The Other Side of London... a Very Green One

A friend visited London last week on the occasion of his book publication, and he commented that the city seemed very expensive.  Indeed.

Yes, well, my friend was staying at the Savoy Hotel... and then he moved to Brown's Hotel (which is celebrating its 175th anniversary and looks fab).  He was dining at restaurants and private clubs in Mayfair (Mark Birley's new establishment he liked).  Against my advice to him, someone else was choosing the wine at meals.  High tea alone was eighty dollars.  Black cabs he found were astronomical, especially when compared to New York's yellow taxis.  Wifi in the hotels were a good thirty dollars a day.  And the phone bill there!

All true.  But London is a vast city, as spread out as Los Angeles, and there are other neighborhoods than gold-plated Mayfair.  All of London's museums are free.  The underground is not particularly enjoyable but it is moderately efficient, and almost affordable.  Simcards for mobile phones with data are much cheaper than in America, and would have solved his expensive hotel comms problem.  Tea?  Consider PG Tips, with a biscuit.

More importantly you will not get to know London, or Britain, from Mayfair, which is essentially one vast concierge service for the international wealthy.  My NY friend's trip was too short, so understandably he ignored my advice, but after saying goodbye to him I went walking with a London friend.  She has lived in North London near Hampstead Heath, an enormous wild park, for years and knows the trails, and the trees... and the birds.  Since I'm better on the poems than the birds I pointed out that Keats composed "Ode to a Nightingale" nearby in the garden of a pub on the fringe of the Heath. 

Here, below, the view from the start of our walk, at the entrance to an adjacent park.  Andrew Marvell, the poet and one-time secretary to John Milton and Oliver Cromwell, lived in a house fifty yards to the right.

But this walk was not about houses, or even poets.

Below is a broad meadow on Hampstead Heath.

continued after the jump...

Hotel Review - Four Seasons Punta Mita

The juice was green. And because this was Mexico I suspected, correctly, that this might be cactus.

The light, coming off the wide expanse of Pacific, was dazzling. “Glare,” I thought. I adjusted my sunglasses.

Was that a breeze wafting up from the jungly vegetation below and through the expansive lobby? I wrote in my notebook: “Draughty?”

The reception lounge was calm, quiet, with just one couple checking out, far off, at the front desk. I knit my brow, and wondered: “Undue space?”

I saw a splash on the horizon. A dolphin possibly. Exotic birds darted here and there through the palm trees, heading for the Sierra Madre mountains, the haunt of sea eagles, behind. On a rooftop down the hill a lizard sunned himself. I remembered that John Huston’s film The Night of the Iguana was filmed nearby. I sniffed. “All this wild life... ever have any problems?”

The check-in manager sat across smiling, nonplussed by my act. The fact was we were in one of the most beautiful spots on earth, once called by native Americans “the place where heaven and earth meet,” and everything was perfect.

As mentioned in an earlier post (link below), I’d first heard of Punta Mita, a broad green peninsula on the central Pacific coast of Mexico, from a well known “Rockosaurus.” At the top of the enormous Bahia de Bandares, thirty miles from Puerto Vallarta, on a privately-owned six-km square peninsula limned by white beaches, sit two of the world’s most exclusive international resorts, the Four Seasons and the St. Regis. In the middle of a world tour last year, the rocker in question had a short break between legs, and had rented a villa there, inviting a score of family members to join. “Sounds terrific,” I said.

He paused, some dissatisfaction hovering. “I suppose,” he said. “But, well... they wouldn’t let us land our helicopter on the grounds.”

“Oh,” I said. “How inconvenient.” (But how considerate for the other guests!)

I myself arrived there not by helicopter but by taxi, at the end of a one city tour... as a tourist in fact! I'd been sent to Mexico City by British Airways High Life magazine to report on the vibrant rebirth of that city and as well as its Nueva Onda of young artists.

I quickly learned that Four Seasons Punta Mita was not merely luxurious, a rustic and relaxed Mexican chic, but staffed by some of the most considerate people I’d ever encountered. The resort, scattered over the slope of a hill, hosts a range of accommodations, from condos to luxury villas, and one family-oriented complex was encircled by a slow-flowing, man-made “river.” We were shown to a casita with glass doors opening on to a terrace framed by frangipani trees. Beyond was pristine beach.

Far along the sand two young men in shorts and polo shirts waved, beach butlers, discreetly setting up an umbrella and lounge chair. Kayaks, paddle boards, and surf board were stacked nearby. (There are five good surf breaks on the peninsula.) In the other direction a small island lay off shore with a small flag waving on it, a golf hole. This was the famous Tail of the Whale, the only natural island green in the world, part of two golf courses there designed by golfing great Jack Nicklaus, and his favorite par 3 hole in the world.

That evening we visited the Four Seasons’ casual beach-side restaurant specializing in Mexican cuisine to sample its chili infused margarita (cool, citrusy, lip-smackingly spicy), before heading up the hill to another of their dining spots that specialized in Asian fusion and did extraordinary miso-soy things with huachinango, a white fish akin to red snapper that we were to encounter happily and repeatedly there. Luckily we arrived at a table overlooking the resort just as a former staff member, now working as an assistant winemaker in Baja, had returned like an alumnus made good to share his knowledge, and his wine, with his former work-mates. They included us in the bounty, and the wines were very good indeed.

The next day I rose at the crack of dawn to see what the tide had brought to the doorstep.

Outside I saw a worker tending to some bushes, snipping here and there. He had no idea anyone was watching him, but as he worked he smiled to himself. Truly, my attempt, for journalistic purposes, to test the patience of this staff was never going to work with these people.

I resolved to turn my energies elsewhere--the gym, I discovered, was state of the art. Their spa offered massages traditional for Swedes (with vigor) or for Mayans (lashings of cactus goop). My companion, who’d been eager to devote her time to the local turtle hatchery found that such activity was out of season and so sought consolation in the resort’s boutique, one that would put a woman in good standing with the fashionistas in Tulum. When I went looking for her, I found golf and beach kit for men, including a dizzying array of customized Havianas flip-flops (cognoscenti there stick to the brown and navy).

Aside from the surfing and kayaking, both resorts offer snorkel and scuba diving, yachting, hiking and birding in the Sierra mountains, or off shore on the Marietta islands, deep sea fishing, and as mentioned (if you preferred to put things back into the water) that opportunity to help turtles hatch. Punta Mita sits on a migratory path for three species of whales, so if the time is right they may be seen from balcony or boat.

Of course, one can also just sit on the beach.

As mentioned in my St. Regis post, what Punta Mita is best known for though is its TWO tournament-level, oceanside golf courses. I’d only ever in my life played two or three rounds, and considered golf simply an excuse for an afternoon stroll; but I happened to meet the resident pro, Phillip Ferrari, who said, “Golf along the ocean? At least try one hole here. It will change your life.” I chose, hole #3b, the famed Tail of the Whale.

The tee for that legendary hole sits on a small bluff above a beach. The green is on a small natural island 180 yards off shore. From the tee, the island looked tiny, a patch of grass surrounded by a ring of boulders and sand trap, with blue ocean around. The fairway: all water, with a thin walkway accessible at low tide off to the right.

“Don’t think about it,” Phil said. “Just put a tee down, no ball on it.” I swung missing the tee, and created a large divot. “Don’t think about that either! You just created a job for someone here. Employment!” He proceeded to give me a three minute lesson: forget everything I’d ever been told to do, just get comfortable, swing how you like, and swing through. After a few swings I began to breathe deeply, and finally, for the first time all week, I relaxed. Soon I was hitting the top of the tee every time.

“Now put a ball on it.”

I put a ball upon the tee.

I swung.

And I hit the ball, and for the first time ever I felt that perfect ping, a harmonic resonance, like tuning fork struck by hammer hitting just the right note, the perfect note.

Phil hooted.

I squinted.

The ball had sailed 180 yards across the ocean and landed on the island, right on the green itself.

“I told you I was going to change your life. How do you feel?”

I had to think for a moment, considered, then said, “Like a rock star.”

_____________________

HOW TO GET THERE

Fly BA to Mexico City, then Mexicana to Puerta Vallarta (1.5 hours). Or Fly BA to Dallas or Los Angeles, and continue to Puerto Vallarta via American Airlines (2.5 hours). Punta Mita is 45 minutes by car from PV airport.

WHERE TO STAY

Four Seasons Punta Mita has elegant villas and beach front casitas in a rustic, jungly setting, with activities for families, the friendliest of staffs.  Details HERE.

NEED TO KNOW

READ

The Labyrinth of Solitude, in which Mexico’s greatest poet, the Nobel Laureate Octavio Paz, considers what it is to be Mexican. One of the classic essays in 20th century literature. (Penguin, 14.99)

Like Water for Chocolate by Laura Esquival, a fun novel about a romance and its frustration, with local recipes thrown in.

Viva Mexico, Charles Flandrau’s 1908 comic and colorful memoir of living on his brother’s coffee plantation, with far-flung excursions to sleepy countryside. (Eland, 12.99)

WATCH

John Huston’s film adaptation of Tennessee Williams’s hot-house drama The Night of the Iguana, set in Puerto Vallarta when it was but a humble fishing village. One of Richard Burton’s strongest performances, opposite the smokin’ Ava Gardner.

DON’T

Don’t explore the wider region without research on your route and safety. Consult specifics via the UK FCO and US State Department.


STAYING FOR MORE THAN 72 HOURS?

Spend an afternoon at laid back, hippy chic Sayulita, take a surf lesson and have fish tacos on the beach.

Venture to the Marietta Islands, home to a species of bird (the blue-footed booby) found only there and on the Galapagos.

NOTE TO READERS: 

I'd earlier written about Punta Mita's St. Regis resort on the other side of the peninsula, about which HERE. Apologies for any redundancy.

Thomas Goltz's Primer on Chechnya

In the wake of the Boston Marathon bombing, Chechnya, with its complex and sad legacy, is in the news.

Apropos of that, Thomas Goltz, a Montana-based writer and Caucasus specialist, sent me his notes on Chechnya's recent history.

I met Goltz in London in the late 1990s when my mid-summer visit for Paris Review business coincided with his exit, under a storm of Russian bombs, from a reporting trip in Grozny.  We both landed at the same friend's flat in Belsize Park.  (Goltz, as it happens, introduced me via a tour of Camden pubs to the world of English real ale and explained that REAL ale was a living thing... but more on that another time.)

Shortly after that visit, Goltz was back in Chechnya, and was at one point the only Westerner living in the forsaken town of Samashki, which became the symbol of Russian brutality as a result of a gratuitous massacre. His camera-shaking reportage appeared on PBS stations in the USA and then the BBC. while his writing in all the major US newspapers.

Meanwhile, this week he writes:

To start with what is not obvious to many Americans, the Chechens are not Russians but a distinct national and lingual group indigenous to the north slope of the Caucasus mountain range, where they have lived since before recorded history. Rather like Native American peoples known by names given them by the white man and whose sad history in the 18th and 19th centuries is a strange and cruel mirror of the experience of the Chechens at the hands of Russian imperialism, the very name "Chechen" is not what the Chechens call themselves. They are the "Noxchi," which translates more or less as "The People."

During the so-called on-again-off-again Murid wars of the 19th century, the Chechens were the backbone of Muslim tribal resistance to the Czarist expansion south, and earned the reputation of being fanatical, fearless Sufism-inspired warriors. After the resistance collapsed with the capture of Imam Shamil (an event somewhat akin to the surrender of Souix/Lakota Chief Sitting Bull), many of those fearless warriors brought their skills into exile in the Ottoman Empire, where they were stationed in problematic border areas, such as the Balkans and the Arab lands of the Levant, where they became known under the generic name of "Circassians," a term that also includes other related North Caucasus mountaineers such as the Ingush, Abkhaz and Adagei who were also driven into Ottoman exile by the czars.

To this day, the palace guard of the king of Jordan are all Circassians; in Syria, they are (or were) concentrated in the Golan heights, but are now attempting a reverse migration to their ancestral lands in Russia, even while undetermined numbers of their "cousins" from Chechnya-in-Russia take up arms along side Jihadists against the secular regime of Bashar al Assad in Damascus.

In the 1920s and 1930s, the Chechens (like many of the 150-odd new "nations" in the USSR, many manufactured from whole cloth) maintained a low-boil resistance to Soviet rule and collectivization. But it was also thanks to Joseph Stalin and his commissars that a Chechnya was first defined as an "Autonomous Republic," a territorial entity replete with borders, a Soviet-style official "culture" and other attributes of (Soviet-style) national "statehood."

Many other marginal peoples in the USSR did not fare so well, and were thus absorbed into larger non-Slavic nutshells whenever Stalin sneezed.

For the Chechens, that sneeze came on February 23-24 1944, when Stalin and his fellow Georgian henchman Lavrentii Beria accused the Chechens of collaborating with the Nazi Wehrmacht, dissolved their Autonomous Republic and sent the new non-people sent into exile in Siberia and Soviet Central Asia. Transportation was provided aboard boxcars chillingly similar to those that brought European Jews to Hitler's death camps.

In the case of the Chechens, an estimated half of the 478,479 people sent into exile died in route.

Read the whole things here.  Also cross posted at Michael Totten's blog here.

Also look for Goltz's books Chechnya Diary (2003) and Georgia Diary (2006/09).

Hotel Review - The St. Regis Punta Mita

Punta Mita.

I’d first heard of the place, a broad green peninsula on the central Pacific coast of Mexico, from a well known “Rockosaurus.”

At the top of the enormous Bahia de Bandares, thirty miles from Puerto Vallarta, on a privately-owned six-km square peninsula limned by white beaches, sit two of the world’s most exclusive international resorts, the Four Seasons and the St. Regis. In the middle of a world tour last year, the rocker in question had a short break between tour legs, and had rented a villa there, inviting a score of family members to join.

“Sounds terrific,” I said when he told me about it.

He nodded, paused, with some dissatisfaction hovering.  (He's a man of discriminating taste, usually staying when in, say, London at the Berkeley or the Mandarin Oriental.)  “Terrific?  I suppose,” he said.  “But... well... they wouldn’t let us land our helicopter on the grounds.”

“Oh,” I said.  “How inconvenient.”  (But how considerate for the other guests!)

I myself arrived there not by helicopter but by taxi, at the end of a one city tour... as a tourist in fact!  I'd been sent to Mexico City by British Airways High Life magazine to report on the vibrant rebirth of that city and its Nueva Onda of young artists, as mentioned HERE.  The magazine's editor suggested that before heading home I look at one of the resorts on the Pacific Coast.  After braving the Zona Maco art fair, the restaurant visits, the studio look-ins, I thought such a visit might be, if not fully deserved, at least needed.

On the south side of Punta Mita sits the diminutive St. Regis Resort.  It's an elegant, slightly formal place, as befits a resort that is part of a hotel group founded a century ago by New York grandee John Jacob Astor.  Admittedly, I never became accustomed there to having a personal butler, as was assigned to each room, but I suspect that many other guests (including assorted rock stars) arrived already used to such.  The interiors of both the guest suites and the public spaces bring a Provencal touch  to Mexico.  Their spa is an expansive complex of treatment rooms, open-air showers, hot pools and jacuzzis with sunshine beating down and the sound of waves nearby.  Of their three restaurants (and all restaurants are open to guests of either resort) the highlight is Carolina, named after JJA’s wife, an award-winning fine dining restaurant, overseen by Sylvain Desbois.  The wine list has depth and breadth, and I encountered a wine I’d always wanted to try, the legendary Vega Sicilia of Ribiero del Duero, Spain.  It was worth the wait.

Aside from the surfing and kayaking, both resorts offer snorkel and scuba diving, yachting, hiking and birding in the Sierra mountains, deep sea fishing, and (if you preferred to put things back into the water) the opportunity to help turtles hatch.  Punta Mita sits on a migratory path for three species of whales, so if the time is right they may be seen from balcony or boat.

What Punta Mita is best known for though is its TWO tournament-level, oceanside golf courses, designed by golfing great Jack Nicklaus, the "Golden Bear."  I’d only ever in my life played two or three rounds, and considered golf simply an excuse for an afternoon stroll; but I happened to meet the resident pro, Phillip Ferrari, who said, “Golf along the ocean?  At least try one hole here.  It will change your life.”  I chose, hole #3b, the famed Tail of the Whale.

The tee for that legendary hole sits on a small bluff above a beach.  The green is on a small natural island 180 yards off shore.  From the tee, the island looked tiny, a patch of grass surrounded by a ring of boulders and sand traps, with blue ocean around, as you may see below.  The fairway: all water, with a thin walkway accessible at low tide off to the right.

“Don’t think about it,” Phil said.  “Just put a tee down, no ball on it.”  Following his instruction, I did so, then swung missing the tee, creating an enormous divot in the finely-cut, expensive grass.  “Don’t think about that either!  You just created a job for someone here.  Employment!”

Phil proceeded to give me a three minute lesson: forget everything I’d ever been told to do, just get comfortable, swing how you like, and swing through.  After a few practice swings I began to breathe deeply, and finally, for the first time all week, I relaxed.

Soon I was hitting the top of the tee every time.  “Now put a ball on it.”  I put a ball upon the tee.  I swung.  And hit the ball, I did.  For the first time ever I felt that perfect ping, a harmonic resonance, like tuning fork struck by hammer hitting just the right note, the perfect note.

Phil hooted.  I squinted.  The ball had sailed 180 yards across the ocean and landed on the island, right on the green itself.

“I told you I was going to change your life.  How do you feel?”

I had to think for a moment, considered, then said, “Like a rock star.”




HOW TO GET THERE

Fly BA to Mexico City, then Mexicana to Puerta Vallarta (1.5 hours).  Or Fly BA to Dallas or Los Angeles, and continue to Puerto Vallarta via American Airlines (2.5 hours).  Punta Mita is 45 minutes by car from PV airport.

WHERE TO STAY

St. Regis Punta Mita is a bijou on the Bahia de Banderas, with butler service, and a world class restaurant.  It offers access to two championship golf courses.

NEED TO KNOW

READ

The Labyrinth of Solitude, in which Mexico’s greatest poet, the Nobel Laureate Octavio Paz, considers what it is to be Mexican.  One of the classic essays in 20th century literature. (Penguin, 14.99)

Like Water for Chocolate by Laura Esquival, a fun novel about a romance and its frustration, with local recipes thrown in.

Viva Mexico, Charles Flandrau’s 1908 comic and colorful memoir of living on his brother’s coffee plantation, with far-flung excursions to sleepy countryside. (Eland, 12.99)

WATCH

John Huston’s film adaptation of Tennessee Williams’s hot-house drama The Night of the Iguana, set in Puerto Vallarta when it was but a humble fishing village.  One of Richard Burton’s strongest performances, opposite the smokin’ Ava Gardner. 

DON’T

Don’t explore the wider region without research on your route and safety.  Consult specifics via the UK FCO and US State Department travel section.

A War-Time Leader, and "The Weight"

... this via a TIMES of London lead editorial, at the time...

Hours before the first shots were fired in the Falklands War, Margaret Thatcher noted in a telegram to General Leopold Galtieri, the Argentine dictator, that in a few days they would both be reading casualty lists. "On my side," the Prime Minister wrote, "grief will be tempered by the knowledge that these men died for freedom, justice and the rule of law. And on your side? Only you can answer that question."