JUNE 25, SUNDAY

RESTORATION HOTEL AND TAORMINA

Last night at Old Asheville Jail Hotel and Bar Rob Amberg told me a little more about Taormina which is five miles from the seaside hotel where he is going to celebrate his 75th birthday on October 14. He said that I should look at the second season of the White Lotus which was filmed at Taormina. So on Sunday evening I did and what I saw made me feel a little queasy.

I’ve been preaching and trying to live the pleasures of traveling cheap, cheap flights and cheap Airbnb’s booked for a month. I booked my flight to Milan and a further flight to Sicily knowing no more about Sicily than what the hotel in Letojanni on the beach about five miles from Taormina looked likd. It is $70 a night, expensive but bearable. The beach looks pleasant and I bet it will be fun place to be with a hotel full of folks from Marshall, Rob’s family and Rob’s photo project friends from Duke University.

So last night I looked at the a trailer and photographs of White Lotus filming sites. And what I realized was that Taormina is about five classes of luxury above me. The hotel where the filming took place is the San Domenico Palace where rooms with a view are over $3000 a night. Not only is the hotel very expensive with only the very, very rich staying there. (I haven’t seen it but hear the White Lotus series is a satire on the very, very rich) but it looks like a movie set, not a real place. Even the on line tourist descriptions make it sound like the Sainte Tropez of Sicily. The G7 conference was held there a few years ago. The stores in Taormina are all expensive boutiques. So what am I doing going there? It is as if I came to Asheville for a luxury weekend at the Restoration Hotel rather than staying at the Sweet Pea Hostel or an airbnb on the outskirts of town.

Taormina is on a rocky cliff with a steep drop to a wide beach below and a cable car going up and down. There are cliffs above the town and 15 miles away is Mount Etna with its occasional eruptions and lava flows. There are gardens and parks and an ancient Greek amphitheater that is used for concerts and many of the buildings are centuries old and modernized inside. All of this is why all of the super rich flock to Taormina in the summer. Luckily I’ll be there at the end of the season.

My thought was that I would get an inexpensive Airbnb for about a week when my son comes to visit me before we fly to Greece. But I haven’t tried yet and don’t know what luck I’ll have.

But what I really I want to wonder about is these different ways of traveling. There is a huge market for luxury hotels and luxury living when visiting a tourist town for a few days or a week. This is true in the advertisements for Asheville and the Restoration Hotel and a large number of other hotels in Asheville. People who can afford a short luxury vacation are here to spend money and have a good time, which I’m guessing is what the White Lotus is about on a grand scale. The same will be true in the towns that I am going to visit with my son, his wife Kathy and granddaughter Caroline when we go to Greece in late October. We will visit the towns of Santorini and Mykonos and stay for a week in Naoussa on the island of Paros. There are luxury villas and luxury life in all of these places and homes of the rich and famous.

But in all of these towns there are ordinary people making a living in one way or another. In Naoussa there are fishermen going out on their boats, there are people who work for low wages in the hospitality industry and as sales people in the elegant shops. These people in Asheville, because of the high realestate values, can hardly afford to live here and certainly don’t eat in the expensive restaurants and shop almost certainly at Target and Walmart. And of course in Asheville there are also inexpensive restaurants catering to low paid workers. The same is true in Naoussa. I have rented the same airbnb apartment from Efi Tripolitsioti, that I stayed in two years ago. The Covid price was $650 a month, now with Covid gone and tourism booming it is $1000 a month, but still $35 a day. There is a grocery store nearby and I can fix my own food, a Turkish stand offers cheap Turkish kebobs and when I am up to a mile walk there is a place where I can can buy ready made Greek food, patronized by locals, for a moderate price.

What you get at the very elegant hotels are the feel of luxury, large rooms, great views, a swimming pool, expensive restaurants, obsequious attendants taking care of every whim. What you don’t get is what you can get in an inexpensive place if you are lucky. What I get at Efi’s place is Efi, herself, coming up the stairs every day with some treat that she has baked saying Beeel, Beeel, Beeel. And at some point I will be invited down to her place for a bucketful of snails. Last time I also got the presence of Wolfgang Vick, who comes from Germany to Efi’s place whenever he can. I went for rides with him in his rented car and got invited out for a fancy meal at a harbor restaurant hosted by Wolfgang. At Efi’s place I get two friends and meet more people through Efi: her brother a fisherman and a family she has befriended. Elegant hotels cut you off from this kind of experience.

The same is true Varanasi, if you stay at an elegant hotel with wider lawns, no riff raff, nice restaurants at $150 a night with large comfortable rooms at the edge of town, far from the Ganges, you will have one Indian experience. When we stay at the Sahi River Guest House at Assi Ghat at $15 a night including breakfast in an old Maharajahs Palace right on the Ganges river with all kinds of pilgrims walking past and little shops and people that I have gotten to know over the years I have a direct experience of everyday India and can afford to stay for a month.

So that is why I am a little queasy. I wouldn’t mind one night in the San Domenico Plaza to see what if was like, if someone else paid, just as I enjoyed my accidental business class flight back from Delhi to Paris, but I wouldn’t pay more than $75 over economy if I had to pay myself. I don’t envy the white lotus people and if all they are up for is a lascivious life style I think I would be nauseated.

And the simple fact is that no matter if you stay in a luxury hotel or the simplest of Airbnbs, most of the pleasures of visiting Paris or Taormina, the walks, the gardens, the restaurants, are open to everyone and the pleasures of Asheville, except for the one tourist attraction, the Biltmore House, are free. Riding on the Blue Ridge Parkway is exhilerating and costs nothing and the Smoky Mountain National Park, a marvelous day trip is close by. And the great variety of stores and restaurants are open to anyone.

But what I want for a week in Taormina is the equivalent of a week with Efi. I would even pay $100 a night if necessary. But I fear that in the St. Tropez of Sicily I won’t be able to find this.