The Naked Lunch

The news that rocked the naturist world - and much of the media beyond that - this month, was that London would get its own nude restaurant.
A restaurant where not the waiters or only the female waiters would go topless or naked, but where the guests would actually be allowed to disrobe and dine or lunch completely nude.
The idea was so popular that the number of people who registered to reserve a place shot up to 11,000 just within a few days, and has now surpassed 28,000 as I am writing this.
Most of those people will never make it, for the simple reason that The Bunyadi is a limited space operating for a limited time as a "pop-up" restaurant. Gawkers will be thrown out as they should be, and according to the website http://thebunyadi.com, visitors will even hardly see their fellow diners naked because of the interior outlay of the place.
So imagine my surprise to find the first criticism of the place not coming from puritanical or religious sources, but from nobody else than the head of the Dutch naturist federation NFN speaking to a women's magazine.
In the interview with vrouw.nl, Christine Kouman says the location might be wrong for naturism, and no real naturist would feel comfortable eating "in the middle of a busy city." Really, Miss Kouman?
You won't be sitting naked in front of a window for all passersby to see. It won't be a naked Starbucks, where anyone outside will be allowed to peek in and watch everything. As the organizers have said, there will be absolute privacy, and diners at different tables might not even see each other.
As a naturist myself, I was absolutely stunned during my first visit to a naturist resort, in Croatia more than a decade ago, when I was not allowed naked inside its restaurant.
As a result, after I woke up from my naked sleep, I had to put on clothes to go and have breakfast, then return to my room to take my clothes off before heading for the beach. By noon, I would go to my room to wear some clothes to go to lunch, then back to take them off, and the same annoying routine again for dinner. Is that how real naturists want to live? No, when they are at a naturist resort, they want to be naked all the time and wherever they can, weather permitting.
So I think NFN chairwoman Christine Kouman is totally wrong to condemn The Bunyadi initiative. She does have a point when she says that naturists on a nude beach should not be required to put on clothing when they go and order something at the beach bar, but her rejection of the London restaurant is something I cannot agree with.
Just like Spencer Tunick's mass naked photo shoots and the topless equality movement, The Bunyadi might not be true naturism, but as a form of promotion of non-sexual social nudity, it deserves the full support of all true naturists.
The Bunyadi website is http://thebunyadi.com/home.php
The article about Miss Kouman's views - in Dutch - is http://www.telegraaf.nl/vrouw/actueel/25648342/__Naturist_Christine__45____Naakt_dineren_is_geen_naaktrecreatie___.html
A general media article, one of dozens, about The Bunyadi project is http://www.telegraph.co.uk/food-and-drink/restaurants/would-you-dine-at-londons-first-naked-restaurant/
The picture above comes from the Croatia camping website camping.hr and shows guests at the Koversada naturist resort.

I am a Thailand Naturist

Little did I know in December 2011, when I chose the Naturist Association of Thailand as my Real Naturist of the Year 2011, that the organization would take such a flight and that I would join it.
According to its website http://thailandnaturist.com, it now has more than 1,400 members, not just in Thailand, but worldwide. And from now on, that also includes me.
No, I do not live in Thailand, but only four hours flying away, and that's why I joined.
Most Asian countries ban public nudity in all its forms, including the non-sexual social nudity of naturism, which is so popular in other parts of the world, with free nude beaches, resorts, hotels and campings. None of those exist in the Asian country I live in, so my only naturist periods so far have been at home or during short visits to Europe, where I managed to fit in a day at a beach, if the weather happened to cooperate.
Thanks to the NAT, that should now change, because not only is it an organization, it also has succeeded in letting naturist resorts get off the ground in Thailand.
I haven't visited any of them yet, but I have been taking a look at their websites.
There is the Oriental Village in North Thailand's Chiang Mai (www.orientalvillage-chiangmai.com) which looks like paradise, in the middle of rice fields, with a sunny pool and beautiful villas. Speaking on a personal note, its location might be the downside for me. Being remote from the town, it would be difficult to find outside restaurants, while the fact that it also caters to non-naturists might be positive for my non-naturist wife, but not for me.
On the opposite side of the scale, there is the Chan Resort (www.chanresort.com) in busy Pattaya. No problems finding restaurants, shops and nightlife there, I'm sure. The only drawback - and it's a small one - is that it feels a bit locked in. Since there are no naturist beaches, it's not possible to walk along in the sand to the edge of the sea, there's only the swimming pool, which you can see in the picture above.
What sounds great is that the Chan Resort is also the site of an annual international naturist conference, this year on June 4-11. I have not decided yet whether to go. The only such event I attended before, was the International Naturist Federation congress in 2004 at the Croatian resort of Valalta. My biggest disappointment there was that because there was a rule that you had to wear clothes inside the buildings, the whole naturist congress was ... textile! I do hope and expect that will not be the case at the Chan Resort.
The third resort that caught my attention was the Sala Villas (www.salavillas.com), also in Pattaya close to the Chan Resort, which does not have real pictures on its site yet. It has the same advantages as the other Pattaya place, though one practical drawback is that for some reason it does not accept credit cards. In contrast to the Oriental Village, it is very strict about being nude inside the resort, which is good for me, bad for my non-naturist wife.
Having made those remarks, I must praise all of those resorts for doing a great job in launching naturism in one of Asia's most beautiful countries.
With a lessening of political tension on the horizon, I am hopeful that I might soon be able to stay at one of them. The Chan Resort might be my first choice, during the conference or not, but I want to give the others a try too.
Thailand was already a frequent destination for my travels around 2006, and the NAT is likely to put it back near the top from 2014 on.

The Allure of Naturism

I started out by thinking that I would have restrict myself to writing about the bikini pictures of Julia Roberts, Naomi Watts and Rihanna. Then a new US television series came along, 'Don't Trust that B**** in Apartment 23,' where the female lead does her ironing in the nude. I can't watch US television where I am, so I can't actually tell you how much was shown and in what context, though the title sounds negative. Then there was Melody Thornton - a former member of the Pussycat Dolls, the media tell me - who showed up at some Hollywood event wearing a see-through dress and nothing underneath.

Naturism? No, just different shades of nudity.
Then there came Allure. A magazine I don't follow, but which has the custom of asking famous people - women, of course - to show up naked for artistic pictures. The person honored with the magazine cover was nobody else but our 2011 Celebrity Naturist of the Year - German supermodel and Project Runway host Heidi Klum.
Also featured in the Allure naked photo list are actress Debra Messing, Maria Menounos and some other celebrities I was not familiar with, and Taraji P. Henson.
Miss Henson was nominated for an Academy Award for one of my favorite movies of the past few years, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, where she played Brad Pitt's mother. Apart from that, she comes across as someone who likes nudity like a naturist would.
Miss Henson says she likes walking around in the nude in her New York apartment and asks whether she's on a nude beach before taking her top off.
Miss Henson, let me tell you this. You can take your top off at any beach you like, because being topless - wearing a monokini as Europeans say - is not nudity. You can do so at any European beach. At a nude beach, you can take everything off and be totally free. We would love Taraji P. Henson to visit Europe and spend at least a day on a real naturist beach, without the paparazzi in tow.
The Oscar nominee comes closest to the spirit of naturism. The allure of being naked is not exhibitionism or press coverage, it is the feeling of being completely free, of feeling the sunshine and the water on your skin, of being close to nature and to yourself.
Congratulations to Allure, since, while not being a naturist magazine, you might have done a service to naturism by launching this project.
To be a true naturist, you don't have to be a celebrity, you don't have to have a body like Heidi Klum or Taraji P. Henson, you just have to be yourself and feel comfortable as a human being in the middle of nature.
Turning away from Allure to my own picture and the ones in the two previous postings: they hail from a tourism brochure around 1991 for the region of Istria, then in Yugoslavia, now Croatia. The country has been a destination for mass naturist tourism since the late 1960s.

Nude Beaches

It's summer time, particularly hot summer time, so the media need extra copy to fill their web sites and pages. One simple ploy is to come up with lists: the best this and the top that.
It's nice to find that naturism can also be the subject of such a practice. Belgian Dutch-language newspaper De Standaard, one of the top papers in Belgium, did just that. It presented a top-10 of the best nude beaches in Europe. Unfortunately, the list featured not just nude beaches, and certainly not the best.
First, let's make clear what a nude beach is. It's a beach where all people can enjoy the sun and the water while not wearing any clothes. However, the newspaper mixed up beaches, naturist resort and mixed beaches.
Showing up the unfamiliarity of its editors with naturism, it also went for the most famous places with the general public, including some locations real naturists would stay away from.
The choice of Cap d'Agde, a huge naturist town in the south of France, as its number one immediately revealed the paper's lack of expertise and touched off a furious debate among readers. First of all, the place is not a beach, it's a huge town. Secondly, it has grown infamous for some goings-on of a sexual nature that are completely incompatible with true naturism. In other words, the paper completely misfired.
Another poor example is the choice of Paradise and Super Paradise beaches on the Greek island of Mykonos. Again, two famous beaches, famous because non-naturists know about it, and too many of them go there just to watch naturists, not to enjoy naturists themselves.
The 'best nude beaches in Europe' should only include beaches with the following characteristics: they are nice and comfortable, relatively easy to reach, and provide a quiet environment for all men, women and children who want to spend their day on the beach completely naked from morning until evening. Naturists should not have the feeling that too many people are just on the beach to watch others naked and not be naked themselves.
A real nude beach is also not a resort. It is not locked off from the outside world, it does not require a membership card. Don't misunderstand me, I am in favor of all-naturist and naturists-only resorts, but they don't belong in a list of nude 'beaches.' The beginning naturist will want to find a real 'nude beach' first before he or she tries a resort.
One of the resorts on the newspaper list is Valalta in the Croatian town of Rovinj close to Italy. Again, it is not a beach, it's a complete resort with camping and rooms. My disappointment with Valalta was that some parts were only accessible if you wore clothes, i.e. the main restaurant and the supermarket. It was annoying to have to change in and out of clothes all the time if you wanted to go from one to the other. Again, it was a nice place, and I certainly would recommend it to naturists for a stay of more than a week, but it is not a 'nude beach,' it's a resort.
I read the article in De Standaard and I just had to write this piece because of my dissatisfaction with the whole list. Nevertheless, if it moves people to try out naturism, good for them, only I would try other places than most of the ones they recommend. Even small beaches in the nearby Netherlands can be more fun than those mentioned on the list.
Anyway, thanks to De Standaard for naming naturism as a holiday option and for the above picture.

Legal Progress in Italy

Italy seems to be making progress with legislation allowing naturism, but first let's turn to other topics in the latest edition of Info Naturista, the magazine of the Italian Naturist Federation Fenait which I receive on a regular basis. From the travails of our Italian friends, we can learn a lot about how naturism in Asia might evolve.

In his foreword, chairman Gianfranco Ribolzi mentions the year 2009 as the year of 'keeping afloat' because there was only a slight increase in membership.

However, in another article we read that worldwide, about 25 million people practice naturism, i.e. non-sexual public nudity such as swimming and sunbathing naked. So if you are in a naturism-unfriendly country in Asia, don't think you are just part of a small minority. 25 million people are already with you.

The International Naturist Federation has awarded its first world quality certificate for a naturist resort, and it went to Valalta in Rovinj, a picturesque town in the far north of Croatia, close to Slovenia and Italy. I had the pleasure of staying there back in 2004. The certificate system will be expanded to include all of Europe within the next three years.

Back in Italy, the biggest event concerning naturists has been the formation of a youth group, the Giovani Italiani Naturisti or GIN, putting to rest the often American perception that naturists are all elderly people. The group addresses naturists between the ages of 16 and 30 and will take part in a European naturist youth meet in Hamburg this year.

On the topic of legal progress, Gino Palumbo writes a report in the magazine about the different legislative proposals to allow naturism in Italy. One version wants to hide naturism too much in places "where non-naturists and children cannot see them." In fact, despite this formulation, many naturists I saw on beaches in Western Europe and at Valalta and Croatia are in fact young couples with children, and like parents everywhere, they should have the right to spend their holidays with their children, naked or not. Other problems with the new legislation include a possible bias in favor of large commercial resort operations, versus the free beaches without amenities and the small campings often run by grassroots naturists.

Palumbo also emphasizes the economic benefits of naturism. Each summer, Italian naturists hold an "exodus" to Croatia in the East and Corsica in the West to find naturist beaches and resorts, he says, and many North-European naturists just avoid Italy altogether and spend their Euros in other countries. The author points out rightly that Italy would be foolish to turn those tourists away, just like it would catastrophical if it didn't want tourists visit its churches and castles. Italy will make a fool of itself if it sends the police on to the beaches to persecute innocent naturists, he says.

One of Palumbo's suggestions is that each municipality with beaches should set aside a minimum of 5 or 10 percent of its coastline - along seas, lakes or rivers - to naturism. The measure should not only apply to beaches, but also to parks or other areas suitable for naturism, with naturist associations involved in the management of those areas.

The magazine further also mentions that a new naturist association for the Venice area saw an increase in membership of 56 percent - though it does not mention how many people that actually means - and that the group has been active in organizing sauna and dinner meetings.

As usual, the magazine concludes with a non-naturist tourism report - a visit to the ornate Stupinigi hunting lodge near Turin.

Over the next few weeks, I hope to be reporting on this blog about the next edition of Info Naturista, and more importantly, about new naturist associations in Asian countries.

Italy Again

The latest copy of the Italian naturist magazine Info Naturista arrived in my mailbox.

Inside, a far too short report telling me that the Croatian naturist resort of Valalta celebrated its 40th anniversary. Forty years, that means it was opened in 1968, in what was then the communist country of Yugoslavia. Communism always used to have this image of being very conservative and prude, but Yugoslavia was certainly an exception, welcoming naturists with open arms that long ago.

I had the pleasure of staying at Valalta, near the picturesque town of Rovinj in northern Croatia, in 2004. It was a great experience, and I only wished there were resorts like that closer to East Asia.

Back to the Italian magazine: other articles mention a swimming competition, the naturist author Pino Fiorella, a proposal for a law on naturism at the Italian parliament - now there's good news - the publication of a book on naturism in Italian by Monia D'Ambrosio under the title "Il Corpo Nudo - Sociologia della Nudita" or "The Nude Body - Sociology of Nudity" which you can find at the publisher http://www.sylviaedizioni.it/. The magazine also has a theoretical article about naturism which also describes the early history of the movement in Europe in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The battle to keep a beach with the poetic name of Lido di Dante near the historic city of Ravenna on Italy's east coast in naturist hands is apparently still continuing, with Info Naturista publishing an open letter to the city's mayor. The campaign will sound familiar to activists worried about similar changes for some famous U.S., Canadian or Australian beaches. The magazine closes with some funny cartoons, including one in which a naturist wife berates her husband for watching a TV show with footage of 'textile' women dancing.