The places so bad I didn’t write about them

Hi there everyone, and welcome to the latest instalment of the Food + Travel Edit. This week I’m gearing up for a family trip to the snow, in Australia – which right now is looking a lot more like a family trip to the grass. This holiday might turn out to be one of the few travel experiences that are so bad I don’t want to write about them, which neatly happens to be the theme of this week’s newsletter. Scroll down, too, to find out about the not-so-surprising return of formerly cancelled Danish chef Rene Redzepi, and my verdict on Canberra airport. Thanks again for reading!

The American guy was pretty confident he could get a martini. “It’s fine,” he told me, “I’ll just ask.”

I had already ordered an Old Fashioned and been told they couldn’t do it. I asked, what are you missing? The bourbon. Oh, and the simple syrup and the bitters. So, everything. But a martini has fewer ingredients and they’re more likely to be stocked by a hotel in Argentina, right?

The woman taking the drinks orders looked quizzical, but she accepted the request for a martini and disappeared into a back room. “This is going to be good,” I told the American guy as we waited for at least 20 minutes, maybe half an hour for the waitress to return.

And she did, eventually, clutching the largest martini you have ever seen in your life. It was one of those wine-glass-like bowls they use for gin and tonic in Spain, huge vessels that in this case was filled to the brim with clear liquid and ice.

Ice, you’re thinking? Martinis don’t have ice. And that’s correct. They’re also not served in a glass large enough to accommodate a small aquarium. The American guy took a sip, curious to see what he’d been served, and spluttered. “It’s pure gin!”

Surely at least 200ml of gin, served in a bucket, before we had even had lunch.

If this was a cheap hotel or a dive bar you would just chuckle. But this is not a cheap hotel. This is a luxury estancia (a type of Argentinian ranch), a Relais & Chateaux property that attracts a high-end, mostly American clientele and costs more than $A1000 a night. You would expect that at a place like this they would be able to make a martini.

That’s not the only thing that’s wrong with La Bamba de Areco, a former farm turned polo ranch about an hour outside Buenos Aires. It’s been a weird stay here, from the cleaner barging into my room at 8.30am without knocking, to the afternoon snacks being served in a different location to the one I was told about, to the flies in my room (and the handheld shower) and the lack of wifi and phone signal in the estancia’s public areas.

Again, this is stuff you would let fly in a cheap hotel. It’s not a big drama. But people are paying $A1000 a night to stay here – everything should be perfect. And it’s not.

I’m often asked, as a travel writer, what I do in a situation like this. I’ve been sent to Argentina by an Australia-based travel company, who have paid for my flights and transfers and organised free accommodation at various hotels. The deal is that I will then write about the places I stay, and Australian travellers will want to go to these places and book with the people who sent me.

But what happens now? Because this place is not good. It’s not somewhere I would recommend to anyone, and I love Argentinian estancias and I’m also willing to cut businesses here some slack given the country’s recent economic troubles.

But $1000 a night is still $1000 a night. And there are other ways to spend that money in Argentina.

So here are the choices: I could lie, or at least just focus on the positive aspects of my stay at La Bamba and leave out the bad stuff. That keeps the travel companies happy. I could tell the truth, and write about both the highs and the lows of my experience at the ranch, which probably wouldn’t please the travel companies or the readers. Or, I could just not write about it at all.

My choice, and I think the choice of most travel writers out there, is usually the latter. I choose not to write about places I don’t like.

I should say, this doesn’t happen all that often. Mostly, the places I go to are great. I choose trips that I know I’m going to love, because I travel to have fun, not to go through hell for the sake of a good story.

So it’s rare that I do something like ride a horse around Japan wearing plastic samurai gear because I didn’t realise that was a thing I was going to be asked to do. Or go hiking in China’s Yunnan province and almost die in a white-out. Or find myself almost attacked by a snake in Thailand. Or have to eat at the wankiest restaurant in the entire world in Bangkok.

I’ve talked about this in a newsletter before: travel writers tend to leave out the bad stuff, with the rationale that it’s better to spread the word about good things that we love rather than spread hatred for experiences and places and even people that we do not love. Don’t tear bad places down. Pump up the good ones.

There are some exceptions to this, places that I judge worthy of public criticism. If places are popular enough, and I see their negative aspects as being intentional or obviously misleading, then it’s a public service to let people know what is really going on here.

But that’s not the case with La Bamba. I even toyed with the idea of letting it remain anonymous in this newsletter. But then you would want to know which property I was talking about, and you could think it’s the wrong one; or you would just book a trip and stay here sometime and find out about the flies and the martinis and the lack of a shower in some of the rooms and pay more than $1000 a night to gain that knowledge.

Which clearly isn’t fair. Though if you do want a bucket of gin on ice, you now know where to go.

THE RETURN OF NOMA

Cancel culture is terrible, we’re all told. And yet who truly gets cancelled? You might recall a few weeks ago I wrote a newsletter discussing the abuse that appears rampant in high-end kitchens, citing the example of Noma chef Rene Redzepi. The Dane was accused of punching cooks in the face and stabbing them with kitchen implements, as well as a long-held culture of using unpaid interns, who were threatened with blackballing if they left before their allotted time. Redzepi eventually stepped away from Noma, ostensibly for the good of the brand.

And now, in news that will surely surprise no one, Redzepi is back. The Noma team announced recently that it would reopen its Copenhagen restaurant – which was apparently deemed unsustainable not so long ago – with new chefs at the helm. Redzepi, who said in March that he was stepping away from the business, is very much not away from the business: he’s serving as Noma’s creative director.

Redzepi has previously said he has “worked to change” his behaviours. Must have been a steep learning curve.

REVIEW: CANBERRA AIRPORT

As mentioned in last week’s newsletter, I visited Canberra Airport recently to check it out, given it’s the only capital-city airport I haven’t been to. And the verdict? It’s good. It’s very good. CBR is set just a 10-minute drive from the city centre, it was built from scratch in 2013 so everything is cohesive, everything makes sense, and it is designed for 8 million passengers a year, but only gets about 3 million. This place is spacious, airy, with public artworks everywhere, and you’re rarely in a queue for more than a few minutes. I’m ready to call it: CBR is Australia’s best.

THINGS I’M LOVING THIS WEEK

• Australia is doing away with paper arrivals cards! Finally, our great nation is catching up with the rest of the world, with the announcement this week that we will do what everyone else has already done and introduce online arrivals forms, rolling out in the next 12 months.
• Vietnam is now No.5 on the list of most-visited destinations by Australians, after huge surges over the last few years. This country is affordable and enjoyable and delicious – I completely understand the appeal.
• Pop quiz: where is Cape Verde? After watching the World Cup, this is one of the destinations I now want to visit.

THINGS I’M NOT LOVING

• An LGBTQ+ cruise ship was last week refused the right to dock in Egypt, after being banned a few days before that from Turkish waters. This sort of bigotry is appalling, and should make everyone think twice about a visit to these places.
• It’s brutal out there for Australian ski resorts. This has been a terrible start to the season, with warm temperatures and little precipitation. Is this still a viable industry?