My husband and I are traveling in New Zealand. With a limited time for the trip, we chose mostly to fly from one place to another within the country, but the opportunity to visit an area certified by the International Dark Sky Association was too good to resist.
Let me say by way of background that we owned a home on the north shore of Block Island, Rhode Island for many years. Twelve miles off the coast, we were able to see the stars. So many stars! The Milky Way, even. Nighttime was beautiful there. Some years ago, we moved to the West Coast of the USA and gave up this vacation home. In our suburban location, we are lucky, on a clear night, to see Mars, Venus, Jupiter, and maybe, just maybe a few of the brightest stars. We began to forget our lost nighttime sky.
Researching our trip, we learned that New Zealand has a number of dark-sky sanctuaries and reserves. One of them was located between Queenstown and Christchurch–and it was possible to stay the night. We reserved a car in Queenstown, to be returned the next day in Christchurch. And we reserved a “skybed” at Skyscape.
Yes, you are seeing correctly: This building is a single bedroom with a deck and a *glass roof* through which you can lie in bed and watch the sky grow dark and the stars blossom.
There were clouds, but only in places. In other places, the sky was clear and as civil twilight turned to nautical twilight and then to astronomical twilight, the stars came out in their millions.
The following day, after we drove to Christchurch and settled in there, I wanted to thank my husband for all his fearless and excellent driving–three hours from Queenstown to Skyscape, and then four hours to Christchurch, all of it on the “wrong” side of the road. I told him how much it meant to me to see the stars again, and to my surprise, I found myself in tears.
I had no idea how much the sight of the infinite universe means to me. How much we city-dwellers have lost.
Ribe was the far point in our planned trip through the Danish countryside, almost 300 kilometers from Copenhagen. But our goal was to see some of the Danish countryside outside of Copenhagen, and Ribe was worth the effort to get there. At well over a thousand years of inhabitation, Ribe is the oldest settlement in all of Scandinavia. It’s also lovely, as is the countryside along the route. The clouds were magnificent, and so was the pristine farmland with nary an electric line in sight. Approaching Ribe, we got a sense of the delightful experience that awaited us.
But we were feeling frazzled and stressed, or at least I was. Why? It involved an electric car we rented from Hertz that had a fairly short range. “Don’t worry, they’ve got electric chargers at almost every gas station,” said the rental agent at the counter in Copenhagen. “You can just use your credit card.”
I’ll be as brief as I can in summarizing the woes of this car. Enough to say that your credit card will be denied unless you’ve downloaded an app for that charger (and maybe even if you do have the app). That there are many brands of chargers, and each requires a different app. That you cannot download the app “on the fly” unless you have internet on your phone. That I do not have internet on my phone while traveling abroad. And that although the chargers exist at many gas stations, they are not affiliated with the stations, and the attendants know nothing about them and can’t help. Fortunately, the very nice Danish customers at other chargers nearby will help, and after two painful charging experiences, we arrived in Ribe. There, we were completely unable to charge our albatross car at three separate charging locations.
But this blog post is not about that. It’s about the charming town of Ribe and the curative properties of the magical Wadden Sea.
Ribe has been inhabited for some 1,600 years. I think it’s safe to say that none of the houses we saw this month has survived since that time. But still, the town changes slowly. Here are two pictures of the same spot ninety years apart.
Some of the houses do show their age and look to be, well, maybe three or four hundred years old. Maybe more. They seem right for a town that’s as proud of its long history as Ribe is. All in all, the effect is unmitigated charm.
The residents are welcoming. Open gates lead to charming inner courtyards. For example, the Bladt-Hansen family welcomes visitors to their backyard, with a view over the gardens. A café and shop in the same structure face the street. Here’s a link to read about their house and its history. On this page, you can also see the commercial side of the property, and how they have restored it to a look similar to the one it might have had when it was built–over five hundred years ago.
Thank you, dear family, for giving us a peek inside!
Fortunately, the friendly hotelier in the lovely Kammerslusen Hotel outside of Ribe allowed us to hook our electric albatrossvehicle up to an outdoor electric outlet.
I’d like to add here that, in addition to a sparklingly clean room with a view of the river Ribe Å, the Kammerslusen also offers an excellent dinner menu and great Danish hospitality. Surprisingly (to us, anyway), it’s not within walking distance of the town, an attribute we generally look for. Instead, it’s located well withing the Wadden Sea National Park, a large nature preserve of marshes and tidal flats that borders (and extends into) the North Sea.
We climbed the protective dike along the coastal marshlands and got a close look at the lock at the mouth of the river. I gained a whole new respect this day for the sheer beauty of this seaside terrain.
The next day, we knew with certainty what we had to do. Thanks to the Kammerslusen, we had enough charge to get to a Hertz counter, where we traded in the car for a car whose fuel we could pay for with credit card or with cash.
It’s a lovely island. Enchanting, beautiful, windswept, and enduring all at once.
Its name is only three letters long, and apparently I can’t pronounce even one of them correctly. It’s spelled Ærø. To my ear, that sounds a lot like “Air-rue” [with the “r” trilled slightly]. But try as I may, I can’t seem to tell about it to anyone who actually lives in Denmark. The conversations go like this:
Me: “We visited this really great island. We liked it a lot.”
Danish person: “Oh? What island is that?”
Me: “Ærø.”
Danish person (with a squinty-eyed, puzzled look): “Uh… where?”
Me: “Maybe I’m not pronouncing it right. It’s spelled with that letter that looks like an A and an E combined, then R, then an O with a slash through it.”
Danish person (with a broad smile of recognition): “Ah… Ærø!”
My linguistic failures notwithstanding, I loved the name with its alluringly foreign letters. And I loved the island even more. Its soul is sailing the seas, and its heart is on the land.
Seafaring is particularly evident in Marstal, the largest town on Ærø, from the building of large wooden ships to the small details on the buildings.
The ferry from the mainland town of Svendborg arrives in Ærøskøbing, a delightful town of cobbled streets and colorful houses.
Everywhere, there are hollyhocks and roses, and many of the windows seem to be made for passers-by to look in as well as homeowners to look out.
Outside of the towns, the island has its beauty as well. Sea and sky and land come together very harmoniously on Ærø.
It’s confession time: I studied architecture, have a masters degree in it, in fact, from a university that is very serious about good design. And I believe that most modern architecture, particularly the high-rise vernacular of our center cities, is anything but good design.
But Melbourne is different.
Any city where the architecture makes you smile or even laugh, or shake your head in sheer disbelief… Well, that city has to be fundamentally delightful. And Melbourne is.
Now, come on, tell me, doesn’t this make you laugh out loud? Or at least maybe smile, just a little?
There’s something about the sheer modern exuberance of Melbourne that’s positively contagious.
(Yes, the reflective glass really is purple and blue and orange and green.)
And here’s another thing I like about Melbourne’s architecture: There is a certain respect for their architectural heritage. And that heritage is rich.
Often, the facades of old buildings are preserved even after the building is torn down to make room for a modern high-rise. Sometimes, in fact, the entire old building is preserved, and the high rise is cantilevered right out over it.
The juxtaposition is jarring, but also in a strange way, delightful. And Melbourne is fortunate to have preserved these fine old buildings.
Here and there, too, are classic, timeless, and perfectly lovely details.
When you’re in a place for only a few days… a place where you could stay for weeks and still not see and do everything you might want to… you have to be picky. Villa Taranto was not on our list. Not that we didn’t want to go. Of course we did. But we intended to go to the Borromeo islands, which have their own amazing gardens, and, well, I didn’t want to lay too many gardens, one after another after another, on my patient husband. But the host at our hotel insisted that Villa Taranto was worth the journey and could be easily combined with a short drive to Orta San Giulio, one of (she said) Italy’s most beautiful towns.
So, we went. And we’re glad we did. Villa Taranto could be the most beautiful garden we’ve ever seen. That’s true, even though the day we went there was rainy.
I’m trying not to overload you with pictures here, so I’ve tried to leave out pictures of individual specimens. That last one–that single, lovely tree–is a Cornus Controversa ‘Variegata,’ in the same family as the more familiar dogwoods. It was too good not to include. And, oh, the dahlias! Here are a couple.
I wanted to say that I’ve saved the best for last, but the fact is, it’s all so good there is no ‘best.’ Instead, let me put it this way: I have so many lovely photos of gorgeous waterlilies that they will need a post of their own.
Okay, actually Positano is not my home town. I live in Newton, Massachusetts, USA. But for a week this year–May 3 through May 10–it became the home town of my husband Dan and me, our children Margot, Adam, and Clair, and our friends Steve and Susie, when we rented a gorgeous villa with the view you see above.
Our last full day in Positano after a busy week going one place or another, we spent at home. For visualization purposes, I have outline this home in red in the picture above. The corner room with the Juliet balcony is our bedroom. The next two windows each belong to a separate bedroom, and the fourth bedroom, with a private balcony is around the corner. Below, a broad terrace opens up from the living and dining areas. This terrace has an area for sunbathing and a covered area with a table that’s great for breakfast, lunch, and snacks while enjoying the sea breezes. Below the terrace sweeps an extensive garden, and below that, vistas of the sea, where we can watch the ferries going up and down the coast and out to Capri.
This villa, like many in Positano, can be accessed only on foot, along a narrow pedestrian street punctuated with stairways.
Finally, on our last day here, I walked down the 375 stairs (okay, that’s probably an exaggeration) to our local beach, the smaller of Positano’s two beaches. There’s one very attractive hotel and restaurant, and the opportunity to rent beach chairs and umbrellas.
Myself, I chose to follow the path that from here winds around the cliffs to the larger beach at the town center.
From here, I walked farther north, to the far end of Positano’s main commercial tourist area, where the views looking back at the town were–like everything about Positano–charming.
Yes, it was our own choice to eschew the standard tourist fare and instead hire a four-wheel drive vehicle to take us to Kolukkumalai Tea Estate, allegedly the highest tea plantation in the world. But after about thirty-seven hours of bouncing around on rocky and rutted terrain that only loosely resembled a road, we were beginning to wonder whether this was a good idea.
Actually, I have slightly exaggerated the amount of time it took.
Also, you have seen pictures of the scenery along this road, and you’ve learned all about how they make the tea at the Kolukkumalai factory, so I’m sure you’ll agree that this excursion was in fact a very good idea.
We stopped for some photos at the entrance to Kolukkumalai Estate, with stunning vistas of the mountains on both sides of the–dare I call it?–road.
I have this uneasy feeling that the haze, even in this remote mountainous area, may be at least partly smog. I hope I am wrong about this, because the place is truly beautiful.
I didn’t know about Munnar before I started researching the trip to Kerala, but it didn’t take long to find out. High in the mountains of the Western Ghats, Munnar is famous for its tea and for its beauty. And after the heat of the coast, we were ready for a couple of cool evenings in the mountains. So we asked our houseboat manager to find us a driver, and off we went! Wide expanses of rich, flat farmland, rivers, and lakes gave way to hills and these to the usual–and welcome–mountain scenery.
We arrived in the late afternoon at the welcoming Blackberry Hills Retreat–which our very competent driver had no trouble finding. There was a different problem about the driver–he didn’t want to say goodbye. He explained that he used to work at the tourist bureau and could easily show us the sights in Munnar tomorrow, and then drive us on to Kochi the next day. The problem was that we didn’t want to see the tourist package of sights. We wanted to visit the Kolukkumalai tea plantation, at 7,900 feet supposedly the highest in the world, with amazing views and one of (I think) only two tea factories that offer tours to the public. And Kolukkumai is accessible only by four-wheel-drive vehicle, an all-day trip. So we turned down our taxi driver’s offer. But he was persistent, and we finally agreed that he would drive us to Kochi the following day at the price the hotel indicated was fair. This seemed to make sense, since Kochi is very close to Alappuzha so that in effect he’d get some money for his return trip. And so he slept in his taxi in the parking lot while he waited for us. The Blackberry Hills Retreat is built as a series of two- and three-story buildings cascading down the side of a mountain.
Probably every room has a lovely view from its balcony. Certainly, ours did.
Yes, you probably guessed it–those green maze-like bushes growing up the slopes and under the trees are tea! More on this in the next post.
Last night’s sunset was exquisite. The sun’s moving north, and it’s now setting between Sachem Pond and the North Light. Streaks of clouds added vividness and color.
The sun will also, alas, be setting sometime soon over our tenure in this wonderful location. We bought this unique piece of land the year my daughter was born; we built this house twenty-four years ago; and we have been coming here whenever we could ever since. We love this place, and it will always be close to our hearts.
I hope whoever buys this wonderful home will find that it is a home not just for your visits and your things but also for your heart and for some deep place that defines who you are.
