Cross River State governor, Ben Ayade, Ethiopian Airlines and Transcorp Hilton Hotel, Abuja are among winners in various categories of the keenly contested Balafon Awards powered by organisers of the Accra Weizo event in Ghana.
Gov. Ayade won Tourism man of the year as Ethiopian Airlines as well as Arik Air and Emirates won the award Top interanational airlines in Ghana, and Transcorp Hilton Hotel, Abuja; Eko Hotel and Suites Lagos; Sheraton Lagos Hotel, Oriental Hotel and, Intercontinental Hotel Lagos won in the Top 5 Hotels in Nigeria category.
The Balafon Awards, according to organisers is an award targeting people in travel business in West Africa.
Mr. Ikechi Uko told Arts & Ideas that the competition is based on the fact that there is need to encourage travel business in West Africa. He said judges - comprising journalists from Nigeria and Ghana - presented a shortlist of contenders in the various categories to public voting through which winners eventually emerged.
The series, whose name originates from a francophone traditional xylophone, had previously held in Lagos as part of the annual travel and tourism fiesta, Akwaaba.
· Best Airlines in West Africa
Arik, Asky, Air Peace
· Top 10 Hotels in West Africa
Eko Hotel and Suites Lagos ,Transcorp Hilton Hotel Abuja, Intercontinental Hotel Lagos, Labadi Beach Hotel Accra, La Palm royal Beach Hotel Accra,Kairaba Hotel Gambia, Radisson Blu,Hotel Lome, Wheatbakers Lagos, Lou Moon Ghana ,MovenPick Ambassador Hotel Accra.
· Top 10 Hotels in Ghana
Labadi Hotel, LaPalm Royal Beach Hotel, Movenpick Ambassador Hotel, Golden Tulip Hotel Accra,Holiday Inn, African Regent, Kempinski Gold City, Tang Palace, Royal Senchi Resort Akosombo, Lou Moon,
· Top 5 Hotels in Nigeria
Eko Hotel and Suites Lagos, Transcorp Hilton Hotel Abuja, Sheraton Lagos Hotel, Oriental Hotel and Intercontinental Hotel Lagos
· Top International Airlines in Ghana
Emirates, Ethiopian, Arik Air
· Tourism Man of The Year in Ghana
Hon. Elizabeth Ofosu- Adjare, Minister of Tourism , Ghana; Kwame Ofosu Bamfo, Swiss Spirit Alisa Hotel Accra and Tourism Ambassador, Abeku Santana
· Tourism Man of The Year - West Africa
Gov. Ben Ayade, Cross River State; Obinna Ekezie, CEO Wakanow and Elizabeth Ofosu- Adjare Minister of Tourism, Ghana
· Aviation Man of The Year in Ghana
Tourism, Travel, Hospitality, Conservation: News,Stories And Experiences From Allover The World
Showing posts with label Oriental Hotel. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Oriental Hotel. Show all posts
Wednesday, 13 July 2016
Tuesday, 3 May 2016
THAILAND: River Of Kings
Long tail boat on the Chao Phraya
When Somerset Maugham staggered from the Bangkok train station one steaming day in 1923, he knew exactly where to head: the Chao Phraya — the River of Kings — whose fresh breezes and open skies were even then a relief from the intensity of the Thai capital. Feeling the onset of malaria, Maugham checked into the Oriental Hotel, where verandas overlooked the busy waterfront. As his temperature climbed to 105 degrees, the writer, soaked in sweat and addled by hallucinations, overheard the Oriental’s owner telling his doctor that it would be bad for business if the author should die on the premises.
Maugham’s verdict on Bangkok would make a brutal TripAdvisor review today. In his travel memoir “The Gentleman in the Parlor,” he reviled the city’s “dense traffic,” its “ceaseless din,” its “insipid” cuisine and “sordid” houses. The Thais, he declared petulantly, are “not a comely race.”
But once he recovered, Maugham experienced a rush of euphoria at the waterside setting. He watched the parade of barges, sampans and tramp steamers pass by with “a thrill of emotion,” and conceded that the wats, the gilded and glittering temple complexes rising along the river, made him “laugh out loud with delight to think that anything so fantastic could exist on this sombre earth.”
I had a taste of Maugham’s extreme reactions as I sat in Bangkok’s nefarious traffic trying to get to the river on the first morning of a recent trip, although I was addled by nothing more dangerous than jet lag from the epic 21-hour flight from New York.
Laden with literary reference, the Oriental — now the Mandarin Oriental, although nobody calls it that — is still the obvious introduction to the Chao Phraya, which has in recent years returned to its status as an escape from the city’s urban chaos. The colonial-era edifice where Maugham stayed is now called the Author’s Wing. Although overshadowed by a 1970s addition, its exterior looks much as it did when it opened in 1887 and astonished the city with its luxurious imported carpets, Parisian wallpaper and electrified chandeliers. And the setting has not lost its soothing effect.
I pulled up a chair feet away from the “liver-coloured water swirling by,” as another famous guest, Noël Coward, put it. A parade of ferries, barges and steamboats still battles the surging currents, while islands of vegetation float past, washed downriver from the jungles of the northern provinces. It was a step back into a leisurely past, worlds away from the explosive neon energy of the central city.
It’s no secret that, despite recent political disorder, Bangkok has emerged as the unofficial capital of Southeast Asia. Everyone from Swedish aid workers to Vietnamese I.T. specialists prefers to live there and commute around the region to less dynamic cities.
The most alluring consequence for travelers has been the revival of the Chao Phraya, which was once the heart and soul of Bangkok. It was by its shores that the sumptuous royal district was built in the 18th century and, although Thailand is one of the few Asian countries never to be colonized, where European powers erected their legations and warehouses in the 19th.
It was along the river that Bangkok’s first road was built (an elephant track that became known as the New Road) and where a raucous Chinatown sprang up. The river was then so alluring that Bangkok was affectionately called “the Venice of the East,” a serene warren of canals, floating markets and stilt houses.
But after World War II, the focus of Bangkok moved north and east. The river districts fell into decay, their waters polluted. Travelers mostly stayed away and visited the waterfront as part of a day trip to the famous wats. It is only over the last two or three years that the river has been rediscovered by bohemian Thais and intrepid expats, creating a mix of decay and contemporary chic that evokes an Eastern New Orleans.
“The Chao Phraya is a lifeline of history, culture and spirituality,” said David Robinson, director of Bangkok River Partners, founded in 2013 to help coordinate the revival. “It’s changing but keeping its traditions. There are roast duck and congee shops there that are 100 years old.” The novelist Lawrence Osborne, who moved here from New York three years ago, agreed: “The modern city was thrown up over the last 40 years in gimcrack style. It looks like it might collapse any moment. You don’t feel that at all by the river — there’s a real sense of continuity.”
The parallels to New York’s adventures in urban renewal are not lost on Thai preservationists. Last year, Bangkok River Partners invited Joshua David, the co-founder of the High Line, to speak at a conference. He became fascinated by the Chao Phraya. “The river allows you to experience Bangkok in a completely different way,” said Mr. David, now president of the World Monument Fund. “An amazing variety of watercraft is still used by local communities and will take you to places you would never imagine existed.”
To me, the river also made Bangkok seem manageable. Over years of travel in Asia, I had somehow failed to venture outside its airport, in part because I was daunted by the prospect of navigating a megalopolis of over 8.5 million people that can seem like an alternate set from “Blade Runner.” But the idea of exploring by water made Bangkok more human-scale. I decided to spend my time entirely on the river to reimagine its golden age.
My inspiration would be less the jaundiced Maugham than Jozef Konrad Korzeniowski, a Polish sailor soon to be renowned as the author Joseph Conrad, who found himself in 1888 frequenting the Oriental Hotel saloon for a little over two weeks, chatting with the barflies, as was his wont, “of wrecks, of short rations, and of heroism.”
Conrad had taken over command of an Australian ship, the Otago, but was stuck in Bangkok waiting for his crew to recover from tropical illnesses — an experience that is reworked in his novel “Lord Jim” and the shorter works “The Shadow-Line,” “Falk” and “The Secret Sharer.” Although he had his life savings of 32 pounds stolen by his Chinese steward (who thoughtfully brushed and folded his clothes before disappearing), Conrad still felt fondly toward Bangkok, and never forgot its “gorgeous and dilapidated” temples, or the city’s “vertical sunlight, tremendous, overpowering, almost palpable, which seemed to enter one’s breast with the breath of one’s nostrils and soak into one’s limbs through every pore of one’s skin.”
As Conrad would surely agree, if the river traffic was hypnotic to watch, it was more satisfying to join. The variety of watercraft churning between the bobbing jetties was bewildering, ranging from high-speed long tail boats to private vessels and public ferries. I found the ferries definitely the most exotic, if not always the most comfortable. In peak hours, crowds squeezed into the sweltering below-decks like sardines, with yellow-robed monks and dapper businessmen alike jostling for elbow room while harangued by boat workers with megaphones, who bellowed “Go down! Go down! Go down!”
There are no continuous walkways along the river, so I made surgical strikes from the piers on foot, ducking in and out of laneways to the lapping waves. All along the right bank stood poetic ruins. The splendid 1887 offices of the East Asiatic Company sat vacant and awaiting rescue, while the stately Old Customs House had become a fire station sprouting greenery from gaping cracks. Catholic cathedrals and European embassies staggered on in crumbling glory, while the iron pins used to moor steamers that Conrad may have used quietly rusted.
One crooked lane led to the river temple where albino elephants were cremated, another to the sacred slab upon which Thai royals could be executed. (It was forbidden for royal blood to be spilled, so a bag was placed over the victim’s head and he was cudgeled to death — a considerate gesture.)
And yet, around every corner, ventures of startling modernity were sprouting: boutique hotels, restaurants and bars, often housed in small antique buildings, alongside a pioneering art gallery called Speedy Grandma or a bespoke furniture store like P. Tendercool. A new “Creative District” is even being marked out by the city on both sides of the river to promote local talent.
Its marquee site is the Jam Factory, a renovated warehouse complex set around a grassy courtyard with a high-end restaurant called the Never Ending Summer, all designed to appeal to natives first, tourists second. “Our real ambition is to get Bangkokians back to the river,” said Mr. Robinson of River Partners. “Travelers will follow. People want authenticity.”
To get a sense of the potential for the grandiose historic structures, I headed a few minutes away to Sathorn Road on the back of a motorbike-taxi. A century ago, this was the Fifth Avenue of Bangkok, lined with the palatial mansions of Thai sea merchants. Today, a lonely vestige from 1896, the House on Sathorn, is dwarfed on three sides by glassy skyscrapers. Originally the residence of a rice baron, it survived the demolition blitz that has ravaged Bangkok since the 1960s because it housed the Russian Embassy. The landmark reopened last year after a multimillion-dollar renovation as a glamorous restaurant and event space and has become a symbol of a new spirit of preservation.
“It has been an epic journey,” said Christine McGinnis, then the director of the Bangkok office of the United States design company AvroKO, which has overseen the project since 2008. “If this house was a child, it would be speaking and in school by now.” Construction problems included dealing with the ghost of the first owner’s mistress, who regularly spooked workers by overturning paintings she didn’t like during the night. (“It’s Thailand; there is always a story,” Ms. McGinnis said, laughing.)
Working with the city’s Fine Arts Department, the designers had to maintain the building’s historic integrity while making it commercially viable. Its Corinthian columns have elephant motifs carved into their wooden pediments; the color scheme is drawn from the Royal Thai costume, but the tapestries and artworks are all by contemporary local artists.
Afterward, we strolled back to the nearby pier to catch ferries in different directions. “Everyone is getting back to the river,” Ms. McGinnis said. “Everyone is getting inspired.”
“There is definitely a new interest in preserving Thai history,” said Dan Fraser, a Canadian expat who qualifies as a walking atlas to forgotten Bangkok, as we plunged by foot along the dark waterfront of the Talat Noi (“small market”) neighborhood. Here, the streets were built only broad enough to allow two rickshaws to pass, while shoulder-width alleys snake to the docks. “Wealthy Thais are coming back from trips to Europe, looking around and asking, ‘What have we done? Why are there so many 7-Elevens,’ ” Mr. Fraser said. “For the first time, people are openly admitting that unchecked development has all but destroyed Bangkok.”
Even a year ago, the conventional wisdom was that the river is thriving by day but dead after dark. All that has changed — if you know where to look. At least that was what I had been assured by Mr. Fraser, who has one of the most colorful résumés in the Thai expat world. He first arrived 15 years ago to tutor the children of the royal family in English and tennis, and he later achieved minor celebrity status as the star of Thai-language TV shows exploring local culture and food “through the eyes of a foreigner.”
The riverfront at night is his ideal stamping ground. “This used to be the real core of the city,” he said, as we zigzagged from the old Portuguese district toward Chinatown. “But since the 1960s, people have wanted to get away from here. So development has bypassed this area altogether, which is perfect for me. It’s maintained its Old World charm.”
In Talat Noi, the alleys were dark and deserted, but concealed secret worlds. Behind one screen door lay a bar with a broad wooden porch opening directly onto the river and decorated with mismatched retro furniture as if for a backyard barbecue. On the edge of Chinatown, a carved portal marked Teens of Thailand turned out to be the entrance to a bar by that name, with a dozen rickety seats and erotic photographs hanging on distressed concrete walls.
“Bangkok had no gin bar!” said Niks Anuman-Rajadhon, the bar’s co-owner, who sported a black T-shirt and a pompadour Elvis would have envied, as he concocted a batch of martinis with fresh pomegranates. “Every city has to have one, so I thought, let’s do it! We got about 30 gins together — including Bangkok’s own Iron Balls — and started experimenting.”
Before long, the night began to feel like the premise for “The Hangover Part IV.” I had not the slightest idea where we were — “even if we’d used a ball of twine, I doubt we could retrace our steps,” Mr. Fraser said happily — when we heard the haunting strains of traditional Thai music coming from what seemed to be a dilapidated merchant’s mansion.
Shouldering open the door, we found an establishment called Tep Bar, whose interior was lined with century-old worn teak and crowded with arty Thais; the ambience lay somewhere between a speakeasy and an opium den. The bar’s co-owner, Kong Lertkangwarnklai, was so excited that a pair of farang (foreign) explorers had arrived by accident that he insisted we sample an array of ya dong, ancient whiskey infused, he said, with 20 exotic herbs.
A half-dozen shot glasses materialized on a sumptuous golden tray adorned with mango pieces and pickled grapes. “Technically, ya dong is medicine,” Mr. Kong said, pushing the potent spirits forward. As I knocked the first glass back, I had a sudden vision of myself waking up in an alley with my memory of the night erased, perhaps with a tattoo across my forehead and a monkey on my shoulder.
Dressed in jeans and a white T-shirt and sporting the suggestion of a goatee, Mr. Kong seemed an unlikely cultural revolutionary. But he said that he had given up a successful career in advertising for this attempt to keep Thai history alive — which starts with the bar’s name, a nod toward the Thai title for the city, Krungthep, roughly, “City of Angels.”
“Everyone in Bangkok is trying to be someone else,” he said. “But what about our roots? Why are we throwing everything away?” At first, the retro impulse behind the bar, which Mr. Kong opened last year, felt like a quixotic gamble, he recalled. “Nobody believed in us. They thought the location, the concept, everything would fail! They didn’t think Thai people would come to such a place.” The bar was packed with a crowd that seemed spellbound by the music (enhanced, no doubt, by the ya dong).
It was about 3 a.m. when I wandered back to a lonely pier, staring out at the inky waters reflecting the lights of passing barges. A decade from now, Mr. Robinson, of the Bangkok River Partners, predicted, the Chao Phraya would be transformed but still be recognizable. “Our vision is of a cleaner river, with more walkable areas, enriched with creative industries and renovated warehouses and clusters of art galleries you can visit without sitting all day in a taxi,” he said. “But at the same time, all the old roast duck shops and congee stores will still be there. They’ll just be 10 years older.”
Maugham’s verdict on Bangkok would make a brutal TripAdvisor review today. In his travel memoir “The Gentleman in the Parlor,” he reviled the city’s “dense traffic,” its “ceaseless din,” its “insipid” cuisine and “sordid” houses. The Thais, he declared petulantly, are “not a comely race.”
But once he recovered, Maugham experienced a rush of euphoria at the waterside setting. He watched the parade of barges, sampans and tramp steamers pass by with “a thrill of emotion,” and conceded that the wats, the gilded and glittering temple complexes rising along the river, made him “laugh out loud with delight to think that anything so fantastic could exist on this sombre earth.”
I had a taste of Maugham’s extreme reactions as I sat in Bangkok’s nefarious traffic trying to get to the river on the first morning of a recent trip, although I was addled by nothing more dangerous than jet lag from the epic 21-hour flight from New York.
Laden with literary reference, the Oriental — now the Mandarin Oriental, although nobody calls it that — is still the obvious introduction to the Chao Phraya, which has in recent years returned to its status as an escape from the city’s urban chaos. The colonial-era edifice where Maugham stayed is now called the Author’s Wing. Although overshadowed by a 1970s addition, its exterior looks much as it did when it opened in 1887 and astonished the city with its luxurious imported carpets, Parisian wallpaper and electrified chandeliers. And the setting has not lost its soothing effect.
I pulled up a chair feet away from the “liver-coloured water swirling by,” as another famous guest, Noël Coward, put it. A parade of ferries, barges and steamboats still battles the surging currents, while islands of vegetation float past, washed downriver from the jungles of the northern provinces. It was a step back into a leisurely past, worlds away from the explosive neon energy of the central city.
It’s no secret that, despite recent political disorder, Bangkok has emerged as the unofficial capital of Southeast Asia. Everyone from Swedish aid workers to Vietnamese I.T. specialists prefers to live there and commute around the region to less dynamic cities.
The most alluring consequence for travelers has been the revival of the Chao Phraya, which was once the heart and soul of Bangkok. It was by its shores that the sumptuous royal district was built in the 18th century and, although Thailand is one of the few Asian countries never to be colonized, where European powers erected their legations and warehouses in the 19th.
It was along the river that Bangkok’s first road was built (an elephant track that became known as the New Road) and where a raucous Chinatown sprang up. The river was then so alluring that Bangkok was affectionately called “the Venice of the East,” a serene warren of canals, floating markets and stilt houses.
But after World War II, the focus of Bangkok moved north and east. The river districts fell into decay, their waters polluted. Travelers mostly stayed away and visited the waterfront as part of a day trip to the famous wats. It is only over the last two or three years that the river has been rediscovered by bohemian Thais and intrepid expats, creating a mix of decay and contemporary chic that evokes an Eastern New Orleans.
“The Chao Phraya is a lifeline of history, culture and spirituality,” said David Robinson, director of Bangkok River Partners, founded in 2013 to help coordinate the revival. “It’s changing but keeping its traditions. There are roast duck and congee shops there that are 100 years old.” The novelist Lawrence Osborne, who moved here from New York three years ago, agreed: “The modern city was thrown up over the last 40 years in gimcrack style. It looks like it might collapse any moment. You don’t feel that at all by the river — there’s a real sense of continuity.”
The parallels to New York’s adventures in urban renewal are not lost on Thai preservationists. Last year, Bangkok River Partners invited Joshua David, the co-founder of the High Line, to speak at a conference. He became fascinated by the Chao Phraya. “The river allows you to experience Bangkok in a completely different way,” said Mr. David, now president of the World Monument Fund. “An amazing variety of watercraft is still used by local communities and will take you to places you would never imagine existed.”
To me, the river also made Bangkok seem manageable. Over years of travel in Asia, I had somehow failed to venture outside its airport, in part because I was daunted by the prospect of navigating a megalopolis of over 8.5 million people that can seem like an alternate set from “Blade Runner.” But the idea of exploring by water made Bangkok more human-scale. I decided to spend my time entirely on the river to reimagine its golden age.
My inspiration would be less the jaundiced Maugham than Jozef Konrad Korzeniowski, a Polish sailor soon to be renowned as the author Joseph Conrad, who found himself in 1888 frequenting the Oriental Hotel saloon for a little over two weeks, chatting with the barflies, as was his wont, “of wrecks, of short rations, and of heroism.”
Conrad had taken over command of an Australian ship, the Otago, but was stuck in Bangkok waiting for his crew to recover from tropical illnesses — an experience that is reworked in his novel “Lord Jim” and the shorter works “The Shadow-Line,” “Falk” and “The Secret Sharer.” Although he had his life savings of 32 pounds stolen by his Chinese steward (who thoughtfully brushed and folded his clothes before disappearing), Conrad still felt fondly toward Bangkok, and never forgot its “gorgeous and dilapidated” temples, or the city’s “vertical sunlight, tremendous, overpowering, almost palpable, which seemed to enter one’s breast with the breath of one’s nostrils and soak into one’s limbs through every pore of one’s skin.”
As Conrad would surely agree, if the river traffic was hypnotic to watch, it was more satisfying to join. The variety of watercraft churning between the bobbing jetties was bewildering, ranging from high-speed long tail boats to private vessels and public ferries. I found the ferries definitely the most exotic, if not always the most comfortable. In peak hours, crowds squeezed into the sweltering below-decks like sardines, with yellow-robed monks and dapper businessmen alike jostling for elbow room while harangued by boat workers with megaphones, who bellowed “Go down! Go down! Go down!”
There are no continuous walkways along the river, so I made surgical strikes from the piers on foot, ducking in and out of laneways to the lapping waves. All along the right bank stood poetic ruins. The splendid 1887 offices of the East Asiatic Company sat vacant and awaiting rescue, while the stately Old Customs House had become a fire station sprouting greenery from gaping cracks. Catholic cathedrals and European embassies staggered on in crumbling glory, while the iron pins used to moor steamers that Conrad may have used quietly rusted.
One crooked lane led to the river temple where albino elephants were cremated, another to the sacred slab upon which Thai royals could be executed. (It was forbidden for royal blood to be spilled, so a bag was placed over the victim’s head and he was cudgeled to death — a considerate gesture.)
And yet, around every corner, ventures of startling modernity were sprouting: boutique hotels, restaurants and bars, often housed in small antique buildings, alongside a pioneering art gallery called Speedy Grandma or a bespoke furniture store like P. Tendercool. A new “Creative District” is even being marked out by the city on both sides of the river to promote local talent.
Its marquee site is the Jam Factory, a renovated warehouse complex set around a grassy courtyard with a high-end restaurant called the Never Ending Summer, all designed to appeal to natives first, tourists second. “Our real ambition is to get Bangkokians back to the river,” said Mr. Robinson of River Partners. “Travelers will follow. People want authenticity.”
To get a sense of the potential for the grandiose historic structures, I headed a few minutes away to Sathorn Road on the back of a motorbike-taxi. A century ago, this was the Fifth Avenue of Bangkok, lined with the palatial mansions of Thai sea merchants. Today, a lonely vestige from 1896, the House on Sathorn, is dwarfed on three sides by glassy skyscrapers. Originally the residence of a rice baron, it survived the demolition blitz that has ravaged Bangkok since the 1960s because it housed the Russian Embassy. The landmark reopened last year after a multimillion-dollar renovation as a glamorous restaurant and event space and has become a symbol of a new spirit of preservation.
“It has been an epic journey,” said Christine McGinnis, then the director of the Bangkok office of the United States design company AvroKO, which has overseen the project since 2008. “If this house was a child, it would be speaking and in school by now.” Construction problems included dealing with the ghost of the first owner’s mistress, who regularly spooked workers by overturning paintings she didn’t like during the night. (“It’s Thailand; there is always a story,” Ms. McGinnis said, laughing.)
Working with the city’s Fine Arts Department, the designers had to maintain the building’s historic integrity while making it commercially viable. Its Corinthian columns have elephant motifs carved into their wooden pediments; the color scheme is drawn from the Royal Thai costume, but the tapestries and artworks are all by contemporary local artists.
Afterward, we strolled back to the nearby pier to catch ferries in different directions. “Everyone is getting back to the river,” Ms. McGinnis said. “Everyone is getting inspired.”
“There is definitely a new interest in preserving Thai history,” said Dan Fraser, a Canadian expat who qualifies as a walking atlas to forgotten Bangkok, as we plunged by foot along the dark waterfront of the Talat Noi (“small market”) neighborhood. Here, the streets were built only broad enough to allow two rickshaws to pass, while shoulder-width alleys snake to the docks. “Wealthy Thais are coming back from trips to Europe, looking around and asking, ‘What have we done? Why are there so many 7-Elevens,’ ” Mr. Fraser said. “For the first time, people are openly admitting that unchecked development has all but destroyed Bangkok.”
Even a year ago, the conventional wisdom was that the river is thriving by day but dead after dark. All that has changed — if you know where to look. At least that was what I had been assured by Mr. Fraser, who has one of the most colorful résumés in the Thai expat world. He first arrived 15 years ago to tutor the children of the royal family in English and tennis, and he later achieved minor celebrity status as the star of Thai-language TV shows exploring local culture and food “through the eyes of a foreigner.”
The riverfront at night is his ideal stamping ground. “This used to be the real core of the city,” he said, as we zigzagged from the old Portuguese district toward Chinatown. “But since the 1960s, people have wanted to get away from here. So development has bypassed this area altogether, which is perfect for me. It’s maintained its Old World charm.”
In Talat Noi, the alleys were dark and deserted, but concealed secret worlds. Behind one screen door lay a bar with a broad wooden porch opening directly onto the river and decorated with mismatched retro furniture as if for a backyard barbecue. On the edge of Chinatown, a carved portal marked Teens of Thailand turned out to be the entrance to a bar by that name, with a dozen rickety seats and erotic photographs hanging on distressed concrete walls.
“Bangkok had no gin bar!” said Niks Anuman-Rajadhon, the bar’s co-owner, who sported a black T-shirt and a pompadour Elvis would have envied, as he concocted a batch of martinis with fresh pomegranates. “Every city has to have one, so I thought, let’s do it! We got about 30 gins together — including Bangkok’s own Iron Balls — and started experimenting.”
Before long, the night began to feel like the premise for “The Hangover Part IV.” I had not the slightest idea where we were — “even if we’d used a ball of twine, I doubt we could retrace our steps,” Mr. Fraser said happily — when we heard the haunting strains of traditional Thai music coming from what seemed to be a dilapidated merchant’s mansion.
Shouldering open the door, we found an establishment called Tep Bar, whose interior was lined with century-old worn teak and crowded with arty Thais; the ambience lay somewhere between a speakeasy and an opium den. The bar’s co-owner, Kong Lertkangwarnklai, was so excited that a pair of farang (foreign) explorers had arrived by accident that he insisted we sample an array of ya dong, ancient whiskey infused, he said, with 20 exotic herbs.
A half-dozen shot glasses materialized on a sumptuous golden tray adorned with mango pieces and pickled grapes. “Technically, ya dong is medicine,” Mr. Kong said, pushing the potent spirits forward. As I knocked the first glass back, I had a sudden vision of myself waking up in an alley with my memory of the night erased, perhaps with a tattoo across my forehead and a monkey on my shoulder.
Dressed in jeans and a white T-shirt and sporting the suggestion of a goatee, Mr. Kong seemed an unlikely cultural revolutionary. But he said that he had given up a successful career in advertising for this attempt to keep Thai history alive — which starts with the bar’s name, a nod toward the Thai title for the city, Krungthep, roughly, “City of Angels.”
“Everyone in Bangkok is trying to be someone else,” he said. “But what about our roots? Why are we throwing everything away?” At first, the retro impulse behind the bar, which Mr. Kong opened last year, felt like a quixotic gamble, he recalled. “Nobody believed in us. They thought the location, the concept, everything would fail! They didn’t think Thai people would come to such a place.” The bar was packed with a crowd that seemed spellbound by the music (enhanced, no doubt, by the ya dong).
It was about 3 a.m. when I wandered back to a lonely pier, staring out at the inky waters reflecting the lights of passing barges. A decade from now, Mr. Robinson, of the Bangkok River Partners, predicted, the Chao Phraya would be transformed but still be recognizable. “Our vision is of a cleaner river, with more walkable areas, enriched with creative industries and renovated warehouses and clusters of art galleries you can visit without sitting all day in a taxi,” he said. “But at the same time, all the old roast duck shops and congee stores will still be there. They’ll just be 10 years older.”
Tuesday, 3 November 2015
NIGERIA: Eko Hotel, Intercontinental, Wheat Baker, Emerge As Best Ranked Hotels in Lagos
Eko Hotel, emerged as the best ranked hotel in Lagos, while Intercontinental and Wheat Baker emerged second and third best ranked hotels respectively.
The survey for the top 100 hotels was done over two months through personal questionaire survey of Hotel managers and secret vote by Travel Journalists in Lagos and online voting.The online voting was done via the largest travel news website in Africa www.atqnews.com. Questionnaires were delivered as newsletters to over 25000 people globally and the votes were collated using the Survey Monkey software. Each voter was asked to rank the top 15 Hotels out of all the leading hotels in Lagos giving reasons for the ranking.
At the end of the survey, the hotels were now arranged according to the number of high ranks they had garnered. Eko hotel had the highest number of number one votes in all the collated votes while other hotels on the top 25 list did well as number 2 and number 3 ranked hotels. Other hotels that did very well in the ranking includes Oriental Hotel, 4 points by Sheraton, Southern Sun hotel, Sheraton Ikeja hotel, Federal Palace hotel, Radisson Blu,Bogobori Hotel Westwood, The Protea hotels and Golden Tulip Festac.
The ranking for these hospitality providers were based on the perceived service rendered, Location, facilities, and capacity of the hotels. The not so popular new players on the Top 25 list include The George in Ikoyi, Genesis Sojourner in Ikeja , Fahrenheit Maison in Victoria Island, Ibis Hotel Toyin street, The Best Western hotels, Welcome centre and Admiralty Hotel Lekki.
The Full results for the Top 100 hotel in Lagos will be published in the next edition of Travellers magazine, and will be carried on www.atqnews.com, It will also be shared on different social media platforms.
Travellers Magazine will be presenting certificates to the Top 100 Hotels at the Hospitality Day on the 24thNovember 2015 at the 11th AKWAABA Travel Market at Eko Hotel.
The presentation of certificate is a mark of Recognition and to encourage the hotels to maintain their standards and also to encourage other hotels not so choosen to up their games in the hospitality business and improve their appeal to the public.
Travellers Magazine started the Top 100 Hotels survey in 2001 and stopped the annual survey in 2006 when the then DG of NTDC Dr.Eborieme set up the national Hotel Classification committee to grade hotels in Nigeria. Because the Publisher of Travellers Mr. Ikechi Uko was co-opted as a member of the committee it suspended it’s annual survey in order not to confuse the public with it’s survey. Considering the new reality and the need to guide travellers and hotel guests aright Travellers decided to reintroduce it’s annual survey . It carried out the survey as part of its social services to travellers in Nigeria.It is the first travel Magazine in West Africa Published since 1996.The journal serves as a one stop shop for airlines, Hotels, Restaurants, Tour operators, Travel Agents, State Tourism Board etc. Travellers’ magazine is set to be the in-house magazine of over 100 hotels in Nigeria and Ghana. Already Guests of Holiday Inn Airport hotel Accra and La Palm Royal Beach Hotel Accra and Southern Sun hotel Lagos will be served copies of Travellers for their Reading comfort.
It is now an inflight magazine for Africa World Airlines that flies between Ghana and Nigeria and also within Ghana. AWA was voted as the best Domestic Airline in Ghana. AWA is the strategic partner to South African Airlines on the Accra/Washington DC route.
AWA is expected to carry all SAA passengers between Nigeria and Ghana. This partnership provides a huge opportunity for visibility. It was the inflight magazine for Virgin Nigeria before it stopped operating.
NIGERIA: Top 25 Ranked Hotels In Lagos
The ranking for the top 25 hotels was released after a 2 month long survey of Travellers and Travel trade practitioners in Nigeria.
The survey for the top 100 hotels was done through personal questionnaires, survey of Hotel managers and secret vote by Travel Journalists in Lagos and online voting. The online voting was done via the largest travel news website in Africa www.atqnews.com.
Questionnaires were delivered as newsletters to over 25000 people globally and the votes were collated using the Survey Monkey software. Each voter was asked to rank the top 15 Hotels out of all the leading hotels in Lagos giving reasons for the ranking.
At the end of the survey, the hotels were now arranged according to the number of high ranks they had garnered. Eko hotel had the highest number of number one votes in all the collated.
Other hotels that did very well in the ranking includes Federal Palace, Oriental Hotel, 4 points by Sheraton, Intercontinental Hotel, Southern Sun hotel, Sheraton Ikeja hotel, Wheat Baker, Golden Tulip Festac, Protea Ikeja (Bon Hotels). Others in the pact include, De Renaissance, Moore House, VCP, African Sun (Golden Tulip), Welcome Centre, Parkview Astoria, Radisson Blu, Lilygate, Westwood, Stop Over Motel, Protea Leadway, Bestwestern VI, Protea Kuramo, The George and Bogobori.
The ranking for these hospitality providers were based on the perceived service rendered, Location, facilities, and capacity of the hotels.
The Full results for the Top 100 hotel in Lagos will be published in the next edition of Travellers magazine, and will be carried on www.atqnews.com, It will also be shared on different social media platforms.
Travellers Magazine will be presenting certificates to the Top 100 Hotels at the Hospitality Day on the 24thNovember 2015 at the 11th AKWAABA Travel Market at Eko Hotel.
The presentation of certificate is a mark of Recognition and to encourage the hotels to maintain their standards and also to encourage other hotels not so choosen to up their games in the hospitality business and improve their appeal to the public.
Travellers Magazine started the Top 100 Hotels survey in 2001 and stopped the annual survey in 2006 when the then DG of NTDC Dr. Eborieme set up the national Hotel Classification committee to grade hotels in Nigeria. Because the Publisher of Travellers Mr. Ikechi Uko was co-opted as a member of the committee it suspended it’s annual survey in order not to confuse the public with it’s survey. Considering the new reality and the need to guide travellers and hotel guests aright Travellers decided to reintroduce it’s annual survey. It carried out the survey as part of its social services to travellers in Nigeria. It is the first travel Magazine in West Africa Published since 1996.The journal serves as a one stop shop for airlines, Hotels, Restaurants, Tour operators, Travel Agents, State Tourism Board etc.
Travellers’ magazine is set to be the in-house magazine of over 100 hotels in Nigeria and Ghana. Already Guests of Holiday Inn Airport hotel Accra and La Palm Royal Beach Hotel Accra and Southern Sun hotel Lagos will be served copies of Travellers for their Reading comfort.
It is now an inflight magazine for Africa World Airlines that flies between Ghana and Nigeria and also within Ghana. AWA was voted as the best Domestic Airline in Ghana. AWA is the strategic partner to South African Airlines on the Accra/Washington DC route.
AWA is expected to carry all SAA passengers between Nigeria and Ghana. This partnership provides a huge opportunity for visibility. It was the inflight magazine for Virgin Nigeria before it stopped operating.
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