My island home

Ever since sandwiches have been cut into tiny morsels and pillows have been piled onto ornate beds, hotels and resorts have been vying to deliver ‘luxury’ to their guests.

Luxury is difficult to define as it is a constantly changing mindset – just think of how you turn up your nose when there is no wireless internet available these days, for example.

The other problem, of course, is that luxury means different things to different people – one man’s personal butler may be another’s private stalker (albeit a polite one) – so I was interested to see what might be on offer at Ratua Private Island in Vanuatu.

In a previous life I was the editor of a hotel magazine based in Dubai, which gave me privileged access to some of the finest luxury accommodation money can buy. After a couple of years working in this industry you get tired of using the jargon, of talking about bathrooms bigger than a normal person’s house and of valets and butlers and concierges to take care of every whim and need.

Writing from this background, perhaps it carries more weight when I say that Ratua is something special.

The resort is the brainchild of a French nature lover who discovered the island while sailing around the world in 2004. Under the guidance of owner’s representative Eric Le Calvez the island has developed its own infrastructure including roads, alternative power and water sources and vegetable gardens.

Starting with the accommodation itself, with an end-goal of creating a sustainable and eco-friendly resort, the hotel developers have sourced huts from Indonesia which have been painstakingly de-constructed, packed and then reconstructed on the island. These ‘huts’ are individual works of art constructed from old-world teak (where else could you get spans of teak greater than 150cm these days?) which have been clustered to create individual villas. I’m sleeping in ‘Tiger’ – each villa is named after an animal – where there is a master bedroom which joins onto a main living area and then an adjoining bathroom. Some of the huts are more than 200 years old and you can feel it in every surface that you touch which has been rubbed smooth by generations of use.

The island sleeps up to 24 people across a wide range of villas, with the option to hire the entire island or individual villas subject to availability.

Comfort is clearly the main aim here and in my villa alone there are 13 different chairs to laze the day away – including three day beds and two sun lounges on the jetty leading down to my own private beach.

Staying with numbers, it takes 81 steps to reach the beautiful warm water of the Pacific Ocean from the door of my bedroom – the quiet sounds of waves lapping on the shore are so soporific I must confess to several unscheduled naps.

The island lends itself to a host of activities and all the equipment you need is available free to use.

Want to go snorkeling? Just grab fins and a mask from the equipment hut and then go – there’s no need to sign any forms or join a group at a certain time. There are heaps of reefs just off the island to explore, but if you manage to get a boat out to the island of Espirito Santo you can swim off the beach at Million Dollar Point where the US Army dumped surplus equipment at the end of World War II – it is slightly surreal experiencing a shipwreck at snorkeling depth. For those who enjoy scuba diving, Espirito Santo is also close to the wreck of the President Coolidge, a 30,000 tonne liner sunk during the war that remains structurally perfect.

If you prefer being above water, there are also windsurfers, kayaks and canoes, with plans to bring out kite-surfing equipment later on.

There are plenty of options to explore the island as well – either by mountain bike, golf cart or on horseback. The island’s equestrian expert Stephanie Caillaud took me for a ride around the whole 146 acres of the former coconut plantation and after getting over the terror of my horse tripping over the coconuts we rode into the water and went swimming with the horses. This confirmed two things: horses are better swimmers than I thought they were and it is harder to stay on a swimming horse than I thought it was.

Excursions off the island are easily organized and include the slightly arduous trek to Millenium Cave (Frederick’s wife Victoria described it to me as ‘Have you ever seen Survivor Vanuatu? It’s exactly like that!’) or visits to local ‘blue holes’ (swimming holes) and schools. We had the pleasure of visiting a local school on nearby Malo island, where all the school children came to meet us and perform a special greeting dance even though it was Sunday (apparently the fact it allowed them to skip the church service played no part in the large turnout). After a hard day’s relaxation we settled into our beachfront table for a long evening of food and drink. Chef Kandy is blessed with the freshness of her ingredients – many of the vegetables are grown in a garden several hundred metres from the kitchen and the cows and fish are all butchered on the island – but also with a rare talent for inventiveness. It may be counterintuitive to suggest someone goes to Vanuatu to try the bread, but over four days with bread at every meal we never had the same variety twice – and all were delicious. The bar is stocked high and is open to suggestions – you can bring your own music on your iPod and create your own drinks if you feel like it. Ratua is certainly a place where anything can happen – Caillaud confides that just a week earlier there was a dance party going strong into the night where she brought her horse onto the dancefloor.

In fact it is this familial intangible element of the island that makes it so special. There are the personal elements, such as the ducks named Oopsy and Daisy and the island’s one sheep, named Horse because it only socializes with the horses.

There is the lack of contact with the outside world – even though the games room has a quick internet connection and there is GSM coverage on the whole island you will quickly find it is better to totally switch off.

There is an uncanny intimacy to the surroundings, which Maclean credits to the real world feel of the resort.

“There is a desire by guests to get back to ‘real’ things – the woods and fibres and fabrics,” he said. “There are no plasma televisions here, it forces people to talk and get back together and it forces people to stand back and think about what is important to them.”

But perhaps the last word on the resort’s intangible quality should come from Le Calvez who says that the mantra of the resort has always been that guests can do what they want, when they want.

This should become the definition of luxury for the new age.

Chris Jackson was a guest of Ratua Private Island.