Why The 'Cool Rich' Adore Antiparos

Dearest Readers,

There are Rich People, and then there are Cool Rich People, and rarely the twain doth meet — especially on vacation, but even more especially during that most sacred of vacation months, August.

Holidaying is complicated for the Cool Rich set because it demands being in places that are not in danger of being polluted by Ordinary Rich People who cause aesthetic alarm by doing things like wearing diamond bracelet stacks while paddling in the ocean, swanning about on mega-yachts that are custom-painted matt black, or arriving in heels for lunch at the beach. The solution is to vacation in impossible-to-get-to spots that are too mountainous to land a jet, too windy to helicopter into and whose coves are so tiny and shallow that they can’t possibly accommodate a tech titan’s ugly boat. Anywhere with tarmac-ed roads, convenient airports, fully-equipped hospitals or deep ports — Sardinia, St. Tropez, Southampton — are not an option, obvs.

You can see where I’m going with this: where is inaccessible enough to be glamorous, but also a place one can casually run into friends? (I mean what’s the point in being in the centre of Cool Rich-Land if no one knows you are there, right?) Enter Antiparos, a very small island in the Cyclades, in the Aegean Sea off mainland Greece. The journey there is suitably arduous: there’s the flight to Mykonos, from there a taxi to the harbour, from the harbour a ferry to the island of Paros, from there a taxi across Paros to the little harbour, from the little harbour a small boat to Antiparos and from the teeny weeny harbour in Antiparos a car or a taxi to your divinely bohemian-chic, gigantic shack up in the hills. On a good day it’ll take a minimum of fourteen hours from London but there are always delays, no one gets in on time, and every trip to Antiparos becomes an ‘adventure’ with which to regale your hosts over dinner upon arrival: even the gossip among the chic-sters on the Sea Jets ferry is so good it makes the hellish journey worthwhile, I kid you not. (But more of the ferry gossip later.)

Now, I was lucky enough to get invited to Antiparos last week by dear friends Tree and Tosh. No, really, I promise you those are their names - they are Brits. (Tree is the girl one and Tosh is the boy one.) Between them they have multiple offspring from various marriages who had multiple friends who were all in the house, so I spent a week in their glorious villa on the bay side of Antiparos, usually being woken up at 4.30am every morning by the sound of several twenty-somethings dive-bombing into the pool after prowling the bar scene all night.