Well, here´s an article on Sylt, the German island where Nic will be shooting the movie next January... Sounds like an incredible place.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Of course you've never heard of Sylt. That's because the Germans don't want you to. Nick Redman discovers why.

What do you think of when you hear the words "the Riviera"? Is it the snap, crackle and pop of champagne, the deep heat on the breeze from the ocean or the magnificence of the yellow- trousered yachties scrambling for pole promenade position?

Now add the word "German" and what happens? The German Riviera. That's thrown you, hasn't it?

Don't worry, you're not alone. Who associates Germany with sun-splashed platinum sands, after all? Only those who have been to Sylt (pronounced "Zooolt"), Germany's most exclusive resort, and the country's "best-kept summer-holiday secret", according to the American glossy magazine Travel & Leisure. Recent sightings here include Claudia Schiffer, Boris Becker and Roman Polanski, and a quick glance along its shoreline will tell you why.

Sylt is an unmanicured beauty. Spooned like a 24-mile-long dollop of pancake batter on the blue sea, it comes with thatched villages and horizons of pink wildflowers or purple heather. Bosomy dunes romp along the west coast and the skies are vast and empty, skewered here and there by a lonely lighthouse.

To ensure its secrecy, it's suitably remote. In fact, it's in the middle of nowhere - making it the ideal atmospheric location for Polanski's forthcoming thriller The Ghost, starring Pierce Brosnan, which begins filming early next year. Based on the novel by Robert Harris, it is set in Martha's Vineyard, Massachusetts, but Polanski, due to a certain misdemeanour with a minor, hasn't set foot on American soil for 30 years. Which is why he looked to Europe for the next best thing, and found it here.

Presumably, Polanski didn't take my meandering route to get here. Flying to Hamburg, I travelled for four hours by train through grassy Schleswig Holstein, past endless fields of dairy-toffee cattle and wind turbines, north to the sea. The carriages rattled over a causeway to Sylt's capital, Westerland, and by the time I'd reached the clipped hedges of Keitum village and my hotel, the Benen-Diken-Hof - all lawns and urban-smart bedrooms - I had slowed nicely to Sylt time.

The island first made it big in the 1850s, its clean air a tonic for bronchitis sufferers, who came to recuperate in grand hotels. Before that, the islanders fished glumly for a living or scarpered in search of a more glamorous life - toiling for a Friesian shipping company, for example. Now, everywhere you look, you'll find stores such as Hermes unveiling a new boutique in a twee rose cottage.

For all the wind-blown rusticity, the island glitters, not least with Michelin stars (five in all). The Dorint Sol'ring Hof restaurant (00 49 46-5183 6200, www. soelring-hof.de), on the surf-battered sunset coast at Rantum, has two. They'll pick you up from your hotel in a midnight-blue 1956 Rolls-Royce and whisk you away for Dom Perignon and caviar. I watched slender women in white linen murmuring to wizened CEO husbands - not necessarily their own - and, 400 courses later, decided to call it a night.

Sylt takes its food seriously - there's an annual gourmet festival in January that centres on a "safari" of the island's best restaurants - but you don't need a fortune to eat well. Rising next day to flotillas of fluffy clouds, I hired a bicycle (the preferred means of transport) and wobbled off in the warm morning air to the village of Kampen for a spot of cake.

Kampen is Sylt's Designer Central: part Rodeo Drive, part Reigate and apparently conjured up by JRR Tolkien. Branches of Bulgari, Joop! and Louis Vuitton inhabit cutesy thatched houses with surreally pointed roofs. The main drag, "Whisky Street", is lined with curious after-dark haunts, including Pony (514 2182, www.pony-kampen.de), a "yeah baby" nightclub evidently frozen cryogenically during Emma Peel's heyday.

Different, yet equally bizarre, is cake paradise Die Kupferkanne (514 1010, www.kupferkanne-sylt.de), on the edge of Kampen. The name translates as the Copper Kettle, and it's a warren of rooms within a second world war bunker, beautified by gardens of high hedges shielding tables from the wind. The wraparound sea views below were almost as outstanding as the enormous slices of home-made kuchen, laced with chocolate, cream and vanilla.

The clean air (and the cake) helps to explain why I took to pedalling around Sylt. One afternoon, I found a cycle path across the island and bowled over to Westerland; next day, I battled north, bent against breezes, to the thread thin Ellenbogenspitze peninsula, "Elbow Point". Wilderness dunes stretched to infinity, littered with scallop shells and razor clams, waiting to be gathered by distant stooping silhouettes.

The Danish island of Romo lurked mysteriously just across the waters, but, surrounded by strewn seaweed and spectacular towering sand-scapes, I was somewhere else - Cape Cod, perhaps. By the time I'd reached Sansibar (5196 4656, www.sansibar-sylt.de), the fashionable beach bar further south, I was on the French Caribbean island of St Barts: there was 1966 Dom Perignon Oenotheque for Pounds 800 a bottle, and candles flickered on pretty faces gazing at the dunes beyond.

Only on leaving did I spot a sign on the outside wall that brought me back down to Deutschland with a bump: "Mercedes-Benz parking only. Others towed at owner's expense."

I think it was a German Riviera joke, but I was happier than ever to be on a bike.

Nick Redman travelled to Sylt as a guest of Dertour and the German National Tourist Office

Travel brief

Getting there: there are no direct flights to Sylt, but Air Berlin (0871 500 0737, www.airberlin.com) has services there from Stansted, with a plane change in Dusseldorf. Alternatively, fly to Hamburg with British Airways (0844 493 0787, www.ba.com), EasyJet (www.easyjet.com), Flybe (www.flybe.com) or Air Berlin (as above), then take a 50-minute flight to Sylt with Syltair (www.syltair.de; Pounds 158 each way).

The train is a cheaper option: the three-hour trip from Hamburg starts at Pounds 23 through Deutsche Bahn (0871 880 8066, www.bahn.co.uk).

Where to stay: the Hotel Benen-Diken-Hof (00 49 46-519 3830, www.benen- diken hof.de), in Keitum, has a spa and doubles from Pounds 157, B&B. Or try Walter's Hof (519 8960, www.walters-hof.de) in Kampen, which has sea views, a gourmet restaurant and one-bedroom apartments from Pounds 229, B&B.

Packages: Dertour (0871 231 3355, www.dertour.co.uk) has four nights at the four-star Hotel Sylter Domizil from Pounds 489pp, B&B, including flights from Heathrow to Hamburg and rail transfers to Sylt.

More information: contact the German National Tourist Office (020 7317 0908, www.germany-tourism.co.uk) or visit www.sylt.de.

(C) Times Newspapers Ltd, 2008