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The spy who loved the Americas

Steve McKennaThe West Australian
Sugarloaf mountain cable car, Rio de Janeiro.
Camera IconSugarloaf mountain cable car, Rio de Janeiro. Credit: Steve McKenna/Supplied

It’s fitting that Jamaica, and its jungly inland waterways and palm-fringed beaches, will feature in the upcoming 25th official Bond movie, No Time To Die. For it was on this Caribbean island that Ian Fleming hunkered down to pen his original 007 stories, naming his protagonist after James Bond, a Philadelphia-born ornithologist who had become spellbound by the birdlife in the West Indies.

Daniel Craig as James Bond in No Time to Die.
Camera IconDaniel Craig as James Bond in No Time to Die. Credit: Unknown/Supplied

GoldenEye, Fleming’s former tropical getaway, has grown into an upscale resort on Jamaica’s north coast, comprising a collection of villas, cottages and beach huts set around a rainforest and a lagoon.

A perfect book to read while staying here is Matthew Parker’s Goldeneye: Where Bond Was Born. It charts the life and times of 007 and its mastermind, who, for two months every year, from 1946 to his death 18 years later, lived at GoldenEye.

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Special packages can be booked, giving guests the chance to peruse inside Fleming’s old writing retreat and to visit the nearby beach where one of the most iconic Bond movie scenes was shot: the one where a bikini-clad Ursula Andress, as shell diver Honey Ryder, emerges from the sea, spied on by Connery’s 007, in the first Bond flick, Dr No.

Elsewhere in the Caribbean, you can plunge into, and snorkel in, the Thunderball Grotto — a limestone cave on the west coast of Staniel Cay in the Bahamas that was used in the 1965 Bond movie.

A short hop across the Straits of Florida brings you to Key West, where in Licence to Kill, Timothy Dalton’s 007 has his licence revoked by M (“a farewell to arms”, he calls it). The quip was a nod to the fact that filming took place at the Ernest Hemingway Home and Museum, where the American writer once resided. You can explore this French colonial-style property — and its lush gardens — on public tours, but watch where you’re walking. Around 50 polydactyl (six-toed) felines, descendants of Hemingway’s cats, live on the premises.

Miami Beach.
Camera IconMiami Beach. Credit: Steve McKenna/Supplied

Continue your journey up Florida’s east coast and stay at the Fontainebleau Miami Beach hotel, where, in Goldfinger, Bond caught his foe cheating at cards by the pool. A celebrity magnet since 1954 — it drew the likes of Frank Sinatra and the Rat Pack — the Fontainebleau remains a stand-out on the Miami Beach strip. It’s had a face-lift of late, with contemporary chandeliers by artist Ai Weiwei and hip bars and eateries serving steak and seafood and modern Cantonese.

If you continue heading west on a Bond-themed American road trip, you can pit stop in New Orleans, a key location in Live and Let Die (perhaps you’ll go for a boat trip, like Bond, through the alligator-strewn waters of the Louisiana bayous and swamps?).

Further west, take a spin along the neon-drenched strip of Las Vegas, and try your luck at the gaming tables of the Circus Circus casino, like Bond in Diamonds Are Forever. Moore’s stint as 007 ended in A View to A Kill, with him gripping to an out-of-control fire-truck on the hilly streets of San Francisco before crashing a blimp airship into the Golden Gate Bridge. Our advice: stick to riding the city’s historic streetcars and taking helicopter trips over the bay.

For the past 25 years, Bond aficionados have made a beeline for the Arecibo Observatory in the US Caribbean territory of Puerto Rico. Dubbed “El Radar”, it doubled as the villain’s jungle-shrouded Cuban lair in GoldenEye, but it’s currently closed to visitors, having collapsed in December (it’s supposedly going to be rebuilt, so watch this space). One of the most vivid passages of recent Bond films was the Day of the Dead parade in Spectre. Each November, you can (normally) do likewise, rubbing shoulders with crowds in skeleton masks and costumes in the streets of Mexico City.

Sugarloaf mountain cable car, Rio de Janeiro.
Camera IconSugarloaf mountain cable car, Rio de Janeiro. Credit: Steve McKenna/Supplied

In South America, Rio de Janeiro was another exotic Bond locale. Enjoy vistas of the so-called Marvellous City on a cable-car ride up Sugarloaf mountain. It’s likely to be more relaxing than 007’s trip with Holly Goodhead in Moonraker (the cable car was sabotaged by his metal-toothed nemesis Jaws).

Bolivia is meant to be the location for the explosive finale of Quantum of Solace — but it was really shot in neighbouring Chile (more specifically in the parched, other-worldly landscapes of the Atacama Desert). Cameras rolled at the ESO Paranal Observatory, which is perched 2635m above sea level and billed as the world’s most advanced optical observatory. Free tours of the facility usually run every Saturday, but you can’t stay at the observatory’s “eco hotel” which, in the movie, was the villain’s hideout but is actually a residence for scientists and engineers, earning the moniker “a boarding house on Mars” due to its Martian-esque surroundings.

The port city of Antofagasta, 90 minutes away by road, has good Pacific Ocean-facing hotels, but for the desert experience, with universe-class stargazing, make the bumpy four-and-a-half hour drive to San Pedro de Atacama. This quirky middle-of-nowhere town has an array of sleeping options, from B&Bs in low-rise adobe buildings to ultra-luxurious lodges where you could imagine Bond feeling very much at home.

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