Mediterranean Maldives

(In one of those rare moments where my working life suddenly becomes all it's cracked up to be, Outlook Traveller magazine sent me to the Maldives for three days -- to review a Club Med resort. This is that piece.)

Trisha Gupta finds an island-wide watering hole to wallow in at Club Med Kani

I’m usually the sort of person whose holidays involve lots of seeing and doing. I’m the museum girl, the city wanderer, the excited jungler. And yes, sure, I love the sea, but I could never get myself to plan a whole vacation around being a beach bum. Until now.

At Club Med Kani, a swim in the sea is the most hectic thing you can do. Actually, no, I should take responsibility for my decadence: it’s the most hectic thing I did.

The tone of my holiday was set on the first morning. After a long and lazy breakfast, I was idling in the sea-facing pool when they announced aqua gym time. I considered the temptations of wa­ter aerobics, but my waiting gin and tonic won out. I swam one last lap quickly and got out, and didn’t get back in for the synchronised pool dancing or the water basketball game that came immediately after. Instead, I moved my deck chair into a carefully orchestrated patch of palm-tree shade and finished the last third of my David Mitchell novel. And more G&Ts, of course.

With a beach bar that opens up at 11 in the morning (and stays open until the action shifts to the evening bar), superb and varied buffet meals, and the gener­ally mellow vibe produced by a calm blue sea, Kani makes decadence seem normal. But Club Med’s all-inclusive vacation style caters just as well to the sporty, active holiday-maker: you’d certainly feel like you’re getting your money’s worth if you’re the type who goes sailing in the morning, snorkelling in the afternoon and kayaking in the evening.

I didn’t sail or go kayaking, but the snorkelling was a revelation. Two snor­kelling trips are conducted every day at Kani, and all you need to do to sign up is a basic swim test. An instructor (often two) accompanies each boatload of snor­kellers to a coral reef (there are over ten different spots in the vicinity) and keeps track of them in the water. I’ve only snor­kelled in India before, in the very shal­low, small stretch around Sindhudurg Fort, on the Konkan coast. I enjoyed that very much, but the reef in the Maldives is something else. I went thrice in three days, and before you ask: no, it doesn’t count as hectic. To float on the surface of a turquoise sea and let your eyes feast on the most spectacular-hued fish below, as the sun warms your back above: it’s as close as I’ve gotten to paradise.

The island itself is also quite lovely: great big bushes of cheerful red ixora act as buffers between one beach villa and another, and the path down to the villas is lined with fragrant frangipani trees, many-coloured hibiscus and multiple kinds of coleus. The beach is the classic palm-fringed variety, the water a perfect temperature and waves in the lagoon almost non-existent. The only thing you might complain about is that the sand isn’t powder-smooth, but I think that would be churlish. I didn’t spot a large variety of birds, though it was fun to watch the white-breasted waterhens chase each other and a solitary grey heron stood sentinel by the poolside for so long that I actually thought it was a life-size sculpture.

As with most Maldivian hotel resorts, at Kani the resort is the island, the island is the resort. Upon arrival, this can bring on the slightly surreal sensation of what I call ‘Hotel-California-ness’—the realisa­tion that unless someone sails or flies you out of there, “you can never leave”. But once you get over that and stop imagining  yourself in some postmodern version of an Agatha Christie desert island where people are going to start dropping off one by one, you could even begin to enjoy the resort’s rather predictable routine: large buffet breakfast, even larger buffet lunch, evening display of suitably tropi­cal cocktails and post-dinner display of artistic talent by Club Med staff, who go by the name of GOs (Gentils Organisa­teurs). And the opportunities for people watching are aplenty. The international beach divides itself neatly into West Europeans and East Asians, one group spreading themselves out en masse to receive the sun, the other swathing themselves in scarves and edging their chairs into the shade. The staff, too, feels truly international, and since GOs are meant to drink, dance and generally hang out with guests, you can actually have conversations with someone of a differ­ent nationality at every meal.

I stayed in one of the 24 beach villas, which are ranked between the more reg­ular rooms and the über-luxurious suites on stilts that are arranged at one end of the island in the shape of a palm tree. The first thing I did when I checked in was to experience that ultimate in ironic resort luxury — a shower open to the sky, with a high wall to protect you from prying eyes. The other highlight of the room for me was the wooden sit-out through which you can access the beach, equipped with its own long chairs and beach umbrella — and most marvellously thoughtful of all, a large earthen pot of water placed there with a coconut-shell ladle, to wash sand off your feet before you enter your room.

On my third and last evening, I signed up for something I’d never done before: a Balinese massage. Run by the Mandara chain that owns Balinese spas across the world, the spa at Kani is a calming space, with water gurgling gently into a little pool and therapeu­tic herbal smells wafting out of the curtained cubicles. The masseuse of­fered me a choice of four oils, dabbing my hand with them in turn. The one I picked turned out to be called Island Spice: a soyabean-oil base infused with ginger, clove and nutmeg, which I was told was a warming oil, good for ener­gising sore muscles. After being slowly kneaded with it for fifty minutes, my body felt both energised and perfectly relaxed. It was in a happy haze that I arrived at the open-air Kandu Bar for my sundowner. I spent another hypnotic hour or so enjoying Kandu’s most fantastic feature: a light cast into the water that turns the sea around you into an open-air aquarium. By the time the evening’s stage show rolled around, I was ready to roll into bed. After all, it had been a hectic three days.

  

The information

Location Club Med Kanifinolhu, North Malé Atoll; 35 minutes by speedboat from Malé airport

Accommodation 117 Superior rooms, 24 Beach Villas and 75 Lagoon Suites (also called Suites-on-Stilts)

Tariff Per person for 3 nights: $748 (superior room), $1202 (beach villa), $1634 (lagoon suite)

Contact +960-6643152, clubmed.co.in

Published in Outlook Traveller magazine, June 2014. 

Hotel Review: Amber Vermont Estate, Mussoorie

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Sleepy Hollow

Nestle-up in the Himalayan mountains in the beautifully serene rooms of the Amber Vermont Estate.

Neither bustling Dehra Dun, where we arrive by train from Delhi, nor the winding drive up through Mussoorie town, chock-a-block with hotels, leads us to expect the startling peace of the Amber, Vermont Estate. Barely 10 minutes’ drive up from the Mall, we find ourselves walking down a pebbled outer courtyard, the only sound that of stones crunching underfoot.

The hotel’s sloping green roofs sit serenely atop three separate blocks of rooms, all with glorious views of the Happy Valley. The older block, with three deluxe rooms and a luxurious suite that opens out into the flower-filled back garden, also houses a poolroom, a TV room, a private dining room and a chic but comfortable lobby. This block, we are told, retains much of the original structure, with the wooden panelled walls and some of the lovelier old pieces of furniture restored to perfection, but the rooms (apart from the suite) are usually reserved for the owner’s special guests. We are given a first floor room in the new block, a contemporary stone-and-wood structure built on the site of the old servants’ quarters. Fortified by a luxurious hot shower and a hearty breakfast of aloo and paneer paranthas with pickle and dahi, we deliberate the prospect of a walk, but are defeated by the combination of approaching rain and an irresistibly cosy room: wooden floors, a warm bed and a glass-walled balcony through which you can see the mountains whenever they choose to reappear through the fog.

Every room at the Vermont gets its own balcony, which is priceless. But the high point of the five-acre property is undeniably the Deck: an open area adjoining the lobby where guests are welcome to dine, read or just gaze into the distance, watching the mist slowly wrap itself around the mountains, or listening to the langurs chatter in the trees. There is a dining table for four, a space for low seating, as well as two reclining chairs.

A post-breakfast siesta is followed by lunch on the Deck, after which we are driven down to Mussoorie town (the hotel provides a very welcome shuttle service to and from Library Chowk). We walk first along the picturesque Camel’s Back Road, and then along the length of the Mall, stopping to look at the wrought iron bus stops, the tired ponies lined up for potential tourists to ride. It is off-season, though, and no hordes of cantering children appear. Business is slow in general, whether for ponies or cable cars, or the many photographers offering to capture couples at ‘Bunty-Babli Point’ — which turns out to be outside the Continental Hotel, where Abhishek Bachchan and Rani Mukherjee are shown conning a hotel owner in the 2005 film.

We return to the hotel, where off-season manages to seem like a quiet state of readiness rather than despair or desperation. Yes, the spa is still being built, the regular chauffeur is unavailable and the continental chef has decided to take a holiday, but things seem entirely under control. The brisk and cheerful general manager doubles up to drive guests to town and the waiters volunteer desi alternatives to the western-style snacks we ask for (wonderfully crisp paneer pakoras). The service is slightly slow, but always courteous and mostly thoughtful — though someone needs to take care of the little things, like remembering to provide a strainer on the tea tray, and a tea cosy to ensure that the tea doesn’t get cold by the time it’s found its way up to the guests. The food itself is good: carefully prepared, non-greasy and spiced mildly enough to cater to the most sensitive palate. I recommend the tandoori platter, as well as the Kashmiri rogan josh with home-style tawa rotis. (Oh, and the gulab jamuns.) There isn’t any alcohol available, though the manager suggested he would arrange to have some bought in town if we wanted.

When it isn’t pouring, you can drive up to atmospheric Cloud’s End, among the oldest estates in the area, which seems less like a functioning hotel and more like a museum to Mussoorie past, with its tiger skins and sepia-toned pictures of the Mall and Kulri Bazaar. You could also spend a day in nearby Landour, visiting the old St Paul’s Church, the cemetery or, if you’re lucky, Ruskin Bond’s house. But if you end up at the Vermont in the middle of the monsoon, as we did, there are going to be long stretches of rain during which you can do not much except eat, drink, read, sleep — or watch TV. I watched more TV in two-and-a-half days than I have in a whole year. I also read half a biography of Samuel Pepys, feeling a strange link to foggy London as I sat in my cloud-sheathed balcony, watching the rain come down in sheets. And yet, life seemed to move much faster in 17th-century London than it did at the Vermont. How often does a contemporary holiday offer you such stillness?

The Information
* Location Hathi Paon Road, Mussoorie
* Accommodation 12 deluxe double rooms and one deluxe suite
* Tariff Rs 6,500 (rooms), Rs 13,000 (suite). Includes breakfast and dinner. Valid till last weekend of September. High-season tariff: Rs 8,500 (rooms), Rs 15,000 (suite)
* Contact 0135-2630202; www.theamber.in