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.”

Rwanda's silverback gorilla lodge

The hairy locals don’t find Richard Green funny on his exclusive visit to Rwanda’s new safari lodge

• A star turn on silverback mountain

The world's coolest hotel rooms

Bill Tikos, editor of trend-setting blog, the cool hunter, picks his top ten sexy hotel rooms

• The A-listers' guide to luxury holidays

The A-listers' guide to luxury holidays

Paul Croughton finds the best tour operators for a blow out break and gets to the nitty gritty of the bill

• The 13 hottest hotels for winter sun

• A new era in first class travel

• What do you get for a £12k a week Oz resort?

BACKGROUND

• The VIP guide to the world's top 12 sites

• The world's best colonial hotels

• 13 of the world's most remote hotels

• World's most expensive hotel suites

• World's hottest hotels

Related Links

• The world's coolest hotel rooms

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.

Times recommends

• Oasis of the Seas: the Times review
• The 20 best new year party places to stay
• Green Spaces 2009: are you the winning writer?