FORMOSAN TOUCH
AT EVERGREEN INTERNATIONAL HOTELS, GUESTS WILL FIND A RELAXING ENVIRONMENT IN WHICH TO WORK AND PLAY.
For over 20 years, Evergreen International Hotels has welcomed business and leisure travelers in a variety of locations. Although it counts overseas properties in Paris, Penang, Bangkok, and Shanghai, the hotel chain is best known for those on its home island of Taiwan. The Evergreen Laurel Hotel Taichung has 354 rooms near the city’s main leisure and entertainment spots, such as Fengjia Night Market. The property includes a variety of dining venues, and travelers can take a dip in the outdoor pool, keep in shape at the fitness center, or make use of its spa facilities.
Situated in downtown Keelung, the high- rise Evergreen Laurel Hotel
Keelung occupies a prime waterfront position in Taiwan’s second- largest port city. Its 140 rooms offer modern comforts with mountain vistas or sweeping harbor views. While the hotel is an ideal venue for business events, guests can take excursions to Yehliu Geopark and the historic gold mining towns of Jiufen and Jinguashi. At its sister property in the Taiwanese capital, each room of the
Evergreen Laurel Hotel Taipei maintains an ambient noise level below 40 decibels, ensuring a good night’s sleep. The property is just a fiveminute walk from Songjiang Nanjing MRT station in the bustling district of Zhongshan, near several museums, Xingtian Temple, and Guanghua Digital Plaza – Taiwan’s biggest electronics and computer mall. The modern Evergreen Plaza Hotel is the first five- star hotel in Tainan, offering 197 rooms in a convenient location next to Tainan Cultural Center and the 15- story Durban Department Store. The grounds of Barclay Memorial Park are a short walk away, offering a break from the varied shopping, dining, and cultural experiences. Near the island’s east coast in Yilan County, the five-star Evergreen Resort
Hotel Jiaosi features 231 European- and Asian-style suites and 20 houses, each with its own hot-spring-fed bath. Guests are welcome to use the nano-milk bath, Japanese ganbanyoku (stone bath), the large outdoor hot-spring swimming pool, and the rooftop hot-spring spa pool. The resort is an ideal choice for familyfriendly accommodation in the popular Jiaoxi hot spring area.
Flashing a knowing smile,
my guide Mohammed Elafia ducked under a low branch, releasing a shower of raindrops onto the peaked cowl of his woolen djellaba. Then he disappeared through a tangled lattice of shrubs and bramble into the cork forest. The sky above was a whorl of charcoals and pearl grays, and the morning air here, 500 meters up in Morocco’s Rif Mountains, was chilly. Tender ferns sprouted from the loam, beards of moss dangled from twigs, and delicate purple and red flowers added pinpricks of spring color.
Hearing Mohammed’s son Abdelghani call my name, I scrambled down the wet slope until I spotted him under a cork tree, crawling on his hands and knees toward a chanterelle
Above: Local forager and mushroom expert Mohammed Elafia in the mountains near Chefchaouen. Opposite, from
left: A basketful of chanterelles with wild lavender and other foraged herbs destined for the kitchen; Chefchaouen’s signature blue houses cascade down a hillside.
protruding from sodden leaf litter and acorn shells. Sweeping the base clear with his fingers, he cut around the stem with a paring knife and handed me the mushroom, smooth and a deep golden-yellow. Before placing it in my wicker basket, I inhaled the chanterelle’s pronounced fruity smell and caught strong notes of apricot. Abdelghani and I dug out another dozen or so fungi before moving on in slow pursuit, looking for the dull glint of gold among the woody browns of the forest floor.
As Africa’s northernmost range, the Rif forms an almost impenetrable arc along Morocco’s Mediterranean coast, stretching from Cape Spartel, at the entrance to the Strait of Gibraltar, some 350 kilometers east toward the Algerian border. But it really starts about two hours southeast of Tangier, at Chefchaouen, where the mountains rise up dramatically. The Rif was once called bled es-siba (“land of lawlessness”). Tamer now, the region remains the chief supplier of hashish to Europe. But, little known to most people—including many Moroccans— the forests of the Rif also conceal 35 varieties of edible wild mushrooms.
Mohammed and his sons aren’t guides in the traditional tourism sense. They know the forests intimately because they graze the family’s goats there. And they know their mushrooms, too. Like many other young men in the nearby hamlets, when Abdelghani or his brothers are out with their flock, they sometimes pick up mushrooms to sell to a middleman who sends them on to Casablanca. Chanterelles, porcini, and black trumpets are the easiest to sell, along with valuable matsutake found in the cedar forests higher in the mountains. Some of these are destined for restaurants in Morocco’s largest cities, others for European markets such as La Boqueria in Barcelona, where I live.
A few years ago, while I was working on a Moroccan cookbook, my wife, our two young daughters, and I stayed at Auberge Dardara, a guesthouse and restaurant near Chefchaouen. Joined by the owner, Jaber Elhabibi, and a handful of Moroccan guests from Casablanca and Rabat, we gathered mushrooms with Mohammed and another of his sons, Nafia. In just a few hours we filled our baskets with several varieties, including a type of coral fungus the size of a cauliflower. That visit whetted my appetite, and I had returned to forage during peak season. “You can find mushrooms here all the time,” Mohammed had told me, “but March is the best.”
I enjoy the thrill of the hunt, of venturing into the deepest reaches of the forest in search of wild fungi, but I love the spoils of the effort even more. On this return trip, I had also come
to eat. Once Mohammed, Abdelghani, and I had collected two kilos or so of chanterelles and some porcini with bright yellow undercaps, the three of us headed back up the hill to the road. It wasn’t a great haul, but it was enough for a couple of meals.
Back at the Auberge Dardara, I took off my wet boots and sat down in the dining room for lunch. As I warmed up beside the flickering fire, I nibbled on wrinkled black olives and hunks of leavened bread with a crust coated in wheat chaffing. Soon came small dishes of chilled cooked carrots seasoned with cumin and paprika, a mash of roasted eggplant and red peppers called zaalouk, and fresh goat cheese—blended with olive oil, garlic, and oregano—that was light as mousse. These were followed by bessara, a simple, creamy puréed soup of dried fava beans. When I finished the bowl, I went into the kitchen to watch the chef, Mustapha Zaizoun, prepare the main course, a mushroom omelet.
Mustapha is mute, so the kitchen was almost silent as he used hand signs to give instructions to his two assistants. He thinly sliced some chanterelles, crushed cloves of garlic under the heel of his hand, and then sautéed both with fresh bay leaves. After whisking eggs (from a neighboring farm) with a generous pinch of cumin, he poured them into a skillet. Once they had set, he arranged the mushrooms and garlic on the eggs and added minced parsley and a sprig of rosemary.
A few moments later, Mustapha slid the omelet onto a plate and handed me a fork and knife. I took a bite. The mushrooms were delightfully toothsome, and as for the eggs, nothing better absorbs the flavors of the hills. Before I could eat more, though, Fatima, Mustapha’s assistant, snatched up the plate and insisted I go to the dining room and eat it properly.
As I lingered over a dessert of silken goat’s-milk yogurt topped with heather honey, Dardara’s owner, Jaber, joined me at the table for tea. Born and raised in Tangier, Jaber had returned to this area, where he had spent childhood vacations visiting his grandparents, and opened Dardara in 2000. Quiet and thoughtful, he wears frameless, square-lensed glasses, a