Friday 21 December 2018

The Real Experience

The Guardian has a piece today on what to buy the super rich for Christmas. It turns out the answer is a luxury experience: a special trip to Antarctica, behind-the-scenes at Jimmy Choo's.

Well, I might put some money aside for a trip to Antarctica. But it won't be full-on luxury. And in fact, Antarctica will have to compete pretty hard with something I got for free: a walk along the shores of Iceland's Jokulsarlon, at midnight, completely alone, listening to the calls of wild geese and the crack and suck of breaking ice-calves in the lagoon. I'd pitched my coffin of a tent behind the little cafe, and after the tourists left, I had the place entirely to myself in the dim, strange light of the not-quite-night.

Which leads me on to where you get the real experience. I know I've rushed some countries. I was about to say I'd rushed Laos, really only seen it as a tourist, and only seen Luang Prabang and Vientiane - I had a motorcycle crash that put me out of action, and it was back to Bangkok for dental work and effective painkillers (not available in Laos, but hearty thanks to the villager who put me on the back of a truck and took to me hospital, and the excellent health team in Phonsavan who stitched me up). And yet just by dint of taking these cities gently and slowly, and walking everywhere,

  • I chatted to the young curator at the photo museum who showed me with great delight a photo of himself as a monk, taken a few years before;
  • I got invited to dance at a wedding in the suburb over the river;
  • I sat and watched a man make a cage for his rooster - he didn't speak English, but it didn't matter - and had a cup of tea with him afterwards;
  • I met pilots from all the different Asean countries who were visiting Pha That Luang after a two day conference;
  • and I was invited to share lunch in one of the temples on Buddha's birthday.
All of which things happened to me, just because I was taking things slowly, keeping my eyes open, and keeping my mind open, too. 

I've had a tour of Pago railway station in Myanmar by the second station-master; two days later I met Burma's sole Rastafarian and we gave an impromtpu performance of 'Get up, stand up' on the platform. 

Sometimes the guide books tell you to avoid great local festivals - it's difficult to get a hotel, there are crowds, it's not for tourists. I was about to take that kind of advice and jump on the bus at Palitana when I changed my mind, and stayed for the great mela,  walking 18 km with a few thousand Jains, cheered with cries of  'Jai Adinath!' and supplies of water and cool towels when things started to get tough. At Pachmarhi, I climbed Chauragarh with the pilgrims at Shivatri Mela and made friends with a brass band from Hyderabad, and ended up jamming with them back at their camp (I had no instrument, but I can carry a tune).

None of these experiences were really planned. None of them involved the mediation of a tour group of facilitator. And they sure as heck weren't super-luxury.

Sometimes you have to get up before sunrise. Sometimes you have to stay up late. Sometimes you have to put in some physical effort.

You might need to know how to read a map. You might need to put up with some discomfort, or with spartan living conditions. You might need to travel light.  You have to put up with buses that refuse to take you, or let you on and then sit there for two hours, or trains that are six hours late; and sometimes you crash in what looks like a great hotel, only to find that the temple or mosque next door starts broadcasting at four in the morning.

But the big luxury you need? It's not being super rich. It's affording the time. Whether, like me, you're lucky enough to be able to take six months off, or whether you have two weeks but apply them to getting to know one place, rather than whistle-stop-touring ten.

So if I had a super-rich friend, I'd give them one luxury. Three weeks of travelling light, and travelling rough, and just seeing what happens. The ultimate luxury.


Saturday 19 May 2018

Visites protocolaires

I have just found a lovely phrase from writer Julien Gracq: les visites protocolaires, by which he means the 'obligatory' visit to the five-star attraction.

It's rather a wonderful phrase. It doesn't actually dismiss such sights, but it very nicely sums up the somewhat institutional nature of such visits - and the fact that we are not always (perhaps not often) free to choose how we see such places.

Contrast, for instance, Stonehenge, the visite protocolaire, and Stanton Drew, a pair of stone circles in the middle of nowhere, not even in the top ten megalithic monuments in the UK.

Stonehenge has to be experienced the way everyone sees it - through the visitor centre, into the fenced compound with the crowds. It's impressive, but unless you're there at midsummer (which I really must do some time, it's always going to be the same; crowded, something to gawp at.

At Stanton Drew some years ago, I wandered in, putting a pound in the honesty box, and found the circles delightfully inhabited by children playing a game of tag around the stones, and families picnicking. It wasn't till someone hailed me - "Blessed be!" - and offered me bread, cheese, and a cup of wine, that I realised it was Beltane.

My way of experiencing Stonehenge a bit differently was to walk away from it. It's part of a superb, huge-scale sacred site, stretching from Woodhenge (now with concrete discs where the post-holes were) to the Normanton Down Barrows and the great swath of the Cursus cut through the landscape. I walked all the sacred sites around Stonehenge in a huge circle; sometimes I could see Stonehenge, more often not, but I felt its presence. Instead of the claustrophobic confines of a fenced compound, I had the liberty of Salisbury Plain, the wide chalk landscape and the huge open sky.

Visites protocolaires have something to be said for them, even if, sometimes, it's just that you never have to do them again, that you'll never regret not seeing the Taj Mahal. And if you want to study Mughal architecture, you do need to see the Taj - but you also need to see Sikandra, and Agra Fort, and Itimad-ud-Daula, so you'll need a week in Agra to do things properly. Sites such as Chartres Cathedral, Avebury, or St Peter's, Rome, are on the list for a reason; so are Mount Bromo and the Pennine Way.

But it's the little things you see along the way that sometimes make the most impact; a fern-fringed fountain in a Breton forest, an orange-painted stone under a banyan tree.

The pity is that some people spend all their time chasing from one visite protocolaire to another, without noticing what's in between. Modern tourism is expressly laid out to enable you to do this; and modern tourists, only too often, are intolerant of the in-between. They're bored once they've seen the big sight; they get back on the bus, they chomp crisps or read or book or chat, and never look out of the windows.

Manners makyth man, but protocol does not make a traveller.

Monday 5 February 2018

In praise of early morning

Jaisalmer
Walking round Gadisar before breakfast. After the ghats, it peters out to shallows and scrubland. The city-side banks of the lake are covered with temples and chattris, but out towards the country, there are only scattered memorials, single stones, small cenotaphs. A bittern sits hunched, looking miserable. A heron stalks the shallows.I hear doves cooing and a single crow guffaws loudly at his own joke.

Pushkar
Walking towards the Brahma temple I find the street of confectioners, the cauldrons of halwa already simmering, steam rising into the cool morning air. Shopkeepers coming to their shops are singing: one passes me - Hari Ram, Hari Ram. The streets still empty. The sun just touching the edges of the roofs with gold.

Bermondsey Antique Market, London
Even though it's August, it's chilly this morning, the sky pearly grey like a silver tabby. The market's bustling - not crowded, but purposeful. I stalk the stalls for sight of vintage fountain pens but all I can find is Parker 45s, all in black, all with medium nibs, all priced at a tenner. I buy a little brass lion instead thinking it will go with my Omani lion-shaped padlocks bought in the old souk at Muttrah.I listen in to a chiseller trying to get a price reduced and the stallholder giving as good as he gets; it's like listening to an old married couple squabbling. They've done this before, I think.

There's an Italian guy does coffee and bacon sarnies i the corner. I crack. The bacon is crispy and the coffee hits my bloodstream with a jolt. Fortified, I try the little inside market - and here I find my prey; a whole big big of vintage pens that cleans my wallet out and is still cheap at this price.

Gelati, Georgia
The little wicket gate hangs open, awkwardly, and awkwardly I bend to go under it, and down the steps, into the monastery. A black cat stalks across the lawn and is lost in the monastery buildings.

Inside the church, the early light is pale gold, suffusing the sky blue of the paintings. So many paintings; every arch, every pillar, every inch of wall is covered with images. A priest all in black, and black bearded, comes to cense the church; the censer's chain hisses and rattles, but his feet make no noise at all on the pavement. Everything else is quite still.

Outside, a monk sits on a bench by a waterspout and talks to a cat, which takes umbrage and turns tail. I stand and look at the view of the forested hills and the twisting road below.

Cannaregio, Venice
Out here you feel closer to the lagoon than anywhere else in Venice. No twisting alleys or tall palaces close off the lagoon. I walk past the abandoned bulk of the new Scuola, brickwork that was never meant to be seen - a tale of old failure; there was no money left for marble. A solitary jogger passes me.

The houses are low, the pavements narrow. Grey water of the lagoon, brown water of the canal. As I walk back towards the centre of Venice I smell dark bitter coffee being brewed up. Someone is loading an upright piano into a boat.

Taj Mahal
I can't believe it. All the tourists who came in through the gate with me as it opened have stopped on the steps of the Naubat Khana to take pictures of the sunrise over the Taj, and I am alone here, quite alone with the tombs of Mumtaz Mahal and Shah Jahan, and the cleaner, who is rubbing the white marble till it shines and sprinkling rose water on the tombs.

I take my time looking, drinking in the atmosphere. The stone is like honey, pale honey. The stillness is absolute. As I turn to go, the cleaner motions me over, signs for me to give him my scarf, and tips rosewater on it. All day I move in a rose scented cloud. 

Burgundy
I had a big slab of ham with chervil sauce last night, and coq au vin, and I still feel pleasantly full even though I've started out before breakfast to climb this last ridge and look out over the smaller hills below. That's where the path will lead today, towards Avallon and Vezelay and the great basilica of the Magdalene; but it's too misty to make out where the path leads, and the furthest hills are lost in haze.
I turn to look back, and suddenly the low sun lights up a glittering sprawl of diamonds - the funnel spiders' web alight with flame.

Mornings It's not just the fact that the big tour buses don't arrive till everybody has had breakfast, and they've rounded up the guy who is always late, and called the rota, and fixed all the lunch bookings, and found the guy who is always late has wandered off and they have to find him again...

That's one reason I embrace early rising on holiday, because there's no better way to see places without the crowds. But it's not the only reason.

There's something marvellous about seeing the world before it has put its makeup on. Seeing everything fresh, sometimes fresh with dew, or a thin rime of ice before it melts. The early sunlight that casts long shadows or tinges the world with gold. The expectation of the new day.

A friend once told me he would never, ever get up before eight. I can't be bothered to argue with him. I just feel sorry that there are so many things he'll never experience.