Big Island Off the Beaten Track, Part Two
Guest Post and Photo by Amy Perry Basseches
Guest Post and Photo by Amy Perry Basseches
While there are more than 300 islands in Fiji, most visitors opt to stay on the main island of Viti Levu where the international airport and the country’s two largest cities, Nadi and Suva, are located. Knowing that intimate Fijian villages and remote islands are less than an hour boat ride away, it pains me to meet people who spend their entire trip on this one commercial isle. Stay a night or two on the Coral Coast, one hour south of Nadi, to relax after the 10-hour flight from Los Angeles. Then ferry over to the town of Levuka on the island of Ovalau. More than fifty stores and hotels built in the 1850s still stand in this former capital of Fiji. Walk past the ficus trees down Beach Street to the most prestigious establishment of all, The Royal Hotel. Continuously operating since Levuka’s heyday, this is the oldest hotel in the South Pacific. Walk around the lobby and you feel like you’re entering a novel by Somerset Maugham or Robert Louis Stevenson, who both spent at least a night here. Inside, you’ll find rattan chairs, ceiling fans, a large stained oak bar, and a 100-year-old snooker table. Thankfully, one doesn’t have to be an acclaimed man of letters to afford this lodging. Cost of a room starts at $32 a night, including toast and tea for breakfast.
I recently went to a 5-course meal at the stylish Liquid Art House in Boston to commemorate the 30th anniversary of the gourmet meat and charcuterie purveyor, D’Artagnan. Founder Ariane Daguin, who I last met at a luncheon a decade ago at No. 9 Park, has successfully filled a niche for both chefs and consumers, delivering healthy free-range meats from farmers all over America. For example, the rabbit in the first course, Rabbit Ballotine, created by one of my favorite Boston chefs, Tony Maws, was raised on a farm in Arkansas. Other dishes included duck, bison, and porcelet. Daguin is headed across the country this year to host special 30th anniversary dinners, so be on the lookout in your city. In the meantime head to the D’Artagnan website to see special discounts on many of her meats.
Wayne Curtis is best known as author of “And a Bottle of Rum: A History of the New World in Ten Cocktails” (Crown, 2006) and as cocktail columnist for Atlantic Monthly. But my friendship with Wayne goes back at least a decade prior when we were both moaning about the egregious book contracts Frommer’s publisher forced upon us. Thankfully, those days are far behind us. I caught up with Wayne in 2008, when he had just moved to New Orleans. He brought my brother Jim and me to his favorite bars and bartenders and it resulted in this story for The Boston Globe. But I know that Wayne has a passion beyond cocktails, including architecture, urban renewal, jazz, and biking. All figured prominently in a 5-hour tour he designed for my family on our trip to Nola this past April.
Voted the finest small lodge in America by Travel & Leisure magazine, Triple Creek Ranch is located in the Bitterroot Valley of western Montana, surrounded by the Rocky Mountains. It’s the ideal terrain to go fly-fishing, horseback riding, and hiking, then return to one of 23 cozy cabins and get a ready for a Relais & Châteaux-designated dinner. Thankfully, the fun doesn’t end in autumn. The lodging is also known for its exciting winter sports. This includes skijoring, where a cross-country skier is pulled by a cowboy on horseback; and dogsledding with 13-time Iditarod finisher, Jessie Royer. Other adventures include winter horseback riding, cross-country skiing on the Continental Divide, downhill skiing at nearby Lost Trail Powder Mountain, and snowmobiling. Triple Creek Ranch has thrown together a Big Sky Big Five Snow Package that includes all these activities, 5 nights lodging, meals, wine and spirits, and a one-hour massage in your log cabin. Cost is $7,635 per couple and the package is available January 17 to February 29.
The best time to enter Las Cruces is on a Friday night like I did. The next morning when the sun arose atop those jagged peaks known as the Organ Mountains, I headed to Main Street for the Saturday Farmers Market. If you’re yearning for authenticity in the Southwest, all it takes is a 7-block stroll in Las Cruces on a Saturday morning to find it. It was the end of the green chile and tomato harvest and bins were filled with fresh produce from the Dona Ana Valley. Also found were pomegranates, Arkansas Black apples, jugs of horchata and limonata, locally farmed pecans and pistachios, and ristras (long strings) of red chiles hanging in front of many of the stalls. Yet, what really impressed me were the local artisans offering gemstone-laden jewelry, pottery, wooden crafts like adobe-style salt and pepper shaker holders, sculptures, watercolors of the local desert wildflowers, and photographs of the Organ Mountains splashed in red sunlight. All offered at a fraction of the cost one would find these wares 4 hours to the north in Santa Fe.