Travel by ear: soundscapes

Travel magazines love to hook us with a picture. Turquoise skies, white snowy mountains, the bright colours of Indian saris or the houses of Bogota. 

But they never hook us with sounds.

Still, when I think of some of the places I've been, the soundscapes are a big part of the memory. Mumbai for instance: the honking and traffic noise is almost a stereotype of India, but I also hear the tip-tip-tip of a metal beater's hammer and the clinking wheel of a sugar cane crusher, and a crow perched on a gutter screaming.

In a Burmese temple I hear little kids running, their bare feet slapping the marble; and in a back room somewhere, someone is hitting a little brass meditation gong softly, creating a rich hum; and a cat meows at a passer-by who hasn't paid it any attention. (If you love gongs... you'll love the video.)

In Ethiopia, the rattle of sistra, the sound of a trumpet playing a single phrase over and over again at a funeral, the wailing and ululating mourners, and the repetitive scratch and swish of a metal spatula in a metal pan as one of the family roasted the coffee beans, and all this at eight in the morning.

Sometimes things don't quite match. Westminster Cathedral always sounds like a railway station, where the faint noise of individual feet adds up to a subdued pedestrian roar, and people are reading newspapers (or maybe hymn books) with a stiff rattle or soft rustle of pages turning, and mass being said in a side chapel punctuates the busy non-quite-silence with announcements - "and at 1032 he took bread and broke it... 1155 lamb of God departing from altar number five"... It doesn't sound cathedral-like at all.

Finally scrambling my way to the top of a pass in Ladakh, and hearing the prayer flags in the wind. Or another Himalayan memory, the rain pelting down at Khecheopalri Lake, hissing across the lake, then thudding on the umbrella held by a better-prepared traveller like a toy drum. 

Sometimes you need to open your ears a bit wider to get past the immediate sound. In a tent at a Berber market in Morocco we were serenaded by a fiddle player; but there were other sounds to remember besides that pungent, gut-strung music. There was the hiss of the knife through a side of meat, the crackle of the fire and loud spurts and crunches as fat dripped on the burning logs; people chatting, shouting for service or to hail friends, and outside the tent there were goats and sheep bleating and the occasional horse whickering or snorting, and the snap of horseshoes on tarmac.

It's odd though. When I dream of places, they're always silent. But when I'm awake and I remember them, I can always remember the noises.