So, in no particular order, because I'm bored today, and it's raining, and I wish I was able to travel somewhere, here are a few of my favourite things from a lifetime of wandering.
- Karkadeh - hibiscus tea. Rich, dark, red, with plenty of sugar in, it's like drinking an entire flowerbed. For me, it's the taste of Egypt. I've made it at home, but it's never quite the same.
- The sound of the early muezzin. In London, in Istanbul, in Delhi, Muscat, Fez, or Ethiopia, it's the same, and associated with the faintest touch of paler darkness on the horizon that says dawn is close. (Black mark for the muezzin in Casablanca who then decided he'd like to carry on singing a few songs for the next three quarters of an hour.)
- Fasting, in Ethiopia. Meat dishes are okay, but the fasting platter is exceptional; greens, pulses, a huge sour injeera as the plate and scoop (I'm never quite sure whether it's a bread or a pancake) - I could fast all year. When Christmas comes and everyone has meat again, it's just not the same.
- Mountain passes. Kardong La where from a nice warm morning in Leh you suddenly find yourself in snow, and finally looking down the other side to the Nubra Valley. The pass where after a day walking from Kyzart where suddenly you see Song Kul spread out below you, an almost circular lake surrounded by mountains.
- Arcades. In the streets of Evora, in the palaces of Mandu, in cathedral or abbey cloisters, in the ancient covered markets of French bastides, arcades are wonderful things; they make a little self-contained world out of the glaring sun. Their rhythm is wonderful, too, whether the staggered, always changing, three-arches-at-a-time rhythm of Venetian or Portuguese vernacular, or the regular wave-forms of a Gothic cloister.
- Pineapple with sugar and red chilli from the street vendors in Bangkok.
- The comforting roll and clank of a night train. Eventually its soporific purring will let me sleep until it stops at yet another night-time station, which apart from having a name on the signboards is indistinguishable from any other station on the line, and where the train will stop for ten or twenty minutes before softly straining, juddering, and starting to roll onwards.
- The Big Tree. Sacred banyans in India and Thailand; trees planted by Sully or as Trees of Liberty in France; huge hollow yews that you can stand inside, a thousand years old; the great trees that dominate junctions in Gondar and Aksum, or that grow to shade Muslim shrines in Somaliland and Harar.
- Old trains. There will never be a love like my first love, Mallard, but I have a lot of time for old trains - Soviet trains with huge cowcatchers in Tashkent, old French locomotives in Dire Dawa, the sparkling brass and splendid whistle of the little tourist train in the Baie de la Somme, the rusting hulk of a train at a disused station in Colombia (shades of Fitzcarraldo!).
What are your favourite things?
