There was no standing room in second class on my train last week, so I got to
stand in first. A real privilege. You overhear a different kind of
conversation in first.
“I know, George. You’re so right. A luxury hotel can get soooooo boring.”
“Terribly, terribly so.” “And, ironically, George, it’s all that luxury, isn’t
it? The fluffy bathrobes. The massaging. The Jacuzzis. Drives me mad.”
“The breakfasts with the omelette chef and the 20 yoghurts and the champagne.
And all the smiling staff. The endless smiling. It gets to you.”
Standing there on the packed 19.37, I began to feel sorry for George and his
friend in their roomy seats. All that overeating and lying around: poor
them. There’s no aim to their holidays.
No peaks and troughs. No point. The trick, of course, is to earn your luxury:
a deluxe weekend at the end of a marathon hike; a fortnight in a tent on a
windswept mountain followed by back-to-back treatments in a five-star spa.
If George were to trek through the desert for a month, eating nothing but
scorpion faeces and drinking nothing but his own urine, he wouldn’t complain
about the fluffy bathrobes waiting at the end of it.
Of course, some people just won’t do the urine-drinking. Too spoilt, you see.
But that’s okay - there is a halfway solution. You base yourself at the
luxury hotel, then, just as the hand-feeding-of-grapes is getting too much,
you vanish into the wilderness for a night. Then, just when the wilderness
is getting too much, you scurry back to the luxury hotel again.
We did this in the Italian Dolomites, and it worked a treat. The luxury hotel
in question was Rosa Alpina, in the swanky little town of San Cassiano, and
it does the spa/smiling/champagne-at-breakfast stuff very well indeed. Its
restaurant has two whole Michelin stars, and some of our fellow guests were
eating there every night... the ones, that is, who weren’t being
helicoptered to Venice for lunch.
They were beyond help. We weren’t: not quite. Two days in, at the point when
our facial muscles were cramping from having to return all the radiant
Alpine smiles, just as our two-year-old was beginning to behave like the son
of a Russian oligarch (“I want caviar, dada, bring me caviar, waaaaaaaa”),
we decided it was time for that shot of wilderness.
When I say wilderness, don’t panic, George. The hotel owns a small chalet high
up the side of an adjacent mountain. On the roughing-it side, it has only a
light bulb’s worth of solar electricity, rainwater taps, mattresses in the
eaves and no satellite television. On the not-really-roughing-it-at-all
side, it has a rack of fancy wines, the same crisp cotton bedding and fancy
toiletries as the hotel and, goddammit, the fluffy bathrobes.
What normally happens is that the guests have a slap-up dinner at the hotel,
then, as darkness falls, they are transferred to the chalet (a precipitous
20-minute 4WD ride away) to sleep it off. Madness. You miss the whole
evening. We decided to really live life on the edge and get transferred
there before dinner.
“We’ll cook our own food on the grill,” I said bravely. So, Hugo Pizzinini,
the third generation of Pizzinini to run Rosa Alpina, asked the kitchens to
prepare a little picnic.
