Becoming a real-world Bond in 7 easy steps

Bond in 7 easy steps. Go on the following seven breaks and we promise you'll be as cool as a superspy... well, almost - reports The Times

Bond is back, with the craggy rough diamond Daniel Craig in the title role. When Casino Royale opens on Friday, men of all ages will once again fantasise about being 007. You will see them leaving the cinema smoothing their hair, straightening imaginary bow ties and patting their jackets where in another life they might have tucked a Walther PPK.

But why dream when you can do it for real? Simply book these seven trips and, by the time you’ve done them all, you will have the flair, finesse and a little of the charm of agent Bond.

1 DRINK LIKE BOND

Although Bond is best known for drinking martinis (three measures of Gordon’s, one of vodka, half of Kina Lillet vermouth and a slice of lemon peel, wrote Ian Fleming), it is his knowledge of champagne that marks him out as a man of the world.

When Sean Connery picks up a bottle to defend himself against Dr No, the villain warns him: “That’s a Dom Pérignon ’55. It would be a pity to break it.” Connery replies: “I prefer the ’53 myself.”

According to the fan site mi6-hq.com, Bond is seen quaffing champers 30 times, compared with 19 for martini. He’s loyal: after flirting with Dom Pérignon, he settles on Bollinger as his favourite brand.

The place to learn about champagne is, of course, Champagne. Arblaster & Clarke (01730 263111, www.winetours. co.uk) has been running upmarket escorted tours to the region for almost 20 years, and has a four-night trip aimed at aficionados. Held only once a year, it includes lunch at Bollinger, dinner at Pol Roger and visits to Krug, Moët & Chandon and Louis Roederer. You travel by Eurostar — in first class, of course — and stay at a manor-house hotel owned by Goutorbe, a small champagne house. The trip includes breakfasts, six other meals, some at Michelin-starred restaurants, and tutored tastings of vintage champagnes with the wine writer Robert Joseph. The next departure is on November 5, 2007, and costs £1,949pp.

2 GAMBLE LIKE BOND

Bond’s game of choice is chemin de fer, a variation of baccarat. Elegant and deceptive, it is a simple card game where a “player” and a “banker” play hands on which other gamblers around the table may lay bets. Because the odds are relatively good, and because baccarat is often played in private salons away from busy casino floors, it tends to attracts high rollers.

Fleming crafted the plot of Casino Royale around an epic high-stakes game of chemin de fer between Bond and the villain, Le Chiffre, in the fictional French resort of Royale-les-Eaux. The new movie sets the game in Montenegro and, instead of baccarat, has the characters playing Texas hold ’em poker, a game more familiar to modern audiences.

You can learn to play poker or baccarat on the internet, but that’s not really Bond’s style, is it? Better go to a casino. Several casinos offer beginners’ classes, including Atlantis (00 1 242 363 3000, www.atlantis.com), on Paradise Island, in the Bahamas, which holds free daily lessons in both poker and baccarat to introduce you to the rules, basic plays and advanced techniques. The length and depth of lessons are up to you.

The hotel, which features briefly in the movie, is offering a four-night 007 Adventure package, available until February 10. It includes a private baccarat lesson, a helicopter trip to dive for pearl oysters, snorkelling, limousine airport transfers, breakfast and dinner. Book by December 20; from £544pp. Opodo (0870 277 0090, www.opodo.co.uk) has direct flights to Nassau from Heathrow on Virgin Atlantic; from £418.

If you want the gambling without the other bells and whistles, you can get a week, room-only, at Atlantis from £769, including Virgin Atlantic flights, with Best at Travel (0870 709 3035, www.bestattravel.co.uk) if you book by November 20. Bond buffs may experience occasional déjà vu in the Bahamas — Casino Royale is the sixth 007 flick to be filmed there. Location details can be found at www.imdb.com.

If you’re serious about learning poker, you might also consider Las Vegas. The Venetian (00 1 702 414 1000, www.venetian.com), one of the city’s swankiest hotels, has a huge poker room with 39 tables, free lessons on weekdays and minimum stakes on rookies’ tables of just £2.15. It also offers baccarat in semi-private salons. Double rooms start at about £210, without meals, but spend at least six hours per day at the poker tables and the rate drops to £99. Fly direct from Gatwick to Las Vegas with Virgin Atlantic (0870 574 7747, www.virgin-atlantic.com); from £386.

3 DRIVE LIKE BOND

Being Bond means getting behind the wheel of a very expensive, very fast car and driving it like an idiot. In Casino Royale, Daniel Craig takes delivery of a new, custom-built Aston Martin DBS. You won’t be able to buy one at your local dealer, but the car is essentially a souped-up version of Aston’s six-litre DB9, which boasts an alarming top speed of 186mph.

If you can’t afford to buy a DB9 — they cost £112,000 new — you can at least drive one at Loughborough’s Prestwold Hall, a handsome country house with an airfield out the back. After a safety briefing and short demonstration drive with an instructor at the wheel, you are let loose on the airfield for three knee-trembling laps. The half-day jolly costs £149 with Red Letter Days (0870 444 4004, www.redletterdays.co.uk). Stay in Nottingham, at the stylish Lace Market Hotel (0115 852 3232, www.lacemarkethotel.co.uk; doubles from £119, room-only).

For a workout without the walnut dash and leather trim, Knockhill Racing Circuit (01383 723337, www.knockhill.co.uk), near Dunfermline, will help
you find your inner Bond on a full-day Driver Plus Experience. You start with a one-to-one advanced driving lesson on the public highway, followed by a skidpan course (particularly handy if you just have to chase villains around a frozen lake, as Bond did in Die Another Day). As a finale to the £275 day, you use your own car to thrash around 25 laps of the circuit.

It may not be advisable to bomb home on the motorway straight away, so spend a night in Dunfermline at Rooms at 29 Bruce Street (0845 833 1300, www.29brucestreet. co.uk; singles £70, doubles £95). Or relax at the family-run 10-room Davaar House Hotel (01383 721886, www.davaar-house-hotel.com), which charges £55 for singles and £85 for doubles, including full Scottish breakfast.

4 CHARM WOMEN LIKE BOND

There is one accessory no aspiring Bond should be without — a Bond girl. But how to snag one? If you’ve read The Game, the bestseller by Neil Strauss, you’ll know about the “seduction community”, a group of men who swap online pick-up tips based on the premise that a man does not need to be especially good-looking to charm beautiful women.

A key player in the community is Wayne “Juggler” Elise, who heads Charisma Arts (00 1 310 484 4722, www.charismaarts.com), a company that claims to have turned thousands of inept men into smooth-talking lotharios.

Charisma Arts runs regular Charm School Boot Camps, coaching men in body language, “storytelling” and how to put across the right “vibe”. During the three-day course, they are taken to bars and nightclubs to test the techniques on unwary women. The key to success, says Elise, is to “internalise the beliefs of a man who is naturally charismatic”.

You can attend the boot camp in any of half a dozen cities, including San Francisco, Las Vegas and London. But the most appealing venue is the capital of chat, New York City, where courses are held once or twice a month at a cost of £865.

If you’re on the pull, you’ll want a cool crib. In Fleming’s Live and Let Die, Bond took a top-floor suite at the St Regis (00 800 3254 5454, www. stregis.com), on East 55th Street and Fifth Avenue, described by the author as “the best hotel in New York”. The King Cole Bar in the St Regis — one of several bars that claim to be the birthplace of the bloody mary — is a snug venue to celebrate your conquests. . . or drown your sorrows.

Doubles at the St Regis start at £550, room-only, or £388 if you book online at HotelClub.net. British Airways (0870 850 9850, www.ba.com) has flights from Heathrow to JFK or Newark in January from £268, including taxes.


5 DRESS LIKE BOND

If you’re hoping to step into Bond’s well-polished shoes, you will almost certainly need to work on your appearance, starting with a new suit. In his novels, Fleming declined to name 007’s tailor, but he did specify that Bond favoured lightweight, single-breasted suits in navy serge. For a golfing weekend in the country, he would pack a hound’s-tooth check jacket.

Since Pierce Brosnan took over the role, Bond’s suits have been made by Brioni, a family-run Italian tailor. The Brioni look is sharp — wide in the shoulder and narrow in the waist, but lighter and softer than you’d get in Savile Row.

The suits aren’t cheap. You can buy off the peg at the London branch in Bruton Street (020 7491 7700, www.brioni.it; from £1,900), but if you want bespoke, you’ll need to fork out several thousand and spend at least two weeks in Milan kicking your heels between fittings.

A more alluring option is to jet off to Hong Kong and be measured up by one of the world’s most famous tailors. Manu Melwani — known to everybody as Sam — will not only kit you out with a superb handmade suit in high-quality fabric within 48 hours, he’ll do it for a bargain £250. Sam’s satisfied customers include Brosnan and Roger Moore, so you can rest assured that you’re getting James Bond quality at M&S prices. Sam’s (00 852 2367 9423, www.samstailor.com) is at 94 Nathan Road, Kowloon.

You shouldn’t have any problems filling your time in Hong Kong. Stay at the Philippe Starck-designed JIA (00 852 3196 9000, www.jiahongkong.com), in Causeway Bay, which has sleek designer studios for a bargain £135, B&B, then chow down with local office workers for some of the world’s best dim sum at Maxim’s Palace (00 852 2521 1303), a startlingly cacophonous red-and-gold dining room beside the Star Ferry terminal.

At night, the lights come on. Hong Kong’s neon-drenched skyline is never short of spectacular, but now, every evening at 8pm, a high-tech synchronised light show is projected onto the sky from 30 skyscrapers on both sides of the harbour. Watch it from the top deck of the Star Ferry (the fare is a mere 15p) or from Felix, a super-swanky bar on the 28th floor of the Peninsula Hotel, where you can sink cocktails until 2am.

6 SPY LIKE BOND

Your next assignment takes you to a stock-car racing stadium in Brafield, near Northampton. Not, at first sight, the most salubrious venue for a weekend in the country, but bear with us. You’re off to see a man called Dave Thomas — none of that one-letter codename malarkey in Northants — a former SAS operative and covert-operations expert who for the past 15 years has run his own corporate surveillance company. “Essentially, I’m a commercial spy,” says Thomas. “I do a lot of work in business intelligence, and we keep tabs on politicians, pop stars or suspected terrorists.”

In his spare time, Thomas runs spy-training courses and employs a team of instructors, all ex-forces, who will teach you how to keep tabs on baddies — and, if necessary, kill them.

You’ll be introduced to a gleaming array of weaponry, including an AK-47 assault rifle and a Heckler & Koch MP5 sub-machinegun. Because this is the East Midlands, not downtown Basra, you won’t be using live ammunition. Instead, the guns have been adapted to fire 6mm plastic ball bearings at a low velocity — enough to give someone a nasty bruise.

You’ll learn how to fire the weapons and how to draw and aim a pistol in a confined space, and you’ll have a go at hitting targets using an air rifle fitted with a telescopic sight. Other elements to the course include CQB (Close Quarter Battle) techniques and demonstrations of how covert filming and listening devices work.

After a quick lunch, you head to the racetrack and get behind the wheel of a big car — a Ford Granada or a Vauxhall Senator. You’ll then be taught a series of anti-ambush driving techniques, including a handbrake turn and a J-turn (where you reverse at high speed, spin the car through 180 degrees, then race off in first gear. According to Thomas, it’s easy).

The full-day course is held twice a month and costs £199, through Spy Games (0845 130 3007, www.spy-games.co.uk). Stay at Fawsley Hall (01327 892000, www.fawsleyhall.com), a grand manor house near Daventry, which has double rooms from £199, B&B, and dinner, bed and breakfast on selected dates for £99pp. Or try Nobottle Grange (01604 759494, www.nobottlegrange.co.uk), a converted farmhouse on the Althorp Estate that has doubles from £60, B&B.

While in Northampton, book a visit to 78 Derngate (01604 603407, www.78derngate.org.uk), a Georgian house remodelled by Charles Rennie Mackintosh in 1917 and recently restored. The outside might not look anything special, but the bold, distinctive interiors show Laurence Llewelyn-Bowen how it’s really done.

7 DIVE LIKE BOND

It’s time to slip out of your dinner suit and into a wetsuit. Diving is an essential tool in the 007 armoury — you never know when you’ll need to sneak up on a villain’s yacht in the dead of night, or wrestle underwater with a psychotic, knife-wielding woman, with unfeasibly muscular thighs, in
a skimpy bikini.

You’ll need training. If you already have a basic five-day open-water dive course, now’s the time to move up to the next level. To become a Padi Advanced diver, you need to complete five missions: a deep dive, a navigation dive and any three from a selection of others, including a wreck dive, a night dive, an altitude dive and a drift dive. You can just about squeeze the course into two days, but you’ll have more fun, and more time for cocktails and carousing, if you allow a week and head for somewhere in barely charted waters.

One of the hottest new destinations for scuba nuts is in Indonesia: Manado, on the northwest coast of Sulawesi, is a stretch of coastline where volcanoes and rainforest meet the clear waters and coral reefs of the Bunaken National Park. Highlights include the Lembeh Strait, a hotbed of marine life where scientists regularly unearth species new to mankind.

Stay at the secluded Tasik Ria Resort, which has 34 bungalows on a pristine beach — an exotic location worthy of 007 — and a team of expert instructors on site. A week’s B&B, including the Padi course, flights and a night in Singapore, costs £1,114pp with Regaldive (0870 220 1777, www.regaldive.co.uk).

Incidentally, if you really want to look the part underwater, you’ll need to fork out the best part of £1,800 for an Omega Seamaster watch, which can withstand depths of 1,000ft. Bond’s version came with a rather nifty device for remotely detonating explosives.

Discuss this news here...