WHY: You can encounter these sea giants without having to search for them.
THE EXPERIENCE: In the indigo waters of Triton Bay in West Papua, the whale sharks have developed a fascinating symbiotic relationship with local fishermen, feeding off bait fish caught in nets that dangle off their traditional fishing platforms, or bagans. For visitors sailing through this remote and stunning area, this means easy access to the famed speckled giants, with the fishermen willing to share their overnight catch (for a small price) to lure these gummy behemoths closer to the platforms.
These are not the only treasures to be found in these nutrient-rich waters, plied with grace and style by the converted expedition ship Kudanil Explorer. West Papua boasts an incredibly healthy and diverse marine ecosystem, from colourful reef species to pelagic fish, graceful mantas to curious dolphins, making it one of the most lauded dive locations on the planet.
IDEAL FOR: Divers, snorkellers and luxury-loving adventurers.
LIKE THIS? TRY: Raja Ampat, north-west of Triton Bay. Located in the heart of the Coral Triangle, it’s truly a diver’s paradise, with more than 1400 species of fish and 75 per cent of all coral species. Julie Miller
WHY? When nature gives you windy skies, take flight.
THE EXPERIENCE: The street that runs along southern Vietnam’s Mui Ne beach (about a three-hour drive east of Ho Chi Minh City) is reminiscent of the laidback holiday vibe other parts of South-East Asia used to have: a bit ramshackle and potholed, with coconuts for sale at street stalls, cafes and bars under woven roofs, and clubs that pulsate with thumping bass.
But there’s a different kind of draw to the long, wide arc of white sand facing the waters of Vinh Phan Thiet bay: the blowy conditions that prevail more than 200 days a year. Mui Ne is considered by many to be the best spot in South-East Asia for wind-based water sports.
The daytime sky is invariably dotted with a vast flock of fluorescent-coloured kites attached to humans hurtling across the water’s surface on boards, some deftly somersaulting in the air, others taking exhilarating flight hitched to parachutes. With kite-surfing and parasailing craft for hire and classes for beginners, it’s a great place to try your hand. But top-class resorts here, like the new, pretty Indochine-inspired Anam Mui Ne, are affordable and offer plenty of pool time, if that’s what floats your boat.
IDEAL FOR: Wind and wave warriors, beach worshippers.
LIKE THIS? TRY: The Cam Ranh peninsula, also on Vietnam’s south coast, is an emerging beach resort area. The 30-hectare Alma Resort Cam Ranh offers a huge amount of activities including wind water sports. Julietta Jameson
WHY: A dog-leg off the regular tourist trail, you get the Himalayan hikes, Buddhist monasteries and Sherpa culture without the crowds.
THE EXPERIENCE: The Sherpa people, who originally migrated to Nepal’s Everest region from Tibet 500 years ago, regard the Solukhumbu district of north-eastern Nepal as a beyul, or sacred valley. That gives you some idea of the magic to be discovered in this region, a 30-minute helicopter flight from Kathmandu. The village of Phaplu, comprising a handful of small shops, houses and guesthouses (including the extraordinary stacked-stone Happy House, where Sir Edmund Hillary used to stay) is a good base for hikes through rhododendron forests dotted with waterfalls and Buddhist stupas strung with colourful prayer flags.
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Simple wooden teahouses offer fortifying noodle soups, momo dumplings and sweet tea en route, and monasteries including Chiwong and Thupten Choling await, where monks pray among flickering butter lamps and intricate monastic thangka paintings. This region comes alive during Mani Rimdu, one of the oldest Tibetan-Buddhist festivals in Nepal, held publicly from November 8-10 this year.
IDEAL FOR: Adventure-seekers craving nature immersion and spiritual cultivation.
LIKE THIS? TRY: Nepal’s Mustang region, with its raw desertscapes and mysterious Buddhist sky caves. Nina Karnikowski
WHY: Conservation folded into a sumptuous safari camp? Yes please.
THE EXPERIENCE: For the past decade, the Sujan Jawai team has been busy rewilding a tract of degraded farmland in the Godwar region of south-western Rajasthan, and now the land hums with life – leopards, especially. Thanks to conservation efforts, Jawai’s Indian leopard population has risen from 17 to 29 in the past six years, which means you’ll likely spot one within minutes of a safari drive.
The camp itself, set among billion-year-old granite rock formations (pictured), is a Relais & Chateaux property that was refreshed during COVID lockdowns. The 10 tented suites are a match for those found in the best African camps, with padded white cotton walls, freestanding bathtubs and wide patios overlooking the lush landscape. In between safaris, where jeeps weave past temples and shrines and local Rabari tribesmen in madder-red turbans (you don’t get that in Africa), there are lantern-lit long table dinners under the stars, with much of the produce harvested from the on-site kitchen gardens and local farms.
IDEAL FOR: Eco-conscious travellers who still want a dollop of luxury.
LIKE THIS? TRY: Uttarakhand’s Valley of Flowers National Park offers Indian Himalayan trekking tours through fields of hundreds of alpine flower species including orchids, poppies and marigolds, in full bloom from July to mid-August (the park is open June to October). Nina Karnikowski
WHY: With only 3200 Komodo dragons left in the wild, this is a chance to see one of the animal kingdom’s great survivors.
THE EXPERIENCE: The largest living lizard on earth most likely evolved in Australia, about 4 million years ago. Today, Komodo dragons are restricted to a handful of islands in Indonesia’s Lesser Sunda group; Komodo, Rinca, Gili Motang and Gili Dasami (all within Komodo National Park) and the neighbouring island of Flores. Ayana Komodo Waecicu Beach, at Labuan Bajo on the western end of Flores, is the ideal base, offering full-day island-hopping tours to the national park. Stepping off the boat and into the forest of Komodo Island feels like entering Jurassic Park. A naturalist guide will lead you on either a short, medium or 10-kilometre trail, while pointing out dragon egg nests and sharing stories about their habits and behaviour. (Fun fact: they can smell blood from 10 kilometres away.) To study a dragon – whether it is resting in the shade of a tamarind tree or sauntering along the beach – is to behold something rare and wonderful, a relic from a prehistoric time. Furthermore, tourism is helping to keep the poachers and hunters away.
IDEAL FOR: Lizard nuts, seekers of signs of ancient life.
LIKE THIS? TRY: A multi-day cruise around the islands of Komodo National Park aboard the 54-metre luxury yacht Ayana Lako Di’a. Kerry van der Jagt
Between and earth, a measure of David Thompson’s lofty position in the culinary landscape of Thailand appears on the small screen before me. On a Thai Airways flight between Sydney and Bangkok, the lights have come on, flight attendants bustle, and here’s Thompson in chef’s whites in a tourism promotional video, an Australian-born farang extolling the virtues of Thai food to a plane-load of Thais.
I did not expect to see him so soon; our dinner date is not for another few hours. My arrival in Bangkok ahead of a food odyssey with Thompson and his Thai partner, Tanongsak Yordwai, is accompanied by an anticipatory tingle. I have travelled with them here before and have some sense of what the next week will hold. Chiefly, there will be a large volume of Thai food. More than two decades since my first trip in Thailand with them, a fragmentary flavour memory remains: crab fried rice in a Bangkok Chinatown alley; lemongrass-fragrant frog salad at a riverside spot in Central Thailand; a snack – lobster and mangosteen with a relish on a betel leaf (miang kham); a lurid blue cocktail, a dare between Thompson and me, in a bar near the red-lit Patpong Road …
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And I remember the aftermath of the cocktail. It was the late 1990s and Thompson was famous at home for Darley Street Thai, the Sydney restaurant where he cooked food the likes of which Australians had never before tasted. Although little-known in Thailand then, he was invited to address a major food convention in Bangkok. On the morning of Thompson’s speech, we both had disgraceful, blue-hued hangovers. Only one of us, though, was required to address an audience of hundreds of Thais and he was ill-humoured.
I watched Thompson’s face turn puce as he listened to a bombastic German chef expound on the virtues of his Deutsch-Thai fusion food. When it was Thompson’s turn to talk, he spoke in fluent Thai for an hour; afterwards, he was swamped by locals. He had told them what they knew – that their cuisine was remarkable – but he’d gone further, decrying culinary charlatans and compromise, and pleading for the traditions and integrity of the country’s food to be defended.
The convention was a turning point for Thompson: introductions and connections, including with the Thai Royal family, followed. In 2001, Singaporean hotelier Christina Ong backed him in a restaurant in the Halkin hotel in London – Nahm – which became the first Thai restaurant in Europe to get a Michelin star. A Bangkok Nahm followed, then his Long Chim chain with restaurants in Singapore, Seoul, Sydney, Perth and Melbourne.
Thompson’s business relationship with Ong ended in 2018 and some Long Chims have closed, but remaining in his portfolio are Long Chim in Sydney, Perth and Riyadh, Aaharn in Hong Kong and Aksorn in Bangkok. Thompson and Tanongsak are food royalty, internationally and in Thailand.
Taking the lift up to Aksorn for my first dinner of this trip, there’s a flutter in my stomach. The doors open and I step out onto the terrace where a long table is set with mismatched vintage plates for dinner, the sultry city’s glittering nightscape the backdrop. A waiter offers me a glass of wine and an appetiser. One bite and the transportation begins.
From the waiter’s platter, I have taken what looks like one of my favourite things, a miang kham or “one-bite wrap” – a little pile of ingredients served on a betel leaf. Later, Thompson tells me the grilled catfish with a smoky chilli paste and sand ginger on betel leaves doesn’t qualify as a miang because of the nature of the ingredients.
His knowledge about Thai food runs deep. From his earliest days visiting Thailand in the 1980s, the chef collected vintage memorial or “funeral” books created to commemorate the life of a loved one and which often included recipes. “I read voluminously about Thailand as I was trying to find my feet in this culture.”
Whereas Nahm focused on food from the royal court, Aksorn’s dishes, including an exceptional gamey roast pigeon with a silky fermented bean-curd sauce served at tonight’s dinner, are drawn from one of Thompson’s thousands of memorial books. But food is only part of the reason Thompson has invited me to Bangkok; I am here to witness a project Tanongsak has developed, an ancient but new religious ceremony offering a glimpse of another aspect of Thai culture, although still bound up with food. “If you wanted to describe Thailand in two words, their stomach and their soul are the words,” says Thompson.
The day after our meal at Aksorn, we head south-west to the district of Amphawa to watch a wai khru ritual, which will make offerings to the gods and ask them to bless the Thai culinary canon and ensure it is passed on, as well as pay respect to the country’s cooks and food elders, famous and obscure, living and dead – women all of them.
Tanongsak, a fine chef in his own right who has worked alongside Thompson since the Darley Street Thai days, has long worried trainee chefs are more interested in becoming celebrities than acquiring knowledge. Working with Buddhist monks and a Brahmin priest, he has retrofitted the wai khru ceremony to thank cooks and pay tribute to the cultural wisdom they transmit.
In an open-air pavilion set in lush gardens, we watch a program mixing Brahmin rites with Hindi, Buddhist and animistic beliefs. A gallery of portraits of famous cooks looks down over chanting, saffron-robed monks, a traditional music ensemble, a Brahmin priest reading ancient text, and the giving of offerings to the monks and the gods, most particularly to Ganesha, the elephant-headed god of intellect, wisdom and learning. Incense burns, candles flicker and there is a vivid sense of the soulful and spiritual layers of Thai culture.
Later, over dinner at a riverside restaurant – crab eggs stir-fried with chillies, prawns caught minutes earlier in the river and barbecued, and tom kha gai (chicken and galangal soup) – Thompson talks about how “madly superstitious” the Thais are. “They believe everything is affected by the gods, or the imps, or the spirits that surround us. Magic underpins everything.”
Thompson has had an enormous influence on Thai food. In Sydney, London and Bangkok, protégés and acolytes have opened a string of contemporary Thai restaurants.
On one of our final days in Bangkok, we take the city’s BTS Sky Train out into the suburbs for a home-cooked meal. Although that’s a misnomer because self-taught Thai-American chef Dylan Eitharong’s brilliant food is anything but homespun, even though he cooks it in his home kitchen and serves it to no more than six guests at a time in his dining room. The tattooed chef calls his venture Haawm, and his food is some of the best I eat on this trip.
Eitharong himself carries out to the table one devastating dish after another: a tumble of tai yai noodles with chicken and sesame-ginger dressing; grilled beef with dry galangal relish (“It’s witchcraft, it’s sorcery,” Thompson says from across the table); and deep-fried young chillies stuffed with herby Northern sausage.
Thompson has brought us here to show us the face of the new generation of Thai chefs. “He doesn’t mind a bit of rough play with flavours,” Thompson says of Eitharong’s food. “It’s really interesting to see us older chaps superseded by young chaps. If there’s a god in heaven, that’s the way it should be.” Stephanie Wood
WHY: Just a short hop from Bali, this is a unique horse culture.
THE EXPERIENCE: On the little-known Indonesian island of Sumba – just an hour’s flight south-east of Bali – the horse plays an intrinsic role in daily life. It’s a valued family member used as transportation, as currency in marriage arrangements, and even as a link to the afterlife, as it’s traditionally sacrificed to join dearly departed owners on their eternal journey. At the idyllic Nihi Sumba resort, 20 or so of these revered Sandalwood ponies – many of them rescues – gallop headlong down the white sand each day before splashing in the turquoise shallows, carrying guests who cling like limpets to bare backs as they plunge under the breakers into weightlessness.
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Swimming with these magnificent creatures has become an essential part of the Nihi experience, a joy to behold as well as a nod to the island’s fascinating culture.
IDEAL FOR: Horse enthusiasts and amateur anthropologists.
LIKE THIS? TRY: On Vanuatu’s Espiritu Santo, the rescue horses of Santo Horse Adventures plunge into the island’s famed blue pools on aquatic adventures that the horses seem to enjoy as much as their riders. Julie Miller
WHY: Your brain’s stimulated while your body’s soothed with all the pampering delights of Bali.
THE EXPERIENCE: There’s something magical about the Ubud Writers & Readers Festival, which celebrates its 20th anniversary this October. That magical thing is certainly not the Ubud traffic, which clogs the main thoroughfares of this hilly and exquisitely beautiful part of Bali like a sluggish serpent. The magic trick is to avoid the traffic, and that will push you into walking. You’ll be strolling the tiny, high-walled, bloom-filled laneways, navigating the narrow paths of rice paddies and stumbling upon tucked-away eateries like the Yellow Flower Cafe in the Penestanan hills.
At the festival, an author might host a bird tour, or a lunch session will let you stickybeak at a stunning hotel totally outside your budget (such as the Four Seasons Resort Bali at Sayan). Or perhaps you will find yourself sitting cross-legged in a bamboo yoga studio, hearing from a world leader in bamboo architecture.
IDEAL FOR: Book-loving, post-COVID, burnt-out mums.
LIKE THIS? TRY: India’s Jaipur Literature Festival – a famous destination-driven writers’ event. Melissa Fyfe
WHY: A new long-distance path offers ancient culture and Himalayan splendour.
THE EXPERIENCE: Before the 1960s, this was the road everyone in Bhutan travelled. The Trans-Bhutan Trail was the nation’s lifeline, its means of trade and communication, its fortification, its spiritual artery. This mountain pathway bisected the country west to east, an undulating track through forests and over streams, down valleys and up peaks, trodden by monks and soldiers, messengers and traders. And then, it disappeared. A national highway was built in Bhutan. Cars arrived. The need to walk vanished and this vital pathway faded with it, overgrown and largely forgotten.
Now, though, in a sign that everything old is new again, the Trans-Bhutan Trail has been reborn as a tourist attraction. This ancient track, painstakingly unearthed, is a 403-kilometre journey to rival the likes of the Camino de Santiago in Spain, and the Kumano Kodo in Japan. It undulates through 35,000 metres of “vertical”; nights are spent in village homestays or campsites. Some sections have barely ever seen a foreign visitor. There are, however, options to hike for just a few days here and there to understand the history, the beauty and the breadth of this forgotten lifeline.
IDEAL FOR: Long-distance hikers ready for a new challenge.
LIKE THIS? Spain’s Camino de Santiago, a pilgrims’ trail from the French border to Santiago de Compostela in Galicia, is a flatter and more approachable alternative. Ben Groundwater
In association with Traveller. Thank you to Julietta Jameson, Jane Reddy and Anthony Dennis from team Traveller for their help on this issue.
To read more from Good Weekend magazine, visit our page at The Sydney Morning Herald, The Age and Brisbane Times.