Sep 10, 2007
For a somewhat different holiday (to put it mildly), consider a week to a month at the Kalani Oceanside Retreat Center on the Big Island of Hawaii
If you bring your own tent, you'll be given a campsite, three meals daily, two full-body massages, daily yoga classes, and the right to engage in all resort activities (hula, ecstatic dance, meditation, weaving, pool, hot tub and sauna), for a total of $780 per person per week, whether single or double. If you're one of two persons traveling together, you'll receive all the above for $930 per person per week in a room with shared bath, $1,020 with private bath. I'm talking about a dreamy, laid-back, unpretentious Hawaiian resort named Kalani (tel. 800/800-6886; www.kalani.com), on the Big Island of Hawaii, that's designed for the same people who patronize yoga centers and meditation camps on the mainland.
It's been around for 30 years, and is still following the gentle precepts of its founder: a mainly vegetarian cuisine (but lots of fresh fish), yoga and tai chi everywhere you look, supportive and non-aggressive fellow guests who follow their bliss, plain but adequate accommodations, and none of the conspicuous consumption or boisterous show-offs of the standard resort. A typical dinner ("prepared with aloha") starts with coconut squash soup, goes on to seared ahi with pineapple salsa, baked tempeh, quinoa with sunflower seeds, broccoli stir-fry, and cucumber salad, and ends with lemon ginger cake.
It's the kind of Hawaiian vacation where you'll never complain about the islands having changed their character or gotten over-crowded. It's like the Hawaii of a century ago. A final touch: volunteers willing to work 30 hours a week for a month, pay $1,000 for an all-inclusive one-month stay at Kalani, attending all classes and activities, receiving accommodations and all meals.
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It's been around for 30 years, and is still following the gentle precepts of its founder: a mainly vegetarian cuisine (but lots of fresh fish), yoga and tai chi everywhere you look, supportive and non-aggressive fellow guests who follow their bliss, plain but adequate accommodations, and none of the conspicuous consumption or boisterous show-offs of the standard resort. A typical dinner ("prepared with aloha") starts with coconut squash soup, goes on to seared ahi with pineapple salsa, baked tempeh, quinoa with sunflower seeds, broccoli stir-fry, and cucumber salad, and ends with lemon ginger cake.
It's the kind of Hawaiian vacation where you'll never complain about the islands having changed their character or gotten over-crowded. It's like the Hawaii of a century ago. A final touch: volunteers willing to work 30 hours a week for a month, pay $1,000 for an all-inclusive one-month stay at Kalani, attending all classes and activities, receiving accommodations and all meals.
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Aug 3, 2007
From those friendly folks at the Sivananda Vishnu movement: another kind of yoga vacation (on a much cheaper $84 a day)
In an earlier post on yoga vacations, I recommended the long-established Kripalu Institute at Lenox, Massachusetts, with its largely American staff of instructors, leavened by only a few practitioners of the activity from India. Today, for readers anxious to take a more serious plunge into all the aspects of yoga, including the spiritual ones, let me discuss the half-dozen-or-so U.S. and North American ashrams of the Sivananda Vishnu movement founded by the late Swami Vishnu-devananda. Their close-at-hand centers charge as little as $84 per person per night, including accommodations, meals and yoga exercises and lectures, at locations scattered around the country and even in the Bahamas, open all year around. You'll find these Sivananda Vedanta Yoga Centers described at www.sivananda.org.
The outstanding branch of the Sivananda movement, as you'd expect, is on a picturesque stretch of white sand beach right across the bay from Nassau, on Paradise Island, the Bahamas, where it offers a sensational vacation opportunity. Here, meditation and chanting begin at 6am, followed by a two-hour "hatha yoga" (physical yoga) class and veggie brunch (food varies, I've been told, from very good to adequate). Exercise and meditation are required of you, but post-brunch hours are totally free for swimming, snorkeling, or maybe a boat ride into town. There's no lunch (it's a two-meal-a-day, light-on-calories environment), but dinner is served, and afterwards there's more meditation and chanting, perhaps followed by a lecture or concert. Lights are out by 10:30pm, and falling asleep under a canopy of stars is usually no problem.
Drawbacks? I've been told that the small staff is sometimes overwhelmed when the usual 100 to 200 guests increase to nearly 300 during holiday weeks. Some rooms have no closets or bedside lamps, and there are, as you'd expect, no private baths, radios or TVs. But private rooms (including meals and instruction) are only $84 per person double, $89 single, and prices are even cheaper for dorm accommodations and tent sites. Call tel. 800/263-9642 for more information, or access the website listed above.
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The outstanding branch of the Sivananda movement, as you'd expect, is on a picturesque stretch of white sand beach right across the bay from Nassau, on Paradise Island, the Bahamas, where it offers a sensational vacation opportunity. Here, meditation and chanting begin at 6am, followed by a two-hour "hatha yoga" (physical yoga) class and veggie brunch (food varies, I've been told, from very good to adequate). Exercise and meditation are required of you, but post-brunch hours are totally free for swimming, snorkeling, or maybe a boat ride into town. There's no lunch (it's a two-meal-a-day, light-on-calories environment), but dinner is served, and afterwards there's more meditation and chanting, perhaps followed by a lecture or concert. Lights are out by 10:30pm, and falling asleep under a canopy of stars is usually no problem.
Drawbacks? I've been told that the small staff is sometimes overwhelmed when the usual 100 to 200 guests increase to nearly 300 during holiday weeks. Some rooms have no closets or bedside lamps, and there are, as you'd expect, no private baths, radios or TVs. But private rooms (including meals and instruction) are only $84 per person double, $89 single, and prices are even cheaper for dorm accommodations and tent sites. Call tel. 800/263-9642 for more information, or access the website listed above.
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Fifty years ago, 
Arthur Frommer is generally acknowledged to be the nation's foremost travel authority. He is the founder of the
