Revisiones_bibliográficas TyO

sábado, 22 de enero de 2011

36 Hours in Valencia, Spain

Stefano Buonamici for The New York Times

From left: Café Negrito, a good stop for an after-dinner drink; in décor and menu, Balansiya pays tribute to the city’s Moorish past; L’Oceanogràfico in the City of Arts and Sciences.

By CHARLY WILDER

Published: January 20, 2011

REPRINTS

FOR the last decade, Valencia, best known as the birthplace of paella, has been steadily inching onto the radar of savvy travelers. Since 2005 — when work was completed on Santiago Calatrava’s futuristic museum complex, the City of Arts and Sciences — and 2007, when Spain’s third-largest city played host to the America’s Cup, Valencia’s Moorish-accented neighborhoods have been filling up with boutiques, restaurants and night spots. Last month, a new train line on the AVE, Spain’s high-speed rail service, linked the city to Madrid, about 200 miles away, making it even easier for travelers to visit this seaside city, which is cooking up a lot more than rice.

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Friday

4 p.m.
1) SHOP THE CARMEN

In hilly Barrio del Carmen, the oldest part of the city and its creative center, bearded students and elegant urbanites trek over graffitied passageways where cafes and galleries spill onto medieval squares. The sprawling Mercado Central (mercadocentralvalencia.es) has recently become a high-fashion party locale, hosting shindigs for Prada and Aston Martin, among others. Stylish boutiques are tucked behind the 15th-century late Gothic Lonja de la Seda silk exchange. Two of the best, Bugalú (Calle de la Lonja 6; 34-963-918-449) and Madame Bugalú y Su Caniche Asesino (Danzas 3; 34-963-154-476; madamebugalu.es), carry clothing and accessories by Spanish, French and Swiss designers, as well as international labels like Paul Frank.

6 p.m.
2) VALENCIAN ORIGINAL

Valencia is the birthplace of horchata, a drink made from the juice of chufas, or tiger nuts, and said to date from the city’s Islamic period, the 8th to 13th centuries. You can sample it at the Horchatería El Siglo (Plaza de Santa Catalina 11; 34-963-918-466) in the Carmen. Pair a glass (2.20 euros, or $2.80 at $1.27 to the euro) with a café cortado (1.30 euros) and another Valencian original: the farton (.50 euros), a fluffy pastry finger dusted in powdered sugar.

9 p.m.
3) TAPAS, DECONSTRUCTED

Valencia’s once-middling restaurant scene is seeing the emergence of creative young talent. Carosel (Taula de Canvis 6; 34-961-132-873; restaurante-carosel.blogspot.com), a chic but unpretentious restaurant that opened in the Carmen in March, has become a standout. The Valencian chef Jordi Morera serves up delectable twists on traditional cuisine, like a mini cuttlefish stew with artichokes and almonds. The prix fixe menu changes weekly and is always a bargain at 22 euros.

11 p.m.
4) CARMEN CAROUSING

In the Carmen, late-night action converges on the Plaza del Tossal. Locals avoid the splashy tourist traps and pour into the Stone Age-themed Bar los Picapiedra (Caballeros 25; bar-lospicapiedra.com), where students, bohemians and miscellaneous walk-ins guzzle cider out of large, spouted glass porrones, which look vaguely like watering cans (7 euros), and listen to Spanish alt-rock.

Saturday

10 a.m.
5) FUTURE CITY

Last summer, Valencia adopted Valenbisi (valenbisi.es; 10 euros a week), a public bicycle rental system. Pick up a bike near the Torres de Serranos, one of the gates to the city, and cycle under a series of bridges through the palm-filled Jardín del Turia to the City of Arts and Sciences (Avenida Autopista del Saler; 34-902-100-031; cac.es). The buildings’ curved, billowing facades resemble everything from the skeleton of a whale to the upper half of a giant eye completed by its mirror image in a reflecting pool. Farther south , at L’Oceanogràfico marine complex, you can wander through underground tunnels as sharks float overhead. Entrance is 24.50 euros; a three-day pass to the entire City of Arts and Sciences is 32.40 euros.

12 p.m.
6) AN ALTERNATIVE HUB

Built largely in the 1920s, the neighborhood of Rusaffa became a center for the city’s Muslim immigrant community in the second half of the 20th century. This influence still dominates, with Middle Eastern and East Asian markets and cafes dotting the streets. But as the Carmen has become increasingly touristy, Rusaffa has also become an alternative hub for artists and students. A combination bookshop, bar, performance space, publishing house and gallery, Slaughterhouse Books (Denia 22; 34-963-287-755; slaughterhouse.es) used to be a butchery and still has the meat hooks to prove it. Gnomo (Denia 12; 34-963-737-267; elblogdegnomo.blogspot.com), a design boutique, carries things like ceiling lamps made from recycled cola bottles and oil and vinegar pourers shaped like beakers.

2 p.m.
7) TAPAS, FAMILY STYLE

Maipi (Maestro José Serrano 1; 34-963-735-709), a small tapas restaurant in Rusaffa, fills up in the early afternoon with businessmen who spend their siestas trading barbs at the bar and sampling dishes like fresh artichoke and morcilla sausage wrapped in a thin dough or grilled cod fish in lemon and olive oil, beneath a backdrop of country-kitsch décor and soccer paraphernalia. Lunch for two costs around 40 euros.

5 p.m.
8) RUINS UNDER GLASS

One of the best spots for exploring Valencia’s history is at the museum L’Almoina (Plaza de Décimo Junio Bruto; 34-962-084-173; valencia.es/almoina), which opened three years ago in the Carmen on the site where Valencia was founded by the Romans in 138 B.C. Visitors walk over glass floors, looking down at a stunning assemblage of ruins excavated in the area. The exhibition includes Roman baths, Visigoth tombs and a medieval Moorish ward for plague victims. Free on weekends and 2 euros during the week.

9 p.m.
9) MOORISH COURSES

The city’s Islamic past is the focus of Balansiya (Paseo de las Facultades 3; 34-963-890-824; balansiya.com), an out-of-the-way restaurant that authentically recreates the culinary experience of medieval Moorish Valencia. The décor is exquisite Arab-Andalusian, and the prix fixe dinner menus include tabbouleh, tagine and couscous plus lesser-known Moorish specialties like assaffa (Andalusian pasta with chicken, cinnamon and nuts), waraka inab (grape leaves stuffed with cereal in an almond-mint vinaigrette) and xarab Andalusi (a drink made of fruits, flowers, spices and herbs). Dinner is 20 to 30 euros.

Midnight
10) PARTY UNDER THE MUSEUM

Club life doesn’t kick off until after 1 a.m., so hit Café Negrito (Plaza Negrito 1; 34-963-91-4233) for an after-dinner drink. Later, witness Valencian late-night decadence at MYA(Avenida del Saler 5, City of Arts and Sciences; 34-963-319-745; umbracleterraza.com), a domed club underneath a landscaped walkway leading to the Principe Filipe Science Museum. It’s Studio 54 meets imperial Spain meets Jersey Shore. Entry and your first cocktail, 15 euros.

Sunday

11 a.m.
11) SHOP THE LOT

Every Sunday, Valencia’s antiques and junk shop owners convene at the Plaza de Luis Casanova, a giant lot tucked behind the 55,000-seat Camp de Mestalla stadium, the home field of Valencia Club de Fútbol, to sell their goods at huge markdowns to a fantastically eclectic cross-section of locals.

1 p.m.
12) PAELLA EN LA PLAYA

The shore is lined with large restaurants that have made paella their specialty. La Pepica(Paseo de Neptuno 6; 34-963-710-366; lapepica.com) is the best known (for good reason), but a few doors down is an even better choice, L’Estimat (Paseo de Neptuno 16; 34-963-711-018; restaurantelestimat.com). On Sunday afternoons, the place fills up with the after-church crowd chowing down on paella Valenciana (made with chicken and rabbit). Lunch for two costs around 70 euros.

2 p.m.
13) WALK THE CABANYAL

There is a controversial initiative to bulldoze many of the gorgeous but decrepit turn-of-the-century buildings in the seaside neighborhood of Cabanyal, the former fishermen’s quarter, to link the city with the coastline and “regenerate” a district known for crime, vagrancy and prostitution. Before it’s too late, stroll past the colorfully tiled maritime murals and weathered but elegant Art Nouveau town houses. One can’t help but hope to some day come back and find it utterly unchanged.

IF YOU GO

The new AVE high-speed line travels between Madrid and Valencia in about 90 minutes, a marked improvement from the previous travel time of just under four hours. Round-trip tickets start at 96 euros, about $125 (renfe.com).

The Hospes Palau de la Mar (Navarro Reverter 14; 34-963-162-884; hospes.es), a design hotel built in adjoining 19th-century mansions, melds grand arches, detailed woodwork and marble staircases with 66 minimalist-chic rooms in hues of white and chestnut, replete with Egyptian cotton sheets and plasma televisions. Doubles start at 115 euro when booked 15 days in advance.

Petit Palace Germanias (Sueca 14; 34-963-513-638; petitpalacehotelgermanias.com), also in a 19th-century residence, is a comfortable 41-room boutique hotel in up-and-coming Russafa; from 65 euros.

A version of this article appeared in print on January 23, 2011, on page TR10 of the New York edition.

In Borneo, City Pleasures and Jungle Adventure

David Hagerman for The New York Times

Boating on the Sarawak River in Kuching, with the Sarawak State Legislative Assembly in the background. More Photos »

By DANIEL ROBINSON

Published: January 21, 2011

REPRINTS

A SNOW-WHITE fortress in the style of the English Renaissance, garnished with crenellations, pepper pot turrets and an octagonal keep, is not quite what you’d expect to find on a steamy bluff overlooking an equatorial river in Malaysian Borneo. But Fort Margherita, built in 1879 by Charles Brooke, the second White Rajah of Sarawak, is just one of the many charms of Kuching, a gracious and kaleidoscopically diverse city of about 600,000 just an hour and a half by air from Singapore.

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Borneo’s City Streets and Jungle Trails

An amble through its safe, eminently walkable streets will reveal dragon-festooned Chinese temples a few blocks from a 19th-century South Indian mosque; fortresses from the time of the White Rajahs (English rulers of the Kingdom of Sarawak from 1841 to 1941) a short walk from a high-rise district of hotels and icily air-conditioned shopping malls; and chic restaurants that would not be out of place in London a few streets away from open-air stalls redolent with half-a-dozen Asian cuisines.

The most extraordinary attractions in the Kuching area, however, are natural. Drive an hour or two out of town and you come to tracts of some of the most ancient and species-rich rain forests on earth. In less than a week, you can plunge into an exotic world of primeval flora and endangered fauna, visit — or live with — a local tribe, and still have time for urban pursuits — i.e. eating and shopping. In addition, many Sarawakians converse comfortably in English, making travel a breeze.

I first discovered the sundry delights of Kuching, which is the capital of the Malaysian state of Sarawak (pronounced sah-RAH-wok) several years ago. My soon-to-be wife, Rachel, was living in Singapore and we decided to escape it for a few days and explore some of Malaysia’s other half. In less than a day I was entranced and decided to return at some point — with a note pad.

When I went with Rachel, we stayed in the center of town, but for this visit I chose a guesthouse a bit off the beaten path. Kuching has several international-standard business hotels, but this place came with a good recommendation, and the fact that the co-owner of the Fairview Guesthouse, Eric Yap, a retired civil servant, offered to show me around was a bonus, especially since many of the places I wanted to go are not accessible by public transport. My game plan was to head to nearby national parks in the morning and explore the city later in the day.

One of my top priorities was to pay another visit to Asia’s only great ape, the orangutan, which is endemic to Borneo and the Indonesian island of Sumatra. Early one morning, after a quick breakfast, Eric and I got into his late-model Honda and drove 20 minutes south from Kuching to the Semenggoh Nature Reserve, whose wildlife center was established 35 years ago to rehabilitate jungle animals rescued from captivity. The 2.5-square-mile area is now one of the best places in the world to see orangutans up close and on the loose.

So far, we were told, 5 of the center’s 27 orangutans — 16 of them born here — have kicked the habit of dining at park headquarters, but the other 22 often swing by (literally) to partake of the banana manna set out each day. We had been forewarned, however, that there was no guarantee that any of the orangutans — the world’s largest tree-dwelling animals — would show up.

“Yaaay-ooh!” the park ranger yelled, the second tone lower than the first, as he scanned the forest canopy, “yaaay-oh!” The energetic rustle of leaves in a distant tree was the first indication that an orangutan was approaching. “If a big male is coming, keep distance. He is unpredictable,” the ranger warned, adding nonchalantly, “he might attack, he might not.” But it was a smallish young ape making his way toward us, clambering from one tree to another, grabbing onto vines and branches with gravity-defying agility.

At one point, we — along with dozens of other visitors — could see five shaggy orangutans clutching trunks, branches and vines with arms that can reach six feet or more. A female orangutan with a baby clinging to the long hairs of her torso descended warily to a stash of bright yellow bananas, stuffed as many as she could in her mouth, grabbed a green coconut in one hand and scrambled up a rope. Soon the last of the climbers disappeared back into the canopy, and Eric and I continued on.

We headed farther south, through a patchwork of dense secondary forests, open fields, houses and small orchards. For tens of millions of years — until logging companies arrived in the late 20th century — Sarawak’s dense rain forests remained unchanged, but today only patches of completely untouched jungle remain.

Our destination was Annah Rais, a Bidayuh village whose residents — or most of them — live in longhouses, a collaborative habitation that serves as a home for the entire community. (The Bidayuh are one of the Bornean indigenous groups known collectively as Dayaks.) In a longhouse, each family retains a high degree of economic autonomy (this is not a kibbutz) but common areas are in constant use for cooking, traditional crafts, socializing and celebrations. If you were making a Dayak version of “Seinfeld,” you’d set it in a longhouse.

Although Bornean longhouses share certain features — all, for example, are built on stilts to insulate them from the damp tropical earth — each Dayak group has its own floor plan and decorative traditions. Among the Bidayuh, communal life is centered on the awah, a roofed, open-air veranda whose width is generally about 12 feet but whose length can exceed that of two football fields. Running along one side of the awah is a wall punctuated by doors to the apartments — or bilik — where individual families live. If you ask how big a longhouse is, chances are you’ll be told how many doors it has.

Annah Rais, whose three longhouses have a total of 97 doors, is one of the best places in the Kuching area to get acquainted with the traditions of the Dayaks. As at virtually all Sarawakian longhouses (especially those accessible by road), modern amenities have been embraced with gusto — locals can’t wait to get broadband Internet — but Annah Rais’s inhabitants have consciously decided both to preserve aspects of their traditional lifestyle and to welcome modern tourists. Several residents run homestays that allow paying guests the opportunity to meet local people, dine on Bidayuh cuisine (and help prepare it), drink home-brewed rice wine and try (mock) hunting with a blowgun. For day visits, after paying a nominal fee to the longhouse committee, visitors are free to explore the village, either on their own or with a guide.

The floors of Annah Rais’s public spaces are made of bouncy bamboo slats, which added a spring to our steps as Eric and I took a stroll. We soon came upon an older woman named Bawe who was cutting rattan into long, even strips in order to weave a mat. Her 47-year-old cousin, a traditional drummer named Pola Anak Nan, was seated nearby and we soon struck up a conversation in English. The mat is “for her own use,” he explained, adding that the Dayak mats available for sale in Kuching, many imported from Kalimantan (the Indonesian part of Borneo), are of “poor quality — people in the village don’t touch it.” Our parents, he added, smiling, “they very choosy.”

Our next stop was the head house, a legacy of the Bidayuhs’ days as fearsome headhunters. True to its name, the structure’s centerpiece was a cage containing about a dozen human skulls, blackened by smoke and suspended above an old brass cannon marked “Pieter Seest Anno 756.” (Pieter Seest was a bell and gun founder active in Amsterdam in the 1700s.) These days, almost all Dayaks are Christian (mainly Anglican, in the case of Annah Rais), and the heads are no longer believed to protect the village.

Back in Kuching, I took time to explore the city the way it should be, on foot and aimlessly. For a first-time visitor, most of the highlights — temples, mosques, Chinatown, several excellent museums, and restaurants — are within a short walk of Kuching’s Waterfront Promenade, a half-mile-long ribbon of flower beds, tropical trees and food stalls that is especially refreshing whenever a cooling breeze blows off the Sarawak River. Couples and families flock here in the early evening, when the hues of an equatorial sunset are gradually outshone by strings of colored fairy lights and their watery reflections.

The road that runs along most of the waterfront has long been known as Main Bazaar. These days, its arcaded, colonial-era Chinese shophouses shelter Borneo’s best selection of traditional Dayak artifacts, handmade by members of the Iban, Bidayuh and Orang Ulu (upriver) groups. This is the place to come if you’re looking for any sort of native tools and crafts, along with hand-woven textiles and sachets of Sarawak’s famously piquant pepper. Browsers are welcome and, in most shops, staff members are happy to explain each item’s origin and its traditional significance and functions.

Kuching’s increasingly sophisticated culinary scene reflects the city’s multicultural population, which is about 38 percent Chinese, 36 percent Malay and 24 percent Dayak (mainly Bidayuh and Iban). Over the course of my stay, I ate deliciously crunchy stir-fried midin (jungle fern tips), fiery Sarawak-style laksa (noodle soup), Teochew-style Chinese kueh chap (fish and prawn soup) flavored with crunchy-hot slivers of ginger, and delicious pepper steak at an elegant French-inspired restaurant. There are also several Indian restaurants and, for the spice-averse, KFC.

Another culinary highlight is the Weekend Market, half a mile from the town center on Satok Street, which runs from midday on Saturday until Sunday afternoon. Open-air stalls, many run by Bidayuh farmers from the interior, sell brightly colored local crops — winged beans, okra, ginger, bright red chilies — on tiny plates for a ringgit or two (33 or 66 cents). At a table piled high with bananas ranging from lemon yellow to dark red — some barely larger than my thumb, others almost the length and girth of my forearm — I got into a conversation (in English) with the owner, who gave me nine varieties to taste. Despite my protests, he refused payment and — not for the first or last time — I found myself astonished at Sarawakians’ generosity.

“A RAFFLESIA is flowering!”

It was with this exclamation that Eric’s wife greeted me one afternoon as I was pondering my next move. Because this bulletin — the local equivalent of a hot tip for the afternoon horse race — was both unexpected and time-sensitive, it made the decision easy.

Texas-size Borneo is home to some of the most extraordinary plants on earth and one of the rarest is the elusive Rafflesia, the world’s largest flower, some of whose species can produce blooms over three feet in diameter. Because Rafflesia flowers last for just a few days before rotting, we quickly made plans to leave the next morning.

After a 44-mile, two-hour drive northwestward, we arrived at Sarawak’s best place for Rafflesia spotting, Gunung Gading National Park, a 16-square-mile patch of old-growth rain forest overlooking the South China Sea.

The Rafflesia (pronounced rah-FLEE-zhuh) plant is a rootless, stemless, leafless parasite that consists almost entirely of the flower. It attaches itself to vines of the Tetrastigma plant, a member of the grape family, from which the Rafflesia’s filament-like tentacles suck prodigious quantities of nutrients. The genus Rafflesia is named after Sir Stamford Raffles, who discovered the flower for Western science while leading an expedition to the Sumatran rain forest in 1818. (He is better remembered for what he did the following year: founded Singapore.)

A few hundred yards into the forest, our guide turned off the plank walk and we followed him across a rocky hillside. Suddenly, there it was, nestled at the base of two moss-flecked boulders: an orange-red Rafflesia tuan-mudae 30 inches in diameter, its five meaty petals mottled with warty raised spots. The basketball-size diaphragm in the center, speckled with white spots on the inside, enclosed a disk resembling a spiky lotus flower.

The flower’s reproductive organs — each Rafflesia is either female or male — are hidden under the disk, but beyond that scientists understand little about how the flower, whose buds take nine months to mature, manages to reproduce. They do know, however, why Rafflesias smell like rotten meat: to attract carrion flies for pollination. I bent down and put my nose practically inside the flower’s core. Though the odor was hardly overpowering, you wouldn’t want to eat a chicken cutlet that had smelled like a Rafflesia before it was cooked.

As I neared the end of my stay, there was still something I had yet to see: a wild troupe of one of Borneo’s most endangered — and oddest — primates, the proboscis monkey. It was in search of this peculiar creature, endemic to Borneo, that I spent my final evening in Sarawak cruising through Kuching Wetlands National Park, whose pristine mangrove forests are accessible only by boat (easy enough to arrange through your guesthouse or hotel).

In the company of an Italian couple from Turin, Eric and I drove 15 miles north to the seaside village of Kampung Santubong and boarded an open motorboat. Along the shore — the tide was very low — mangrove roots poked out of the mud like thousands of fat, knobby pencils stuck in vertically, eraser-first.

Our affable guide and boatman, Sarbini bin Labong, slowed the outboard to a purr, pointing toward the shore at what he said was a monkey. All I saw were swaying branches. Then I heard the crashing of tree limbs and caught sight of a flash of reddish-brown fur — a potbellied proboscis monkey jumping from one tree to the next in search of choice young leaves. Grunts and chirps emerged from what we soon realized was a troupe of about 10 of the agile creatures. True to their name, the adult males cast an unmistakable profile thanks to their pendulous noses.

When darkness had fully fallen, we began hunting for Sarawak’s most feared creature, the man-eating saltwater crocodile, which can grow to a length of 20 feet or more (it is considered to be the world’s largest living reptile). We chugged into a narrow channel and Sarbini again cut the motor, rowing as he shined a flashlight toward the muddy shore. Little splashes emerged from the blackness as unseen fish broke the surface.

Suddenly we saw a gleam — reptilian eyes reflecting the boatman’s beam. Silently, we approached and spotted a snout and two greedy eyes just above the water line. As we drew near, the critter moved and, for the first time, we could make out its true dimensions. It was a baby — no more than two feet long; he (or she) would have been able to drown and devour a Barbie doll but that’s about it. Without stretching the truth (as long as we were vague on the details), we could now report to the folks back home that we had encountered a hungry crocodile in the wild and lived to tell the tale.

As we headed back to the main channel we slid past ink-black trees silhouetted against an almost black sky. Fireflies swirled around one particular tree, and for a fleeting moment, gasps of “bellissimo!” turned our boat into a tropical gondola. Then Sarbini revved the motor and we zoomed toward the twinkling lights of Santubong — and the creature comforts of Kuching.

IF YOU GO

GETTING THERE

Kuching is about an hour and a half by air from Singapore. Flights are operated by Air Asia (airasia.com), Malaysia Airlines (malaysiaairlines.com), the Singapore Airlines subsidiary Silk Air (silkair.com) and Tiger Airways (tigerairways.com). Malaysia Airlines has frequent flights to Kuala Lumpur (one hour and 40 minutes).

If you would like help planning your visit, contact Borneo Adventure (55 Main Bazaar, Kuching; 60-82-245-175; borneoadventure.com), a travel agency that organizes highly regarded, ecologically sustainable tours and excursions.

Travelers with dollars or euros will find that Kuching offers excellent value, with costs significantly lower than Singapore but higher than Vietnam or Cambodia. International-standard hotel rooms are available for the equivalent of about $100 for a double (guesthouses cost a fraction of that), and at hawkers’ centers, as little as $3 will get you a possibly excellent Chinese, Malay or Bidayuh meal.

WHERE TO STAY

Annah Rais Longhouse Homestays (longhouseadventure.com). Guests sleep inside the longhouse in very basic rooms with fans. Two days and one night cost 98 ringgit, or about $33 at 3 ringgit to the dollar, per person, including Bidayuh-style board (298 ringgit with trekking, rafting and other outdoor activities). Situated 37 miles south of Kuching (by taxi, 80 to 100 ringgit one way).

Gunung Gading National Park (ebooking.com.my; sarawakforestry.com for general information; 60-82-735-144). Rafflesias, when they’re in bloom, can be seen on a day trip from Kuching, but to do a night walk you have to stay over. The park has basic dorm beds (15 ringgit) and six-bed chalets (150 ringgit). It’s 44 miles northwest of Kuching (by taxi, about 100 ringgit each way).

Hilton Kuching Hotel (Tunku Abdul Rahman Street, Kuching; 60-82-248-200;hilton.com). Comfortable rooms with fine river views from 369 ringgit. One of several international-standard hotels in Kuching’s high-rise district

Singgahsana Lodge (Temple Street, Kuching; 60-82-429-277; singgahsana.com). An atmospheric guesthouse with authentic Dayak décor and backpackers’ doubles from 98 ringgit.

Fairview Guesthouse (6 Jalan Taman Budaya, Kuching; 60-82-240-017thefairview.com.my) My home-away-from-home while in Kuching. Unpretentious and very friendly but the rooms (70 ringgit for a double) are pretty basic. It’s often full, so book well ahead.

WHERE TO EAT

Popular Vegetarian (Lot 105, Section 50, Abell Road, Kuching; 60-82-238-752). Tasty, strictly vegetarian Chinese, Malay and Bornean dishes cost 6 to 15 ringgit.

Teochew Chinese Hawkers’ Center (23 Carpenter Street, Kuching). Delicious Sarawakian and Chinese dishes start at about 4 ringgit.

Top Spot Food Court (Padungan Street, Kuching). Garishly lighted with colorful neon, this place is improbably perched atop a multistory parking garage. Fresh fish and seafood entrees cost 35 to 70 ringgit per kilogram.

Jambu (32 Crookshank Street; 60-82-235-292; jamburestaurant.com). French-accented cuisine, including luscious desserts, in an elegant colonial-era mansion.

Weekend Market (Satok Street). An extravaganza of tropical fruits and vegetables that brings Bidayuh, Malay and Chinese farmers and merchants to town from noon to 10 p.m. on Saturday and 5 a.m. to 1 or 2 p.m. on Sunday.

KEEPING IN TOUCH

To phone North America whenever and wherever you want for pennies a minute, buy a prepaid Malaysian SIM card (8.50 ringgit; signing up takes 10 minutes) at one of Kuching’s many mobile phone shops and install it in a 900/1800 MHz cellphone (available locally; from 120 ringgit).

Almost all of Kuching’s hotels and guesthouses have Wi-Fi, and many also offer Web-ready computers in the lobby.

DANIEL ROBINSON is working on the second edition of Lonely Planet’s Borneo guide.

A version of this article appeared in print on January 23, 2011, on page TR1 of the New York edition

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Hamlet (and Others) as the Strong, Silent Type

By PATRICK HEALY

Published: January 21, 2011

REPRINTS

WASHINGTON — For their first attempt at wordless Shakespeare — that’s right, wordless Shakespeare — the husband-and-wife leaders of the Synetic Theater company chose to apply their physical-theater aesthetic to “Hamlet,” counting on audiences’ familiarity with the plot.

Enlarge This Image

Graeme B. Shaw

Irina Tsikurishvili, center, as Margarita in the Synetic Theater production of “The Master and Margarita.”

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Evelyn Hockstein for The New York Times

Irina and Paata Tsikurishvili observing a warm-up at Synetic Theater's rehearsal space.

In place of three-plus hours of verse, Synetic presented 90 minutes of highly stylized dance, movement, acrobatics, pantomime, music and story. “To be or not to be” was never uttered, but Hamlet stormed across the stage, gesturing to convey desperation. He and Ophelia never touched; their tortured attraction was reflected, instead, by the two actors’ bringing “their fingertips to within a hair’s breadth of each other,” as TheWashington Post noted in its rave review in 2002.

Just a year-old troupe at the time, Synetic ended up drawing wide critical praise and winning local theater awards as best resident play for “Hamlet” and best director and best choreographer for the husband-and-wife team, Paata and Irina Tsikurishvili, who also played Hamlet and Ophelia. Since then Synetic has won many more local awards — mostly for wordless Shakespeare stagings like “Macbeth” and “Romeo and Juliet” — as well as a devoted following in this city and nationally among admirers of physical theater.

Émigrés from the former Soviet republic of Georgia whose style draws on the popular tradition of pantomime there, the Tsikurishvilis (pronounced T-SEE-koorish-VEAL-ee) have also been embraced by establishment theaters here.

“No one does what they do — not in Washington or, really, anywhere that I know of,” saidMichael M. Kaiser, president of the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, who has advised the couple on building a theatrical troupe and provided performance space for some Synetic productions.

What he likes about Synetic’s artistry, Mr. Kaiser said, is that “it starts from a theatrical base — what plot and characters do we want to portray? — and then creating the most imaginative physical movements in service to that story.”

During a long interview over tea here, the Tsikurishvilis described yearning for a wider audience to discover their large-scale works of physical theater. “I think if any place other than Washington would appreciate what we do, it would be New York,” Mr. Tsikurishvili said. “But we wanted to spend the last 10 years developing into a premier physical theater company, and that took all our energy.”

With a budget of $1.7 million this year, Synetic produces four to five mainstage plays and three shows for children and families each year. Most performances this season are at the Lansburgh Theater in downtown Washington or at the company’s theater in Arlington, Va., where an encore presentation of Synetic’s text-free “Midsummer Night’s Dream” is to begin on Tuesday.

Last fall Synetic was among 10 theater companies nationwide to receive the first set of $10,000 grants to support their work from the American Theater Wing, a nonprofit group that is a presenter of the Tony Awards. Before 2010 that grant money went to New York companies, but Howard Sherman, the Wing’s executive director, said it wanted to honor innovative companies with rising profiles in their cities and towns and with distinctive artistic vision that stood out nationally.

“Synetic impressed us for their singular, idiosyncratic, exuberant physical style, which clearly wasn’t like others on the Washington scene, and for the obvious embrace in which they were held by their growing audiences,” Mr. Sherman said.

Ms. Tsikurishvili, a sinewy dancer in her late 30s with the expressive face of a silent-movie star, said she knew that Synetic was onto something special with physical theater during her first performance of Ophelia’s suicide, as she ran across the stage gathering flowers and then “folding and unfolding and dissolving my body as Ophelia drowned.”

“You get this feeling inside you, and then the feeling is pushing your body, as if movement and speech are coming out of your body rather than out of your mouth,” Ms. Tsikurishvili said. “After we were done, and the curtain came down, there was a silence that was going on for a century. And then people started clapping.”

Both raised in the capital city of Tblisi, the Tsikurishvilis met in the late 1980s at the Georgian State Pantomime Theater, where they had worked in separate productions. Mr. Tsikurishvili had trained in pantomime and acting and had broken free of his parents’ expectations that he become a scientist or scholar. Irina, meanwhile, gravitated to dance after an early interest in ballet faded because she could not perform on pointe (despite her father’s sitting on her knees to strengthen them).

One day in a hallway of the theater, Ms. Tsikurishvili recalled, she slid through a pack of actors and dancers — Mr. Tsikurishvili and his friends — and ended up teasing him with a possible invitation to a swimming outing the next day. (She finally offered, and he went.) It was not love at first sight, Irina said; she did not fall for him until she saw him onstage.

“He was playing a chicken, in this Georgian family-oriented play about a fox, and I finally understood how an actor can use his face and body to full effect, how a character’s story could be told without words,” she said. They married four months after their first meeting.

Mr. Tsikurishvili, now 44, was known in Tblisi theater circles then as an outspoken critic of the government and the deprivations of daily life; in time he stopped getting much work. He ended up defecting during a performance tour in Germany and worked there for several years while Ms. Tsikurishvili raised their young son, Vato, in Georgia. (They now have a daughter, Anna, as well). Eventually they both came to Washington, where Ms. Tsikurishvili’s parents settled after her father was offered a job teaching and coaching gymnastics.

At first Mr. Tsikurishvili performed as a mime for patrons at Russian restaurants in the region, while Ms. Tsikurishvili taught gymnastics in Baltimore. They began acting with the Stanislavsky Theater Studio in Washington, but broke away after a few years to start Synetic — a name that Mr. Tsikurishvili coined by fusing syllables of two words, synthesis and kinetic, that he thought captured their aesthetic.

While some Synetic productions include full texts and speaking, like a recent adaptation of Bulgakov’s novel “The Master and Margarita,” the production next week of “Midsummer” particularly captures their signature style: un-self-consciousness, bravado and an undeniable sexiness, including a highly erotic wrestling match between Ms. Tsikurishvili’s fairy queen Titania and her sparring partner, King Oberon. (In March Synetic will take on “King Lear.”)

With the company now in its 10th year, the Tsikurishvilis are eager to take Synetic on the road, especially to New York, where they have performed only once — last year atColumbia University during a benefit for its Georgian Studies program.

“Our great wish since we were children was to perform in New York City and on Broadway,” Mr. Tsikurishvili said. As much as he looks forward to performing more beyond Washington someday, Mr. Tsikurishvili said that the physical theater of Synetic also brings him back, in his imagination, to Georgia and to the couple’s early days together.

“You miss home sometimes, we both do, but physical theater involves living in an imaginary world, the world of a children’s mind like my own in the ’70s,” he said. “I had no toys. I amused myself with what I could make my body do. When we perform, still, I think of where we’re from as well as where I hope we go.”