B&B owners seek better coordination

Members of the Bed & Breakfast Association in Delhi have outlined concerns over the government’s Bed and Breakfast Scheme, which aims to provide centralised coordination for the industry.

Nearly 100 operators, including representatives from Delhi Tourism and Transport Development Corporation that manage the Bed and Breakfast Scheme on behalf of the Government of NCT Delhi, gathered at a meeting last week.

The association shared a number of concerns particularly relating to marketing the scheme, filling up the establishments, on line booking and the problems faced in accepting on line payments, compliances issues related to Form C requirements as regards foreign citizens, applicability of Service Tax to the industry and absence of suitable insurance products that could be applicable to the business.

They also questioned the reluctance of many Government departments, particularly defence, to reimburse bills of their staff on temporary duty that stays in such establishments.

Atul Khanna, President Delhi Bed and Breakfast Owners Association lauded the efforts of the Government and emphasised on the need for joint redressal of some of the issues.

Source: http://www.traveldailymedia.com

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Carnival “highlights APD unfairness”

Photo credit: Clive Chilvers / Shutterstock.com 

Notting Hill Carnival has been used as a platform to show how thousands are priced out of holidays to the Caribbean due to unfair APD rates.

Islands in the Caribbean have seen a 17% drop in visitors and the UK has seen a 32% decrease in visitors from the islands in the last five years due to the tax, it has been said. While the tax is largely criticised in all destinations, the Caribbean has particularly suffered for its banding for a higher level than the USA. A family of four can pay up to £324, or more increases planned for 2013. ABTA has now called for the Caribbean community to get behind A Fair Tax on Flying and email their local MP.

“The Caribbean Tourism Organisation continues to lobby the government against APD and the unfair banding to our region. We deeply regret that after all our efforts so far, we have been unable to achieve more parity with other long haul destinations,” said Carol Hay, director of marketing at the Caribbean Tourism Organisation.

“It will be great to see so many people enjoying themselves at the Notting Hill Carnival this weekend and getting into the holiday spirit; but many people there will be missing out on seeing their friends and family because they simply cannot afford to travel home this year.”

Source: http://www.traveldailymedia.com

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On the road to My Tho

 Boat trip through water coconut trees in Thoi Son Island, Tien Giang Province

Last weekend I made a trip with a friend to My Tho Town in Tien Giang Province. My Tho is the closest Mekong Delta destination to Ho Chi Minh City, and it takes less than two hours to drive there.

My Tho is a peaceful riverside city surrounded by beautiful gardens, a sublime weekend getaway from the hustle and bustle of Saigon.

We expected a relaxing couple of days enjoying a typical Mekong delta orchard. We hoped to experience the tranquil village life of the Delta’s endless gardens, where nature’s lushness moves quickly and vegetation will swiftly overtake settlements if villagers are not attentive to their gardens. We hoped for nights lit by full moons over the river and bicycle trips on shady paths winding through villages on tiny river islands.

After crossing Rach Mieu Bridge, we reached Thoi Son and luckily came across a small travel agent.

We were approached immediately by the travel agent. We negotiated a bit, and she offered a package for two for VND900,000.

It was a very hot day, and the boat trip to the hotel turned out to be the perfect introduction to the Delta. It was much cooler on the water. The scenic Mekong River revealed its power; a fast-moving, muddy expanse that seemed to take everything with it. We passed large floating tracts of uprooted vegetation and lush islands that looked like they would be overtaken at any moment by the river.

Our lodging, the Con Phung Hotel, was located right on the riverbank. Yet it wasn’t tranquil when we arrived. It was mid-afternoon, essentially rush hour on Con Phung. Hundreds of tourists loitering in matching tour company ball caps filled the hotel’s garden and made navigating the check-in difficult. There were seas of ball caps in the distance, overwhelming the quaintness of the island with a cacophony of chatter.

We decided to take in the afternoon with a walk around the island. There were several outdoor restaurants among the lush gardens. We passed a crocodile pond, filled with many lazy creatures sunning themselves. Con Phung was a network of quiet paths crossing through villages and skirting the river. Fruit trees were everywhere, and in the distance we could hear the engines of boats working the river, slowly and determinedly. Sometimes openings in the jungle allowed us to see the boats plodding by.

We walked deeper into the island, away from the hotel. There were few villagers out. Most were at home at that hour, preparing dinner. Not many villagers to meet on the path, but we weren’t necessarily complaining. It was a moment of serenity, the afternoon temperatures were cooling, and we became aware of the sounds and scents of the orchards. Having grown up in the countryside, my companion pointed out fruit trees, herbs, and flowers. I took the pulse of each new small discovery, smelling beautiful and tiny flowers and leaves I’d otherwise pass, and learned about Vietnam’s different herbs and the dishes for which they are the base. If there is one thing Vietnamese cuisine is justifiably known for, it is creativity with herbs.

We were deep in the countryside. No brick walls separated houses. Houses and yards showed a certain restraint and liberalness with space, as none of them intruded on the path.

Here, nature is inescapable, but somehow the locals have tamed it and created a world of idyllic landscapes and scents. Coconut, banana, and mango trees are everywhere, reaching out to the path we were on; we picked and ate fruit from the trees. Wild roses and other plants appeared, beautiful, fed by nutrient rich soil and the ever-present powerful Mekong River.

Local musicians sing traditional songs in a garden in Thoi Son Island

The next day, we started a half-day boat trip. Our first stop was neighboring Thoi Son Island’s honey bee farm. We saw bee hives in the garden and learned how the honey is created. Then we went back to our table where we were served royal jelly, pollen, tea, honey, and herbal wine.

Our next activity might have been the best. We boarded a small dugout canoe and navigated a three-meter wide stream through a coconut forest. We disembarked and sat down at a shop in another orchard for a fruit tasting. Meanwhile, we were entertained by several troupes playing don ca tai tu, or traditional Mekong Delta music.

Most of the singers were young ladies in ao dai or ao ba ba, charmingly singing southern traditional songs. Some songs were in Japanese or Chinese, depending on the audience. Sometimes they sang in groups of both men and women, as well as children standing in front. They were quite focused on their singing, and moved little. They were accompanied by several artists playing Mekong Delta instruments and locally-made guitars. The performances were simple, but memorable.

It was a sweet ending to a wonderful weekend. After another boat trip, we met our driver, waiting to take us back to Ho Chi Minh City.

Source: http://www.thanhniennews.com

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Uncovering the Secrets of Fukuoka

Hajime Kimura for The New York Times

For the city's famous ramen, head for a yatai, or street cart.

THE crowd at Akatan, a narrow, standing bar in the southern Japanese city of Fukuoka, thickened as each glass of sake and shochu was poured. By midnight, strangers had swept my husband, Dave, and me — the only Western faces in the smoky bar — into alcohol-fueled conversations that, with the language barrier, often devolved into comical pantomime. Every time we explained that we were visiting Fukuoka as tourists, the same question arose: “But why?”

Hajime Kimura for The New York Times

Tenjin, one of several notable shopping neighborhoods.

Our four days in the low-key city this spring provided plenty of answers. Fukuoka has chic boutiques, laid-back bars, a fantastic high-and-low dining scene and beaches nearby. Nearly equidistant to Tokyo, Shanghai and Seoul, it sits on the northern tip of Kyushu, the southernmost of Japan’s four main islands.

Despite its many assets, relatively few tourists have discovered Fukuoka. But with a multitude of new transport links, that may soon change.

Cruise ships began docking in the port three years ago, joining ferries from South Korea and China. In 2011, the Kyushu Shinkansen high-speed rail line was completed, linking Fukuoka to Kagoshima, on the southern tip of Kyushu. And this year, two new low-cost airlines, Peach Aviation and AirAsia Japan, have started flying to Fukuoka from Osaka and Tokyo, respectively.

To explore the subtle appeal of this often overlooked city, I turned to two local experts, Nick Szasz, a Canadian and 22-year Fukuoka resident, and his wife, Emiko, a Fukuoka native. They run Fukuoka Now, a bilingual monthly magazine with a comprehensive online city guide.

Over dinner at the upscale restaurant Yakitori-Hachibei, they told me that Fukuoka has long had a reputation among the Japanese as a great place to live. But it is not thought of as a holiday destination, partly because it lacks a standout attraction.

“The biggest crisis for this city is defining an identity,” Mr. Szasz said. “What we have is great, but how can we brand this?”

What Fukuoka does have — a little bit of everything — is pretty enticing. West of the city center is the manicured Ohori Park, whose wide walking, jogging and biking paths encircle a lovely artificial lake. On its periphery is the Fukuoka Art Museum, with a plump Yayoi Kusama pumpkin sculpture plopped out front. Nearby is a hilltop with castle ruins and views across the city to Hakata Bay, which is partly lined by a wide beach, also artificial.

(Getting an overview of the city became easier last year, with the introduction of boat tours on the Naka River. Also, in March bus tours with multilingual commentary were inaugurated.)

An easy 25-minute train trip takes you to Dazaifu, a city with impressive cultural sights. During our early-spring visit, plum blossoms framed the town’s Tenmangu Shrine. A short stroll from there is the Kyushu National Museum, one of Japan’s four national museums, which opened in 2005. Its exterior, a soaring cerulean glass facade that reflects the lush vegetation-covered hills, houses stunning exhibition halls packed with ancient treasures.

But even finer than these sights are Fukuoka’s intangibles: the laid-back atmosphere, the friendly people, the relaxed pace of a city large enough, with about 1.4 million people, to have its own attractions but not so large as to be overwhelming.

So, compared with navigating Tokyo’s busy subway system or hurrying to visit one last shrine in Kyoto before closing time, taking in the sights in Fukuoka actually feels like a vacation. It’s one that may be spent sipping locally roasted coffee at Manu, a welcoming coffee shop with neon-yellow walls, mellow music and piles of design magazines. Or lounging on the low banquettes, cocktail in hand, at Bar Klug, an elegant, cavelike hideaway.

Even shopping has an unhurried quality. Sure, big-name brands are on offer in the trendy Daimyo neighborhood and the bustling Tenjin area, where a Barneys New York opened last year. Across town, the JR Hakata City complex packs two department stores and more than 200 shops and restaurants into 11 floors.

But it’s possible to skip those stores altogether and browse back-street boutiques in the quiet Imaizumi neighborhood, poking around shops like Naif, Dice & Dice, Curve and Florent to unearth delicate handmade bracelets, leather-bound notebooks, bags fashioned out of seat belts, suede T-strap sandals and racks of clothing bearing labels from local designers and Lanvin alike. Fukuoka’s shopping scene led Monocle lifestyle magazine to dub it Retail City.

“Frankly, I don’t think that’s right,” Mr. Szasz said at dinner at Yakitori-Hachibei. “Gourmet City would be closer to the truth.”

The outstanding yakitori we ate that night, including sake-spritzed skewers of plump chicken, ginkgo nuts and edamame croquettes, supported his claim, as did the succulent gyoza, a local specialty, at Yuu Shin a few nights later. There, the diminutive dumplings were seared to a delicate crisp and served sizzling in the cast-iron skillet.

Hajime Kimura for The New York Times

A beach in the Fukuoka area.

Hajime Kimura for The New York Times

A shop selling handmade purses.

The dish the city is most famous for, however, is not high end, or even close. It’s Hakata ramen, made with thin noodles and rich tonkotsu (pork bone) broth. (Hakata, once a separate city, is a ward of Fukuoka.)

I was schooled in slurping by Patrick Mackey, a local blogger, ramen-lover and freelance translator, over piping hot bowls at Shin Shin.

“For ramen, most people say Fukuoka is the best,” he said. Two of Japan’s most famous ramen chains, Ichiran and Ippudo, hail from the city.

But the one can’t-miss dining experience in Fukuoka is yatai.

Yatai are tiny street food carts that are constructed (and deconstructed) nightly. Plastic curtains typically enclose a bare-bones kitchen and minuscule counter around which no more than a dozen or so diners can cram. Many yatai serve basic fare like grilled things-on-sticks or ramen; some supplement counter seating with folding tables and chairs.

“Yatai used to be all over Japan,” Mr. Szasz said. “In Fukuoka, they’ve hung on in great numbers.”

Today, there are about 150 operating yatai in Fukuoka, with most clustered along main roads, parks and the riverfront. Because of a law that bans the opening of new yatai, those numbers are dwindling, said Mr. Szasz, who serves on a committee created to review the law. He expressed optimism, however, that it might soon be reversed, noting that Fukuoka’s new mayor, Soichiro Takashima, views yatai as a tourism draw.

With their curtains drawn, yatai can seem exclusive, for regulars only. The opposite is true.

“It’s a community experience: part the curtains, sit down and you’re with friends,” Mr. Szasz said. “Once you’re in there, it’s like a mini-party.”

And a mini-party it was when Dave and I squeezed onto a bench at the popular yatai Ajifu on Watanabe-dori on a cold weekday night. Inside, 10 other diners, all local people, were tucked around the U-shaped counter. Cigarette smoke commingled with the familiar aroma of ramen broth as we sipped cold Asahi beers and devoured yakitori pulled from the grill outside. And much like at the sake-and-shochu bar Akatan, we were soon among friends.

Source: http://travel.nytimes.com

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In Kentucky, Fried Chicken History

Jonathan Palmer for The New York Times

The Sanders Cafe and Museum in Corbin, Ky.

WHEN making his rounds as a traveling salesman for a Chicago printing company, Duncan Hines would occasionally pull off the Dixie Highway in Corbin, Ky., and eat at Sanders Cafe. In the 1939 edition of “Adventures in Good Eating,” his pioneering restaurant guide, he recommended the cafe and its adjoining motor court as “very good place to stop en route to Cumberland Falls and the Great Smokies,” highlighting its “sizzling steaks, fried chicken, country ham, hot biscuits.”

Jonathan Palmer for The New York Times

A sculpture of Colonel Harland Sanders.

The cafe is still there, only now it incorporates a museum and holds down a spot on the National Register of Historic Places, for one huge, unignorable reason. The owner, chef and resident genius of the place was none other than Colonel Harland Sanders, who, on this hallowed ground, cooked the first batch of Kentucky Fried Chicken.

Cumberland Falls does not work the magic it once did, and Corbin itself is not high on anyone’s list of tourist destinations. But the Colonel Harland Sanders Cafe and Museum is a modest must. In addition to capturing a pivotal moment in the mass-marketing of American vernacular food, it evokes a dreamlike time, before the arrival of the Interstate System and its proliferation of fast-food restaurants and chain hotels, when traveling the American highway was a thrilling, high-risk proposition, with marvelous discoveries and ghastly disappointments waiting at every turn.

In its present form, the Sanders Cafe and Museum was born in 1990, the 100th anniversary of Colonel Sanders’s birth. JRN, a Tennessee-based company that operates nearly 200 KFC franchises in the Southeast, was about to open a modern KFC restaurant next to the old cafe. To mark the great birthday, it put out a call for artifacts and memorabilia that would allow it to celebrate the Colonel, his cafe and his fried chicken.

All sorts of stuff came out of the woodwork, which makes the Sanders Museum a cabinet of curiosities rather than a scholarly enterprise. It’s a little of this, a little of that, and a lot of the Colonel, memorialized in a bronze bust, two strange-looking all-white life-size sculptures and a vintage store display that depicts him, larger than life, holding a bucket of chicken and radiating joy. His title, first bestowed in 1935, is an honorific conferred by the state.

The museum managed to get its hands on Bertha, the actual pressure cooker in which Sanders, years away from coloneldom, began experimenting with pressure-frying as a way to reduce the cooking time for his chicken. At the back of the cafe, the old open kitchen has been restored and outfitted with period ovens and dishwashers.

The historic trove includes a 100-pound barrel, dating from 1956, that contains the 11 herbs and spices that gave Kentucky Fried Chicken its distinctive flavor and its air of mystery. There’s a handwritten recipe for a mock-oyster casserole based on chopped eggplant, crushed crackers and cream; a vintage postcard that shows a squirrel drinking out of a giant Kentucky Fried Chicken cup through a straw; and a pair of wooden shoes presented to the Colonel when he visited Amsterdam in 1974. It’s a very mixed bag, in other words.

Many of the 75,000 customers who walk into the place each year simply order their fried chicken and biscuits and sit down in the old cafe’s dining room, with the original maple tables and chairs by Willett, a Louisville company whose furniture was enormously popular from the 1930s through the 1950s.

If curiosity moves them, they drift across the dining room to look at a lovingly restored model room that the Colonel installed to advertise the motor court next door. Theorizing that women had a big say in where the family stayed for the night, he placed it squarely on the path to the ladies’ room. That way, female diners could not avoid admiring its immaculate black-and-white bathroom tiles, maple furniture and pristine white chenille bedspreads.

As the motel room suggests, the Colonel explored many entrepreneurial byways before emerging as the public face of Kentucky Fried Chicken, the grandfatherly figure in the white suit with the white mustache and manicured goatee.

He was a much wilder, more colorful figure than the museum or the official company histories let on. By the time he arrived in Corbin, in the early 1930s, to run a failing gas station, he had already been a farmhand, a railroad worker, a country lawyer, an insurance salesman, a ferryboat operator, a secretary to the chamber of commerce in Columbus, Ind., and a salesman for Michelin tires.

Jonathan Palmer for The New York Times

A display at the Sanders Cafe and Museum.

Josh Ozersky’s zesty “Colonel Sanders and the American Dream” (University of Texas Press, 2012) tells of a lethal shootout that pitted Sanders and two Shell Oil representatives against the owner of the Standard Oil station across the road. The Colonel, gun blazing, emerged victorious.

Often, motorists asked Sanders to recommend a place to eat, and he soon began cooking home-style meals, which he served in a tiny room at the back of the gas station.

The impromptu kitchen evolved into a cafe, which spawned a motor court. The big draw in the early years was not fried chicken but a hearty breakfast of fried country ham, eggs and biscuits. A breakfast nook, with Willett furniture, a tiny table and red and white checkered tablecloths, has been lovingly restored and put behind glass in the cafe.

The whole operation burned down in 1939. The present cafe rose in gabled splendor a year later, along with a new motor court, now gone. In the KFC lobby, interested visitors can see the 1940 Sanders Court and Cafe, the old service station and surrounding businesses reconstructed in HO scale.

Kentucky made the Colonel. It almost unmade him, too. In the mid-1950s, with the cafe and court going gangbusters, the route of the new Interstate was announced. It swung several miles wide of the cafe, leaving the Colonel in the lurch. He sold his empire for just enough to pay his taxes and bills, and, after cashing his first Social Security check, for $105, hit the road with his pressure cooker to turn Kentucky Fried Chicken into a national franchise.

He succeeded beyond his wildest dreams. As the historical marker outside the cafe points out, it all began in Corbin as a humble, seat-of-the pants operation. Turn off the highway, and you can still catch the flavor.


Source: http://travel.nytimes.com

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