Ponant’s new ship sets sail for Antarctica
Under normal circumstances, a bunch of lucky Australians would be preparing for a cruise to the icy south.
It’s that time of year when, under normal circumstances, a bunch of lucky Australians would be laying out their thermals and down jackets in preparation for a cruise to Antarctica. Sadly, 2021 (not to mention the year before it) has been anything but smooth sailing for avid cruisers. Despite moves to restart international travel next month, the White Continent is likely to remain out of reach for most locals until the 2022-23 season. Nonetheless, several cruise lines are setting sail for the icy south, including Hurtigruten, Silversea, Crystal and Lindblad Expeditions.
One ship likely to be turning heads is Ponant’s Le Commandant Charcot, a hi-tech, hybrid electric polar-class vessel that was christened at the end of last month. The 200-passenger ship, named for a French explorer, embarks on the first of 10 Antarctic expeditions this season on October 31. It will sail an array of itineraries exploring the Weddell Sea, Charcot Island and the emperor penguin colonies of the Bellingshausen Sea, with special offerings to coincide with Christmas, New Year and a total solar eclipse. The voyages range in length from 11 to 24 nights.
For readers seeking to rub salt into their travel-starved wounds, Ponant has released a 45-minute documentary featuring its newly appointed brand ambassador for Australasia, television veteran Andrew Daddo. It traces his 16-night journey on Le Boreal from Ushuaia, Argentina, to the Falkland Islands, South Georgia and on to the Antarctic Peninsula. Watch it and weep.
Eleven-night Antarctica sailings on Le Commandant Charcot from $19,520 a person, twin-share.
PENNY HUNTER
Book club
BORGES AND ME: AN ENCOUNTER
Jay Parini
I have the tiniest connection with Jorges Luis Borges. In 2008, I met his controversial widow, Maria Kodama, via an Argentinian friend in Buenos Aires and she permitted me to spend hours amid the archives at the foundation she fiercely guards in his honour. I emerged reeling from this privileged immersion into the mirrored labyrinths and “inexhaustible stairways” of the blind author’s fantastical world. My plans to write a novella about the experience proved fanciful. American writer, literary biographer and academic Jay Parini, however, with far more insight, has produced a hugely entertaining new “novelised memoir” of Borges.
In 1970, Parini, then a shy doctoral student in Scotland, was co-opted by a friend at late notice to drive and host the great writer on a week-long tour of the Highlands, despite knowing nothing of his work. Off they set from the East Neuk of Fife in Parini’s threadbare and unreliable 1957 Morris Minor. The famous Argentinian is dressed in a too-big suit with a powder-blue tie “full of orange waterfalls, flying fish, and the residue of many meals”. Parini must describe everything to his sightless companion and is humbled by Borges’s brilliant intuition, penchant for elliptical puzzles and echoing pronouncements. They overturn a rowing boat on Loch Ness as Borges stands reciting poetry and are forced to share a small bed at a terrible B&B (Borges wears yellow satin pyjamas). At the Carnegie Library in Dunfermline, the famous author “tastes” a Walter Scott book by licking its spine. Later, Borges slides roughly down a slope and injures his head. Parini exclaims in horror, “I had killed Borges!” The quest to meet a Mr Singleton of Inverness, an expert in Anglo-Saxon riddles with whom Borges had shared a long correspondence, comes unstuck when it transpires he lives in the town’s distant refraction in New Zealand.
Borges talks at, around and through Parini, quoting the classics and summoning the sages. Is it all true? Well, Parini wisely makes no claim of full recall of 50-year-old conversations. In the book’s afterword, he describes a narrative with “contours enhanced or distorted … by time and retelling”. Borges, who died in 1986, neatly aged 86, would perhaps have welcomed such evidence of “the easily shattered mirror of memory”. Of the eternal paradise that awaits after death, he once expressed a hope it would be “a kind of library”. If so, Borges might find Parini’s volume an unexpected but not unwelcome addition to those celestial shelves.
SUSAN KUROSAWA
View from here
ADAM AND POH’S MALAYSIA IN AUSTRALIA
SBS Food, Thursday, 8.30pm; On Demand
Poh Ling Yeow and Adam Liaw have much in common: their heritage and both are MasterChef alumni, TV presenters and authors. Their shared culinary passion is Malaysian cooking with an Aussie spin so it is a surprise, perhaps, they have never appeared together on camera before this six-part series, Adam and Poh’s Malaysia in Australia. Delightfully, they share a sense of humour. Poh remarks she has not had a co-host with the same hairstyle, referencing Adam’s trademark top-knot. They are easy companions happy to compliment rather than compete.
Their mission is to find Australia’s freshest produce to recreate Malaysian classics such as juicy beef rendang and crispy roti canai, and they wend their way from New Norfolk in Tasmania to Oberon in the NSW Central Tablelands, Merimbula on that state’s south coast, Bendigo in Victoria and Katanning, southeast of Perth.
There are Malaysian expats and other locals to point them in the direction of the choicest meat cuts, mouth-watering seafood, and fruit and vegetables fresh from the field. Katanning is an eye-opener with 42 multicultural groups represented in a town of 4000 people and a Muslim Malaysian food van that alone would make the trek across the Nullarbor worthwhile.
When it comes to the kitchen, Poh and Adam have favourite dishes and separate styles but their work doesn’t look simple. As the ingredients mount up, it’s a relief to hear Adam confess, “Malaysian food is not for lazy cooks. It’s a labour of love.”
Both hosts left Malaysia in their early years but return regularly and share the conclusion, “Eating is the main recreational activity in Malaysia. And the best.”
GRAHAM ERBACHER
Spend it
Santa Maria Novella opened a boutique in Sydney’s Paddington earlier this year (T+L, June 26-27) and its Australian online store stocks a wide range of the Florentine heritage pharmacy brand’s fragrances, skin and body products, and home accessories such as candles, impregnated wax tablets, diffusers and potpourri. Up there in the most exotic realms is a handcrafted terracotta pomegranate, kiln-fired in multi-stage processes, including immersion in a vat of pomegranate oil. SMN’s Melograno (pomegranate) fragrance releases softly from the porous terracotta and lasts for about nine to 12 months. The smell is powdery, warm and musky; when the scent has dissipated, use the shapely little pomegranate as a desk decoration or paperweight. Saucer included; $95.
SUSAN KUROSAWA