caused by erosion. We have extensive, well-preserved evidence of the Incas, but much of it is inconclusive. The guides are the storytellers, the ones who tell us what might have been. On the way out of Moray, ours collected muña and cleaned up trash that had been left behind by other visitors. It didn’t feel showy or self-righteous. It felt more like the challa to Pachamama—an expression of deep gratitude for the earth.

matt and i headed across the

Urubamba River to unwind at the Inkaterra Hacienda Urubamba, a two-year-old property from a company that has been a mainstay in Peruvian luxury travel for more than 40 years. It is in a traditional hacienda-style farmhouse with dark wood beams, tiled floors and lots of colonial grandeur, with jaw-dropping views of multiple mountain ranges.

It is furnished in Incan artifacts, worn-in leather, vibrant textiles. The

atmosphere of the rooms, the lounge and the restaurant was relentlessly romantic. After checking in, we wrapped ourselves in blankets near the fire, with obligatory pisco sours, watched the sun move, and, for the first time since we had arrived in the Sacred Valley, did nothing.

The hotel calls its dining concept “earth to table.” Most of the vegetables are grown on a fourhectare organic farm that runs across the bottom of the property.

Matt and I toured it one evening, recognizing various herbs, walking fields of different potatoes, which the farmers identify by their flowers.

The farm is a reminder of why the valley has been called sacred for so long. Our guide told us that the fertility of this land was considered Pachamama’s greatest gift. The beans, corn, potatoes, quinoa and amaranth that grow so well are what enabled the Incas to build their empire. There are 50 kinds of corn and nearly 4,000 kinds of potatoes indigenous to Peru. The struggle

today is to protect that wealthy, natural biodiversity.

We feasted in a candlelit hall, the lights of the valley glowing through the floor-to-ceiling windows. The restaurant excelled at traditional dishes like lomo saltado and pastel de choclo, a surprisingly light corn pie, layered with guinea-pig ragù. The ají de gallina, a creamy, spicy dish of rice, chicken and cheese, was so satisfying I had it twice.

The next day, two genial guides took us to a Quechuan weaving cooperative in Chincero (elevation 3,772 meters), which is known as the Rainbow City because the Incas believed it to be the birthplace of the rainbow. The guides pointed out adobe houses topped with ceramic bulls that were supposed to protect the inhabitants. Red plastic flags hanging in doorways signaled that chicha—a fermented alcoholic beverage made from corn—was available that day. The women of the collective showed us their natural ingredients, from soap made of

grated yucca for washing alpaca wool to dyes made from herbs, berries, bugs. A young weaver smashed a cochineal insect, a parasite that lives on cacti, into her palm to produce a bright red pigment, then spread it on her lips. “Inca lipstick,” she giggled.

We hiked down from Chincero on one of the original sections of the Inca Trail, built in the 15th century, following ravines and streams that feed into the Urubamba. It was our same swath of the valley, but we were seeing it from a new angle. At this point, it did feel like it belonged to us.

We had been there less than a week, but I knew that glacier under Sawasiray from multiple vantage points, and I knew when we hit a dirt road that we were almost to Urquillos and the gigantic pisonay tree. The Incas called these violet and jade mountains mystical because the gods remain in the earth, and no matter how modern voices might intrude, theirs are the cadences the Quechua still listen to, the ones that call the rest of us to explore.

The details getting there Visitors typically fly in to Cuzco by way of Lima. The valley’s southern edge is only 12 kilometers from Cuzco, but many of its destinations, like Pisac and Urubamba, require a 30-minute to two-hour drive. tour oper ators andBeyond The experiential travel specialist offers two seven-day Peruvian itineraries with in-depth visits to the Sacred Valley: a Peru Family Adventure, focusing on outdoor activities, and the Flavors of Peru, designed for epicurean travelers. The company can also create bespoke itineraries to cater to travelers’ specific interests. andbeyond. com; itineraries from US$4,850.

Mountain Lodges of Peru This outfitter’s new Lares Adventure is a customizable five- or sevenday itinerary along the Sacred Valley’s Lares Trek, concluding at Machu Picchu. The journey includes hikes to Incan sites, visits to remote Andean communities, and more, with each night spent at a different

luxury lodge along the way. mountainlodgesofperu.com; itineraries from US$2,400. hotel s Belmond Hotel Rio Sagrado Along the banks of the Urubamba River, this property consists of 11 suites, 10 rooms and two villas nestled in verdant, terraced gardens. In addition to horseback riding, rafting and guided tours of archaeological sites, visitors can also experience the region aboard the company’s luxury train, Belmond Hiram Bingham (US$560 per person for a roundtrip). belmond.com; doubles from US$365.

Explora Valle Sagrado Located on a working corn plantation, this resort is designed to maximize the quiet and grandeur of the landscape. Choose from among 26 different excursions to various Sacred Valley destinations. explora.com; doubles from US$1,950 per person for three nights, all-inclusive.

Inkaterra Hacienda Urubamba The newest hotel from one of Peru’s most venerable nature

travel specialists. It consists of 12 rooms in the Casa Hacienda and 24 stand-alone luxury casitas on 40 hectares surrounded by mountains. On the four-hectare organic plantation, guests can pick their own produce to be used in their meals. inkaterra.com; doubles from US$462.

Inkaterra La Casona Whether on your way to or from the Sacred Valley, you will want to spend a night or two in the imperial city of Cuzco, the historic capital of the Inca empire. This boutique hotel, in a lovingly restored 16thcentury manor house on the Plazoleta Nazarenas, offers the finest accommodations in town. inkaterra.com; doubles from US$418. sights & activities The Sacred Valley is filled with important cultural sites. Ask your hotel or outfitter to assist you with visits to each.

Moray An Incan site consisting of elaborate terraces in concentric circles. The structure is believed to have been formed to grow

You may notice your guide pouring his beer onto the ground before taking a sip.

The toast is called a challa, and is an offering to Pachamama, the fertility deity from Incan mythology.

crops like coca and tobacco.

Ollantaytambo Overlooking its namesake village, this fortress and temple ruin marks the site where Manco Inca, the Incan prince, repelled an attack by the Spanish conquistador Hernando Pizarro.

Pisac The ancient Incan ruins here overlook the Urubamba River and house one of the rare intihuatanas, ritual stones used for astronomical observation.

Salt Pans of Maras Thought to have been created by the Incas sometime in the 1400s, these salt pools are still in use today.

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wish you were here

Lauryn Ishak / Nihiwatu / indonesia When you really want to get away from it all on vacation, choosing a secluded resort on an out of the way island is only a start. On the island of Sumba, Nihiwatu—an exclusive but do-gooder resort with one of the world’s most coveted left-hand breaks, and a mission to uplift the local population— checks those boxes. Once you’ve made the hop from Bali, take the path less followed even further to these pool- and sea-side loungers at the resort’s spa. Sure, you could hop in a jeep to get there but walking across the island through local villages and rice paddies is the way to go, a tropical trek that takes up to two hours. On arrival at the bale, enjoy breakfast, then plant yourself under the umbrella and chill. Your spa treatments (they’re unlimited all day) start whenever you want.

We would suggest after exploring the two private beaches and taking a dip in the pool. This is pure, unadulterated relaxation. It’s a day to be pampered—and maybe an evening too, since Nihiwatu recently added a spa villa for overnight stays. We doubt you’ll be dreaming of anything other than a return visit.

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