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!)

continued after the break...

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.

continued after the break...

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.

continued after the break...

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."