Glamour and camping have come together. They call it glamping, and the latest travel extravagance is a tent with a flushing bog.
I went to lunch with a big travel company, a big, big international holiday firm. I don’t normally waste a lunch on business. It’s that horrible hybrid: work, wheedling, and pretending to be social and chummy. Anyway, the food’s invariably corporate-ghastly, and there’s a presentation of unreadable brochures and a pen that doesn’t work and a luggage label that I really don’t want. Anyway, this time I went because, you know, I’m feeling sort of sorry for the travel industry. They’re having a really horrid time. It’s the inexplicable but rather enjoyable truth about the travel business that it provides the nicest, most fun and exciting weeks of our lives, and is consequently the most consistently reviled, railed against, sued and detested business in the world. This particular company trawls the expensive end of the market and so has to deal with some of the most irrationally bad-tempered customers in the world.
Now I expect you’ve noticed that the tempers in airports are short in exact relation to the shortness of the queues they’re standing in. Economy will have a snake of several hundred people patiently shuffling their regulation-size suitcases along, reading books, chatting, and giggling with holiday anticipation. Business class will have a queue of 20 irritated people hissing at children called Tamsin and Roland and trying to corral skittish herds of matched baggage. They are regular travellers and therefore hate travelling. In the queue for first class, where there is a vase of real flowers, and an attendant of cinematic beauty and unparalleled diplomacy, there will be one fat woman in a fur coat who is having a histrionic tantrum, swearing banishment and humiliation to all the staff in the airport and a slow death in particular to the baggage handler because she has lost her mink face mask and they don’t have her brand of moisturiser in the bathroom. As anyone in hospitality will tell you, other people’s happiness is a miserable career, and the more happy you strive to make them, the more miserable they’ll make you.
So I went to lunch, and they gave us the good news, which was that the market was very fluid and contracting and that many companies were going to find things very difficult and would go for long holidays never to return, but for people who could move with the prevailing climate, adapt to the sudden change in commercial environment, then there were great advantages to be taken. There were vast opportunities for the plucking.
My accountant has been saying much the same sort of thing: there are fortunes to be made in recessions, he says. And a banker I know mentioned darkly that some of his mates have never been richer. If this is all true, why don’t we have a depression every other month so we can all have a go at being carpet-bagging plutocrats? They all look at me with a bland pity when I say things like that.
After the steamed sea bass and something chocolate over coffee, the travel bods got into their presentation and pointed out the bullet points on the screen. They came on like the mantras shouted by rugby teams in their dressing room before they go out and get flattened by the All Blacks. Luxury, apparently, is over. Conspicuous consumption is inconspicuous again. Gold bath taps, restaurants run by swanky chefs, are all over. Jewellery on the beach, rose petals in the bath, bikini bottoms floating in the Jacuzzi: that’s also utterly, utterly passé. Apparently the rich still left with money and time to enjoy it don’t want to look like the past-it rich, the over-rich or the idle rich with nothing but hedonism and hair extensions on their minds.
They, and by implication the aspirational bits of you, want an adventure. You want to learn something. You want to come home with more than pictures of a sunlounger and an abused lobster. You want to boast about something that isn’t a tan-line, and who you saw at the next table. You want to come back with a traveller’s tale, a saga, not a holiday drink-alogue. You want to get out into the corners of the world that room service won’t reach. The future of travel, I was told, is going to be [drum-roll; keen young executive flicks the button on his remote; and the screen flashes up, ta-ra … a tent. A tent. That’s it, a tent. The future of top-of-the-range holidays is a tent. What’s the mass-market version going to be – a refugee camp? Oh no, no, you see I’m not looking closely enough. The images flicker across the screen. This is no ordinary tent: this is a tent you can stand up in, with a bed you can lie down on, with sheets that you could glide across, with a carpet, with mirrors and windows and a mosquito net that looks like interior design. This tent is to other tents what Ava Gardner is to other gardeners.
What we are about to yearn for is Scouting for liberals. And there’s a name for it. It’s called glamping. (That’s glamorous camping for those of you who are slow at word and concept combining.) Never before have camping and glamour come together. Indeed, they’ve never been in the same sentence before. Camping is almost by definition the absence of glamour. But here we are, in the bush, in some distant savannah, on a river bank. There is a crackling fire on which a clever native bakes brioche and ciabatta in an old tin trunk. The Chablis is chilling, a camp table is set with napkins and a storm lantern. The only glitzy thing here is the Milky Way, and in the distance some questing creature calls. And sat next to you is a guide who has a degree in biology, astronomy, geology and anthropology, and a chest you could tee golf balls off.
And tomorrow it will all be gone, as if it had never happened. You will leave nothing behind; the whole lot will be packed away into a discreet 10-tonne truck and whisked off to another virgin caravanserai. You have the enormous smug satisfaction of owning not only a singular experience but an unimpeachably organic and green one.
This is a fantasy of ruggedness, a nursery play version of the wild. It is Marie Antoinette’s weekend picnic farm, which is fine by me: given the choice between Marie’s and a real farm, I’m with the French queen every time. What I mind about this is that however risible and embarrassing and tasteless big, expensive honeymoon holidays are, they do exist in real places and employ real indigenous people, and pay for somebody’s economy, putting real kids through school so that they can grow up and be businessmen and come and have holidays with us. This Peter Pan camping adventure slips through the beautiful bits of the world leaving not a trace and very little cash.
I asked the man who was selling glamping to me what the most important thing about this new moveable feast was. He thought for a moment, and smiled, and said: ‘Dimmer switches. And proper lavatories.’ So there you have it. The latest must-have extravagance, the chic one-upmanship, is a flushing bog in the outback. We live in momentous times.