October 2018

Southeast asia

october 2018

A new twist on

Luang Prabang china’s land of karsts

A Biennale for Bangkok

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

Sri Lanka’s southern gems

Across the river in Saigon

Novotel Bangkok Sukhumvit 20 - Thailand

Modern City

Living

Every Novotel is a destination in itself. Stylish and timeless designs are complemented by warm and responsive staff.

Buzzing lobbies are purpose built for making connections and having fun. And a strong family spirit ensures children feel special as well.

Whether travelling solo or part of a group, for business or leisure, Novotel guests live life to the fullest in charming cities across Southeast Asia.

A gateway to the exotic cultural charms Thailand’s capital, the awardwinning Novotel Bangkok Sukhumvit 20 provides easy access to a wonderland of local markets, fine restaurants and adventurous nightlife. Back at the hotel, guests are treated to complete comfort and convenience in vibrant rooms with splendid city views.

Leisure facilities are equally as welcoming, whether indulging in a signature treatment at Urban Retreat Spa or spending an afternoon under the sun at the infinity pool. Food Exchange and Gourmet Bar excel at casual dining that’s also fun, with a wide variety of Thai and

Novotel Suites Hanoi - Vietnam

Novotel Yangon Max - Myanmar

international cuisine featuring natural and organic produce. At Sky On 20 rooftop lounge, drinks and tapas are served with panoramic views of the Bangkok skyline.

Novotel Suites Hanoi is a brand new kind

of hotel. From studios to three-bedroom apartments with spacious living quarters, smart décor and well equipped kitchenettes, rooms are perfect for short trips or extended stays. Extensive wellness facilities mean everyone can enjoy a dip in the outdoor heated pool, unwind in the sauna or work out with the latest cardio, weights and resistance training equipment in the 24hour gym. To refuel, Food Exchange’s buffet features exquisite Asian and Western cuisine and live cooking stations in a trendy atmosphere. On the 17th floor, the Rooftop Terrace is the perfect place to chill out with friends or colleagues with expertly crafted cocktails and stunning views over the Hanoi skyline.

Novotel Manila Araneta Center - Philippines

An oasis of calm in Myanmar’s largest city, Novotel Yangon Max offers travellers friendly service, international standards, and a perfect location between the central business district and the airport. After a long day of meetings or sightseeing, sleek and spacious rooms are retreats of tranquility with premium beds and thoughtful local design touches. From breakfast to dinner and every snack in between, the hotel provides a wide choice of dining options. Gourmet Bar prides itself on using the very best local ingredients in simple, authentic global cuisine like Italian pasta, American burgers or Spanish tapas, while Le Cellier is popular for its contemporary French cuisine and excellent wine selection. For active guests, a session at the tennis court or a workout in the gym are rewarded with refreshing drinks on the pool deck overlooking the famed Shwedagon Pagoda.

Novotel Manila Araneta Center is loved

by business travellers for its location and by families for its kid-friendly atmosphere. Next door to Smart Araneta Coliseum and just steps from major transit stations, the hotel is in the bustling hub of Quezon City where shopping, entertainment and trade meet. A haven designed with kids in mind, the 6th floor is devoted entirely to youngsters’ happiness with a large outdoor kiddie pool and a colourful playground. Food Exchange Manila delivers delicious meals for guests of all ages, from Filipino favourites to authentic Chinese stir fry and international dishes. At the lobby’s chic Gourmet Bar, delightful tapas, mozza, bocadillos and reinventions of Filipino dishes are elevated by fresh organic ingredients from local farms.

For more information, visit novotel.com or accorhotels.com

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October

contents

features 74

Peaks and Valleys The emerald karsts, cascading rice fields and majestic rivers of Yangshou, Longji and Guilin are best seen on two wheels. Story and photographs by Lillian Chou

c l o c k w i s e F R O M t o p LE F T: t o m f o w l k s ; l i l l i a n c h o u ; B e n o i t L i n e r o / C o u rt esy o f L es R o c h es R o u g es ; c h r i s t o p h e r k u c way

80

98 74 80 90

Tropical Chill Along the southern shore of Sri Lanka is a hidden collection of gems, all mixed into daily life, and places you never imagined existed.

Story and photographs by Christopher Kucway

90

All that Glitters Though the Côte d’Azur is associated with glamour and celebrity, it has another side that’s at one with its Provençal roots. By Adam Leith Gollner

98

Into Amazonia There’s no better way to explore the rich biosphere of the Brazilian rain forest than by a small-boat cruise. By Peter Heller.

Photographs by Tom Fowlks

ON THE COVER

Staying in style at the new Rosewood Luang Prabang. Photographed

by Leigh Griffiths.

t r a v e l a n d l e i s u r e a s i a . c o m / o c t o b e r 2 0 1 8

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contents In Every Issue

T+L Digital 10 Contributors 12 The Conversation 14 Editor’s Note 16 Deals 69 Wish You Were Here 106

aged cocktails in Singapore; untamed Borneo; astro-tourism; how to survive the world’s longest flight; and more.

26 Heritage Heroes Some of the Philippines’ oldest colonial structures are in the midst of metamorphoses thanks to the efforts of a few passionate conservators.

29 A New Temple in Town A new perspective on Luang Prabang through the eyes of a gamechanging resort proves there’s plenty to discover beyond the town’s heritage quarters.

36 Blissful Times The first

Bangkok Art Biennale launches this month, bringing worldrenowned artists to the city’s temples, streets, galleries and green spaces.

38 Cross the Bridge A once-sleepy

A radical new project named 700,000 Heures is poised to disrupt the way we think about taking a vacation.

suburb of Saigon is coaxing art lovers, shoppers and socialites away from downtown.

42 Winter in the Sky Mountain

World A visit to China’s Anhui province in the frigid off-season offers a unique sunrise over the frost-covered landscape.

44 Above the Fray Bangkok has a

new addition to it’s stunning skyline; the Waldorf Astoria has launched with enviable views.

58 Feasting in Philadelphia

Chefs, bakers and creative cocktail makers are shaking up the Pennsylvanian city and its culinary landscape.

62 Your Next French City Move

over Marseille. It’s time to add Nantes—just a two-hour train ride from Paris—to the mustvisit list.

46 The Primer A new emphasis on culture and the arts is leading travelers to the island idyll known as Malta.

50 Bloombury’s New Buzz

No longer known for fading grandeur, this central London neighborhood is a hub for modern dining and shopping.

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52 Thinking Outside the Box

october 2018 / tr av el andleisure asia .com

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fr o m l e f t: L e i g h Gr i ff i t h s ; f e d e r i c o c i a m e i ; j a s o n va r n e y; m o r g a n o mm e r

21 Reasons to Travel Now Barrel-

ADVERTORIAL

A TASTE OF KUALA LUMPUR Enjoy cultures through cuisine at Four Seasons Hotel Kuala Lumpur.

Modern Kuala Lumpur, while remaining a blend of Malay, Chinese and Indian cultures, also melds the traditional with the modern, nowhere moreso than at Four Seasons Hotel Kuala Lumpur. And one of the most satisfying routes to enjoy each of these cultures is through cuisine. That’s where the hotel doubles as a microcosm of the city itself.

Executive chef Junious Dickerson says this blending of cultures is most evident at Curate Restaurant. Start with a selection of Malay specialties like Nasi Lemak and Chili Prawns, which will liven up your tastebuds with a flavourful combination that includes coconut milk and sambal. Then why not celebrate the Chinese heritage found throughout the city by building your own noodle bowl, where you choose which ingredients to best suit your own tastes when it comes to cuisine from the Middle Kingdom?

To top off a great meal, Indian specialties arrive at your table, either from the Tandoor oven or with a live carving of schwarma.

As developed as the menus at Four Seasons Hotel Kuala Lumpur are, the Malaysian capital does require more exploring. So sate your appetite for the variety of culture on offer. Assistant chef concierge Narain Rao suggests a visit to Central Market, where hidden gems include one-of-a-kind crafts. Haggling over price is both required and part of the fun.

Of course, with distinct cultures, Kuala Lumpur plays host to a number of festivals. The Indian Festival of Lights, Diwali, occurs in early November this year and should not be missed. Chinese New Year is on February 5, but obviously Four Seasons Kuala Lumpur is worth a visit at any time of the year.

Chef Junious Dickerson.

Interiors at Yun House.

A blend of Asian cuisine at Curate.

Be among the first to experience this new standard of luxury in Kuala Lumpur: Bookings made at least seven days in advance will receive 15% off the room rate, daily breakfast, and more.

W W W. F O U R S E A S O N S . C O M / K UA L A L U M P U R

t+ L d igita l

+

Lookout

Kolk ata Is for Lovers of Literature Three top scribes from the capital of West Bengal show why this culturally rich Indian city is the ultimate destination for bibliophiles.

Sailing the Mighty Mekong delta Embark on an epic voyage through the lush heart of southern Vietnam with this five-star cruise that explores the diverse waterways.

Island-Hopping Across Palawan in the Philippines The verdant islands off El Nido and Coron remain so pristine you might be tempted to wonder if you’re dreaming.

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A stylish new hotel comes to Phnom Penh; find diverse eats and rich heritage in Sabah’s second city, Sandakan; the latest travel deals; and much more. travelandleisureasia.com

fr o m l e f t: a a r o n j o e l s a n t o s ; m o r g a n o mm e r ; l e i g h g r i ff i t h s

this month on tr avel andleisureasia.com

c o n trib u t o r s

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Connla Stokes

Morgan Ommer

“Cross the Bridge” Page 38 — Since his initial trip to the Saigon suburb 11 years ago, Stokes was inspired by how the district has matured.

“I love how Thao Dien has become a much more diverse neighborhood in such a short space of time with people of all ages and nationalities now hanging out together in a host of eclectic spaces.” Despite new spots continually emerging, Stokes says the recent expansion of Soma Art Café is a game-changer: “They can now accommodate live music shows and various dance events in the evening.

And from what I’ve heard there’s much more to come.”

Instagram: connla_stokes_ saigon.

“Cross the Bridge” Page 38 — The Saigon-based photographer first visited Thao Dien with his grandmother in 1975. “She had a house in Thao Dien. I remember going with her to visit the tenants. There wasn’t much there back then, and now almost everything has changed: from the street names, the district number, to all the people.” When he’s in town, Ommer beelines for his favorite Hanoi-style bun cha restaurant—“Thao Dien has one of the best spots in Saigon, Hai Hoi Quan”—and says the area has picturesque shooting grounds: “I love taking photos of the water along the Saigon River.”

Instagram: @morganommer.

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Lillian Chou

Dave Stamboulis

“Peaks and Valleys” Page 74 — A rainy trip through Yangshou six years ago inspired Beijing-based Chou to return for a ride during the sunnier months. “I have always been a biker and find two wheels the best way to see any area. It allows the freedom to discover, stop, explore and find the unexpected off the beaten path.” Between hunting for the perfect sunset and watching village elders sing traditional opera, Chou says the food was a highlight: “The noodles at the Cultural Center were exceptional with a slightly fermented flavor.

Seeing them made by hand added a depth of flavor.”

Instagram: @lililbeijing.

“Winter in the Sky Mountain World” Page 42 — This Bangkok-based avid hiker was looking for a trekking expedition in the region. “Winter is a pretty limited time, but then I read something about the ice and snow cover on Huangshan and thought it might make for an interesting Christmas trip.” With the mountains of Africa, South America, Himalayas and, most recently, Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan already crossed off his hiking bucket-list, the frosty setting made for a unique trip: “Waking up to the rime ice covering all the trees like a winter wonderland was a highlight.”

Instagram: @stamboulisd.

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W r i t er a nd P h o to gr a p h er

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P h o to gr a p h er

W r i t er

fr o m t o p : c o u r t e s y o f c o n l a s t o k e s ; c o u r t e s y o f m o r g a n o mm e r ; c o u r t e s y o f l i l l i a n c h o u ; c o u r t e s y o f d av e s ta mb o u l i s

W r i t er

th e c o n v e r s ati o n

As travel writers, we are always looking for expressive ways to describe the beautiful resorts, sights and landscapes we encounter on the job. But as new and obscure travel trends continue to emerge, sometimes it’s just easier to make up a new word.

While we at T+L tend to avoid the portmanteau buzzwords, here are some we’ve come across that have given us a giggle.

Cinetourist

Touron

“Cinema + Tourist” A traveler who visits a destination because their favorite movie or soap was filmed there. We’re looking at you, K-drama addicts.

“Tourist + Moron” We’ve all encountered a few of these on our travels…

Nacation

Fakeoff

“Naked + Vacation” Heralds the trend of holidaying in the nude. Pack lots of SPF50+.

“Fake + Takeoff” When you’re hustled on board the plane on time, but leave the tarmac late anyway.

Bleisure

Babymoon

“Business + Leisure” All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy…

“Baby + Honeymoon” The last hurrah before the baby pops.

#TLASIA

We’ve picked a few of our readers’ most dreamy travel snaps.

Reaching a hand in the heavens in Ba Na Hills, Vietnam. By @tap1908.

The lure of the Maldives’s sparkling sea. By @pjjphotographer.

A misty balloon-ride over Bagan, in Burma. By @diografic.

Floral fields forever in Munduk, Bali.

By @tiny_adventurer.

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

e d it o r ’ s n o t e

Clear waters and arbutus trees In British Columbia.

From My Travels

a one-lane road, the beach came into sharp focus through a cluster of palm trees.

Enshrouded by tropical forest, the horseshoe-shaped Hiriketiya Bay appeared almost as a dream; a secluded corner of Sri Lanka where you could—scrap that—should easily spend a week. This was my fourth visit to serendipity, but my first venture along the south coast of this nation that offers so much. As with other journeys in this month’s issue, yes, mine was a dream trip. There’s an electric vibe in the south of Sri Lanka these days (“Tropical Chill,” page 80), where the surprises come in small pockets and pop like nowhere else in Asia.

That urge to visit places more than once strikes us all, the saving grace being that every destination is in constant flux, so there is always something to uncover. Luang Prabang, writes our features editor, Eloise Basuki, in “A New Temple in Town” (page 29), has been just as notable for the overflow of visitors the past few years as for tranquility. Enter the new Rosewood Luang Prabang, where guests are encouraged to engage with the local culture rather than just observe it.

Also, don’t overlook Brazil (“Into Amazonia,” page 98) where kayaking around that famous river elicits a sense of awe in reaching an unexpected place.

The Amazon of dreams.

@CKucway chrisk@mediatransasia.com

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o c t o b e r 2 0 1 8 / t r av e l a n d l e i s u r e a s i a . c o m

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

s we strolled down

Back on familiar ground in British Columbia, we went kayaking on the Sunshine Coast where the waters were clearer than the sky, thanks to seasonal wildfires, in the process reuniting two friends who hadn’t seen each other for almost 50 years. In what might be typically Canadian, the interlocking stories revolved around beekeeping in Vancouver more than a generation ago and not-so secret log cabins on that city’s north shore.

More to the point, it was a conversation about friendship, on the deck of a cottage in the woods of a remote island, a cold can of beer in hand, well before noon. Now, that is Canadian.

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

editor-in-chief art director Deput y editor Features editor senior DEsigner

Christopher Kucway Wannapha Nawayon Jeninne Lee-St. John Eloise Basuki Chotika Sopitarchasak

Regul ar contributors / photogr aphers Cedric Arnold, Kit Yeng Chan, Marco Ferrarese, Duncan Forgan, Lauryn Ishak, Mark Lean, Grace Ma, Morgan Ommer, Aaron Joel Santos, Stephanie Zubiri chairman president publishing director publishER digital media manager TRAFFIC MANAGER / deputy DIGITAL media manager sales director business de velopment managers regional manager chief financial officer production manager circul ation assistant

J.S. Uberoi Egasith Chotpakditrakul Rasina Uberoi-Bajaj Robert Fernhout Pichayanee Kitsanayothin Varin Kongmeng Joey Kukielka Leigha Proctor Paul Adams Gaurav Kumar Kanda Thanakornwongskul Yupadee Saebea

TRAVEL+LEISURE (USA) Editor-in-Chief Senior Vice President, News, Luxury, st yle

Nathan Lump Meredith Long

meredith partnerships, LICENSING & syndication (syndication@meredith.com) Business affairs director director, licensing oper ations editorial director e xecutive director, content management

Tom Rowland Richard Schexnider Jack Livings Paul Ordonez

meredith Chairman and ceo president and coo chief content officer editorial director, lifest yle group e xecutive vice presidents

Steve Lacy Tom Harty Alan Murray Nathan Lump Brad Elders, Lauren Ezrol Klein

tr avel+leisure southeast asia Vol. 12, Issue 10

Sanur I Ubud I Nusa Dua I Jimbaran

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

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. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording or any information storage or retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the Publisher. Produced and distributed by Media Transasia Thailand Ltd., 14th Floor, Ocean Tower II, 75/8 Soi Sukhumvit 19, Sukhumvit Road, Klongtoeynue, Wattana, Bangkok 10110, Thailand. Tel: 66-2/204-2370. Printed by Comform Co., Ltd. (66-2/368-2942–7).

Color separation by Classic Scan Co., Ltd. (66-2/291-7575). While the editors do their utmost to verify information published, they do not accept responsibility for its absolute accuracy.

This edition is published by permission of Meredith 225 Liberty Street, 8S-212 B, New York, New York, 10286, U.S.A. Tel. 1-212/522-1212 Online: www.meredith.com Reproduction in whole or in part without consent of the copyright owner is prohibited. subscriptions Enquiries: www.travelandleisuresea.com/subscribe

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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 kayumanisresort

kayumanisresort

ADVERTORIAL

Art Deco interiors at Peacock Alley lounge.

Front Room’s open kitchen.

The Waldorf Astoria Bangkok.

An Icon Blossoms in Bangkok Waldorf Astoria elevates their impeccable service and legendary tradition for a new generation.

The magnolia symbolized nobility and dignity to Victorians, and the ideal of feminine beauty to ancient Chinese. We can’t think of a better embodiment for the first Waldorf Astoria in Southeast Asia, a graceful tower inspired by the gentle flower, which has just bloomed in the plummest of locations in central Bangkok.

With interiors designed by Cambridge-educated world-renowned designer Andre Fu, the airy, high-ceilinged interior curves and flows, allowing guests to naturally wind their way through the hotel, making a new discovery—and finding yet another stunning view—at every turn. (Just wait until you reach the magnificently cantilevered pool deck.) Fu says he was inspired by the fluid hand movements of traditional Thai dancers, just one example of how his work “reinterprets traditional notions of national identities or East-meets-West aesthetics in a new hybrid.”

This is also a spot-on way to describe Front Room, a ‘New Nordic’-Thai restaurant that is already one of the city’s most coveted tables. At the helm is amiable chef Rungthiwa Chummongkhon, born in Chiang Rai and trained in multi Michelinstarred kitchens in Europe. Having spent the past decade in Denmark, she has returned home brimming with culinary creative genius, and here is melding Scandinavian cooking methods with local flavors and ingredients. “You will recognize some of the tastes and traditional techniques such as pickling and salting,” she says from her gorgeous show kitchen. “But they feel fresh and different.”

Other tastemakers can be found in Peacock Alley and The Brasserie, lovely relaxed venues overlooking the Royal Bangkok Sports Club, and on the top three levels of the property where the trifecta of Bull & Bear steakhouse, creative cocktails at The Loft and the divine Champagne Bar offer a full night out without ever leaving the hotel. In fact, Bangkokians in the know have already laid claim to this collective sky-high spot as the best date-night in town.

Waldorf Astoria, one of the world’s most iconic hotel brands, likes to encourage us to “Live Unforgettable.” A stay in their beautiful new luxury hotel in Bangkok will be certainly one to remember.

•

CELEBRATING 20 YEARS 2080 MINUTES OF BREATHTAKING PERFORMANCES OVER 1,000 ARTISTS 20 CONTAINERS OF SETS 17 WORLD CLASS SHOWS FROM 12 COUNTRIES THAILAND’S NUMBER ONE FESTIVAL

•

•

•

Carmen, Opera

•

Hangzhou Philharmonic Orchestra

Teatro di San Carlo of Naples, Italy Conductor: Zubin Mehta 12/9/2018 (7.30 pm)

People’s Republic of China 1/10/2018 (7.30 pm)

Firebird / Rite of Spring,

14/9/2018 (7.30 pm)

Classical Ballets, Moscow State Classical Ballet, Russia 5/10/2018 (7.30 pm)

Beethoven Symphony No.9 & Leonore Overture Teatro Di San Carlo Symphony Orchestra & Chorus Conductor: Zubin Mehta 13/9/2018 (7.30 pm)

Nutcracker

Classical Ballet Moscow State Classical Ballet, Russia Conductor: Evgeny Volynsky 6/10/2018 (2.30 pm)

Tchaikovsky Symphony No.4 & 6

Teatro Di San Carlo Symphony Orchestra Conductor: Zubin Mehta 15/9/2018 (7.30 pm)

The Legend of Swanlake and the Ugly Duckling

Stunning Virtuosity

Classical Ballet, Moscow State Classical Ballet, Russia Conductor: Evgeny Volynsky 7/10/2018 (2.30 pm)

Ju Percussion Group, Taipei, Taiwan 16/9/2018 (7.30 pm)

The Magnificent Seven

The International Magicians Society’s Top Seven Magicians of The World 19-20/9/2018 (7.30 pm)

Michael Jackson Tribute Concert USA and Europe 8/10/2018 (7.30 pm)

Break the Tango / Hip Hop

A Midsummer Night’s Dream

Argentina and Switzerland 22/9/2018 (7.30 pm), 23/9/2018 (2.30 pm)

Karlsruhe Ballet, Germany 14/10/2018 (7.30 pm)

Korean Symphony Orchestra

Gala Performance

Republic of Korea 24/9/2018 (7.30 pm)

Karlsruhe Ballet, Germany 15/10/2018 (7.30 pm)

Classical Weddings

Born to Dance

Singapore Dance Theatre, Singapore 26/9/2018 (7.30 pm)

Los Vivancos, Spain 18/10/2018 (7.30 pm)

Taj Express

Bollywood Musical, India 28/9/2018 (7.30 pm), 29/9/2018 (2.30 pm)

Photo: Break the Tango

Details for all performances:

www.bangkokfestivals.com Supported by SCG

Hotline 02 262 3191 (24 hrs) www.thaiticketmajor.com

Performance starts on time at 7.30 pm (Door open 7.00 pm)

Venue: Thailand Cultural Centre, Bangkok

REASONS TRAVEL NOW october 2018

TO

T+L’s monthly selection of trip-worthy places, experiences and events.

The Milky Way over Medlands Beach, Great Barrier Island.

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Astro-tourism is the latest travel trend: here’s why your next trip should be to see the stars.

M a r k R u ss e l l

No, we don’t mean a ticket on Elon Musk’s SpaceX, “astro-tourism” is all about appreciating the solar system on solid ground. As light pollution spreads across Asia and blinds our night skies, travelers have been drawn to the region’s darkest pockets to get a glimpse of the most dazzling celestial shows.

Great Barrier Island New Zealand Also known as Aotea, this completely off-grid island a 30-minute flight from Auckland last year was crowned a DarkSky Sanctuary: remote land with exceptional quality of starry nights certified by the International Dark-Sky Association. Good Heavens (goodheavens.co.nz; group tours from NZ$90, private tours for 1–4 people from NZ$600) offer stargazing tours of Aotea’s clear skies with use of their nighttime binoculars and 8-inch Newtonian telescope. Guests have spotted Saturn’s rings, the moons of Jupiter and unique views of the Milky Way.

Yaeyama Islands Japan In April, Okinawa’s IriomoteIshigaki National Park, which covers the most southern islands in the Yaeyama archipelago, was declared a Dark-Sky Park, only the second in Asia after South Korea’s Yeongyang Firefly Eco Park.

Coral Foundation (coralfoundation-hoshizora.com; from ¥4,000 per person; tours begin in March 2019) offers tours on Iriomote Island that includes being bathed in moonlight in the subtropical forest and visits to the habitats of the luminescent Yaeyama fireflies, who can only exist in the darkest regions of the island.

Mount Bromo Indonesia Many trek this East Java volcano for the golden views of sunrise, but nighttime also offers some sparkling sights.

While the stars aren’t visible to the naked eye here, DSLR photography can capture the lit-up sky in ethereal ways.

Mount Bromo Tour Guide (mtbromo​tourguide.com; twoday tour from Rp2,500,000; tours begin April 2019) offers two- and three-day photography tours that include locales where you can shoot the Milky Way against the mountain silhouettes or capture time-lapse footage of passing meteors.

Tasmania Australia While Iceland is known for the chartreuse Northern Lights, the less-hyped but equally stunning Southern Lights, or Aurora Australis, can be seen across Tasmania, including Mount Wellington, Eaglehawk Neck and South Arm Peninsula.

Keep track of the skies on aurora-service.net, which monitors solar activity, solar winds and Earth’s magnetic field, and sends out alerts on optimal viewing times and locations. Usually forming a rippled green or magenta curtain, you’ll need a DSLR to capture this natural light show.

— Eloise Basuki

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r e a s o n s t o t r av e l n o w

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Now you can become a worldrecord setting flyer.

This month, Singapore Airlines launches the longest commercial flight in the world, from Singapore to Newark, which clocks in at more than 18 hours.

So how exactly do you survive three quarters of a day in the air? The short answer is that the new A350-900ULR is built precisely for such long hauls; here is why we’re excited to get on board.

+ Singapore Airlines’ version of the aircraft offers only two cabins, business and premium economy, and that alone means much more space.

Consider that this version has 67 business-class and 94 premium economy seats, compared with SIA’s standard A350-900, which

offers 42 business, 24 premium economy and 187 economy seats, and you begin to get the idea.

Business comforts on Singapore Airlines’ new long-haul.

+ The inflight entertainment system has more than 1,500 options, including more than 290 movies, 600-plus television programs and 800 audio CDs. Passengers can bookmark the content, saving preferences and playlists for future flights.

If none of this appeals— unlikely—the aircraft also offers Wi-Fi.

centering their new menus on a wellness theme. That means a focus on nutrition and hydration—think bold flavors and textures in addition to the regular dishes on offer. + As for the things you don’t see, the cabin of the A350-900ULR is designed to provide better air pressure (read: more oxygen) and increased

+ As for food service, Singapore Airlines is

no.

humidity, both of which mean you’ll feel better refreshed after any long-haul flight. + There are up to 24 customizable lighting scenarios on this aircraft that simulate different times of the day, mimicking natural sunrise and sunset, which helps passengers better acclimate to time changes.

— Christopher Kucway

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These new coastal havens showcase Tasmania inside and out.

Freycinet Lodge’s forest-view Coastal Pavilion.

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Eastern Tassie’s Freycinet Lodge has just unveiled its new Coastal Pavilions, nine private suites set among the tranquil scrub of Freycinet National Park. Devised by Hobart design studio Liminal, the sleek, architecturally focused rooms feature Tasmanian oak paneling, blackwood furnishings, outdoor tubs and curved floor-toceiling windows that fully immerse guests in the park’s natural landscape. Going bush just got better. freycinetlodge.com.au; doubles from A$549. — E.B.

c o u rt esy o f s i n ga p o r e a i r l i n es ; c o u rt esy o f f r e yc i n e t lo d g e

+ Departing at 11:35 p.m. from Singapore, you’ll head non-stop to the U.S., landing in New Jersey at 6 a.m. the following day.

Not bad, if you forget about time zones, and enjoy the diversions and comfort levels on board.

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Explore one last patch of untamed Borneo by boat.

c o u rt esy o f B i k e & To u r s

The less-trawled corner of Tabin Wildlife Reserve in southeast Sabah packs an adventurous punch of misty canals, mysterious thickets and exciting wildlife encounters. Lahad Datu–based operator Bike & Tours, a pioneer in boating and hiking packages up the bends of remote Kapur River, has launched a new three-day adventure tour to explore the creatures of the water.

Based in the jungle-immersed rain forest resthouse, guests will go on daily sunrise and sunset river cruises: at dawn, glide on a longtail boat in search of kingfishers, storks, proboscis monkeys and rare hornbills as they forage the virgin mangroves and Nipah forest; at dusk, bask in the glorious pink sunset until hundreds of fireflies and a mantle of blazing stars light up the night.

The fun doesn’t end on the water, hike through the hardwood forest in Pokok Kapur, and join the evening jungle safari by four-wheel drive. If you’re lucky, you’ll even spot the elusive slow loris. bikeandtours.com; three-day Sungai Kapur Expedition from RM2,500 per person, per double.

— Marco Ferr arese

Explore the Kapur River by longtail boat.

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A Coconut Negroni at 1864 – The Lobby Bar.

In New Delhi, a pioneering luxury hotel has been reborn.

It’s hard to overstate the role of the Oberoi in the social fabric of Delhi.

The hotel was heralded as the finest on the subcontinent when it opened in 1965 and has been a favorite ever since, so closing shop for a two-year renovation was a big deal. The new look, unveiled in January, ditches the paisley-print carpets and stuffy carved-wood dressers for a lighter, brighter aesthetic, with jewel-tone walls and elegant, cleanlined furnishings. Designer Adam Tihany trimmed the room count from 283 to 220, and decked out the new spaces with enormous bathtubs and iPads that let you open the door for room service without leaving the couch. As for what will never change? The hotel’s enviable address, close to some of Delhi’s top attractions. oberoihotels.com; doubles from US$385. — Sar ah Khan

The iconic Oberoi in Delhi has a new look.

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Barrel-aged cocktails are making an evening tipple even smoother.

Aging cocktails in barrels creates a softer, mellowed-out tone, which is exactly the vibe of 1864 – The Lobby Bar, the brassy anchor at the heart of Sofitel Singapore City Centre, the brand’s new flagship in the Tanjong Pagar neighborhood. Most alcohol aficionados will have tasted a rounded-off barrel-aged negroni or two by now. But assistant bar manager Sam Uthra Paty Arasan takes the technique to a delicious new level. He’s got two walls of baby bourbon barrels gestating variations of negronis and all manner of other drinks such as boulvardiers and even margaritas, all aged for four weeks. Serious imbibers should swing by on Fridays for their all-you-can-drink of three select barrels happy hour. Sam says the best part of his job is “getting to know our guests and referring to them by name”—a handy habit for regulars, whose favorite drinks are recorded in a book so that you can sidle up, say no words and still get perfect service. Another Octomore negroni, please, Sam. Oh wait, you already knew that. sofitel.com; doubles from S$390; cocktails from S$18; French Fridays happy hour 5:30 p.m. to 7:30 p.m. S$48 per person.

— Jeninne Lee-St. John

fr o m to p : c o u rt esy o f s o f i t e l s i n ga p o r e c i t y c e n t r e ; c o u rt esy o f o b e r o i h ot e ls & r es o rts

no.

Experience.

Moments.

Memories.

A perfect place to meet, connect and experience the most refreshing stay while visiting the vibrant Thai capital.

Special Opening Offer: Enjoy 20% off with complimentary breakfast when book 2 nights or more.

For reservations, visit hyattregencybangkoksukhumvit.com HYATT REGENCY BANGKOK SUKHUMVIT 1 Sukhumvit Soi 13, Klongtoey Nua (BTS Nana Station), Bangkok 10110 Thailand Tel. +66 2 098 1234, Email. bangkoksukhumvit.regency@hyatt.com The HYATT trademark and related marks are trademarks of Hyatt Corporation or its affiliates. Š2018 Hyatt Corporation. All rights reserved.

N e x t A ct

clockwise from far left: The

Basílica Menor de San Sebastián, the only steel church in the Philippines; the vaulted ceiling in the church has suffered from rust; a preserved room in the 1730 Jesuit House.

Heritage Heroes

Some of the Philippines’ oldest colonial structures are in the midst of metamorphoses thanks to the efforts of a few passionate conservators. From Manila to Cebu, Rachel Malaguit discovers three structures being rescued from the wrecking ball of modernity.

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Now converted into a museum, this 18thcentury, two-story bahay na bato (stone house) is getting a much-needed makeover that befits its reputation as the oldest documented residence in the Philippines.

Located in Parian, a historical district in Cebu City, the Jesuit House will see its sinking foundations and terracotta roof repaired. Its cement walls, which absorb moisture, will also be stripped off. A traditional coating called palitada (a combination of sand, lime and water) will take its place, which will let the walls “breathe” and prevent deterioration. The house, which contains antiques, recovered artifacts and memorabilia, will remain open to visitors during the construction over the next two to three years.

Giving the House its much-needed facelift is Escuela Taller, a non-profit organization based in Intramuros and Bohol that trains unemployed youths in the rehabilitation of heritage buildings. Funded by the National Commission for Culture and the Arts (NCCA) and the Spanish Agency for International Development Cooperation, Escuela Taller has assigned at least 30 graduates and trainees to the project, the Bohol outpost’s biggest to date.

According to Jesuit historian William C. Repetti, the House served as the Society of Jesus’ residencia from 1730 until 1768, the year the Jesuits were expelled from the Philippines. As well as preserving this tangible history for Cebu’s future generations, the restoration also gives Escuela Taller’s students the opportunity to become a steward of Cebu’s heritage. One graduate working on the Jesuit House, Rachel Dumanacel, says, “I now realize how valuable these old buildings are.” fb.com/1730jesuithouse; 26 Zulueta St., Parian, Cebu City. >>

fr o m t o p : D av e Ta c o n ( 2 ) ; c o u r t e s y o f 1 7 3 0 j e s u i t h o u s e

+ 1730 Jesuit House

Nipah Beach, Lombok

A contrast harmony of an infinite bliss We are a part of nature. We live on a beautiful planet that treasures marvelous harmony. Just like day to night. They give rise to each other as they interrelate to one another. The unity in this universe, akin to our sanctuary. Have an eventful pause in Lombok. Discover a diverse type of break for you to dive in. Prosperous in stunning stopovers above and below the horizon, here, you can have an exploration of limitless sensory indulgence. Feeling curious? Treasure more exciting packages from Visit Wonderful Indonesia 2018 through the QR code below. Embrace your life with a meaningful journey in the land of endless wonders.

www.indonesia.travel indonesia.travel Indonesia.travel indtravel

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the restoration of the Statue of Liberty and was a former NASA consultant.

While San Sebastián is still functioning as a church, lack of funding has slowed its refurb. Paterno estimates the project will need another P400 million to finish, and the foundation is raising money by organizing tours and selling souvenirs and art pieces made from the rust scraped from the columns. Pasaje del Carmen Street, Quiapo, Manila; visit fb.com/savessbasilica for tour information.

from left: Though

currently laced in scaffolding, the Metropolitan Theater of Manila is set to reopen by 2022; an old photo of the Met’s original stage.

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+ BasIlica Menor de San Sebastian Nestled on a quiet street in Manila’s Quiapo district, the Basílica Menor de San Sebastián, the country’s only steel church, is getting an overhaul. Underneath its magnificent beauty, rot has spread within the 127-year-old NeoGothic structure: misguided and heavyhanded improvements left columns partially submerged in water, resulting in corrosion; over time, paintings of religious icons on its walls and dome have faded or been destroyed by stains; and even a few holes dot the stained-glass windows.

Yet in spite of its deterioration, the building has proven to be the strongest among all of the churches that were built in the neighborhood: four places of worship were built here prior to San Sebastián, and earthquakes destroyed them all.

To try a different approach, the parish, managed by the Order of Augustinian Recollects, chose steel as the fifth church’s foundation. The parish hired Spanish architect Genaro Palacios, who roped in Belgian contractor Société Anonyme de Travaux Publics, known for constructing the cars of the Orient Express, and the church was completed in 1891.

The sad state of the basílica prompted U.S.-educated conservator Tina Paterno in 2010 to launch the San Sebastián Basilica Conservation and Development Foundation to secure funding for its refurbishment. Almost 80 volunteers have been involved in the project so far, including the late Dr. Robert Baboian, a corrosion scientist who worked on

october 2018 / tr av el andleisure asia .com

Spending the past few decades in a state of decay, the 87-year-old Metropolitan Theater of Manila was granted a P700 million restoration by the NCCA last year. Designed

by Filipino architect Juan M. Arellano and inaugurated back in 1931, the 1,670-seat grand Art Deco venue hosted colorful Spanish zarzuela dances and Filipino versions of classic foreign operas.

After World War II bombings stripped the Met of its glory, former first lady and Manila governor Imelda Marcos pushed for a restoration, and by 1978 the Met was once again welcomed by the city’s culturati.

Marcos, however, had scandalously used the theater as collateral for a loan from the Government Service Insurance System; in 1986 she fled to Hawaii, leaving her debt unpaid and the Met foreclosed.

The property was eventually sold to the NCCA in 2015, and official restorations began last year to both modernize the theater and reconstruct original elements from Arellano’s design—such as his original inner courtyard and the carved banana and mango reliefs— using old photographs and a copy of the initial plan as references. An elevator will be added to comply with modern building codes, and the wings will be converted into art galleries.

Expected to reopen in 2022, the Met marks the beginning of a larger rejuvenation of Manila. The arts venue will connect via an underground tunnel to other landmarks such as Intramuros and the Central Post Office, another Arellano-designed structure reportedly being targeted for adaptive reuse.

Padre Burgos Street, Ermita, Manila.

fr o m l e f t: D av e Ta c o n ; c o u r t e s y o f M ETr o p o l i ta n t h e at e r o f m a n i l a

+ Metropolitan Theater of Manila

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A New Temple in Town

From the balcony of her luxury tent above the forested hillside at Rosewood Luang Prabang, Eloise Basuki gets a new perspective on the former capital of Laos, and finds there’s plenty to discover beyond the town’s heritage quarters. Photogr aphs

by Leigh Griffiths

Rosewood Luang Prabang is set alongside its own private waterfall.

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CLOCKWISE FROM TOP LEFT: Morning

alms begin; a trip to Wat Phonpao with Rosewood guide Sommay; Kuang Si falls, an oasis in the jungle; a scarf is worn during tak bat as a sign of respect.

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It’s storming when I arrive at Wat Phanom at 5:30 a.m. to begin tak bat, the Buddhist tradition of giving morning alms. I join a huddle of locals taking refuge in the small temple six kilometers from the center of Luang Prabang with my guide Sommay, a former monk and now the excursion manager of the city’s new Rosewood hotel. He pushes a woven basket of hot sticky rice into my hands, and we kneel on the floor as a stream of saffron-robed monks shuffle through the pavilion. So begins the daily merit-making process, pawing out fistfuls of the steaming rice to the procession of monks for their breakfast. I’m the only foreigner here, but the congregation hardly notices. In this well-trod tourist town it feels good to be invisible.

Driving back to Rosewood we pass the loud throngs of red-eyed tourists finishing up tak bat on the town’s main drag—this alms-giving spot now avoided by locals, Sommay tells me— and I can’t help but feel a little smug. Though no Instagram post marks my tak bat experience, Sommay has offered me a moment to slip into real-life Luang Prabang.

When unesco crowned the former royal Lao capital a heritage site in 1995, the very aim to protect the city instead catalyzed its popularity (tourist arrivals quadrupled by the year 2000,

and grew 30-fold by 2017). It became a constant pillar on the backpacker trail, as tubers from Vang Vieng peaced out in the city of temples.

Luxury names have cropped up throughout the decade, but the last two years has seen a recent spate—besides Rosewood, a Sofitel, an Azeraiturned-Avani, and a Pullman have opened— and with new refined eating and drinking locales, Luang Prabang is going through a rebrand of sorts. But it’s not just about high-end hospitality—as the city expands beyond the protected old quarter that restricts new development, we’re encouraged to explore a little further as well.

Every room is inspired by personalities of the region: the Alix Aymé riverside villa mimics a studio of the French artist and friend of the Lao royal family; the botanical-themed Ernest Doudart de Lagrée pool villa honors the 19th century French-Mekong expedition leader and entomologist; hilltop tents are named after the region’s hill-tribes. Mine celebrates the Lisu, a Tibeto-Burman highland tribe known for their colorful clothing. Dresses decorate the room, traditional patterns are hand-painted on walls and a tasseled headpiece stands above the bed, from which my tent window looks out to an oversized balcony and the green beyond below.

I have reached traveler’s nirvana.

The Rosewood is a 10-minute drive from town, but the distance is a blessing, not a curse.

The 23-room resort is set at the foot of a small waterfall in the Ban Nauea neighborhood, with no sightlines to civilization. The property has the magic touch of design legend Bill Bensley, whose studio developed everything from the French-Lao hill-station concept and The Great House open dining hall to the colorful interiors in every riverside or waterfall-view room, suite and villa.

My room is up in the clouds, in one of the six 75-square-meter hilltop tents perched above the property. It’s a sweaty 100-step stairway to heaven, but its hardly a trek: butterflies and birds flit along the paved walk through bamboo groves, banana palms and tamarind trees, and streams trickle below swinging suspension bridges leading to your tent.

CLOCKWISE FROM TOP: Antique décor

and signature Bill Bensley design in Rosewood’s waterfall pool villa; handwoven scarves at Ock Pop Tok; noor tchou, a royal Lao bamboo dipping sauce at The Great House.

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clockwise fROM LEFT: Rosewood's

Lisu hilltop tent at is decorated with tribalwear and Lao crafts; Wat Xieng Thong, Luang Prabang’s bestknown monastery; mixing creative drinks at 525; beds in hilltop tents look over the jungle.

Luxury comes in many forms at Rosewood.

Dinner at The Great House is less focused on white tablecloths and more on authentic royal Lao, farm-to-table dishes. Executive chef Sebastien Rubis is always around to offer suggestions—for my dinner he looks at the sky, contemplates the humidity, then selects a few signature dishes to suit: oor lam gnoua, a braised water-buffalo curry flavored with sakkhan root, and an off-menu but in-season wild mushroom soup. Sebastian, who has worked in kitchens across Southeast Asia for the past 16 years, sticks to traditional Lao methods, pounding all his pastes and sauces by hand, and fermenting local Mekong fish for the traditional lon som pink pork curry. “I don’t want to change Lao food—it’s not my culture. I prefer to protect tradition rather than create fusion,” he says. He’s also the man in the know for eating-out tips: lotus-lake views at Manda de Laos; his former workplace L’Elephant for French; Saffron for coffee; and upscale drinks at 525, a fledgling cocktail bar that is finally refining the way people drink in this town.

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When I arrive at 525, a cloud has taken over the bar. General manager James Corrighan pours a fragrant smoke made from pomelo- and orange-infused hickory wood into my chiliinflected rum cocktail, testing flavors for their new 525 Experience menu. Since the bar opened in 2015, owner Andrew Sykes and James have been steadily elevating the original classiccocktail menu to feature more experimental drinks you’d find in big-city bars. James says the aim is to create a space where everyone feels welcome—locals, tourists, expats—and it’s a world away from the Beer Lao and cheap ricewhiskey bars of the backpacker days.

As a devout Buddhist and former monk for

8½ years, Sommay doesn’t join me for a drink, but opens up in other ways. “I’m not a guide that reads from a book, I just share my experience,” he says on a temple tour that explores long-lost shrines across the Mekong.

He talks frankly about the impending Chinese high-speed railway that’s destroying much of the natural forest, and the loneliness of a recent six-month silent meditation. It was just after this solitude stint that Rosewood Managing Director Elias Pertoft approached him for the

job; Sommay spent three months developing the hotel’s core activities, talking to hill-tribe elders and village chiefs for approval. “Sommay introduces guests to villagers and shows their way of life,” Elias says. The goal is to make guests feel part of the culture rather than just observing—or, in the case of the overcrowded city-center tak bat, destructively interfering.

Tours that engage like this also help us better connect with take-home treasures.

A popular souvenir stop in this city is at Ock Pop Tok, a fair-trade textile enterprise that supports local women weavers of Laos and the traditional craft; Rosewood’s tour adds an exclusive trip to the weaving village to meet the craftswomen, spin a silk-spool key ring and have a lesson on the loom.

On my last evening in Luang Prabang, Sommay takes me to Wat Choumkhong to observe the monks’ evening chants. The vibration of the hymns pulses through my chest, hypnotizing me into stillness. Outside the temple, the golden Prah-bang Buddha stands tall with both palms facing forward, a palladium of peace. Luang Prabang still embodies its namesake statue, and now there are even more places to seek the serenity.

The DETAILS HOTEL

Rosewood Luang Prabang The immerisve riverside and waterfall-view rooms and hilltop tents are havens of comfort, culture and creativity. Hotel cars can drive you into town and also pick you up. A massage in the Sense Spa tent is a treat: faceholes in the heated massage beds peer through glass windows in the floor overlooking the rushing river below. rosewoodhotels.com; doubles from US$820.

RESTAURANTS AND BARS

525 Snack on a tapas-style menu and sip pro drinks made with craft spirits like gin from Iron Balls in Bangkok or Australia’s Four Pillars, and rum by Laodi in Vientiane. 525cocktails​andtapas. com; drinks from US$7.

Elephant Bridge Bar Try classic cocktails with Lao ingredients at Rosewood’s own

bar that’s perched on a bridge over the rushing Nahm Dhong River that flows across the property. rosewoodhotels.com; drinks from US$7.

L’Elephant Restaurant Housed in a 1960s colonial building, this French-focused eatery has been a mainstay in town for almost two decades. elephant-restau.com; mains from LAK110,000.

Manda de Laos This third-generation, family-run Lao restaurant blends legacy and innovation with dishes like mix-it-yourself laap moo, and coconut crème brûlée. Request a seat beside the lotus pond. mandadelaos.com; mains from LAK60,000.

Saffron Go for brunch, order the mangococonut French toast, a cup of the best coffee in town, and watch the river glide by. saffroncoffee.com; mains from LAK30,000.

Silk Road Café The diverse menu at this café within Ock Pop Tok’s Living Crafts Centre is by former weaver chef Keo. It offers both healthy and traditional options, from DIY betel-leaf wraps and rice-paper rolls to the Weavers’ Lunch: bamboo soup, Lao sausage and sticky rice. Tables overlook the Mekong. ockpoptok. com; mains from LAK29,000.

The Great House Sebastien’s authentic menu is full of rarely found royal Lao dishes. Breakfast offers Western comforts but also tasty local fare—go for khao soi, a typical Lao minced pork-noodle soup. rosewoodhotels.com; mains from US$6.

ACTIVITIES

Rosewood Experiences More explorer than guide, Sommay can take guests to authentic tak bat; the papermaking village Ban Sangkong;

neighboring Nadueay farm, the source of many of The Great House’s ingredients; treks to meet the Khmu and Lao Lum hill-tribes; a chance to sit down with the founders and play with the rescued pachyderms of MandaLao Elephant Sanctuary (mandalaotours.com); a visit to the sky-blue Kuang Si falls; and more. rosewood.com.

Ock Pop Tok As well as two boutiques on Sakkaline Road, the Living Crafts Centre in Ban Saylom offers free guided tours of the weaving workshop, as well as half- to three-day courses that teach traditional dyeing techniques and how to weave your own scarf. ockpoptok.com.

Trails of Indochina A half-day walking tour takes in the city’s heritage architecture and temples, including the glittering mosaic-adorned Wat Xieng Thong temple. trailsofindochina.com.

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A pool with a city view at Orchard Rendezvous Hotel.

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c u lt u r e

The Chao Phraya River will be home to many exhibits.

Blissful Times The first Bangkok Art Biennale launches this month, bringing world-renowned artists, creative installations and potent messages to color the city’s temples, streets, galleries, parks and beyond. By Eloise Basuki

Marina Abramovic Yugoslavia Expect more groundbreaking interactive art from this 71-year-old performance artist, who caught fame for her engaging Rhythm series in the 1970s. Her more recent MoMA retrospective included the 700-hour The Artist Is Present piece, where museum visitors were invited to sit facing Abramović and engage in silent interaction with her.

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Yayoi Kusama Japan Famous for her kaleidoscopic polka-dot graphics, Japanese Pop-art icon Yayoi Kusama will be bringing her muchphotographed pumpkin sculptures to the BAB, exhibiting outside Central World and Siam Paragon. “Unlike her other pumpkins, these are luminous; they will be continuously glowing,” Poshyananda says.

october 2018 / tr av el andleisure asia .com

Elmgreen & Dragset Denmark & Norway This Berlin-based pair create dramatic installations: in 2005’s Prada Marfa they built a Prada store in the middle of the Texan desert to reflect capitalism; and in 2016 built an ear-shaped swimming pool outside the Rockefeller Center in NYC, called Van Gogh’s Ear. They’re planning an eight-meter-tall pool for the BAB, located by the East Asiatic Company building.

Heri Dono Indonesia One of Indonesia’s leading contemporary artists, this Yogyakarta-based painter combines imagery of wayang kulit (shadow puppets) and political and social references into his work, often criticizing corruption, military influence and the destruction of the environment. He is a veteran of 31 biennales, including Venice, Sydney and Shanghai.

c l o c k w i s e fr o m t o p : a r o o n p h u k e e d / g e t t y i m a g e s ; c o u r t e s y o f h e r i d o n o ; c o u r t e s y o f e l m g r e e n & d r a g s e t; C o u r t e s y o f O ta F i n e Ar t s , T o k y o ; D u s a n R e l j i n 2 0 1 8

Artists to look out for:

fr o m l e f t: c o u r t e s y o f a r t l a b o r ; c o u r t e s y o f pat i pat c h a i w i t e s h ; c o u r t e s y o f s a k a r i n k r u e - o n ; c o u r t e s y o f j i t s i n g s o mb o o n

Wat Pho, Wat Arun and Wat Pr ayoon are not just some of the Thai capital’s most spiritual sanctuaries.

This month, the temples will also transform into groundbreaking galleries for the world’s Modern-art elite. So, too, will the old East Asiatic Company building on the city’s Chao Phraya River; the renovated Bank of Thailand Learning Center; the green refuge of Sukhumvit, Benjasiri Park; and an impressive list of Bangkok’s other iconic landmarks.

Portraying the theme “Beyond Bliss,” the Bangkok Art Biennale (BAB), the first art biennale in Thailand supported by the international Biennial Foundation, will take over the city October 19 through to February 3, 2019. The biennale, which means “every two years” in Italian, follows in the footsteps of the festival inaugurated in 1895 in Venice and now reincarnated the world over. This year’s Bangkok edition will feature a few very famous faces: Yayoi Kusama brings her renowned pumpkins from Japan; French artist Aurèle Ricard will exhibit his Lost Dog sculpture outside the historic Mandarin Oriental Bangkok; and Scandi duo Elmgreen & Dragset, known for their swimming pool installations, will create something similar by the river.

We can expect plenty of local talent, too—of the 75 invited artists from across the world, more than half will be from Thailand. “We wanted to give Thai artists,

especially emerging Thai artists, a chance to show alongside these very famous international artists,” says Dr. Apinan Poshyananda, the chief executive and artistic director of the BAB, who has curated contemporary art exhibitions from New York to Tokyo.

He says 32-year-old Thai artist Patipat Chaiwitesh is one to watch: “Patipat has interpreted the theme to comment on pollution and the destruction of nature…

He is looking to the future of Bangkok, especially the Chao Phraya River.”

Poshyananda and his curatorial team, which includes Luckana Kunavichayanont, the former director of the Bangkok Art and Cultural Centre (BACC), Adele Tan, the curator at the National Gallery of Singapore, Sansern Milindasuta, an assistant professor at Bangkok University, and Patrick D. Flores, a professor of Art Studies at the University of the Philippines, hope the festival encourages viewers to create a dialogue on what “happiness” means to them.

“Using the words ‘beyond bliss’ is intentionally paradoxical because it is almost unreachable,” Poshyananda says. “We want to address the idea of chaos and trauma in the world today and the artists can use [their work] as a message; we are going to get 75 different messages for the viewers.” bkkartbiennale. com; from October 19–February 3, 2019; free entry.

Art Labor Vietnam This Saigon-based collective aims to explore cultural and social issues through a range of different mediums. Their long-term Jrai Dew Hammock Café project recreates a typical Vietnamese roadside café— think hammocks, traditional drip coffee, soaps on TV screens—and has been exhibited in Paris, Guangzhou, Warsaw and Seoul.

Sakarin Krue-On Thailand Thai culture is a theme in Sakarin Krue-On’s art: he built a working rice terrace by the German Wilhelmshöhe Castle for “documenta 12,” and at the Venice Biennale in 2009 he made a satirical Thai tourism office. Krue-On is making a film for the BAB on the history of Wat Pho and Wat Arun, which will be shown on open-air screens at the temples at night.

Patipat Chaiwitesh Thailand With a background in textiles, this young artist experiments with weaving everyday objects into vibrant tapestries. For the BAB he’ll portray the changing DNA of marine life in the Chao Phraya. “He is using the animals [in the art], dissecting them and using quite challenging and provocative images to show how they are affected by pollution,” Poshyananda says.

Jitsing Somboon Thailand Known mostly for his work as Creative Director for Thai fashion brand Playhound, Bangkok-based Jitsing Somboon has dabbled in artistic projects, creating a rock-androll-themed hotel room in Chiang Mai’s Art Mai Hotel.

For the BAB he will be communicating faith through a costume installation at Wat Pho.

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o n th e ri s e

Cross the Bridge A once-sleepy suburb of Saigon is coaxing art lovers, shoppers, and even the scenesters and socialites away from downtown. By Connl a Stokes . Photogr aphs by Morgan Ommer

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In 2007, when I crossed the Saigon Bridge into District 2 for the first time, I felt like I was leaving the city for the countryside. I followed a snaking road into a neighborhood called Thao Dien, which, courtesy of the meandering Saigon River, and its mellow, tropical ambience, felt utterly removed from the rest of the metropolis. It suited the expat families in the area just fine, especially those ensconced in large villas with lush gardens and pools. But devoid of history and cultural attractions, and far from downtown’s charismatic street life and rooftop bars, tourists had no reason to visit.

Five years later, when I moved to Saigon from Hanoi, Thao Dien had further blossomed into a full-blown expat enclave with a multitude of family-friendly restaurants, bakeries, gourmet stores, schools and spas.

Every day felt like a lazy Sunday afternoon.

It was cozy, sure, but far from cool.

“Yeah, when I first moved to Saigon in 2010, I had no interest in Thao Dien. In fact, I hated it—there was nothing to do except brunch,” says a sheepish Linh Nguyen, an EnglishVietnamese entrepreneur, who, as much as anyone, can be charged with leading the area astray, in a good way: now it’s being touted as the hippest part of town. “What happened?

One day, in 2012, my friend and I rode around Thao Dien and we saw all these vacant lots of wasteland, and I just remember thinking, okay, we could do something here…”

That something turned out to be Saigon Outcast, an outdoor bar and events space composed of converted shipping containers. With a laid-back, summer music festival vibe, it instantly diversified the demographics of Thao Dien by attracting a younger, more bohemian crowd into the area—not that they were entirely welcome. “We were literally the outcasts,” Nguyen says. “But over the years, through hosting music nights, craft-beer festivals, farmers’ markets, all-day parties for Songkran or Paddy’s Day, we’ve become a part of this community.”

Ever since Saigon Outcast meddled with its DNA, Thao Dien has been evolving into a more diverse, and, yes, interesting, part of town.

Returning yet again to this area once only known for opulent abodes and kid-friendly eateries, I find a diverse scene luring entrepreneurs and trendsetters over the Saigon Bridge—and tourists are starting to follow.

clockwise from top left: Creative

minds refuel at Kokoïs, a café and design store; Villa Sông is a riverside haven in Thao Dien, Saigon; Bao Le, the arts coordinator at The Factory. opposite: Trendy shopping space Bloq.

Some downtown gallery directors will likely demur, but Thao Dien is usurping District 1 as Saigon’s go-to destination for Modern art. In late 2017, Nguyen opened his second business, Soma Art Café, and it has quickly become a hangout for the growing number of artists,

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o n th e ri s e

clockwise from top left:

Plush suites at Villa Sông; Soma Art Cafe; The Factory is helping to make Thao Dien a beacon of art; Soma uses organic beans from K’Ho Coffee; upscale drinks at Q Bar.

designers, writers and freelancers in the locality. “We dedicate our walls to emerging artists,” Nguyen says.

“Right next door there’s Vin Gallery, which showcases established international and Vietnamese artists. I hope in the future this whole road will be seen as an ‘art street.’”

Another big player is The Factory, Vietnam’s first purpose-built art space, which covers a vast 500 square meters; with an artbook store, an outdoor bar, a café and a Thai restaurant on site, it encourages visitors to linger. “We embrace the experimental process here. Even if we can’t sell it, we’ll exhibit it,” promises arts coordinator Bao Le, who admits some of the more esoteric pieces they’ve shown have flummoxed the occasional visitor. “We’re happy to see so much art exhibited around

“Some still say this is not the ‘real Vietnam’... I hope people can think of Thao Dien as just another side of presentday Vietnam. Somewhere contemporary and cool” Thao Dien. The more people are viewing and discussing art, the more confidence we have to present challenging concepts.”

An easier sell, perhaps, but still a recent trend, is Thao Dien’s vibrant shopping scene, now attracting more day-trippers—some of whom come from downtown via the river on board the Saigon Waterbus. “My friends all warned me that a retail business in Thao Dien wouldn’t work. Nobody came here to shop,” says Monty Truong, the French-Vietnamese co-founder of Kokoïs, a modern bistro, café and design store, and Bloq, a three-level dining, drinking and shopping complex. “But what we do is not straight retail. We create spaces to eat, drink, hang out and shop.”

The more you amble around Thao Dien, the more you will discover stores belonging to locally based designers with an emphasis on

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ethical and handcrafted products. “Some people still say this is not the ‘real Vietnam,’” Truong says. “But for me, if I go to New York, I would want to experience Williamsburg.

So I hope people can also think of Thao Dien as just another side of present-day Vietnam.

Somewhere contemporary and cool.”

And while the area has long been home to a substantial number of well-regarded restaurants, when it came to nightlife, well, “God, Thao Dien was always so dull. I never would have imagined we’d have a cocktail bar or club here,” says Sean Mulraine, the co-owner of Q Bar, which has brought more than a hint of downtown’s late-night panache to an area better known for expat-owned sports bars and craft-beer taprooms.

In a previous incarnation that ended in 2011, Q had been a full-blown nightclub (audaciously located right under the iconic Saigon Opera House in the center of District 1), but in spite of their nostalgia for those heady times, Mulraine and his partner, Phuong Anh Nguyen, decided to resurrect Q in Thao Dien.

The pair says many of District 1’s most celebrated downtown bars and clubs will soon open in Thao Dien, too. “We welcome that. We want to be part of a scene, not dominate it. Like Bangkok in the 90s, Saigon is becoming less centralized. District 1 isn’t the only place for a night on the town anymore.”

One of the major drivers behind this dynamic diversification of Thao Dien is the huge number of high-rise apartments that have been built in neighboring areas beyond the Saigon Bridge. Where I once thought I was entering the countryside, I now see urban development stretching beyond the horizon.

That arguably has only heightened the appeal of Thao Dien’s singular identity, especially by the riverside, where you can bask in a balmy, bucolic atmosphere and watch the world float by. “There’s no other neighborhood in the city that you can stay right on the river like this,” says Yega Thiyagarajan, the manager of Villa Sông, a high-end boutique resort in Thao Dien that attracts weekenders from across Asia. “We even have guests who travel here from the other side of town for a staycation just to ‘get away from it all.’”

Sipping iced coffee on the riverbank at Villa Sông, with a view of the city skyscrapers in the distance, but far from the madding crowds, we both agree that this isn’t like the rest of Saigon, or anywhere else we can think of. Today, nobody should hesitate crossing that bridge.

The journey to District 2 via the Saigon Waterbus is a good way to avoid the city’s choked road traffic.

Details Getting there

Thao Dien is about a 20-minute drive from Saigon’s central District 1, and a 40-minute drive from Tan Son Nhat International Airport.

You can travel up the river on the Saigon Waterbus from Bach Dang Wharf in District 1 to Binh An station in District 2 for VND15,000. It’s about a 30-minute walk from the waterbus station in District 2 to Thao Dien village, so it’s best to take a taxi.

A metro line is in construction, and optimistically slated for 2020. saigonwaterbus.vn; waterbuses run from 6:30 a.m. to 7:30 p.m.

Hotel

Villa Sông Saigon A gorgeous luxury riverside boutique hotel with 23 unique rooms and suites, where guests can enjoy breakfast any time of day and avail of a free shuttle river bus service when visiting downtown. villasong.com; doubles from US$171.

Eat & Drink

Bloq An all-in-one urban space for dining, drinking, shopping and—for some— posing for selfies! bloqvietnam.com.

Saigon Outcast This alternative events space hosts music shows,

theater performances, flea markets, outdoor cinema nights, food and craft beer festivals, and more. saigonoutcast.com.

Soma Art Café Serves organic coffee by day, creative cocktails and craft beer by night, with regular exhibitions of emerging artists, and music performances. fb.com/somasaigon.

Q Bar A stylish cocktail bar and club, serving classic cocktails with a twist (the martinis come highly recommended). Make sure to stop by for happy hour (5 p.m. to 8 p.m.). fb.com/ qbarsaigon.official.

See & Shop

Kokoïs A modern bistro, café, lounge and concept store in a leafy, renovated warehouse right in the middle of Thao Dien. kokois.com.

The Factory Established in 2016 by artist Ti-A, The Factory aims to be a dynamic destination for art, designing innovative programs illustrating the creative criticality of Vietnam today. factoryartscentre.com.

Vin Gallery Dedicated to introducing international artists to Saigon while striving to discover and promote promising Southeast Asian artists to the international scene. vingallery.com.

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Winter in the Sky Mountain World Trudging upwards into a cold, gray drizzle, I was trying to recall why my wife and I had decided to spend our Christmas vacation climbing a Chinese mountain in the middle of winter. Instead of a hot strip of sand somewhere in the tropics, we had chosen the peaks of Huangshan National Park, where visibility was registering zero and our soggy packs were feeling heavier by the minute.

Sticking my frozen hands into my pockets for warmth, I vaguely recollected the scenes that had lured us here: otherworldly jagged pinnacles draped in ice and snow, and gnarled solitary trees perched on precipices, with clouds swirling around them like scenes from old Chinese ink paintings. But at the moment, all I could see was my condensed icy breath, funneling out of me like a fog machine.

Though the mist was putting a damper on things, there’s a reason why this place was designated a unesco World Heritage Site in 1990. The park is composed of hundreds of mesmerizing granite peaks, often sticking right out of the passing clouds, and rising more than 1,000 meters from the valley floor.

Huangshan, meaning “yellow mountains,” gets its name not from any specific color feature, but from Huang Di, the mythological Yellow Emperor, said to have inhabited the pinnacles here as a supernatural being.

Located in the eastern Anhui Province the park is thronged with tourists in the summer, coming to explore its waterfalls, caves and hot springs, and hoping for glimpses of the cloudshrouded spires that have inspired so many ancient paintings. Yet winter is the driest time of year, when the weather is clear and it’s likely you’ll have the scenic vistas to yourself.

Our goal was to catch a lucky weather break, brave the cold, and capture the rugged pinnacles bathed in frosty rime ice—frozen

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DAJ / g e t t y i m a g e s

Visiting China’s Anhui province in the frigid off-season, Dave Stamboulis climbs the staggering mountain paths of Huangshan in search of a sunrise in the snow.

white layers caused by crystallized dense fog—in the early glow of dawn.

The top of Huangshan is accessible to mere mortals these days, with several hotels perched on the top of the high ridges, and stone walkways and staircases navigating around all of the most scenic peaks, which are given evocative names like “Monkey Gazing at the Sea” or “Beginning to Believe Peak” after their stone formations. Aerial cable cars make it easy for those who don’t want to exhaust themselves to get up into the clouds, and shops at the start of the climb rent and sell walking sticks and mini-spikes (in case there is snow) for those who want to do it all on foot.

Hollywood director James Cameron purportedly named Huangshan as the inspiration for his fantasy film Avatar, although Chinese netizens claimed he was confusing it with the similar peaks of Zhangjiajie. In either case, Cameron most likely didn’t visit on a numbingly cold January morning like this one, the thermometer registering a frosty minus four degrees Celsius. We are making progress uphill though. I recognize the iconic pine tree we’ve just passed as the one featured on all the postcards and tourist brochures here. Named “Welcoming Guest Pine,” the crooked tree is more than 1,500 years old and is a Huangshan pine, a hearty species noted for its ability to grow directly out of rocks and survive the wrath of perpetual mountain storms.

Several days later, huddled around a small heater in our hotel room, gloomily eating

instant ramen noodles and staring at the persistent drizzle outside, we’re close to considering the trip a bust. Yet come dinnertime in the fogged-up dining room, a shout from several tourists outside sends all of us running to the door, where we see snowflakes falling heavily, smothering the trees with winter cover. I venture out long enough to confirm that the temperature is falling fast, it’s now minus nine degrees, signifying clearing weather, so we retreat to our rooms to prepare our camera gear for tomorrow’s sunrise.

We rise at 5 a.m. The temperature has dropped to minus 15, so we wrap ourselves like mummies, and walk out into a star-filled wonderland: there isn’t a cloud in the sky. At the nearest overlook to our hotel, large macaques scurry along slippery railings and leap into trees, sending mini-avalanches off the boughs.

Some 10 minutes later, the first orange glow of dawn appears, and then the sun begins to slowly rise on the horizon, illuminating one of the most brilliant landscapes I have ever seen.

The entire forest is covered in rime ice crystals; the trees and granite pinnacles look like frozen ghosts.

Ancient Chinese poets raved about Huangshan. An 8th-century passage from Li Bai commences: “Morning sun strikes the tree tops, Here in this sky mountain world.”

Smiling through chattering teeth and gazing at the surrounding beauty some 13 centuries later, I feel just as inspired.

The DETAILS Getting there

Huangshan Tunxi Airport is 65 kilometers south of the mountain, and has flights from Taipei, Seoul, and domestic cities including Beijing, Shanghai and Guilin.

If you don’t want to walk up the mountain, a cablecar ride is RMB80.

Stay

Hotels on the mountain are

overpriced but the only option if you want to see sunrise and sunset. The Beihai (beihaihotel​ huangshan.com; doubles from RMB1,000) and Xihai (xihaihotel​ huangshan.com; doubles from RMB1,000) offer the most comforts. If sunrise views aren’t a priority, Banyan Tree Huangshan (banyantree.com; doubles from

RMB3,500) has elegant modernmeets-traditional villas and suites nestled in the mountains about 30 minutes away from the national park.

The Crowne Plaza Huangshan Yuchen (ihg.com; doubles from RMB650) is the best high-end option in Huangshan City.

pretty uninspiring Chinese fare, but you’re not on Huangshan for a culinary experience.

After trekking, head to Huangshan City for dinner at Mei Shi Ren Jia (247 Old St., Tunxi; 86559/251-2222; mains from RMB30), noted for its authentic Hui cuisine.

Eat

Do

The hotels on the mountain serve

Nimble hikers can do a full day’s trek

up and down the mountain, climbing up the Western Steps, sightseeing along the top trails, and descending from the Eastern Steps, but this will make for a long and tiring day. Better to spend a night on top.

The Xihai Grand Canyon area is a three-hour steep descent, but worth it for the unique rock formations and scenery. — D.S.

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opening

Above the Fray

Part of a wave of new premier hotels opening in the Thai capital, the Waldorf Astoria offers a fresh look onto the city. Photogr aph by christopher kucway

Mid-morning in Bangkok often means searing heat. Our new favorite respite is the cantilever roof–topped pool of the just-opened Waldorf Astoria Bangkok, which seems to levitate over a gorgeous green swathe in the center of town.

The magnolia-shaped hotel accented throughout by layered bronze paneling is graceful, fluid and elegant, like the Thai dancers that designer André Fu says inspired him. You’ll find nary a right angle in this tower, but plenty of light: floorto-ceiling windows at every level, including guestrooms that start at 50 square meters, truly maximize the space and invite the city in.

Up top is a trio of glam, gilded Art Deco outlets conceived by AvroKO. In Bull & Bear steakhouse, jovial chef Patrick Morris helms an open kitchen starring custom charcoal grills plus dramatic 55th-floor views, an unusual treat for a chef... unless you, like Morris, laughingly admit to a fear of heights. Yet, ascending to The Loft bar, it would be hard for anyone to avert their gaze from the windows come 6, when the sweeping magenta sunset perfectly matches your berry-tinged whisky smash— debonairly topped with Italian mint by head bartender Michele Montauti.

If you can figure out how to enter the tippy-top Champagne Bar (hint: there’s a bejeweled button worthy of Cleopatra), pure romance awaits down a stunning harlequin hallway.

At ground level, more beauty can be found on the plates of lovely chef Rungthiwa “Fae” Chummongkhon, whose Nordic cooking methods of Thai ingredients nets gems like her umami-packed Mom’s Soup with springy squid ribbons; and deboned, sous vide, fired and smoked, stuffed chicken wings that taste like light Isaan sausages. Here in Front Room, your head will be swiveling between the action in Fae’s show kitchen and out in the city beyond through, naturally, a panorama of lofty fishbowl windows. waldorfastoria. hilton.com; doubles from Bt13,000.

— jeninne lee-st. john

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th e prim e r

Waking Up to Malta A new emphasis on culture and the arts is leading travelers to this island idyll. Once there, they will get a taste of its centuries-old history, rich cuisine and glorious beaches.

By Maria Shollenbarger. photogr aphs By andrea w yner

I was trying to decide what the place reminded me of. Now, I love Morocco, particularly the Atlantic coast, with its eminently photogenic blue fishermen’s boats. And I really love Sicily, for its wheat-colored landscapes, the cultural palimpsest of its cuisine and pretty much everything else. This tiny archipelago nation—which lies some 95 kilometers south of Sicily and roughly on a latitude with Tangier—feels like a glorious mash-up of those two places. The swaths of prickly pears running riot across the interior put me in mind of the coast near Agadir, and the ornate elegance of the grand palazzo façades had me recalling Catania. But Malta is also entirely, ineluctably its own culture, ambience and people.

The preponderance of package tourists notwithstanding, it’s surprising that Malta has stayed under the radar for so long.

There are white-sand beaches in abundance, particularly along the northern coast of Malta, the namesake main island, and on the smaller island of Gozo. There is an alluring history, a long

Within minutes of l anding on Malta,

The city gate of Valletta, the capital of Malta, was redesigned by Renzo Piano.

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narrative of colonization and attempted invasion going back to the Phoenicians (around 750 B.C.) and lasting until its formal independence from the British Empire in 1974—with Carthaginians, Byzantium Romans, Arabs, Normans, the Knights of the Order of St. John, Ottoman Turks and Napoleon in between. And there is the orderly beauty of Valletta, Malta’s fortified capital, designed on a grid system by those same Knights of the Order of St. John in the 16th century.

When I arrived in early spring, the fields at the island’s center were thick with yellow wildflowers bowing in the stiff breeze. The sun, when it cut through fat white clouds, was instantly warming. (The temperature climbs into the high-30s in late July and August; May through mid-June and mid-September through the end of October are the best times to visit.)

The people are inordinately friendly; three out of the four times I asked for directions, I was offered a personal escort to my intended destination. And the country’s size—just 28 kilometers long and 15 kilometers wide—means it’s a cinch to explore.

Malta continues to rise in popularity thanks to a wave of new development in Valletta, designated one of two European Capitals of Culture for 2018 (valletta2018. org) and host to a robust calendar of exhibitions, performances and events through the end of the year.

So, here are four reasons why you should visit as soon as you can.

Rubino, a 112-year-old restaurant in Valletta, serves classic dishes such as Maltese rabbit and octopus salad with carrot purée.

21st-CENTURY CULTURE IS ON THE rise...

…BUT THE VERY OLD STILL DAZZLES.

Malta wears its multi-millennial history with pride, and its patrimony, from the prehistoric dolmens to the Baroque palaces, is everywhere. But the Maltese are now emphasizing contemporary architecture and design, too—starting with Valletta’s City Gate, dynamically reimagined by Renzo Piano. Five gates have existed on this site, going all the way back to 1569; Piano’s, which was finished in 2014, is a glass, steel and limestone masterpiece that includes the parliament building and an open-air theater. (It’s also one of Malta’s most Instagrammable confluences of beautiful structures, both old and new, and cobalt-blue sky; I must have taken three dozen shots of it from various angles, always coming up with something different.)

This latest gate is adjacent to the 16th-century Auberge d’Italie, currently being renovated to house MUZA (muza.heritagemalta.org), Malta’s new National Museum of Art, slated to open next summer. Also under way: Malta International Contemporary Art Space, or micas (micas.art), which will put the spotlight on art and performance from abroad. Having broken ground in late 2017, it is scheduled to be complete by 2021, but in the meantime, exhibitions and performances are being planned on the grounds of micas starting this autumn, including a show of mixed-media works by the Swiss-born artist Ugo Rondinone.

Beyond the beauty of Valletta’s early Baroque façades, from its tall, elegant town houses to St. John’s CoCathedral, are far more ancient attractions. A handful of megalithic temples, roughly 5,000 to 6,000 years old, pepper the landscape—some of the oldest man-made buildings on earth, exhibiting early bas-relief techniques and other craftsmanship. The temples at Tarxien, located in the suburb of the same name, and those at Ggantija, on Gozo, are especially compelling.

In the Three Cities—Birgu, Senglea and Cospicua, ancient maritime redoubts crowded together on two fingers of land extending into the blue water—you can see foundations at least 500 years old. To the west, near Malta’s center, lies Mdina, a tiny fortified town clinging to a low bluff. Known as the Silent City, it was long the seat of Malta’s noblest families, but is today home to only about 300 people. Befitting the town’s name, its center is a hushed maze of improbably narrow lanes.

The scent of orange flower drifts from hidden courtyards; hot-pink bougainvillea spills over limestone walls. At sunset, the town all but empties.

I walked from one end to the other in near solitude, kept company only by the calls of mourning doves and starlings, before indulging in an artisanal pistachio ice cream from Fior di Latte (gelatofiordilatte.com) on leafy Bastion Square. t r a v e l a n d l e i s u r e a s i a . c o m / o c t o b e r 2 0 1 8

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MALTESE CUISINE IS REALLY TASTY.

The infinity pool at the Phoenicia hotel, just outside the Maltese capital of Valletta.

Various Mediterranean culinary traditions found their way here, but the prevailing flavors are those of Italy, Greece and the Maghreb. Beyond Valletta’s newly restored Is-Suq tal-Belt food market (issuqtalbelt.com), where I was able to enjoy both local sausages and a hard-core green juice, a handful of restaurants are required eating. At Rubino (rubinomalta.com; mains €14–€24), an old Valletta institution, I sampled panfried involtini of delicate local sea bass, stuffed with pine nuts and mint, and rounds of tangy sheep-milk cheese called gjebna, which were pure Greece on a plate (you’ll find the cheese in everything from salads to ravioli). When my table wasn’t quite ready, I was offered a glass of crisp, Maltese white wine by a dapper waiter with a gentle smile.

The Medina Restaurant (medina​restaurant​m alta.com; mains €20–€30), a beautiful courtyard establishment in Mdina, elevates traditional dishes such as stuffat tal-fenek (rabbit stew). Also worth trying in Valletta: Rampila (rampila.com; mains €15–€28), where I liked the food but absolutely loved the hushed, shaded terrace, especially with its views of Piano’s City Gates, and Guzé Bistro (guzevilletta.com; mains €15–€28), a convivial, subterranean space emphasizing familiar local favorites like fat red prawns and ravioli filled with gjebna.

There is a BONA FIDE hotel scene.

One of the Phoenicia’s 136 guest rooms.

Gozo

Valletta

Mdina M a lta

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Five years ago you’d have been hard-pressed to find a stylish place to stay. How things change. At the top of my list was Casa Ellul (casaellul.com; doubles from €290), a nine-suite luxury guesthouse that opened in 2014, across from Valletta’s ornate Basilica of Our Lady of Mount Carmel. Brothers Andrew and Matthew Ellul converted their 19th-century family palazzo with the help of local interiors architect Chris Briffa. The result is a dynamic, original mix of antiques, iconic 20thcentury designs, and pieces custom-designed by Briffa.

Just outside the city gates is the Phoenicia (campbellgrayhotels.com; doubles from €430), built in the 1930s by Baron Strickland, then Malta’s prime minister.

Fresh off a two-year renovation, its 136 rooms and suites sing with color, and its private garden has a killer infinity pool. Across the harbor in Senglea is the brandnew Cugó Gran Macina Grand Harbour (cugo​g ranmalta. com; doubles from €280), set in a building dating back to 1554. The 21 suites, however, are all resolutely contemporary, the dimensions vast. But it’s Iniala Harbour House (iniala.com), opening early next year, that seems to be the most talked about. A sister property to the ultra-luxe Iniala Beach House in Thailand, the Harbour House will stretch across several joined properties along St. Barbara Bastion, and each of the 23 suites—some with rooftop terraces, others with frescoed cupolas—will be entirely unique.

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sel de Guérande cookie and the rhubarb-andlemon sourdough cake. fortitudebake​ house.com.

restaurant offers dishes such as wild mussels with a saffron, orange and bayleaf sofritto. It also pairs shellfish with cocktails such as Nepotism—a gin-and-mezcal creation made with lime, agave, sugar snap peas and dill. neptune.london; mains £12–£30; phcompany.com; doubles from £211.

5 Fortitude Bakehouse This photogenic space is furnished with handsome Norfolk oak counters piled high with examples of London’s latest food trend: slowferment baking (think sourdough, but used to make sweets). Standouts include the rye, chocolate and

6 L’oscar Designer Jacques Garcia shook up the Paris landscape when he opened Hôtel Costes in 1995; now he has unleashed his extravagant style on this boutique hotel on the grounds of a former Baptist chapel, adding opulent touches such as Laliqueinspired crystal faucets and a seven-story chandelier. loscar. com; doubles from £322.

7 La Fromagerie London A spinoff of the beloved Highbury original,

this award-winning specialist cheese store has a deli, a tasting room in the basement, and a delightful little café serving comforting dishes such as melted raclette. lafromagerie.co.uk; mains £8–£13.

8 Pentreath & Hall Those in search of stylish souvenirs should stop in at this housewares store off Lambs Conduit Street, which has become something of a design hot spot in the past few years.

After browsing decoupage trays, unique ceramic pieces, and jaunty graphic notebooks, you’ll be unlikely to leave emptyhanded. pentreathhall.com.

C l o c k w i s e fr o m L e f t: S i m o n B r o w n / C o u r t e s y o f T h e B l o o m s b u r y; S t e v e n J o y c e / C o u r t e s y o f T h e Pr i n c i pa l L o n d o n ; J a s o n I n g r a m / C o u r t e s y o f P e n t r e at h & H a l l

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4 Neptune Part of the newly reopened Principal London hotel, this chic seafood

british museum

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3 James Smith & Sons At this Instagram-ready emporium founded in 1830, you’ll find umbrellas with handles made of ash, blackthorn and hazel woods— some carved into fanciful shapes such as Airedale terriers and jaguars. jamessmith.co.uk.

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The revamped Coral Room bar at the Bloomsbury hotel. FROM TOP: Sea bass with Ibérico tomatoes, mussels and broad beans at Neptune; stylish gifts at Pentreath & Hall.

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Known for cerebral residents like Virginia Woolf and E. M. Forster and, more recently, for fading grandeur, this central London neighborhood is getting a makeover. In December, the long-awaited Crossrail will open up at Tottenham Court Road, connecting the area to Heathrow Airport in 40 minutes. And culture remains a draw: the British Museum, the most visited sight in London, will complete part of a major refurbishment later this year. Here, our guide to the addresses to check out on your next trip. By Jemima Sissons

2 Coral Room The bar at the Bloomsbury hotel has had a

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Bloomsbury’s New Buzz

dazzling overhaul by designer du jour Martin Brudnizki, with lacquered walls and artwork by on-trend illustrator Luke Edward Hall. Wash down the Dorset crab on toast with cocktails such as the verging-onhealthful Green Fingers, with vodka, kale juice, and agave and ginger syrups. thecoralroom. co.uk; small plates from £5; cocktails from £12.

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1 Centre Point Originally an office building, this Brutalist skyscraper and central London landmark has been renovated and made into luxury apartments.

Street-level dining options include Sushi Samba and Black Sheep Coffee. centrepoint​ residences.co.uk.

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Hotel impresario Thierry Teyssier (left) and a friend enjoy a seaside aperitivo in Puglia, Italy, where the first of his roving hotels launched last month.

Thinking Outside the Box

A radical new project named 700,000 Heures is poised to disrupt the way we think about hotels. Lee Marshall meets the charismatic Frenchman who, armed with a set of elegant trunks, is offering some of the world’s most exclusive travel experiences— from Italy to Cambodia and beyond.

Photogr aphs by Federico Ciamei

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On a day as bright and clean as a scrubbed deck, I was sitting in a sky-blue fishing boat anchored in a cove just off the coast of southern Puglia, where the heel of the Italian boot points into the Mediterranean. I’d just been for a swim in the translucent water and was eating the coral-colored roe of a sea urchin that, 10 minutes earlier, had been clamped to a rock beneath the waves.

A stocky, tanned 17-year-old named Giuseppe—one of those rare blond southern Italians—had dived for the urchins. Back on the boat, his father, Rocco, split open each spiny black ball with a pocket knife. Then he’d grabbed a handful of friselle (a type of Puglian dried roll) and served them topped with the scooped-out roe, some halved tomatoes, and a spiral of olive oil. As I ate, I felt the tingle of sea salt crystallizing on my back. No Michelin-starred restaurant could have bettered this—it was perfect.

Italy is good at these serendipitous moments, but this one wasn’t quite as spontaneous as it seemed. All of a sudden I remembered something my host in Puglia, a genial Frenchman named Thierry

Dinner in a lighting factory is one of the unusual moments offered at the hotel.

Teyssier, had said to me on the phone 10 days earlier. “When I discover a beach, or a cave, or a boat,” he said, “I picture your entire moment. Something new on the plate in front of you is as important as the boat, the fisherman. Everything must be part of the scene.”

At the time, it had sounded like a metaphor to illustrate the importance of detail in the planning of Teyssier’s new travel project: 700,000 Heures. Now I realized he had been thinking of a real boat, a real fisherman, and a real “something new on the plate.” Oh, and a real cave, too. On our way to lunch, the boat had entered a sea cave, a Blue Grotto without the tourists, alive with shards of light.

The name 700,000 Heures derives from the amount of time the average person in the developed world spends on earth (it’s a shade less than 80 years, but somehow it seems shockingly brief when expressed in hours). Teyssier describes his new venture as “the first wandering hotel in the world.” It involves taking over existing properties for months at a time, often renting them from owners who are already considering turning their homes into hotels or guest houses, and creating a range of experiences both inside and outside their walls.

Teyssier is the visionary behind Dar Ahlam, a maison d’hôte in Morocco’s Atlas Mountains. Since opening in 2002, the property has become one of the most influential hotels of the 21st century. It’s not the stunning casbah setting or the perfectly pared-back décor that makes it so: plenty of other hotels do nice locations and nice interiors. At Dar Ahlam (which means “house of dreams” in Arabic), it’s the way the guest experience is laced with surprises that has made it such a bucket-list legend. Famously, the hotel has no restaurant—because guests rarely eat any two meals in the same place. Instead, staff whisk them from one immaculately staged romantic setting to the next.

It comes as no surprise to discover that Teyssier has a background in theater design, later parlayed into a career in events management. In the wake of Dar Ahlam’s success, he has extended the formula to create a four-day journey, La Route du Sud, through the ravishingly stark landscapes of southern Morocco, as well as to open temporary hotels in Paraty, Brazil, and Portugal’s Douro Valley.

Teyssier is running 700,000 Heures as a club, with membership available from its website (guests who prefer not to join can book via one of 50 approved travel agents). The most basic level of membership costs just under US$3,000 for two people—an annual charge of US$585 plus a US$2,340 one-off entry fee. This amount is then gradually deducted from the cost of the trips you take, in the form of a 20 percent discount each time you check out of a 700,000 Heures property. “For me,” Teyssier explained, “it’s just money you put in our company to spend on holidays with us.”

Over the years, Teyssier’s most loyal clients have come to regard him as an important part of the experience. So he will be in permanent residence at each 700,000 Heures location, serving partly as general manager, partly as master of ceremonies. He has also devised a series of elements that will recur in every

Palazzo Daniele in Gagliano del Capo, Puglia—the site of the first 700,000 Heures temporary hotel.

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place. These include a range of fragrances from perfumer Olivia Giacobetti and a set of trunks, made by the artisans of L’Atelier de Manue in Agadir, Morocco, which open to reveal portable seats, tables, cocktail bars, massage beds, kids’ play supplies, even camp toilets and showers— all of which will be used to create Teyssier’s trademark surprise excursions.

I was in Puglia to check out the first of Teyssier’s nomadic hotels (he dislikes the term pop-up), which opened last month and runs until the end of October, in the town of Gagliano del Capo. That’s why I was on that tiny fishing boat eating sea urchin roe, sampling one of the excursions that 700,000 Heures members will be able to choose from during their stay. Others include jaunts in a vintage Fiat 500, breakfast

Fresh sea urchin roe, bread, and tomatoes, served on a boat trip at 700,000 Heures.

A prelunch swim off the boat.

in a cave overlooking the sea, and a wine tasting in a cellar that dates back to 1878.

Our base in sleepy Gagliano was Palazzo Daniele, a frescoed mansion on the main piazza. Arranged around a handsome, archlined courtyard that looks like something out of The Leopard, Luchino Visconti’s iconic twilight-of-the-aristocracy movie, it was built in 1861 by the family of Francesco Petrucci, a contemporary art curator who now hosts artist residencies in the property.

At Palazzo Daniele, 700,000 Heures guests will find beds made up with linens from Chez Zoé in Marrakesh placed in the center of airy, high-ceilinged rooms, some of them frescoed. The mood is simple, not opulent, but the details are telling: water jugs and serving bowls made in Grottaglie by ceramist Nicola Fasano (a name in every Puglian interior designer’s little black book); copper tea and coffee caddies made by cult artisanal workshop Kaikado, in Kyoto.

Out in the palazzo garden, I encountered Teyssier in rehearsal mode, stage-directing his upcoming show. The Frenchman jumped down a couple of steps to where I was standing and gestured at the kitchen, where resident chef Rosa Vanina Pavone was making lunch with a couple of helpers, the whole busy scene framed by a tall arched window. “Look!” he exclaimed. “It’s a theater!” I followed him as he strode into a walled citrus garden and glanced around critically. “Bof,” he said. “Can’t do anything here.”

We marched back into the kitchen just as Giuseppe Battocchio, a local organic farmer and proponent of the region’s growing number of Slow Food–style producers, made an entrance. He was bearing a huge basket of specialty breads from a nearby bakery and a tray full of fresh pecorino. Soon an impromptu tasting session was under way, and Teyssier was almost gurgling with joy: he had found another experience.

Later that day, we visited the location for one of the surprise dinner extravaganzas Teyssier is planning to incorporate into his Puglian show—the factory of a family-run company that makes luminarie, those traditional Puglian lighting installations that turn village fairs into enchanted kingdoms. >>

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Breakfast at the entrance to a cave, another surprise offered to guests at 700,000 Heures in Puglia.

Back at the palazzo, Teyssier told me the question What is a hotel? has been much on his mind recently. He believes it no longer needs to be a physical space with “four walls, a roof, rooms.” Instead, he advises hoteliers to literally think outside of the box, to imagine their hotel as the hub for a local network—of people, food, crafts and excursions—that extends far beyond its gates. Searching for an example, his eyes light up. “Giuseppe and the pecorino this morning.

That’s my deal.”

After my stay, Teyssier and his team decamped to Cambodia to plan an experience that will accommodate guests in a traditional Khmer house in Siem Reap, as well as a fisherman’s house on the Tonle Sap lake. Further destinations will open at the rate of two or three a year, and are likely to include Scandinavia, Central America and Japan.

Many of Teyssier’s hotel regulars have become friends over the years, and the highest tier of 700,000 Heures membership will allow guests to help him scout new destinations, plan experiences, and even get involved in offering them. He told me of one member who loves to cook, so she will be doing just that for the other guests when she comes to stay.

I found it hard not to think of Tom Sawyer’s fine ruse, when he made whitewashing a fence seem like the best fun in the world—and charged his friends for the privilege. But as the “great law of human action” uncovered by Mark Twain’s hero at the end of this famous scene decrees, “Work consists of whatever a body is obliged to do, and that Play consists of whatever a body is not obliged to do.”

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HOW TRAVELING WITH 700,000 Heures works 700,000 Heures (700000heures.com) is a membership club that gives access to a series of experiencerich trips curated by hotel impresario Thierry Teyssier. Guests will be lodged in private accommodations around the world, from mansions to houseboats.

The Puglia, Italy, project, which ran September–October 2018, is based at a single property; others, like Cambodia (November 2018–April 2019), will encompass two or more accommodations.

Membership in Teyssier’s club is available on the website, or guests can book via one of 50 travel agents, including T+L A-List members Local Foreigner (localforeigner. com) and Matueté (matuete.com). You don’t need to join 700,000 Heures if you book through an agent, as they pay a fee that gives all their clients membership privileges.

There are four levels of membership, each named after a nomadic tribe. Most members will opt for the most basic, Awa, which requires a US$2,340 entry fee and an annual fee of US$585 for two people.

All-inclusive daily rates range from US$1,755 to US$2,105 for two people, depending on the destination. Membership fees are deducted from the cost of trips taken, in the form of a 20 percent discount on members’ bills when they check out.

dining

Feasting in Philadelphia

Chefs, bakers and creative cocktail makers are shaking up the City of Brotherly Love, where a playful, unpretentious spirit—and affordable rents—have given rise to the East Coast’s most vibrant culinary landscapes.

By Sierr a Tishgart. Photogr aphs by Jason Varney

Chicken wontons with green curry at Cheu Fishtown.

It’s e asy to dismiss Philadelphia as a

Dining at the bar in Cheu Fishtown.

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place forever languishing in New York City’s shadow. But when it comes to food, Philly is actually one of the more exciting destinations in the country right now. The city’s lower prices and young, scrappy energy have given chefs and restaurateurs free rein to experiment, allowing them to reinvent its classic cuisine and add influences from around the globe.

Despite the Eagles defeating the Patriots in February’s Super Bowl, Philadelphia will always be proud of its underdog spirit. It’s a place where servers befriend you, and strangers in bars talk you into taking shots.

It’s not uncommon to see someone break into a dance while making your sandwich. The vibe is more personal and upbeat than that of many U.S. cities—there’s simply more space to play.

Philly native Stephen Starr, who owns 20 restaurants in his hometown and seven in New York City, recently opened The Love, a chic, informal restaurant in Rittenhouse Square that serves updated versions of classic American dishes. “I’ve always thought that Philadelphia and New York shared a lot of the same energy, virility and heart,” he said. “But in Philadelphia, we have bigger footprints in which to create.”

Branden McRill, who opened Rebelle in New York City and more recently Walnut Street Café in Philadelphia, sees an even broader shift under way. “What’s going on in Philly is fascinating—people are coming on weekends and finding there are reasons to relocate here. The quality of life is high.”

Whether you’re after a casual bite or date-night fare, these are the best places to witness Philadelphia’s food evolution—one meal at a time. >>

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dining

Sandwiches Middle Child Matt Cahn’s modern luncheonette draws inspiration from cool-kid spots like New York’s Court Street Grocers, where Cahn trained. The sandwich to order is the Phoagie, a Vietnamese-vegan riff on a classic Philly sandwich. But you come for the staff—who treat everyone like old friends—as much as the food.

Eagles paraphernalia and a pantry filled with snacks handpicked by Cahn, all for sale, make the diner feel even more inviting. middlechild​ philly.com; mains from US$5.

Date Night The Love After expanding his empire in New York City (which includes the award-winning Le Coucou), Stephen Starr returned home to launch this collaboration with beloved local chef Aimee Olexy.

Located in the posh Rittenhouse Square neighborhood, the interiors

look like a designer farmhouse with perfect mood lighting. Yes, you’ve had fried chicken a million times, but it’s perfectly done here, and the spicy Mississippi comeback sauce really should be bottled and sold. theloverestaurant.com; mains US$17–$38.

Brunch Walnut Street Café Melissa Weller, formerly of Sadelle’s in N.Y.C., is one of the most talented bakers working in America today, and this new all-day restaurant is purpose-built for brunch. Settle in at one of the marble tables set with pastel dishes and f lowers, and get ready to try Weller’s famous baked goods like the cinnamon roll and the cherryand-pistachio croissant.

Round out the meal with a fried egg and “black scrapple,” her take on a local specialty made from pork scraps. Pro tip: the restaurant is within walking distance of 30th Street Station, and you can

Lebanese comforts at Suraya.

Buttermilk fried chicken with grits and collard greens at The Love.

sleep over at the sleek AKA hotel upstairs. walnutstreet​ cafe.com; mains US$15–$37.

Big Group dinner Suraya In the heart of gritty, up-andcoming Fishtown, you’ll find something surprising: a 1,100-square-meter space dedicated to Lebanese food.

This is the ideal place to go with a posse, as it includes the Market, where you order at the counter and then stake out your territory (the restaurant also has a sit-down dinner service Tuesday through Sunday). Order ground beef kafta kebabs, labne cheese, and man’oushe f latbreads made with with za’atar and sweet halvah. Don’t miss the Lebanese chai latte made with salep, or orchid powder, and topped with pistachios and rose petals. It’s exactly the right amount of sweet and, devastatingly, impossible to replicate at home. suraya philly.com; mains US$23–$40.

R amen and Dumplings Cheu Fishtown Housed in an old horse stable, this is a restaurant built for

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design lovers. The beer list is displayed on a repurposed marquee sign, and there’s a mural painted by street artists on the wall. The menu is suitably fun: brisket ramen comes with kimchi and a matzo ball (somehow, it works), and chicken wontons are stuffed with green curry and peanuts. It’s festive, creative and low-key—the ideal neighborhood restaurant. cheufishtown. com; mains US$13–$26.

Cock tail s Upstairs Tiki at the Franklin Bar After dinner at The Love, walk to nearby Franklin Bar—a two-for-one punch that is part subterranean speakeasy, part delightful tiki lounge. The décor is straight-up kitsch—cocktail umbrellas, leis, string lights—but the drinks and the service ref lect serious expertise. The Oxy-colada somehow improves upon the classic piña colada, with overproof Plantation rum, crème de cacao, coconut and fresh pineapple juice. thefranklinbar.com.

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d i s c o v e ry

The historic Château des Ducs de Bretagne houses the Nantes History Museum.

Your Next French City

Move over, Marseille. It’s time to add Nantes—just a two-hour train ride from Paris—to the must-visit list. Josh Levine discovers a former industrial backwater transformed into a powerhouse of culture and cuisine. Photogr aphs by Céline Cl anet About six months ago, my Parisian friends Gregory and Delphine told me they were leaving the French capital and moving to Nantes, a small city in western France, near where the Atlantic meets the Loire River.

This sounded like odd behavior. Paris is Paris; Nantes is the birthplace of author Jules Verne and…remind me what else?

I may have considered my friends’ move harebrained, but it turned out they were far from the only hares. In recent years, I learned, the city has become a go-to for young professionals fleeing the high rents

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and (relatively) noisy streets of Paris.

Not only has Nantes become a flourishing start-up hive (Gregory quickly found work as a creative director at a digital ad agency); it has also completely retooled its identity.

Shipbuilding, long the main industry, declined through the 1970s and 80s—destroying the livelihoods of many Nantais. Over the past 10 years, I was told, a deliberate effort has been made to replace ships with art. Splashy installations are supported by hefty municipal spending and a fun-loving populace with a taste for public spectacle.

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Before long, it began to seem like a good idea to pay Gregory and Delphine a visit. So my wife and I took the two-hour TGV from Paris on a Friday afternoon, curious to find out what all the fuss was about.

Friday evening We checked in to the reliable Radisson Blu (radissonblu.com; doubles from €125), which has occupied Nantes’ colonnaded former courthouse since that institution moved to Jean Nouvel’s austere black Palais de Justice, on the site of the abandoned shipyards, in 2000. >>

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From top: The

brasserie La Cigale, a lively hangout long favored by local artists; Nantes’ storied Passage Pommeraye, an 1893 arcade that remains one of the city’s favorite shopping destinations.

the first local chanterelles of the season—he’d put them through a dehydrator to add an exquisite crispiness—with lard and a smoked egg. Next came superb, obscenely plump mussels from Groix, an island up the coast, that Quirke had gotten his hands on after months of struggling. (“I know a guy who knows a guy,” he said.)

Saturday

For dinner, we headed to a tiny restaurant called Pickles (picklesrestaurant.com; tasting menu €47)—a place, our friends had told us, that embodies the new spirit of Nantes. “This city has access to wonderful ingredients, but no local tradition of cuisine,” said Dominic Quirke, the English proprietor.

“Now a bunch of young chefs are changing that.”

Quirke and his French wife opened Pickles four years ago, after he bailed out of an IT job in Paris to start cooking seriously. He served us

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Starting out on foot from the hotel after breakfast, we strolled through the heart of bourgeois 19th-century Nantes, where the city’s rich merchants left their imposing mark.

We passed through the Place Graslin, stopping to admire its grand, Neoclassical opera house. Across the square stands the historic brasserie La Cigale (lacigale.com; mains €13– €28), where artists André Breton and Jacques Prévert used to talk surrealism in the 1920s. It’s a great place to drink a café au lait and check out the fabulous Art Nouveau tiles.

From there, it was a short downhill trot to the newer part of the city. Here, what was once a waterfront was filled in the early 20th century, after the river channels silted up. The resulting concrete landfills remained unused and deserted until the early aughts, when they were finally transformed into broad swaths of green—lined with trees, dotted with public parks, and

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crisscrossed by modern tramlines and bike lanes. (Nantes is bike-mad, we soon discovered.) We walked by an open fruit and vegetable garden where any passerby is free to pluck an apple or pull up a carrot and eat it at a nearby picnic table—one of nine community potagers in the city.

At that point, our formerly Parisian friends Gregory and Delphine joined us for a walk along the quay. They had only just gotten settled and were still reeling from the culture shock. “In Paris, crossing the street is a test of wills. Here, cars slow down before you even leave the curb,” Gregory marveled. We reached a section of the esplanade embedded with 2,000 glass plaques, each bearing the name of a slave ship that had once made Nantes its home port. (The city was responsible for around 5 percent of the Atlantic slave trade until it abolished the practice in 1830.) The installation is part of a museum called the Mémorial de l’Abolition de l’Esclavage (memorial. nantes.fr). In a country that is often accused of covering up its historical blemishes, the experience felt refreshingly enlightened.

Near the museum, the four of us jumped aboard a shuttle boat that took us across the estuary to the charming fishing village of Trentemoult. We explored narrow alleys of brightly colored houses, with their neat gardens of tropical >>

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flora carried back from distant sea voyages (one neighborhood is nicknamed “Little California” for its palm trees). We lunched on the terrace of a delightful seafood restaurant called La Civelle (lacivelle. com; mains €17–€39), while all around us crowds of Nantais soaked up the sun on lounge chairs. It all felt much farther away than the seven minutes it took to get there.

Down a narrow lane from the restaurant, we happened upon a derelict factory with an incongruous 7-meter pendulum swinging from its tower. This is Roman Signer’s Le Pendule, one of 30 giant art installations strung out along 65 kilometers of the estuary, from Nantes to St.-Nazaire. The guiding spirit is playfulness. In Nantes itself, you can see model Laetitia Casta’s wavy-haired image staring up from the bottom of a canal, like drowned Ophelia, in a piece by the artist Ange Leccia called Nymphéa. And out by St.-Nazaire, Huang Yong Ping’s Sea Serpent, an aluminum skeleton of a 130-meter snake, rises from the shallows.

These are the kinds of cultural fireworks on which Nantes has bet big in the past 10 years. In 2012, the city created a kind of superagency called Voyage à Nantes to manage its comeback. It shrewdly chose Jean Blaise, an outside-the-box artistic director and urban planner, to run it.

“Nantes no longer had an identity, and we had to be audacious to change its image,” he told me. “I don’t want to sound immodest, but I have to say, I’m pretty satisfied.”

Sunday

The Marché de Talensac (marchetalensac.fr), where Nantes displays its edible bounty on Sunday mornings, happened to be a fiveminute walk from our hotel. I’m a devotee of my Paris marché on the Boulevard Raspail, but I have never seen shellfish like this: baskets of sea snails, langoustines, scallops and tiny pink shrimp still wriggling. And oysters—I counted eight different kinds at one stand.

Before heading home, we crossed over a branch of the Loire to the Île de Nantes, the island that once housed

the city’s shipyards. While new office cubes and apartment buildings are clustered around the Palais de Justice, perhaps the best symbol of the rebranded city is the current occupant of the island’s massive shipbuilding hangars.

As its name implies, the theater company Les Machines de l’Île (lesmachines-nantes.fr) makes machines—like a 12-meter-high elephant that can plod along at around 1.5 kilometers per hour, carrying 50 passengers while blowing majestic jets of steam. In the workshop, you can interact with this menagerie, find out how it was made, and ride on a three-story carousel of sea creatures inspired by Les Machines’ kooky local avatar, Jules Verne. Think steampunk meets Leonardo da Vinci. This mix of technology and fantasy represents the way Nantes likes to think of itself now. We found it utterly beguiling.

From left: Part of the mechanical menagerie at the workshop of theater company Les Machines de l’Île; Trentemoult, a fishing village across the river from Nantes.

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Be the first to stay in new rooms in Bali or get a dose of culture in Macau, Bhutan or Singapore with this month’s deals.

The Reverie Saigon Feel at home in Vietnam’s biggest city with a stay in The Reverie Saigon’s residentialstyle suites. Previously only available for a minimum of three nights, the one-bedroom suites have been opened up for shorter stays—enjoy Italian furnishings, premium bedding, marble-lined bathrooms, separate living rooms and fully equipped kitchens. Guests who book a night in a one-bedroom residential-style suite from US$540 will get US$250 back in hotel credit. This can be used for services such as a luxury airport transfer; Reverie Lounge access with daily afternoon tea, cocktails and canapés; meals at the The Reverie’s restaurants or bars; spa or beauty treatments at the hotel’s spa; dry cleaning and laundry; or butler service.

The Deal Suite Dreams package: a night in a onebedroom residential suite from US$540, through February 28, 2019. thereveriesaigon.com.

fr o m t o p : c o u r t e s y o f T h e r e v e r i e s a i g o n ; c o u r t e s y o f s h i l l a s tay h a e u n d a e

SINGAPORE

Plush surrounds in the Liberty One-Bedroom Apartment at The Reverie.

SUPERSAVER Shilla Stay Haeundae, South Korea

With sweeping ocean views, Shilla Stay Haeundae is just a two-minute walk from the picturesque Haeundae Beach. The hotel’s new “Welcome to Korea” package includes a Busan City Tour Bus Ticket (one-day pass), complimentary breakfast, and a Shilla Stay teddy bear gift. The Deal Welcome to Korea package: a night in a Standard room from W114,000, through December 31. shillastay.com.

Far East Village Hotels To celebrate the rich identity of the Lion City, Far East has collaborated with Singapore’s tertiary institutions to immerse guests in local culture. Students at Nanyang Academy of Fine Arts and Singapore Institute of Technology have designed “Made in Singapore” rooms in each Village brand property to showcase the city-state’s multiracial culture, heritage and history. Guests who book a stay in these rooms across the Village Hotels—Bugis, Katong, Albert Court or Changi—will receive breakfast for two; a Village Passport walking guide; an activity book; a Singaporeinspired souvenir; and more.

The Deal Made in Singapore room package: a night in a Made in Singapore room from S$250, through December 31, 2019. stayfareast.com.

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deals

CULTURE BHUTAN

COMO Uma Bhutan Dive into Nepalese culture with this culinary-focused package from COMO Uma Bhutan. The six-night Himalayan Explorer package includes accommodation at COMO Uma Paro and COMO Uma Punakha on a full board basis, including picnic lunches during excursion days (excluding beverages); a half-day Bhutanese cooking lesson; privately guided excursions, taking in the highlights of the Paro, Thimphu and Punakha valleys; an experienced Englishspeaking Bhutanese guide; one 60-minute COMO Shambhala body treatment; private airport transfers and transport around Bhutan; all Bhutanese government visa and royalty fees, service charges and sales tax; all museum and visitor center entry fees and road permits; one-hour daily yoga class at COMO Uma Paro (except Sundays); and complimentary resort Wi-Fi. The Deal Himalayan Explorer: six nights from US$6,617, seven nights from US$7,746, per double, through December 31, 2019. comohotels.com.

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BEACH BALI

Conrad Bali Fresh from a sleek renovation, this beachfront resort is offering a deal that shows off its sparkling new digs. Book a minimum of three nights and guests can take advantage of the “Premier Getaway” package, which offers a stay in the refurbished Premier rooms; complimentary Wi-Fi access for Hilton Honors members; return airport transfers; buffet breakfast at Suku restaurant; and free meals for children under 12 at Suku restaurant.

The deal also includes complimentary access to the Kura-Kura Kids’ Club, which offers art classes, baking workshops, treasure hunts and daily cultural activities. The Deal Premier Getaway package: a night in a Premier room, from Rp2,900,000, through December 31, 2019. Book before December 31, 2018. conradbali.com.

THAILAND

Santiburi Koh Samui Spoil your loved one with an end-of-year romantic beach

Pool time at Conrad Bali.

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break tucked away in your own private villa on this luxury island in the Gulf of Thailand.

Santiburi Koh Samui’s Romance package includes a three-night stay in a 285-square-meter Grande Deluxe Pool villa; daily breakfast for two; a bottle of sparkling wine; a candlelit dinner on the beach; a 60-minute in-villa signature couple’s spa treatment; and round-trip airport transfers.

The Deal Romance package: three nights in a Grande Deluxe Pool villa from Bt76,250, through December 22. santiburisamui.com.

CHINA

Ritz-Carlton Sanya, Yalong Bay Treat the whole family to a beach escape in China’s tropical south. The RitzCarlton Sanya, Yalong Bay is offering a two-night Reconnect package that includes daily buffet breakfast for two adults and two children under 12; airport pick up or drop-off; complimentary extra bed in room; complimentary night safari tent set-up; Ritz kids amenities; complimentary

beach toys; and more. The Deal is valid for stays in the hotel’s Deluxe, Resort View and Premier Ocean View rooms, or Garden villas. The Deal Reconnect package: two nights in a Deluxe room from RMB34,382, through December 29. ritzcarlton.com.

MALDIVES

Noku Maldives Nestled among tropical greenery and peaceful blue waters, Noku Maldives offers a private sanctuary in this dream destination. T+L readers will get an exclusive 20 percent discount and complimentary villa upgrade on stays before December 22. Located on Kuda-Funafaru in Noonu Atoll, the 20 beach villas and 30 over-water villas are elegantly designed with soft white hues and dark wood accents, while large bay windows and French doors look out onto the sparkling natural views.

The Deal Travel+Leisure Southeast Asia promotion: a night in a villa from US$878, through December 22. To book, e-mail h3-resv@nokuroxy.com and quote NK-TLSEA. nokuhotels.com.

courtesy of conrad bali

MACAU

Mandarin Oriental, Macau In tune with the Macao Orchestra’s upcoming concerts, Mandarin Oriental, Macau is offering a special deal for its guests to combine the sound of music with a luxury stay. The Symphonic Escapade special includes two VIP tickets to one of three concerts by the Macao Orchestra, as well as accommodation in a Deluxe City View room, breakfast for two at Vida Rica and 30 percent off spa treatments. The Deal The Symphonic Escapade package: a night in a Deluxe City View room from HK$2,599, valid for November 25, 2018, February 16, 2019, and July 27, 2019. mandarinoriental.com.

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AN C IENT C HINESE PAINTIN G s C OME TO LI F E IN

yangshuo p. 74

S U RPRISES ALL ALON G THE SO U TH C OAST O F

sri lank a p. 80

LOW K EY AN D LOVIN G IT ON t h e

cote d’azur p. 90

A WATERY WON D ERLAN D ON THE TRIB U TARIES O F THE

Amazon p. 98

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

An otherwordly cocoon at Wild Coast Tented Lodge, Yala, Sri Lanka, page 80.

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Peaks and Valleys The emerald karsts, cascading paddy fields and majestic rivers of Yangshuo, Longji and Guilin are ancient paintings come to life. While the pace of development may seem swift even here in rural China, touring via two wheels allows a slow traveler to keep ahead of the masses. story and photogr aphs by lillian chou

y back is drenched with perspiration from hefting my knapsack up a thousand steps through winding paths that lead me to a vista on the edge of magnificence. I’m scaling the Dragon’s Back, known locally as Longji, an undulating landscape of layered rice terraces home to a cluster of minority villages within southwestern Guangxi province. My sore knees berate me for opting out of the sedan ride I was offered at the village gates, but I feel victorious, as if I’ve physically earned this monumental view and decide not to feel guilty for employing an elderly Zhuang minority woman to haul my suitcase in a bamboo panier on her back for a 50-yuan note.

A decade ago, she might have been bent over these fields planting rice in the ribbon of terraces that are filled with water and mirror the bright sky, like silvery dragon scales. Local life is now carved differently from the depths of these paddies: China’s economic rise means rice imports from Southeast Asia are now cheaper than home-grown grain, but the terraces are still a commodity. Tourism is the new harvest and lucrative throughout the year where every season brings a different beauty and constant flow of visitors. Late spring into early summer is when the terrace pools are irrigated to form mesmerizing reflections that glisten, a remarkable man-made facelift that accentuates nature’s beauty.

At just 650 years old, this bendy stratum of terraces is young relative to China’s age. The valleys and villages of Longsheng County, where the terraces are clockwise from top located, are composed of left: Sun sets over the karsts; mifen, Guilin’s minorities including the Zhuang, fresh rice noodles; along with Miao, Dong and longBanyan Tree haired Yao. I am in Ping’An, a Yangshuo; yangmei, village that is home to 500 Zhuang known as the Chinese strawberry; class residents whose homes double up begins at the Yangshuo as restaurants or guesthouses.

Cooking School; a The village is best known for easy scenic bike trail; hikes through an expanse of zhutong, rice cooked in terraces that can become a full bamboo tubes. t r a v e l a n d l e i s u r e a s i a . c o m / o c t o b e r 2 0 1 8

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day trek over to neighboring Dazhai, where tour buses known to dispel heat, and clear lung and chest tend to stop for day trips and the cable-car views, while issues. It has long grown in these valleys in Jinkeng is even further away. I want to see sunrise and smaller fields but is now gaining ground and choose the Li-An Lodge poised above a striking vista will soon become a global superfood and zerosteps away from my bed. Owner and photographer Keren calorie sweetener with added health benefits.

Su was so inspired by the views that he purchased the land and built the wooden structure as a high-end he next morning, we ride up guesthouse in the traditional architectural style. Rustic a few challenging hills, pausing guesthouses are plentiful in Ping’An and at times the for breath, surrounded and solace is ruined by construction sounds of future hypnotized by the swaying guesthouses as this area continues to expand, but short trunks of bamboo forests. After hikes and a little distance silence even the most a break, we assemble into a van and drive the incredible panoramas. rest of the way through Guilin city. Huge This is a form of preservation tourism my old friend karsts appear like ancient spirits in the Bruce Foreman, who has made his life sharing horizon, a scenic mountain scape so revered, discoveries along rural parts of China for many years, it’s engraved on the backside of China’s 20extols: slow, immersive, hyper-local, exceptionally active. yuan currency note. The arcane peaks are a He and a partner, Scott Spencer, founded the Yangshuo graceful combination of sediment, limestone, Bike Festival, to highlight the romance—some might say dolomite, acid rain and earthquakes that were fleeting, given the pace of development—of Guangxi, once the sea floor leaving fossils and caves Guilin and Yangshuo, and I’ve come along for its fifth within the network of karsts that jut out of the incarnation. This small but growing celebration of ground like colossal jagged teeth. Often hidden cycling through quiet trails under the shadows of karsts, by mists and clouds, they have long inspired idyllic rice fields, and quiet rivers with upbeat DJ tunes poetry, calligraphy and ink paintings. on wireless headphones reveals the region’s iconic Yangshuo is both a popular town and county wonders and unseen backwaters. Luckily for me, the trip in the southern part of Guilin prefecture. also includes exceptional food—fortification for both my Touring Chinese tend to hover in Guilin city for culinary soul and my weary limbs. its scenic karsts and neon-studded While I’m joining the rides and excursions, I parks, and to cruise the Li River on Opposite: Farmers dot prefer to explore some different hotels and eat a motorboats that resemble the the steep Longji rice terraces, which were few local meals without the group. At dinner I try manpowered bamboo rafts that once first cultivated during zhutong fan, a charred tube of bamboo, blackened dominated the waters. Yangshuo town the Yuan Dynasty in from roasting over fire. When it’s cracked open, a was “discovered” in the 1980s when the 13th century. heady scent rises from la rou, a local bacon that is Western backpackers, mostly cyclists preserved and smoked, then air-dried in bundles and rock climbers, began to frequent the dangled off the eaves like silent wind-chimes. It is unspoiled terrain of quiet villages, karsts and chopped and steamed with sticky rice and I dig in. I sip rivers. Yangshuo town has, in some parts, been the local rice wine or baijiu, steeped in giant glass urns decimated by tourism—too much of a good with varieties of medicinal herbs, preferring the one with thing—and at night, restaurants and bars light the fragrant scent of drunken yangmei, (my new favorite up with aggressive, boisterous crowds. fruit) also called the waxberry or Chinese strawberry. It By day, though, the town is peaceful and competes against the passion-fruit infusion, a fruit that is worth a gander, with some places definite a recent cash-crop growing along the countryside. Bruce priorities. Top of the list: the Rice Noodle and I leave the next morning and I pass sedan chair Cultural Center. Despite its museum-like name peddlers, tempted—but instead stop and buy a darkened it is actually a tiny simple eatery whose noodle egg in its shell, fire-cooked by a towel-turbaned Zhuang master chef Li makes Guilin’s best contribution minority woman. It’s warm, with a deep roasted flavor, to Chinese cuisine: mifen, fresh rice noodles. unlike any boiled egg I’ve ever tasted.

The ubiquitous noodles are on most menus, but Down at the village gate, we group together with other here they are exceptional. Local rice is soaked bike-festers to don helmets and load our suitcases into a in water with Chinese medicinal herbs and van that will meet us at our next destination. We cycle stone-ground, then fermented for 200 hours freely through breezy switchbacks and pedal through before being pummeled into a dough that is farming villages while children chase us shouting, pressed through an old vat, using stone “Hello! Hello!” Bruce and I reminisce of the China that is counterweights. This traditional labor ceased slowly disappearing, the paths of innocence that are to exist about 50 years ago according to Jenny fewer and farther between as we ride through another Zeng, who runs the Magnolia Hotel next door; new economy: passion fruit and a concerted effort at the current process omits the fermentation, farming luohanguo, monk fruit, a melon-like round fruit and the manual methods of hammering dough that is dried for use in traditional Chinese medicine and are now automated. Chef Li’s old-school efforts

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Yangshuo town. Secret Garden is the baby of Ian Hamilton, a South African tour guide and architect, who saw the demise of ancient Qing Dynasty buildings and was inspired to reclaim and salvage a building—a feat that seemed so impossible thanks to complicated Communist bureaucracy and the country’s general foreignaverse sentiments that he was nicknamed fengzi, meaning crazy. He partnered with Faye Zhang, a Yangshuo native and tonight they are our hosts.

At the festival culmination party, we feast on panlong qiezi, aptly named dragon eggplant, a village dish of thinly sliced fried eggplant and coiled like a serpent, smothered in a sauce of minced pork, vegetables and Guilin’s famous hot chilies, and other local dishes, while a local band jams in the background. The dynamic mix of Chinese and foreigners from all parts of Asia create a brilliant weekend of kindred travelers and new friends.

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forego the next day’s bike ride, opting for rooftop tai-chi beneath the towering karsts followed by class at the Yangshuo Cooking School. It’s a perfect morning that ends with lunch in a traditional mudbrick house in the countryside. Class begins in Yangshuo’s central market for a quick tour where I pick up a strange leafy vegetable called kumaicai that I’ve cycled past in fields. Stir-fried, it’s bitter and my The rugged layers new favorite vegetable. We make an easy result in subtle noodles with a toothsome texture of Yangshuo’s eggplant with minced pork that reminds different from what you can get from a machine, mountainous horizon me of the version at the Secret Garden— and perfected when sprinkled with local pickled is reflected into the slightly different, but equally delicious. long beans, smoked pork strips and a dab of Yulong River at sunset.

I head over to the Yangshuo Mountain Guilin’s second prized comestible: chili paste. It’s Retreat, a place I stayed in 2012, and simply delicious. anticipate another meal at a local farm The Yangshuo Bike Festival is a uniquely spirited way restaurant in the middle of a bike trail. Back to explore the area’s mysterious limestone structures far then, my friends and I sat on plastic stools in away from crowds. While there is plenty for non-bikers the open air, feasting on local delights: pomeloin the festival, Bruce and Scott are right that seeing the skin dumplings, delicious river snails, and countryside is best done on two wheels. Bruce, who is pijiu yu, a local dish of river fish braised with based in Hong Kong, and Scott, who lives in Yangshuo, beer, tomatoes, peppers and ginger that I find met here in 2000. Each started his own cycling tour on every menu. Alas, there’s no déjà vu because company, believing it to be the only way to discover the the path and restaurant are gone and the road disappearing China—including Yangshuo—that they has moved. Special permits are now required loved. Eventually they decided to collaborate in the for cars to enter this new scenic zone. Although quirky festival. the Li River is popular, I’m advised to skip it We mine through rocky trails past sweet scented and instead take the quieter bamboo raft ride osmanthus trees whose canary blossoms are used for tea along the Yulong River that runs along the and cooking. Crossing over the quieter Yulong River, we retreat. I catch a peaceful sunset cycle on the watch a flotilla of gondoliers hoist poles and navigate new, stone riverfront paths before dining on two-seater bamboo rafts over gentle shifts and passing the same beer-braised fish as well as local taro beneath the shadows of statuesque rock formations. We with dried bamboo at the hotel’s restaurant. finish with a celebration dinner at the Secret Garden, an Yangshuo is plum with small villages that 18-room guesthouse and restaurant along a single dirt disperse visiting crowds. Knowing where to go track that comprises Jiuxian Village, five kilometers from

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and how to avoid crowds is crucial here. My friend, Terry Li, is a local guide and takes me to rural Fuli Village for the market that happens every three to five days according to the lunar calendar. Fuli is famous for handpainted calligraphy fans, but for me nothing is more telling of a place than its local market. Everything is sold here including fine tobacco shreds and almost every form of bamboo imaginable. There are vegetables I can’t translate and some I’ve never seen. Baskets regale full of red spikey yangmei, the irresistible tart and sweet fruit that are now in peak season. Naturally we find live fowl including ducks, geese and chickens. There is also dog meat, a specialty meant to ward off chill, and increase virility and body heat—it is extremely controversial but has long been a part of local life, explains Terry, who is also a cook. Everyone is slurping local breakfasts of mifen, or youcha—“oil tea,” a soupy wash of fried bits and condiments including pickles and chili in a bowl doused with bitter tea. I prefer noodles, but the youcha is rendered more palatable with crispy fried baba, a stamped green disk of chewy sticky-rice dough mixed with mugwort that is filled with sweet bean paste and either steamed or deep fried in giant woks.

I elevate my status and head to the nearby Banyan Tree just a short bike ride away and am robbed of sunset by the misty drizzle, but the sky is still beautiful.

Everyone is drinking luohanguo tea, and in the spa it is incorporated as a part of their signature treatment.

Perhaps the finest restaurant in town is in Bai Yun, the hotel’s Chinese restaurant where I have my best and favorite version of pijiu yu, and feast on another local specialty, river snails that are tender and lovely with ginger and garlic. It reminds me of the farmer’s lunch I once had and is equally delicious if not better, plus this time, I am being served in a formal dining room.

Intellectually, I’m aware that China will keep changing, but that doesn’t prevent me from feeling a bit devastated at the rapid pace I face when coming back to places like Yangshuo. I’m grateful to Bruce, Scott and Terry and of course my local hosts throughout for reminding me that there remain plenty of villages to discover—and provide a new perspective on the magnificent landscape of rivers and karsts.

Huge karsts appear like ancient spirits in the horizon, a scenic mountain scape

YAngshuo

It’s worth touring this part of southern Guanxi by bike to get a unique perspective on the spectacular landscapes and cuisine.

Getting There The best time to visit Yangshuo is from March to December. Cathay Pacific and Cathay Dragon (both at cathaypacific.com) fly from Hong Kong to Guilin non-stop. Air Asia (airasia. com) flies from Kuala Lumpur to Guilin non-stop.

China Southern (csair.com) flies from Bangkok to Guilin via Nanning.

Seventy-two-hour transit visas are available on arrival for certain passport holders with restrictions, otherwise visas must be secured in advance. www. iatatravelcentre.com.

Hotels can offer private car transfers from Guilin to Yangshuo or Longsheng for approximately RMB300 to RMB900 each way. They can also organize day trips to Longsheng from Yangshuo for RMB900 to RMB1,200 round-trip.

Stay Banyan Tree Yangshuo Villas and suites here offer mountain and river views. banyantree.com; doubles from RMB3,000.

Secret Garden This boutique hotel is set within a restored Qing Dynasty courtyard house. yangshuosecretgarden.com; doubles from RMB400.

Li-An Lodge Combining Chinese tradition and modern luxury, this all-wood hotel overlooks the Longji rice terraces. lianlodge.cn; doubles from RMB1,450.

Yangshuo Mountain Retreat This eco-lodge is set along the Yulong River. yangshuomountainretreat. com; doubles from RMB700.

Eat+Drink Bai Yun Banyan Tree's signature restaurant offers Guangxi and Canton recipes. banyantree.com; dinner for two from RMB500.

Guilin Rice Noodle Cultural Center This is the place to find fresh rice noodles made the traditional way. 1 Dieciu Jie, Yangshuo;

86-773/881-8813; meal for two from RMB80.

Qing Feng The lobby lounge at Banyan Tree has cocktails with a view. banyantree.com; drinks for two from RMB200.

The Secret Garden Restaurant A seasonal menu that uses fresh produce from daily markets. yangshuosecretgarden.com; dinner for two from RMB120.

Yangshuo Mountain Retreat Try authentic local dishes at the riverside restaurant—the hotel’s Bamboo Bar is also on the Yulong River. yangshuo mountainretreat.com; dinner for two from RMB140; drinks for two from RMB70.

Activities The next Yangshuo Bike Festival is May 24–29, 2019. Optional pre-festival ride from Longji runs May 21–24. yangshuobike festival.com; US$450; pre-festival ride US$580, or US$900 combined; includes transfers, hotels, food, bikes and activities; excludes flights.

Most establishments in Yangshuo offer bike rental.

Year-round Yangshuo bike tours are offered by Bike Asia (bikeasia.com; private tours from US$50 per day).

Yangshuo Cooking School offers morning and afternoon classes. yangshuocookingschool. com; RMB200 per person.

Hire private guide Terry Li to take you off the main path around Yangshuo.

86-1387/737-9863.

The Longji Rice Terraces have an entry fee of RMB100 for the county (if you’re attending the Yangshuo Bike Festival, this is already included). Ping’An village has a parking base and visitors must ascend by foot. Sedan chairs are available for a negotiated fee and local women are employed to carry your bags to your guesthouse for about RMB50 per bag. Most hotels and guesthouses can arrange this. — L.C.

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Tropical Chill Along the southern shore of Sri Lanka is a hidden collection of gems, spots worth the trek, all mixed into the daily life of this part of the Subcontinent. once you get your navigational bearings, you’ll find a breezy vibe echoing through the palm trees of places you never imagined existed. story and photographs by Christopher Kucway

At Wild Coast Tented Lodge, a selection for the 2018 It List.

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entle waves curl ashore, so the surfers kick back. Some lounge under the palm trees, moving as little as a somnolent gecko. A kid splashes around in the shallows, mom an arm’s length away in the slight, silent breeze. Mid-afternoon and the only sounds along the half-kilometer arc of sand at Hiriketiya Bay are lapping turquoise waves and birdsong from blue skies. Idyllic.

Yet I’m just as awestruck by what is missing in this corner of paradise: coughing tuk tuks, the stagnant sight of yet another reggae bar, any inkling of mass tourism; in short, there’s no trace of overdeveloped shoreline in this jungle-shrouded pocket of Sri Lanka. Instead, palm trees tilt out over the bay, breaking up solid stretches of sand that embrace visitors at will. It’s all natural nooks and crannies, not manicured development.

There are maybe a few dozen people dozing, lolling about in the surf and chatting in the shade of the palms along this inlet on Sri Lanka’s south coast; a chill is in the air if not on the thermometer. A guy could get used to this. Surfers tell me they come here for the peeling lefthander with swells up to two meters and I, safely behind Ray-Bans, stare off to the horizon and nod knowingly, pretending to understand what they’re talking about.

When most think of the south coast of Sri Lanka, they rarely venture much further than Galle. Poetic place names like Cape Welligama or Tangalle might roll off the

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tongue of more adventurous visitors, but that’s where the familiarity ends. Until now. Follow the flip-flopped footsteps of the global surf set today, and you’ll find a wealth of hidden inlets, laid-back eateries dishing up hoppers and ice-cold beer, and small resorts the likes of which you will not see anywhere else in Asia. This is no longer the Sri Lanka of fishermen on stilts—they’re nothing more than a postcard image these days, spending their hours not actually catching fish but trolling for rupees from any tourist with a camera. One iconic tradition down, but don’t fret, there are enough new gems along this coast to ease you into Sri Lankan ways in unimagineable settings.

In aging, overdeveloped and crumbling towns, dilapidated three- and four-story buildings seemingly lean against each other like rows of old men watching the world go past. This string of small towns common to the island links the coast together. Do pick one out at random, take an hour or two to scour it for an everyday local flavor of this region, particularly the morning street stalls stacked high with bitter melons, assorted roots and butterfish. From the shadows, stall-holders will either glare at you knowing full well you’re not going to buy anything or else aim to sell you several kilos of slippery fish from the piles spilling onto the roadway.

Explore beyond these small towns to hidden places that will tap your greatest navigational sense. Some of the routes to these newer spots start as two lanes of tarmac, narrow to one with the jungle claiming back what it can, dissipate into a crumbling half-pavement, half-dirt lane before ending, say, in a makeshift log bridge that warns both in Sinhalese and English do not

clockwise from top left:

Surveying calm seas at the tranquil Hiriketiya Bay; one corner of The Doctor’s House; kottu roti, a Sri Lankan staple, at Cape Weligama; poolside at Why House; rambunctious school kids.

drive your rental car across here. Turn left at the coconut palm and hope for the best. Signage is not a concern.

There is none.

E

tched in the cracking, centuries-old tombstones of Galle Fort is, as you would expect, a vividly painted picture of the past. Surrounding the Dutch Reformed Church are permanent markers of a 21-year-old sailor succumbing to disease back in 1721, another European felled by the tropical heat days after disembarking centuries ago, and countless others. Back in the present I feel for the sun-darkened, tropical-wizened Sinhalese woman tasked with sweeping the garden of its leaves. Her muted smile announces this is every day of my life in this town.

Venturing beyond Galle Fort shouldn’t mean skipping the historic port altogether. I’m mesmerized by history and this equatorial maze simply oozes it. A quick lesson: the Portuguese first built a fort here in 1589, the Dutch

Cricket among the ruins in Galle Fort. opposite: The boards and waves await along Kabalana Beach.

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Surfers tell me they come here for the peeling lefthander and I, safely behind Ray-Bans, stare off to the horizon and nod knowingly, pretending to understand what they’re talking about

clockwise from left: Flash furnishings in an air-conditioned cocoon at Wild Coast Tented Lodge; dense jungle surrounds the manicured grounds of Why House; the rugged coastline along Yala National Park; it’s all in the organic details at Kaju Green.

seized it in 1640, by 1796 it was handed over to the British. Today, tourists outnumber locals by an untold margin, those Sri Lankans who still live here catering to the nostalgia-seeking visitors. Walkable streets and narrow lanes are lined with the occasional perfectly put-together residence, small restaurants and curio shops, a handful of which are must stops. Barefoot bursts with bolts of colorful cotton, while Spa Ceylon teases your nose with sandalwood and grapefruit before you ever lay eyes on it, and KK Collection is home to an eclectic mix of home furnishings given a Sri Lankan twist. Duck through fashion shop Mimimango to reach Poonie’s Kitchen, a small, shaded courtyard tucked in behind the tables laden with costume jewelry, which dishes up fresh salads and tropical juices.

Still, view Galle as a springboard to the rest of the south coast. Heading east are a number of restaurants and resorts worth the journey if you know where to look.

Near to Galle, but well away from the beach, and in actual fact not needing a beach at all thanks to its oversized, T-shaped swimming pool, Why House appears a throwback to another era. It’s more of a private home off in the green fringes of Galle than a resort, with its colonial touches and lush gardens several kilometers down a narrow road overgrown in parts on both sides.

The charm of this place hangs ripening from mango trees, echoes in the birdlife and emanates from its intimate size. In all, there are nine rooms, but opt either for a Garden Villa or a Garden Bungalow—they look and feel more comfortable than space in the main house.

“If I don’t get your story in the first 15 minutes, then I’m not doing my job,” says Henrietta Cottam, the manager who explains she learned her lesson when an American retiree was checking out a few years ago.

Caught up in her daily chores, she hadn’t spoken with the man or his wife at all during their stay, only to discover when they were leaving that he had walked on the moon as an Apollo astronaut. What a conversation over a gin and tonic that would have been. Cottam is also known for her culinary skills, an asset evident on lunch and dinner menus that include Sri Lankan, Western, Nepalese and even Lebanese entries. That’s an added bonus at this resort that makes you want to do nothing but relax.

If found addresses like those along Sri Lanka’s south coast are meant to jar us out of complacency, then Kaju Green is the poster boy. The mere mention of a sustainable retreat might have you rolling your eyes— don’t we all care about the environment at this point?— but Kaju Green, outside of Unawatuna, is a revelation.

Denis Kungurov, a grey-eyed Siberian far from home but completely at ease in his eco-lodge, has planned this place out, right down to the handmade wooden trays holding the local brew from Soul Coffee. Amid jackfruit and coconut trees is a scattering of seven cabanas, an open-air yoga studio that is elevated into the trees with a garden lounge underneath. Should the urge arise, Kaju Green has a shuttle for guests who want to venture 10 minutes to the beach.

When Kungurov found this left-to-nature coconut plantation, he knew he was onto something, as long as he didn’t spoil the scene. “All we had to do was find the right architectural language and techniques to emphasize the natural setting,” he says. He spent a year planning, traveling across the country to study what local building techniques would work best. One, a traditional mudsoaking treatment for wood, took 15 months to complete, the timber adopting a deeper, richer color but more importantly protecting against insects and the climate in what is essentially a jungle. No air-con here, but a forest breeze through bamboo walls and a lot of natural shade.

Kaju Green is surrounded by a salt-water canal and mangroves, each of the cottages perched near the water, with the land rising to a dining area, that yoga studio and an in-ground pool. All of this is below 300 mature coconut palms, the source of much on the menu.

Bananas, papayas and mangoes are also grown here, while the getaway works with two local farmers who provide other produce, as well as rice. Sitting there with an organic coffee, Kungurov tells me, “In Sri Lanka, it’s really easy to eat properly.” That’s easy to believe.

Not far away and right on Kabalana Beach is a spot for those seeking modern creature comforts. The Sandhya, with nine rooms, is an über-modern, chic resort perched on a great stretch of shoreline. Polished concrete and finely turned wood furnishings feel like they’ve sprung from the pages of a trendy design magazine but, unlike much modern design, the property oozes comfort. Guests are meant to mingle in the common areas, whether in the pantry where meals are served, next to the half-sunken t r a v e l a n d l e i s u r e a s i a . c o m / o c t o b e r 2 0 1 8

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truck container that serves as a pool or perched in any of the local-made furniture scattered throughout.

Further east along the Colombo-Matara Road is ample proof that one man’s “down-at-heel” is another’s “repurposed.” Populated with surfers—tattoos, dreadlocks, overripe tan lines, funky sunglasses, the whole bit—The Doctor’s House is a peeling paint, workin-progress, a social magnet come nightfall. You have to love it. The pizza oven is designed as an octopus that looks like it will crawl across the road and back into the sea at any moment. Both the food and drinks in the oversized garden are brilliant—imagine a vegetarian lasagna prepped by a serious Swedish chef—but what stands out is the refurbished nature of everything. That and the name: the main building served as the address for the area’s Ayurvedic doctor for five generations. “I try not to know everyone,” admits Barra, one of the Aussie co-owners who dwells on informality (or maybe anonymity) as only a surfer can. Instead of playing up the size of the waves or their break, he tells me over lunch about the sense of remoteness he encounters on the water. Out on his board one day, he stuck his hand in a wave and unwittingly balanced on the back of a giant sea turtle headed in the same direction. No Australians or sea turtles were harmed in the telling of this anecdote.

If your leanings are more yoga than rasta, back at Hiriketiya Bay, 66 kilometers distant from Galle, Salt House sprouts from dense bamboo groves with eight smartly designed rooms—white-washed walls and darkwood trim—air-conditioned on the ground floor, comfortably open to the breeze on the two higher floors.

Cristal Napper is one half of an Aussie couple that saw Salt House as a not-too intrusive intro to the bay. Along with surfing 10 months of the year, the best swells coming between August and December, yoga retreats are big in this region. At this one, a central common area serves all the food you miss from home, Napper tells me, but made healthily: brownies, smoothies, salads, gelati, burgers. Baking is done on-site, the menu depends upon what ingredients are freshest at any given time, the simultaneous goals being good for you and refreshing.

Superfoods and super food is how Napper puts it.

W

aiting on my kottu roti with prawns isn’t really a burden. I’m high above picturesque Weligama Bay, sitting in a strong breeze that twists the palms providing shade at Cape Weligama’s appropriately named Ocean Terrace, which serves Asian and Western fare. I’ve opted for their take on Sri Lankan street food and I’m in no hurry to move on. I’ve got the restaurant more or less to myself, which underlines what Cape Weligama—along with the few other brandedluxury properties up the coast such as Anantara Tangalle and the Shangri-La—is like: its lush, tiered landscape drops off to the sea, allotting each of the 39 private retreats across these four hectares a secluded feel. Forty meters below, local fishing skiffs are aligned cheek-byjowl with surfboards and kids’ sand pails.

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clockwise from above: A local surf

dude at The Doctor’s House; daily life plays out along the south coast roads; an eye-popping selection of handmade kimonos at Salt House.

sri lanka

Super chill is the word along the south coast of this teardropshaped isle. Each kitchen-table eatery, yoga retreat, eco-lodge, surfer bolthole and luxury pad boasts a distinct character that all combine for a refreshingly eclectic local vibe.

GETTING AROUND Getting to and from the south coast, not to mention from point to point along it, is best planned out well in advance.

Hiring a car and driver is the best option, with Kiwitaxi (kiwitaxi.com) being particularly reliable and reasonably priced.

The remote nature along this stretch only amplifies as I speed far east towards Yala where the coastal road peters out. Veering off onto smaller tarmac, then on to a gutted and dusty track not meant for a shiny Prius, I end up at Wild Coast Tented Lodge, like Cape Weligama, part of the Resplendent Ceylon portfolio.

Bordering Yala National Park, the tented camp is enveloped by the natural margins of the park itself, so for their own safety arrivals are educated first in moving around the resort. The 28 tents that mirror the look of the rocky, wind-swept terrain here are, like the park they abut, open to wildlife, so it’s common to see lemurs stare you down or wild pigs grunt across your path on the way to dinner—both theirs and yours. The cocoons, as the air-conditioned tents are called, house four-poster kingsized beds, massive bathrooms with stand-alone copper bathtubs, dark-leather furnishings and teak floors.

Outdoors is rugged terrain, indoors is anything but. Wild Coast made it to our It List this year and rightly so. I’m left wanting for nothing except for maybe another night.

But a walk along the beach will have to do. At this far end of Sri Lanka’s south coast, waves pound so hard into the house-sized boulders that seemingly hold Sri Lanka in place that I feel the vibration in my bones. Water shoots up 10 meters from the violent collision of the Indian Ocean where it meets Yala National Park. Too dangerous to surf or swim, this is an off-the-charts section of the coast at the bottom of this island that has it all. Here, at the literal end of the road along Sri Lanka’s south coast, nothing is missing.

STAY Anantara Peace Haven Tangalle Resort With 152 rooms and villas spread across a former coconut plantation, the resort is best for those who simply want to stay put. anantara.com; doubles from US$214.

Cape Weligama Perched across a rise above a scenic bay, the immediate vibe is that you’re the only guests here. capeweligama.com; doubles from US$103.

Kaju Green The type of getaway you don’t want to leave. Swim, take a yoga class or even book an Ayurvedic consultation.

Relax. kajugreen.com; doubles from US$115.

Salt House Surfing, yoga, food and quiet are the main lures to this out-of-the-way address, which is why surfboard rentals and yoga classes are included in the price. salthousesrilanka.net; doubles from US$85.

The Sandhya Anyone with an eye for design and the need to mingle will love this spot along a great beach. thesandhya.com; doubles from US$200.

Shangri-La Hambantota A golf resort on the south coast, if you’re into that kind of thing. shangri-la.com; doubles from US$210.

Why House An out-of-theway spot that feels more like a private residence than a resort. whyhousesrilanka. com; doubles from US$275.

Wild Coast Tented Lodge The wildlife of Yala National Park on your doorstep, combined with the comforts of glamping make this an

unforgettable stay. resplendentceylon.com; all-inclusive cocoon suite doubles from US$617.

EAT & DRINK The Doctor’s House Salads, sandwiches, pizzas from the octopus-shaped oven, strong on both non- and vegetarian dishes. Also the place to be come nightfall. Madiha; thedoctorshouse.lk; lunch for two Rs6,000.

Heritage Café and Bistro Comfortable spot for Sri Lankan and Western dishes, or just a pot of tea with some fresh baked goods. Order a dish that lets you sample their house-made chili oil.

Galle; fb.com/theheritage cafeandbistro; lunch for two from Rs6,000.

Poonie’s Kitchen Secluded, small and colorful, search this place out for a break from your walking tour of Galle Fort. 63 Pedlar St., Galle; 94-91/222-6349; lunch for two Rs4,000.

SHOP Acme A small shop tucked away on the side of the road, well worth a look for organic teas, essential oils and colorful handicrafts from a number of charities the shop supports. Matara Road, Mirissa; 94-91/226-0598.

Barefoot Bolts of cotton as vibrant as the equatorial sun.

Galle; barefootceylon.com.

Exotic Roots Colorful home décor, antiques, clothing and jewelry. Lighthouse Street, Galle; exoticroots.com.

KK Collection A varied collection of cool home furnishings. 71 Pedlar St., Galle; kkcollection.com.

Spa Ceylon Home to a range of aromatic souvenirs featuring ingredients from Sri Lanka. Crnr of Lighthouse and Pedlar streets, Galle; spaceylon.com.

Stick No Bills Retro-style posters and postcards of the island. Church Street, Galle; sticknobillsonline.com. — C.K.

All That Glitters Though the Côte d’Azur is most often associated with glamour and celebrity, it has another side—one that’s low-key, a little rugged, and totally at one with its Provençal roots. Adam LEITH GOLLNER checks in to a newly reborn hotel that offers visitors a taste of the real French Riviera.

The ocean-fed swimming pool at Hôtel Les Roches Rouges, a newly renovated resort near the town of St.-Raphaël, on the Côte d’Azur.

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from top: A view of the

Pr e v io us s p r e a d : Be n oi t L i n e r o/ C ou rt esy of L es R oc h es Rou g es . Th is S pr e a d, C lo c k wi s e from to p le ft : Be n oi t Li n e r o/ Co u rt esy of L es Roc hes R ou g es ; A ntho ny L a nne r e to N ne ; B e n oi t Li n e ro/ C ou rt esy of L es R oc h es Rou g es ; Jess ica A n tol a

Mediterranean from a guest room at HĂ´tel Les Roches Rouges; shopping in Sanary-sur-Mer; torta de blea, a type of quiche made with Swiss chard, at Les Roches Rouges. opposite: the Cours Saleya food market, in Nice.

The words Côte d’Azur,

for most travelers, conjure up a distinctive set of mental images. Rosé on a beach. Nightclubs filled with sun-kissed Brigitte Bardot types.

Languid afternoons spent lounging on a yacht off the Cap d’Antibes. But there is a side to this region that couldn’t be further removed from the star power of La Croisette—that famous palm-lined boardwalk in Cannes. The French families who summer down here know exactly how to sidestep the glitzy façade, seeking out secret beaches, pine-scented cliff walks, and simple yet spectacular Provençal food. For foreign visitors, however, finding the French Riviera’s more authentic side has, for the past few decades at least, proved more difficult.

Hôtel Les Roches Rouges, a striking, newly reopened resort tucked into the cliffs midway between Cannes and St.-Tropez, aims to make it a bit easier to experience the true Côte d’Azur.

Until very recently, this hotel was precisely where you didn’t want to stay in Provence. A run-down, two-star place, it was stuck in the tackier reaches of mid-century France, and not in a classic, nouvelle vague way. But even at its polyester-everything nadir, the property still had a few things going for it. To start with: location. Les Roches Rouges lies in the turquoise heart of the Riviera, hovering over a tranquil inlet near the harbor town of St.-Raphaël. The hotel is named after the red rocks of the Massif de l’Estérel reserve—the 32,000-hectare swath of mountainous wilderness it sits alongside. You get there by driving along a road called La Corniche d’Or, or the Golden Coastal Path, which is among the most scenic drives in France. And the hotel itself has always been in sync with the landscape, set into a low cliff with guest rooms cascading down toward the sea.

Nevertheless, until a couple of years ago, its fortunes were looking rocky. Then a savior came in the somewhat unlikely guise of 42-year-old Valérie Grégo, founder of the French boutiquehotel chain Les Hôtels d’en Haut. Grégo is the type of tattooed, black-clad Parisian who looks as if he’d be far more comfortable in the dive bars of Pigalle than lounging on a beach. But while searching for properties in the area, he was blown away: “When I first came to check the place out I saw this two-star hotel, and thought it was a day wasted,” Grégo confessed. “Then I opened the front door, and bam. You walk in and you feel like you’re actually in the water.”

Grégo bought Les Roches Rouges and gave it a five-star upgrade, reopening the 50-room hotel last May. He wanted to create a resort where guests could peel back the glitz and experience Provence the way it’s meant to be.

So he put the building’s mid-century aesthetic front and center, accentuating its t r a v e l a n d l e i s u r e a s i a . c o m / o c t o b e r 2 0 1 8

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The French Riviera wasn’t always an exclusive destination.

Historically, it was known as a poor, rustic stretch of coast where residents made a living growing olives, herding goats and netting mullets. Then, in the late 19th century—the dawn of the Belle Époque—the railroad arrived, bringing well-heeled visitors from Paris and London in search of balmy climes. Queen Victoria was among the early adopters to holiday on the Riviera, and by the 1930s, the pine-clad cliffs of St.-Jean-Cap-Ferrat bristled with grand villas built as summer homes for the aristocracy. Other towns took longer to catch up—when St.-Tropez made an appearance in Bardot’s 1956 breakout movie And God Created Woman, it was still a fishing village. But as the now-famous Cannes Film Festival, founded in 1946, grew into a global event over the second half of the last century, it cemented the region’s glamorous reputation. Today it is the most visited region of France after Paris. It’s become the sort of place where Russian oligarchs and music moguls compare megayachts in the marina, while the rest of us sigh over €45 plates of salad on the promenade nearby.

Indeed, so many people want to travel to the Côte d’Azur that there’s been little incentive for the local hospitality industry to do things well. It’s not that there aren’t exceptional places to stay— more that the standouts have been around awhile. Take La Colombe d’Or, a legendary inn a half-hour drive inland from Nice that, since it started life as a café/bar in 1920, has attracted an extraordinary list of artists and luminaries (a number of whom, such as Picasso and Chagall, left behind masterpieces that still hang on the hotel walls). There’s also the impossibly regal Hôtel du Cap-Eden-Roc, the model for the Hôtel des Étrangers in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Tender Is the Night. When I stopped in for a drink one night, I found the bar populated by a riotous mix of European royalty and aging rock musicians. Fitzgerald and his wife, Zelda, used to stay nearby at a private villa that has since been converted into the Hôtel Belles Rives, which remains an idyllic place to drink a gin and tonic while admiring a pink-hued sunset over the coast of Juan-les-Pins.

At the same time, classic Provençal cuisine has become much harder to find—though if you know where to look, you can still find inviting spots to score legit petits farcis (stuffed vegetables), a fine pissaladière (anchovy-and-onion flatbread), perhaps even a nonbogus bourride (aioli-spiked fish stew). When I wasn’t exploring the menu at Les Roches Rouges, I made excursions to a few nearby restaurants. In the beachside town of Sanary-sur-Mer, I ate at La P’tite Cour—named after the small courtyard at the back where diners are seated. It was crowded with locals devouring one of two set menus of home-style cooking, which that day included a spectacular fish special of daurade royale, or gilthead sea bream.

Then there’s the Auberge des Maures, in St.-Tropez. At this storied restaurant, where the surrealist Paul Éluard was famously married in 1950 with Pablo Picasso as a witness, a singer sat in a corner crooning dreamy French pop songs while I dined on hearty standards like daube de boeuf (beef stew) and artichokes à la barigoule steamed in a white wine broth.

In Nice, Kiosque TinTin is the go-to place for a pan bagnat, that niçoise-salad-on-a-bun deserving of global renown. It’s not far from the excellent Cours Saleya market, where the city’s best chefs—such as Dominique Le Stanc, who runs the cozy La Merenda restaurant, just a couple of blocks back from the beach—stock up on Provence’s famously sun-kissed produce. Market stalls here also sell panisse and socca, addictive regional snacks made from fried chickpea flour batter.

S iva n Ask ayo

floor-to-ceiling windows and long, straight lines with an all-white palette and iconic furniture like Transat chairs by the influential Modernist Eileen Gray. The spruced-up swimming pool—a basin set into the rocky cliffscape and fed by the waters of the Mediterranean Sea—is a marvel. After an afternoon spent reading under an umbrella, as pool boys delivered carafes of pastis to my fellow sunbathers and waves splashed against the rocks, I never wanted to leave.

The way Grégo most sought to connect with the hotel’s history and surroundings was by emphasizing classic local food. His inspiration was a 1963 recipe book called Traditional Provençal Home Cooking by the poet René Jouveau. It isn’t so much a cookbook as an art book about how people used to live and eat in Provence—and still, occasionally, do today. “I wanted every recipe in the hotel to come out of that book,” Grégo explained. The traditional Provençal dishes I feasted on during my stay included everything from an exemplary ratatouille with rosemary honey to a perfect grand aioli, or seafood and raw vegetables with a garlicky fresh-mayonnaise dip enlivened with Menton lemons. The kitchen even offered my beloved torta de blea, a Swiss-chard piequiche sometimes served in a sweet, raisinspiked iteration but here presented in savory form, topped with toasted pine nuts.

And at the hotel’s beach restaurant I also found, to my amazement, a type of soup called aigo boulido, which you rarely see on menus in France anymore. An ancient Provençal specialty, the dish consists of garlic and wild herbs cooked in water, then ladled over day-old bread that’s been drizzled with olive oil. This deceptively basic-seeming broth (its name translates to “boiled water”) is so profoundly soulful and nourishing, it has given rise to a local expression: “aigo boulido sauvo la vido,” or, boiled water saves lives. Recently, however, it has become obscure, meaning lovers of traditional Provençal cuisine (the sort championed by iconic cookbooks like Richard Olney’s Lulu’s Provençal Table or Mireille Johnston’s Cuisine of the Sun) usually have to content themselves with cooking it at home—as I do—if they want to taste the real flavors of southern France. The dish came in a large earthenware tureen so eyecatching, a woman a few tables over came by to ask what I was eating. When I explained what it was—water with garlic and bay leaves poured over slices of yesterday’s baguette—she didn’t seem convinced. Fair enough, I told her, but in a place as image-obsessed as the Côte d’Azur, it’s always worth remembering that appearances can be misleading.

Escaping the crowds at Villefranche-surMer, a beach just east of Nice.

There’s a line in the opening of Traditional Provençal Home Cooking that suggests that even if Provence should lose touch with its identity, it will always be able to rediscover itself: “The soul of the old country is not quite yet dead; the hour approaches when it will be reborn.” Returning from my culinary wanderings to Les Roches Rouges, with its Serge Gainsbourg soundtrack and bedside reading by Jean Cocteau, I got the sense that the hotel aspires to be a part of that rebirth. “In their wisdom,” the book continues, “these people have been so adept at acclimatizing themselves to poverty that they discovered through it the grandeur of simplicity.” The grandeur of simplicity: It’s a beautiful idea, and to me, encapsulates everything special about this region.

Food isn’t the only way in which Les Roches Rouges evokes this grandeur of simplicity.

There’s also its relationship to the inland landscape known here as the arrière pays, in the form of the Massif de l’Estérel nature reserve. Grégo wants to encourage guests to take hikes, so each room at the hotel is outfitted with a walking stick. These beautiful olivewood staffs are lacquered to a deep brown hue, and are objets very much of this place. On Sundays, a state guide offers tours of the park; there are also maps of its trails in each room for anyone wanting to explore on his own.

Inspired by the wooden stick, I set out one morning and quickly found myself surrounded by a uniquely Provençal ecosystem known as garrigue: a resiny, piney, sage-scented agglomeration of low-lying bushes and perfumed herbs. (Notes of garrigue accentuate the region’s wines.) There were endless tufts of wild fennel, sprawling rosemary patches, brittle thyme bouquets and dusty outcroppings of what I can only describe as a feral lemon verbena—all far more potent and sticky than the domesticated versions we’re familiar with.

These were not just any herbs: they were genuine herbes de Provence, the real thing, free for the picking. And they were all sprouting from an epic Death Valley–style landscape of sunbaked porphyry rocks the color of rouille, that rust-toned saffron aioli so critical to the region’s famed bouillabaisse.

As I hiked, walking stick in hand, I felt overwhelmed by a sense of Provence à l’ancienne. I could see myself coming here regularly, maybe becoming one of those wizened, wise-cracking guys who goes to play an early-evening game of pétanque in the town square. The French are masters in the art of whiling away time. When French visitors come to the Riviera, their days are filled with reading and eating and chilling by the pool—perhaps

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even one as Instagrammable as Les Roches Rouges’s. Occasionally they rouse themselves to search out the best beaches along the coast.

When I did the same, the sandy shores of Beauvallon and the carfree island of Porquerolles were my best discoveries.

Spending time here, you realize that the French tradition of a monthlong summer vacation makes complete sense. If I ever make it back to the Riviera—and I’m pretty sure I will—there will need to be room in the schedule for an inordinate amount of hanging out.

But that won’t be too complicated, now that I’ve finally uncovered the genuine, life-affirming side of Provence I’d always suspected was there—but just didn’t quite know how to find.

St.-Paul de Vence

Nice

Mediterranean Sea Cannes

FRANCE

Antibes

St.-Raphaël St.-Tropez

how to see The côte d’azur

The places to experience the French Riviera at its most authentic—from characterful hotels to local restaurants serving classic Provençal food.

GETTING THERE Fly to Nice Côte d’Azur airport (NCE) through Paris or other major European hubs.

STAY Hôtel Belles Rives This Antibes property is housed in the historic Villa St.-Louis, a favorite haunt for F. Scott Fitzgerald—who wrote Tender Is the Night here. bellesrives. com; doubles from €260.

Hôtel du Cap-EdenRoc Just because it’s one of the swankiest, best-run hotels in the world doesn’t mean this Antibes institution lacks personality. Not cheap, but totally worth it. oetkercollection.com; doubles from €1,270.

Hôtel Les Roches Rouges After a fivestar refit, this cliff-side property near St.Raphaël aims to revive the original aesthetic— and spirit—of the

Riviera. The superb Provençal food is another powerful selling point. hotelles​ roches​rouges.com; doubles from €215.

La Colombe d’Or The Roux family has been running this inn in the inland village of St.-Paul de Vence since the days when Braque and Miró paid for their guest rooms with art, and it remains one of the region’s most charming places to stay. la-colombe-dor. com; doubles from €270.

EAT Auberge des Maures Head to this back-alley spot in St.-Tropez for classics like petits farcis, or vegetables stuffed with ground meat. auberge​ desmaures.fr; mains €38–€92.

Cours Saleya Market To sample the most beautiful produce in the region, visit this

marché in Nice. nicetourisme.com.

Kiosque TinTin This street-food stand in Nice offers a perfect pan bagnat: tuna, anchovies, hard-boiled egg and salad on a bun. fb.com/​kiosque​tintin; pan bagnat €5.50.

La Merenda Chef Dominique Le Stanc gave up the two Michelin stars won at his previous Nice restaurant, Le Chantecler, to open this simple 20-table Provençal spot. lamerenda.net; mains €12–€25.

La P’tite Cour About an hour down the coast from St.-Tropez, in the fishing village of Sanary-sur-Mer, this restaurant with a sunny courtyard is a great place to sample the day’s catch. laptitecour.com; prix fixe from €32.

I N TO

The Rio Negro, the Brazilian river that flows into the Amazon near the city of Manaus, floods the surrounding rain forest for much of the year.

AM A Z O N I A

There’s no better way to explore the rich biosphere of the Brazilian rain forest than by a small-boat cruise along the tributaries of its legendary river. On a series of kayaking and paddleboarding excursions, Peter Heller discovers a watery wonderland full of rare birds and exotic creatures. Photogr aphs by Tom Fowlks

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The oropendolas sounded l i k e a d r i p p in g fa u c e t.

We couldn’t see these dark, yellow-tailed birds in the dusk, but their calls seemed fitting because we were gliding through a world of water. My wife, Kim, and I were deep in the Amazon rain forest.

We were propelling our stand-up paddleboards along a narrow channel of Brazil’s Rio Negro.

The forest floor on either side of us was flooded.

The sky, finally clear after hours of heavy rain, had burned to a dusky rose over the tops of the trees.

“Listen!” Kim said, then pointed. A toucan, perched on the limb of a tall ficus tree, cried out a piercing, flutelike note. Its silhouette seemed mostly made up of its huge bill. It felt like a miracle that it didn’t topple forward. Then we heard a sudden racket: a dozen scarlet macaws sailed overhead like a volley of arrows.

“It’s going to be dark soon,” I murmured. “And the guys on the boat said they saw a big caiman.” A caiman is basically Brazil’s version of a crocodile.

“I know,” Kim replied, but kept paddling up the creek, farther from safety. She was in thrall to the forest. A few minutes earlier she had guided us into a gap in the trees, where a troop of capuchin monkeys dropped figs on our heads. Now I looked over my shoulder to make sure there wasn’t a

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monster caiman rippling behind us in the last light of the day.

We were 370 kilometers upriver from Manaus, the jungle capital where the Rio Negro merges with the Solimões River to form the Amazon. We had flown to the city a week before for a 12-day river voyage with Amazônia Expeditions, a Brazil-based company that specializes in customized tours of the region’s waterways. The trip was organized by Ian Miller, a paleontologist at the Denver Museum of Nature & Science, and his wife, Robyn, a floral designer. They had assembled a loose group of friends, mostly from Denver, for a voyage to see some of the most diverse wildlife on the planet. The Dorinha, our compact, tripledecked boat, was made especially for the Amazon Basin. It had a dozen cabins and a dining room finished in teak and mahogany; its open upper deck was lined with hammocks. It towed four canoes with outboard motors, which we used for excursions every morning and often at night.

We had spent the first few days of the trip on the busy Solimões, visiting villages, squeezing up small tributaries, and bird-watching on remote lakes. Then we returned to Manaus and headed

From top: An afternoon

expedition on Lake Cabaliana, which branches off the SolimĂľes River, during high-water season; a guest on a river cruise by AmazĂ´nia Expeditions, next to a ceiba tree on an island in the middle of the Rio Branco.

clockwise From left: An iguana in the trees near Lake Cabaliana; squirrel monkeys along the banks of the Rio Ariaú, a branch of the Rio Negro; dawn breaks over the Rio Negro, which runs along the border of Anavilhanas National Park.

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W e s aw s wimming s na k e s, turtles s u nning on l o g s, f ly ing squirrels t h at s ai l e d t h r o ug h t h e l ow e r c ano p y, an d mon k e y s l e a p ing f r om t r e e to t r e e

up the wilder Rio Negro, whose water is dark with tannin from the thousands of square kilometers of trees that border it. Once we’d motored for 80 kilometers, we rarely saw a soul. This was the Amazon rain forest I’d always dreamed about.

The Amazon Basin has long been steeped in myth. Think of Fitzcarraldo, Werner Herzog’s film about a would-be rubber tycoon’s obsession with building an opera house in the jungle, or English geographer Percy Fawcett’s doomed quest to find the ruins of an ancient civilization, as recounted in David Grann’s The Lost City of Z and its movie adaptation. Today, it’s difficult to separate the real from the imagined. After centuries of exploration, the region is still little understood. The World Wildlife Fund estimates that it contains millions of species, most of which have not even been identified. Its forests produce 20 percent of the planet’s oxygen. They are under growing threat of deforestation, and scientists fear that they may be lost before we even come to know them.

Before daybreak on the morning after our paddleboard adventure, a week into the trip, a recording of Pavarotti singing in La Traviata blasted over the ship’s speakers. This is the way Captain Moacir “Mo” Fortes likes to roust his passengers. It means you have 20 minutes to hit the canoes. I looked out of the porthole. We had traveled all night, and somewhere along the way Captain Mo had turned up a side channel and entered a broad lake. I could see the first ruddy smudges of dawn over the trees on the far shore and the shapes of small islands scattered across the water. The whole country seemed to echo and thunder with the sound of howler monkeys greeting the day.

I met Captain Mo on the lower deck. “Are we going bird-watching?” I said. “Or looking for monkeys or sloths?”

“No, Pedro,” he said, with a gleam in his eye.

“We are going fishing.”

I soon learned that he meant fishing for piranhas.

The crew tied the Dorinha to a tree at the edge of a tributary called the Igarapé Água Boa, which now, at high water, looked nothing like a river.

During the seasonal flooding, from January to June, it had expanded and spilled over the shorter trees. We climbed aboard the canoes and slipped along the western “shore”—the tops of the taller trees. Mo said the water was probably five meters above what was, in dry season, the riverbank.

Mo showed us how to bait our lines with pieces of raw chicken and then bounce the bait off the riverbed. My meat never got there. I would feel a

fierce tug, but when I jerked upward I would discover that my bait was gone. I’d heard what piranhas can do to a dead cow, and I shivered thinking that we had swum off the side of the boat the night before.

But Kim had the touch. She began bringing up one red-bellied piranha after another. Their little teeth were razor sharp. After she caught more than a dozen, Mo looked at her with the respect one great fisherman gives another. That evening, after a slightly nervous swim, we dined on a piranha fry.

The fish were bony but delicious.

It was hard to believe that this flooded world, with little dry ground anywhere, was a seasonal occurrence—and that the animals and plants had evolved to live with it. We saw swimming snakes, turtles sunning on logs, flying squirrels that sailed through the lower canopy, and squirrel monkeys leaping from tree to tree as if they were taking a stroll.

Kim and I had packed inflatable paddleboards and a fly rod. Her fishing prowess inspired me.

Why couldn’t I paddle out into the flood and fish off the board? It would just require a little balance.

The next day—the eighth of our trip, and the fourth up the Rio Negro—I paddled along the edge of tall woods, wondering where I would be if I were a peacock bass. Most likely I’d be hunting the smaller fish hiding in those islands of brush, I thought. I moved into them and found myself in a maze of broad-leaved thicket that had trails and clearings like meadows—except that it was all water.

I tied on a fly made of a clump of feathers the size of a sparrow. The guy in the fly shop in Denver had said, “Down there, when in doubt, go big.” I began to cast. A squall of dusky-headed parakeets flew just over my head, which certainly never happened on my local creek. I dropped the fly just off the brush. Something jerked it hard. I told myself to keep my balance, remembering that I wasn’t standing on the bank of a river but a moving board. The fish hauled me toward the trees. I yelled with glee. I fought the fish for 20 minutes, but when I brought it in I was shocked to discover it was a small peacock bass. I was working the hook out, marveling at the fish’s crimson lower fins and green flanks, when I heard a crash a short distance away. I thought of the three-meter caiman we had seen on the river at lunch. I began to hurry toward the boat, hoping I could remember where it was.

That night we had a dance party on the top deck.

One of the crew hauled out an electric keyboard.

Clouds massed and covered the stars as House of

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Pain’s “Jump Around” echoed over the forest.

The bartender kept pouring caipirinhas.

Michael Mowry, a Denver public-art consultant, spun with his wife, Amy, a real estate developer. Claire Antoszewski, a physician’s assistant from Santa Fe, jumped around with John Hankla, a dinosaur paleontologist at the University of Colorado Boulder. Kim and I danced until we were dizzy. I wondered what the howler monkeys, trying to sleep in the pitch-dark forest, thought of our party.

The next morning we anchored just off a white-sand beach on the main river and took turns diving from the top deck. A few of us did backflips off the roof. Others just swam around in the black water, happy to be in a place few people had ever seen.

Before turning the Dorinha around and cruising back to Manaus, Captain Mo turned off the engines and let the ship drift.

On a hot, windless afternoon we anchored off a sand island in the middle of the river.

Some of the crew and the other passengers played soccer on the sandbar. But I had begun to love paddling, so Kim and I launched the boards and headed upstream along the right bank.

Thick, ropy liana vines hung down into the water, and sprays of orchids—some cream-colored, some rose—flourished on the limbs of the trees. We saw a giant ceiba tree with buttress roots like low walls. We saw blue-and-gold macaws flying and blackcrowned night herons crouching on branches. But mostly we just glided to the rhythm and soft plashes of the paddles.

And then we heard the blow. Four dolphins swam to us, their pink flanks glistening. These were botos, the famed Amazon river dolphins, which, according to myth, can seduce the men living along the river. They were so close we could see their patterns of fine bluish freckles. They circled back and passed us again and chuffed and breathed. I felt a surge of kinship with these water-loving creatures.

A few heavy raindrops made rings on the black river. The shouts of the soccer players drifted to us on a fresh upstream breeze. In a few minutes the sky would crack open with a downpour that would make it hard to see and almost hard to breathe. But for now all was peace. We turned around. The dolphins cruised upstream, heading deeper into the heart of the forest.

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brazil

Rio Negro Amazon River Manaus Solimões River

how to explore the brazilian amazon

A number of small cruise lines navigate the great river and its tributaries, with excursions by land and water that offer a close look at rain-forest wildlife. Consider hiring a travel advisor who can expand your visit with further adventures throughout South America.

Getting There

Most Amazon cruises in Brazil depart from Manaus, in the state of Amazonas. There are several flights per day to Manaus from major cities, including Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo, as well as nonstop flights from Miami on the Chilean airline latam.

Tour Operators

Locally owned charter cruise company Amazônia Expeditions has been navigating the Amazon for 37 years. The team excels at small-group cruises tailored to passengers’ interests, such as botany or fishing. amazonia expeditions.com.br; cruises for up to eight people from US$2,350 per group per day.

Amazon offerings from conservation-minded tour operator Wildlife Worldwide include group river safaris and bespoke private itineraries that take you to see the region’s animal inhabitants. Tack on a transfer to the biodiverse Pantanal, a wetlands region in southwestern Brazil, for a jaguar-tracking trip. wildlifeworldwide.com; nine-day trips from US$3,690.

Tr avel Advisors

Rio-based Brazil travel specialist Paul Irvine (paul. irvine@dehouche.com) is the founder of the South American travel firm Dehouche and a longtime member of the A-List, T+L’s collection of the world’s top travel advisors. He can plan custom riverboat itineraries, with stays at Brazil’s best rain-forest lodges, and a variety of post-cruise extensions, like a

transfer to Trancoso to experience Bahia’s beaches and Afro-Caribbean culture. dehouche.com; US$800 minimum daily spend.

Mary Curry (1-406-5401901; mary.c@adventurelife. com), an adventure-cruise specialist on the A-List, can organize itineraries that put a river excursion in the context of a broader South American expedition. Her team at Adventure Life can book a small-ship cruise supplemented with a visit to Iguazú Falls, Machu Picchu, or the Galápagos Islands. adventure-life.com; US$200 minimum daily spend.

When to go

Irvine notes that fluctuating water levels mean the Amazon changes dramatically from season to season. The rainy season, with intense showers, runs from December to April.

River levels are highest between January and August, allowing access to small tributaries and secluded swimming holes. But the drier season, from September to November, is best for fishing, hiking and visiting the region’s white-sand river beaches.

What to pack

Curry encourages travelers to take precautions against mosquitoes. Bring a strong repellent, pretreat clothes with Permethrin spray and get antimalarial medication from a doctor. Plan on taking light, loose-fitting pants and longsleeved shirts in light colors.

Evenings are cool, so pack layers to keep warm.

NAPLES, ITALY FOUNDED IN 1737

CELEBRATING THE 20TH ANNIVERSARY OF BANGKOK’S INTERNATIONAL FESTIVAL OF DANCE & MUSIC

Naples’ Teatro di San Carlo, the oldest continuously active opera house in the world presents the top singers of the opera world in a stunning production

CARMEN

A once in a lifetime opportunity to hear the world’s leading opera singers who regularly perform at New York’s Metropolitan Opera, Teatro alla Scala, Vienna State Opera, Royal Opera House Covent Garden, Paris Opéra, Bolshoi Theatre, Opera di Firenze and Teatro di San Carlo

IN FOUR ACTS

OPERA

WITH A CAST OF OVER 250 ARTISTS

Among the singers are tenor extraordinare and Grammy Nominee Saimir Pirgu, mezzo soprano Veronica Simeoni, baritone Vito Priante, Carlo Bosi one of the greatest comprimario tenors of his generation and tenor Gianfranco Montresor who has performed along with Andrea Bocelli CONDUCTED BY THE LEGENDARY

ZUBIN MEHTA

ONLY TWO PERFORMANCES September 12 & 14, 2018 Ticket Prices: BAHT 10,000 / 7,000 / 5,000 / 4,000 / 2,000 HOTLINE 02 262 3191 (24 HRS) WWW.THAITICKETMAJOR.COM

PERFORMANCE STARTS ON TIME AT 7.30 PM (DOOR OPEN 7.00 PM) VENUE: THAILAND CULTURAL CENTRE www.bangkokfestivals.com

COMMEMORATING 150 YEARS OF DIPLOMATIC RELATIONS BETWEEN THAILAND AND ITALY

SUPPORTED BY SCG AND TATA STEEL

wish you were here

In Kyoto’s Gion district at dusk, you might catch a quick glimpse of a geisha walking out of a teahouse, swiftly ushered away, disappearing like a ghost. Here, a taxi driver was waiting beside his car as the wooden teahouse doors slid open. A kimono-clad geisha seemed to float forwards, her face covered in full makeup and hair dressed in the traditional Shimada style. The taxi driver circled his car, closing the doors as soon as the geisha and her assistant were safely inside. And off they went. — CEDRIC ARNOLD

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october 2018 / tr av el andleisure asia .com