April 2010

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The Travel Avatar

It started with a simple suggestion from Chileans Robert and Killy Stanton: Why don’t you let your readers decide where you go next?

I rather liked that idea. But I thought, there has to be more to it than that. It seemed too whimsical to simply go wherever the winds blew. There had to be a reason for the travel; there had to be a story. Yes, okay, I’ll go where you suggest, but tell me why. And it has to be more than, “I’ve always wanted to go there.”

Think of it this way: Let’s say that I’m god and I decide that I’m going to bring back the Beatles—all of the Beatles—for a circa 1970 concert. And I’ve picked you and 2,000 other fans to see them in some fabulous intimate setting. Better yet, the fans get to determine the set list. So you’re sitting in your seat in the front row (I give you very good tickets) and the boys come on stage and John looks right at you and says, “So what shall we play for our first number, mate?”

Lots of pressure. You could just call out “Strawberry Fields Forever!” or “While My Guitar Gently Weeps!” but that isn’t good enough. John wants you to explain why you want the song you want. So you bravely stand up and say, “I’d like to hear “A Day in the Life” because the first time I heard it was the summer I turned 13, after my mother had died and my father moved us to a little town in the Texas panhandle where my grandparents lived and I hated everything about it from the dust to the drawl and I’d walk around the empty streets of this town late at night, feeling like I was going to dry up and blow away like the tumbleweeds rolling down the street, and one night I heard some music coming out of a window of a house even smaller and crummier than ours and I stood out on the sidewalk, in the heat and the humidity of a Texas summer, listening to this amazing song—“A Day in the Life”—and I knew I would be okay.”

And with that, John smiles, and begins: “I read the news today, oh, boy…”

Hold on to that image and imagine how it might work for travel. Everyone out there has a “Top 10” list in their head of places they’d like to go before they put away their passport for good. But for whatever reason, they haven’t made it there yet. Maybe a career got in the way or it cost too much money or they’re just not physically able to do it. So I’m going to go there for you. I’ll be your Travel Avatar. But, just as with the Beatles, it can’t just be people shouting out, “Go to Paris!” or “I’d love it if you went to Rio!”

I need a story. Like the one I got from a reader who told me about a distant relative of hers, Osa Johnson. “She was probably the most famous female explorer of her time back in the ‘20s and ‘30s but now everyone has forgotten about her.” She traveled with her husband, Martin, to the South Seas to film cannibals and headhunters, sometimes running for her life when they thought perhaps they were meant to be the next meal, and spent three years living at a “lost” lake in Northern Kenya shooting hundreds of thousands of feet of film documenting the wildlife, including massive herds of elephant and rhino, that even then were dying out.

“She was barely five-feet-tall, but Osa was larger than life to me when I was growing up,” said this reader. “And I always wondered what it would be like to have been her. To go where she went and see what she saw. My dream was to get to that lost lake in Kenya and pick up where she and Martin left off. But one thing or another kept me from that trip and now I’m in my 70s. But it would be wonderful if you could go there and tell me if it’s still there. If, in the mornings, the mist around the lake carries the scent of wild jasmine, as she wrote, and if, at night, the light from the moon still silhouettes the domelike forms of elephants come to drink at the lake. I fear it is all gone now. But I wonder. I wonder all the time.”

So that’s what I’m going to do. Sometime this summer I’ll head for Northern Kenya and look for Osa’s lost lake to see if the elephants are still there. But first, it’s off to the South Seas—to Vanuatu (which was called New Hebrides when Osa and Martin Johnson visited back in the ‘20s). Not to look for cannibals, of course, but just to see the islands they saw, meet the descendants of the Chief Nihapat and the other islanders to see how life has changed for them in the last 90 years. And to tell stories about all of it.

I’m going to take a break for a few days while I travel to the South Pacific. We’ll begin our adventure reliving the journey of Osa and Martin Johnson next Monday. In the meantime, if you’ve got a story of your own to tell, a place you’d like me to visit, please write me at david@davidlansing.com. Not all of my travels will come from your suggestions (after all, I still have lots of places I want to go for my own reasons), but if I get a good story, who knows, I may pick that destination next. Maybe it will be your adventure. Why not?

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The Friday Cocktail: French 75

A couple of weeks ago I mentioned a cocktail from Charles H. Baker’s 1939 cocktail guide, The Gentleman’s Companion, known as the Maharajah’s Burra-Peg, without really saying what it was. Shortly after that I got a note from a friend who thought that was quite unfair. “My birthday was last week, so give: What’s the Maharaja’s Burra-Peg? It sounds delicious.”

To be honest, I think I’m more in love with Baker’s story behind the cocktail than the cocktail itself. To wit: “The word Burra in Hindustani means “big,” “important,” or “big-time,” as the case might be; and “peg” throughout Brtaindom means a “drink”—more often than not a Scotch-and-soda. This particular champagne affair was broken out on the eve of our departure alone across India, after a month with Spofford in his big Calcutta bungalow show in the fashionable Ballygunge section down Chowringhee, beyond Lower Circular Road. This Burra-Peg is to the ordinary Champagne Cocktail what Helen of Troy was to a local shepherd maiden.

“We got aboard the Bombay Mail with our tail between our legs and lunged across Central India, and later on found ourself in Jaipur—already mentioned in Melon, Orientale, Volume I. And here in this amazing town in Rajputana, with its modern government and 120 ft. wide streets, where tigers are protected so the Maharajah may shoot without fatiguing travel much beyond city limits, where we found Ambar—India’s most marvelous deserted city—and got mixed up in the yearly Festival of the Sun, starting from the Gulta Pass, and with more elephants, fakirs and jugglers than a three ringed circus; here we found probably the lonesomest Standard Oil man we’d ever seen.

“So we joined forces, and of evenings we would sit on the rooftop of his bungalow, and while the sun set through the sherry-brown dust cloud that broods over Central India throughout the dry season, would listen to the vain male peacock’s scream, and watched the Rikki-tikki-tavis—or mongooses, or mongeese, or whatever the hell they choose to call those trim little animals that would sooner fight snakes than live—scuttling about their mongoosing business among the bushes in the garden. And we would sip various tall things, including a quartet of Champagne Burra-Pegs, and he would recount to us certain toothsome bits of “under-the-punkah” tales about Majarajahs and people; and how, actually, the young new one we’d just met preferred one wife to the regiment of 400 or so his dad had thoughtfully left him!

“Duplicating our experience we suggest: the largest chilled goblet in sight, at least 14 oz, and 16 oz is better. Into this turn 2 jiggers of good well-chilled cognac; drop in a lump of sugar doused with Angostura, fill up with chilled dry champagne and garnish with a spiral of green lime peel.”

Well, the Maharajah may indeed have enjoyed such a drink when he wasn’t hunting tigers, but what Baker is describing is essentially a French 75, a cocktail said to have been concocted by the flying ace Raoul Lufbery during World War I (a good 25 years before Baker renamed it the Maharajah’s Burra-Peg). As the original story goes, Lufbery, who was part of the Escadrille Américaine air fighting unit, loved champagne but wanted something a bit more potent. So he mixed it with cognac, which was plentiful. The combination was said to have such a kick that it felt like being shelled with the powerful French 75mm howitzer. Something I can, unfortunately, atest to. My experience has been that it’s the perfect cocktail when you’re only going to have one—and I truly mean, just one.

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Icebergs Dining Room and Bar

Getting the Veuve Clicquot ready at Icebergs. Photo by David Lansing.

Getting the Veuve Clicquot ready at Icebergs. Photo by David Lansing.

Here’s how Icebergs Dining Room and Bar describes itself on its web page: “Gracing the cliffs of South Bondi, embracing the panoramic views of the world’s most iconic beach, lays a unique Australian dining experience. A cherished encounter enhanced by the inspired cuisine of Icebergs Dining Room and Bar in an atmosphere of relaxed elegance. Every guest is invited to appreciate the uplifting experience afforded by such a rare location, from the expansive ocean horizons to the yellow sands of the legendary Bondi Beach….”

So definitely a little hyperbole (“the world’s most iconic beach”? “A cherished encounter”?) and they’re obviously full of themselves. But then you click on “Cuisine” and just one word pops up: Mediterranean. Wow. What happened to all the wordiness? Because the food here really is terrific.

Which is pretty amazing considering the setting (you know, gracing the cliffs of the world’s most iconic beach). Usually when you combine beach with panoramic view what you get, at best, is mediocre food. Not cuisine—food. But this was a damn fine meal. In a setting that can only be described as Down Under meets St. Tropez with lots of well-sculpted bronze bodies dressed in expensive resort wear ordering copious amounts of Veuve Clicquot. Which is probably why the receptionist, wearing her hands-free headset to better handle the onslaught of reservation requests, gave me the twice over when I walked in wearing Bonobo shorts and a turquoise polo shirt. Ah, well, not to worry, mate. It’s better than the pudgy guys wearing plaid shorts above black socks and loafers I saw walking along Bondi Beach.

So I’m thinking fish and chips or maybe a burger with a cold beer but when I open the menu I’m looking at an assortment of market fish that includes Tiger Flathead from Bruny Island, Tasmania and Blue Eye Trevalla from Browns Sea Mountain in New South Wales, as well as a wagyu rib eye, from “400 days grain fed export quality wagyu beef” for $165. Not exactly your typical beach snack hut, know what I mean?

Well, heck, who knows when I’ll get back to this rare location with its expansive ocean horizons to the yellow sands of legendary Bondi Beach (besides, I’ve already had two glasses of champagne), so I go for it: a couple of different types of local oysters for starters, followed by little gamberetti shrimp in lemon mustard mango sauce, and ox fillet, aged for 30 days.

And the verdict? It was damn good. In fact, I think I’d have to say it was a cherished encounter enhanced by inspired cuisine. And now I need a nap.

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Rajah, Icebergs, and the Bondi Baths

Bondi Baths above Bondi Beach in Sydney. Photo by David Lansing.

Bondi Baths above Bondi Beach in Sydney. Photo by David Lansing.

Back in the 1920s, municipal salt-water pools along the ocean were all the rage in Southern California. The Plunge, in Mission Beach, near San Diego, was, when it opened in 1925, the largest salt-water pool in the world holding 400,000 gallons of water. There were also salt-water pools in Santa Cruz and Los Angeles, but by World War II, they were pretty much a thing of the past.

Which is a shame because the only thing better than swimming in the ocean is swimming in an ocean-side salt-water pool where you get the sounds of the ocean and breaking surf and the smell of salt air without nasty things like rip tides and killer waves.

Around Sydney they are any number of salt-water pools, the most famous of which is Bondi Baths, an eight-lane, 50-meter pool built into the cliffs at the southern end of Bondi Beach. I was down there yesterday and I must say it’s quite spectacular. It sits just above a rocky outcropping in the ocean, just yards away from the surfer’s section of the beach, and is refreshed by crashing waves that spill over the sides of the pool at high tide.

Anyone can swim in the pool for a small fee, but most of those you see going up and down the swim lanes are members of the Bondi Icebergs Club, which was founded in 1929 by a small group of friends. To become an Icebergs member you must swim three of every four Sundays for five years during the Australian winter (May to September). As a NY Times story reported, “It is a true test of dedication, for while outsiders might think that Australia is the land of endless summer, in winter the ocean water is teeth-chattering cold. And on opening day of the winter swimming season, it is tradition that lumps of ice are tossed into the pool to test the hardiness of the competitors.”

Perhaps the most famous Iceberg was Harold Miller, known as “Rajah” because he used to walk around the club with a towel wrapped around his head, turban style. As the history of the Icebergs notes, “Rajah was elected President in 1936 and dominated the club for the next 32 years. Under his drive the club grew from a group on the “Rocks” to a club which eventually became world renowned and today celebrates 81 years of existence. Those fortunate enough to have known him during those years valued his friendship and memory, whilst those members who came after should be forever grateful to the man who gave them the Club as we know it today, a man known to many as Mr. Iceberg.”

Cheers to Rajah, the Icebergs, and the Bondi Baths—a lovely Sydney institution.

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A Sydney walkabout

Sydney Opera House and Harbour Bridge. Photo by David Lansing.

Sydney Opera House and Harbour Bridge. Photo by David Lansing.

Had my Sydney hotel been located in Paddington or Darlington, I no doubt would have spent the morning lazing around in my room. Which wouldn’t have been so bad. But the Observatory Hotel, as my concierge informed me after breakfast, is “superbly located for a bit of a walkabout. Straight out the door, sir, and in fifteen minutes you’ll be standing on the steps of the Opera House looking across to the Harbour Bridge.”

Well, listen, if your hotel was a fifteen minute walk from the Eiffel Tower or the Coliseum would you sit in your room, even if you were operating on less than four hours sleep in the last forty-eight hours? You would not. You would do what I did: Lace up some comfortable shoes, grab your camera, and head out.

The concierge, every bit as helpful as Bennie had been the night before, unfolded a Sydney map and made suggestions: “Just down the street here is the Lord Nelson Hotel which just happens to also be a brewery where you might want to stop in for a Trafalgar pale ale, a lovely quaffer.”

I reminded the concierge that it was not yet 9 a.m.

“Ah, you’re right,” he said, glancing at his watch. “She won’t be open until 11. Pity.”

Right. So, walk down to the Lord Nelson Hotel, go right on Argyle Street, “and soon enough you’ll be standing in front of the Museum of Contemporary Arts. Lovely museum if that’s appealing to you. If not, walk around the quay, do a little souvenir shopping if you like, and right enough you’ll spot the Opera House. Can’t miss it.”

It was a lovely walk. Already the morning was heating up, my shirt starting to stick to my back as I traipsed past the Holy Trinity Church, better known locally as the Garrison Church for reasons that elude me, which was built out of stone from the adjacent neighborhood known as The Rocks in the 1840s, and down hilly Argyle, a pleasant street of sidewalk cafes and boutique shops occupying what once were modest 19th century houses.

ThThe flâneur scene along Sydney’s Argyle Street. Photo by David Lansing.

The flâneur scene along Sydney’s Argyle Street. Photo by David Lansing.

It was such a gorgeously warm blue day that I decided to take a pass on the Contemporary Arts museum (particularly when I saw the legions of school-age children in uniforms lining up on the lawn in front) and continued on past the quay, at the end of Sydney Cove, where any number of ferries and tour boats were gorging themselves on the hundreds of tourists heading out for a closer look at the harbor.

And sure enough, before I knew it, I was on the steps of the famed Opera House, the brilliant sun reflecting mightily off the blistering white concrete shells that rise up like hands held in prayer. The whole scene was so blindingly light that I felt it impossible to really get the full beauty of this building which, like Stonehenge, is a UNESCO World Heritage Site—the most recently constructed World Heritage Site in the world—so I took the stairs up the Royal Botanic Gardens, just behind the Opera House, and sat on a bench beneath the cool shade of a sprawling Moreton Bay Fig that must have been at least a hundred years old.

All right, time for a confession: When I was maybe 13 or 14, I decided I was going to run away from home and move to Australia. Why? Mostly because it seemed to be the furthest away from where I lived. Which, at the time, was reason enough. And although I didn’t run away—at least not right then—I did become rather fixated on Australia. Until I was old enough to actually do some research into the subject and eventually came to the conclusion that Sydney was just an upside-down version of the place I already lived. And just that quickly I was over Australia.

Over the years, I’ve had many opportunities to visit but I always thought, Why go there? I know what it’s like; I’ve lived in the California version of it. So what a shock to find myself sitting on a bench in the Royal Botanic Garden, listening to the chattering of wild parrots in the trees, staring out at the Opera House and the bridge over Sydney Harbour and thinking, It’s quite charming here. In fact it’s lovely. And I quite like it.

And this, I suppose, is the real reason we travel: To surprise ourselves.

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