The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - Travel
‘When we got to our room in Sicily, I felt a wave of relief ’
With travel corridors constantly changing, Ash Bhardwaj and his new wife took a risk but struck it lucky on a last-minute getaway
In October 2019, my girlfriend, Andrea, took me for a walk on a rainy Hampstead Heath, got down on one muddy knee and asked me to marry her. Naturally, as a travel writer, my priority after saying “Yes” was to start planning the honeymoon.
The pandemic made a mockery of our wedding plans, but we committed to doing the official bit in October 2020, regardless. Our honeymoon was similarly curtailed, although we still held out hope for a post-wedding break.
At the end of July, travel corridors opened to parts of Europe, while the rest of the world remained out-ofbounds. So our eyes turned towards the Mediterranean in autumn, when the weather would still be warm. Despite our shared love of adventure, my fiancée lobbied for a “proper holiday” with some days by the pool, so we settled on Sicily, which has a volcano at least.
Travel corridors were quickly closed to countries with rising infection rates. Spain was the first to go, then France, the Greek islands and Croatia. Italy’s numbers were steady, but crept upwards in the last week of September.
We were nervous on the eve of our wedding – not because we were getting married, but because it was a Thursday, which marked the weekly travel corridor cull by the Transport Secretary. We had made rudimentary contingency plans for Cyprus and Scotland, but Italy stayed on the safe list for now. Our honeymoon was happening.
When Spain’s travel corridor had been cut, back in July, we’d lost money on an Ibiza Airbnb thanks to a 50 per cent cancellation charge. To avoid a similar problem this time, we planned our Sicily trip with the travel agent Citalia and didn’t book anything else until the day before the wedding. The cost of car hire had doubled in price from the previous week, but that was the only glitch in our cautious approach.
The wedding itself was lovely and intimate, shared with just 13 friends and family. The ceremony was at Islington Town Hall, followed by the reception at a nearby pub. That evening, we stayed in central London and headed to Heathrow the following afternoon.
From Catania Airport, we took a taxi to Taormina. The driver told us of an
g 80 per cent drop in visitor numbers compared with the previous year: the Chinese and American markets had completely disappeared, and visitors from elsewhere had come in far fewer numbers.
When we got to our room, I felt a wave of relief. Up until then, we had been walking on eggshells, expecting the trip to evaporate at the last minute; now that we were firmly on the island, we could emotionally invest in our honeymoon.
We spent two nights at Belmond’s Villa Sant’Andrea, right on the coast, where we swam from a private beach, and indulged in our first-ever room-service breakfast. Taormina town centre was busy with Italian tourists, but quiet enough always to get a table at restaurants.
From the town’s GrecoRoman theatre we had a remarkable view of Mount Etna, gently puffing away in the distance. When 19thcentury artists returned to northern Europe with sketches of this scene, they were laughed-off as fantasists because it looked so dreamlike. The puffing did
not look so gentle close-up, when we went for a hike around Etna’s main crater the following day.
We drove to Palermo and the city was a delight. It carries the layers of 13 occupations – including Phoenician, Norman, German and Byzantine – all of which can still be glimpsed in the city’s buildings and food. Arancini originated in Sicily during the 250 years of Arab rule: the rice balls, filled with cheese and meat, were a sort of Sicilian Cornish pasty for shepherds.
Palermo’s pedestrianised old town is gradually being renovated, making it feel like a lived-in archaeological site with spectacular interiors behind unassuming walls. At night, the cobbled streets buzzed with cocktail bars and freshly cooked seafood, like an effortless, less polished, less busy Barcelona.
We finished our holiday in Cefalù, where we kayaked in coves beneath our hotel, and swam in the sheltered beach of the town’s old harbour. But we kept one eye on the news, because there was no guarantee that Italy would keep its travel corridor. To avoid the quarantine that would have come into effect on that Saturday morning, we had booked an additional flight on Friday night, just in case.
But the corridor remained open, so we cancelled the Friday flight and stayed until Saturday, as planned. Friday night felt like a gift, and we had our final honeymoon dinner in a restaurant outside the old town, sharing a pistachio-andshrimp tagliatelle, which might just be the best pasta I have ever eaten.
We got home and crossed the threshold as a married couple for the first time, celebrating our lucky run over the previous two weeks. Five days later, Italy lost its travel corridor.
Citalia (citalia. com) offers seven nights