Consuming Interest

Holidays Abroad

By LESLIE ADRIAN

NEVER make the mistake,' I wrote a few months ago, 'of accepting friends' recom- mendations of a town (or, worse, a fishing village); always go to a particular hotel.' I still maintain this is sound advice; but—I was asked—suppose you do not know of an individual hotel? People no longer trust any recommendation which they see in print, and rightly—not so much because the writers may have been softened up by the owner of the hotel—though that may be true, too !—but because selection of a hotel is a highly personal business and cannot be made without knowledge of the particular tastes of the individual or family concerned.

In the long run, the choice can only be made at first hand, sometimes by a rather wearisome pro- cess of trial and error. Not even our closest friends, or ,our most admired travel writers, can always convey atmosphere—which is, after all, the first need of a hotel, for we can forgive almost anything in the way of a lacks of material com- forts if the atmosphere is right.

I have also given up trying to recommend places since I last condemned Sorrento and Positano for having allowed themselves to degenerate into tourist traps of the baser sort. To me, Positano stands for all that is worst in Italian tourism—a town whose only attraction was that it was unspoiled (for quite a few years after the

war it was vei}, difficult even to get there, until the cliff road from the north was completed), which has become spoiled. And of its hotels, one of the worst was one at which, I heard recently, a friend of mine (whose taste I liked to think was impeccable) had arrived for his summer holidays last August—noisy, expensive and insalubrious. I commiserated with him on his misfortune : he replied that he had enjoyed his holiday immensely.

My own idea of a holiday is to find somewhere with sun; with the sea or a lake to bathe in; and with a hotel or pension a little away from (but not out of walking distance of) a town. Two admirable examples were the Hotel Minerva near Sorrento, and the Beaurivage at Riccione. I state firmly, were; because in the present state of the tourist business on the Mediterranean (this applies now even in Spain, and for all I know in Yugoslavia; and it has long been true of the C6te d'Azur) no hotel can be trusted to preserve its character even from one year to the next. It may change hands, or have a new manager, or.a new chef, or—some- thing that occurs with depressing frequency—its very excellence will bring flocking to it people who have heard of it at second hand, creating in the owner or his employees a different attitude to their visitors, so that though the hotel may out- wardly flourish, it inwardly decays.

The virtue of places like the Minerva and the Beaurivage, assuming they are still good, is that they are just far enough removed froM the awfulness of Sorrento, or the nullity of Riccione, for detachment; yet if you want a little gaiety of an evening or to dine out, it is within reach. The Minerva's situation was, I think, the finest I have ever come across, looking across the Bay of Naples to Vesuvius; its disadvantages were limited to the fact that the beach is quite a long way down and it's a hell of a long way 'back up. Almost as good from the point of view of situation (and as good in other respects) was the Eremitaggio, near Torri del Benaco on Lake Garda; but I have a slight preference for sea bathing (though Garda is a delightfully clean lake, once one gets away from the shallow south end), and a marked preference for continued fine weather, which means that other things being equal I would prefer the Mediterranean to the mountains, beautiful though the mountains are (one summer I went, as an experiment, to the Tyrol; it was mid- August, but it snowed. I know this is unfair but . . . never again).

If you are not tied by family holidays, I suggest you go to Italy, if you can, in June. Perhaps I have been lucky, but I have found June the best month; the sun not quite so unfailing as in the high season, but still hot enough—and you can use the dull days for the sightseeing which other- wise can become a sweaty misery.

But the real advantage of June is that you can

avoid booking ahead. In this way it is possible to go to some town or district which you have

heard of, or have a hunch about; book in at any hotel for two or three days; and cast around until you come to a hotel or pension you like. This was the way I fOund both the Minerva and the Eremitaggio; and it has the added advantage that the place seems better still when you think your- self the discoverer.

I have been dealing with Italy, but much the same applies wherever you go. Last summer a correspondent wrote asking for good stopping- off places on the route from Calais to Grenoble, where she and her family had arranged to spend their August holidays. My suggestion was that they should not attempt to tie themselves to any fixed itinerary; instead, they should stop off wherever they found it convenient—less of a risk than you might think, provided the back of your journey is broken early in the day so that you can start looking for a hotel while there is still plenty of daylight.

This notion seems to have worked well enough—at least my correspondent has no com- plaints about it—but when they arrived at the place to which she had been recommended (not by me!) near Grenoble it turned out to be quite dreadful, and they spent the rest of their holiday on the move, with mixed fortunes.

One point she makes might well receive the at- tention of the French authorities : the amount of litter everywhere. The French are a' tidy people, in the sense that they like to keep their litter out of sight; which in practice means dumping it in some, secluded woodland grove, or in a valley, w by the waterfall—or into the river; when there is a drought, river-beds in France are apt to be ex-

posed as a junk-heap of old bedsteads, tin cans and rubber tyres.

4 I asked Cyril Ray to let me know when he has any information which will be of interest to wine-bibbers; and he writes :

Lyons are setting a good example in their 'Grill and Cheese' restaurants and, no doubt, in their other establishments of serving sound table wines at sensible prices. Though I cannot understand why they put so much higher a mark-up on the Château Valrose, a drinkable but very ordinary claret from the Blayais (16s. at the table; 8s. over the counter) than on the St. Emilion (11s. and 7s.) or the 1952 hock (16s. and 10s. 6d.).

What, so far, seems to be less well known than the good value now to be found in the 'Grill and Cheese' restaurants is that Lyons also sell their wines retail, either over the Corner House counters or from their Hop Exchange cellars. (You can get their wine list from either.) Pre- sumably it is because they do their own shipping and bottling, and buy in huge amounts, that the prices are so low, but they must have bought hugely indeed of the 1949 clarets still to be able to offer named growths of the Medoc of that year, as they do in their current list. It is astounding still to be offered a 1949 Château Beychevelle at half a guinea a bottle. The Ldo- ville-Barton of the same year, which I was buy- ing from the Hop Exchange cellars exactly a year ago at 11s. 6d., when it was nearly half as much again at some other places,,has now gone up a mere shilling; it is remarkable value.