Don't take the jeep safari

I love the Himalayas. I loved Ladakh. I have a very, very soft spot in my heart for Diskit. But the Nubra Valley is, for me, somewhere that's been horribly spoilt; and it's been spoilt by the government requirement for permits, by jeep safaris, by the fact that no one goes alone.

Unfortunately, the Indian government doesn't just want you to get a permit. It wants you to go at least in couples, preferably in fours.

Then travel agencies do their best to present you 'two days, one night' jeep safaris. You go to Diskit, you look at the giant Maitreya, you go to Hunder and have a camel ride, you go to Turtuk and you come back. You go over the Kardongla Pass twice in a couple of days and marvel at the views. That's it.

Come, take photo, go. The whole valley cut up into tiny half hour segments of experience.

Hunder is a dreadful place. Or rather; there's a rather sweet village, where lanes wander under tall poplars or between trailing willow, where little bridges cross burbling cold streams; and there's a monastery and a huge field of stupas and tiny shrines overlooking the valley; but most people come, take a camel ride, and go, or stay in huge tented camps where you drive in and drive out and never walk around the village at all. The river by the camel rides is polluted by water bottles and plastic bags, and the only place you can get a drink is the army cafe, and none of the drinks are actually cold.

I love camels and I'd looked forward to seeing the Bactrians. But they're not useful camels, or wild camels. They're a tourist sight, and nothing else.

In Diskit, on the other hand, the streets were full of donkeys; there were donkey foals, with the dark soft fur of donkey childhood still unsullied, and as I wandered back from the fields by the river, I saw a man letting his donkey in at the garden gate, for his supper and his night's rest.

("Do the donkeys work?" I asked.

"No, they have a good life. No need to work now, we have the road and trucks and the bus. So they go to the fields in the daytime, and at night they come home."

No one proposed getting rid of them. They're part of the village.)

Perhaps the reason I got fond of Diskit is that I was able to stay there for a couple of days, wandering around - up to the monastery, to the old Gonkhang and the tiny temple right at the top, to the monastery's kitchen garden above, and the amazing field of stupas below. I saw monks playing cricket below the great Maitreya figure. I wandered out towards the Shyok river, but never got to it, only to marshy fields and stone walled pastures, where there were tall trees and shade and women urging their cattle home in the low, golden evening light. I got used to the daily rhythm, coming out and going home, and the bells of the prayer wheels ringing brokenly as the wheels turned, whenever someone came past who set them in motion.

I sat in the garden of the Siachen Hotel talking cookery and Indian food with the Nepali chef; why Calcutta has so many fat people and why Mumbai has the best food in India, and how to make gundruk (fermented dried greens), and favourite places in Sikkim; and drinking mint tea made with the leaves he'd picked five minutes before, and sniffing the roses (the pink ones smelt of nothing, the red ones were so fragrant you could get high on them).

But the problem is that you can't take that leisurely attitude with the whole of Nubra. The seven day permit (not extendable) makes you worry about transport. You can travel from Diskit to Turtuk, the furthest you can go before the valley turns to Pakistan and the Karakoram, in one morning; but the bus back strands you in Diskit at nine in the morning, with no bus towards Sumur or Panamik till two. Public transport hardly works at all; you're always waiting for a bus, or hitching a lift, and the jeeps never stop for anyone. Shared taxis exist, but try finding one; you'll be offered the special cheap tourist rate of 1,000 rupees to go anywhere.


So most people, of course, take the jeep safari. They pay through the nose for it, they don't spend long enough in Nubra, they act like typical tourists doing typical tourist things. And because these people all take the jeep safari, the valley is developing to facilitate that, and only that. Which is why you shouldn't take the jeep safari.

If you are aiming to go it alone;

• Shared taxis leave from just above the Polo Ground, from six to about eight in the morning, mostly going to Diskit. 400 rupees should get you there (2013 prices).
• The other way to do the trip is by motorbike. But while I've biked quite a few roads in Ladakh, this one is tough - icemelt streams rip up the road bed, and dirt biking experience is a must. I'm glad I didn't do it (in early June: it might be a bit different in August).
• Most travel agents in Leh will help you get the permit without selling you a safari. If one won't, just go next door.
• Make sure you take enough photocopies of the permit. I needed six, in the end, as there were extra checks on the road up to Turtuk.
• There are plenty of hotels and guesthouses, mostly at reasonable rates. Hotel Siachen cost me 200 rupees a night - a real bargain.

Travel by numbers

I don't usually rant on this blog. I reserve my best rants for the pub - usually the front bar of my local at about two in the morning.

But I felt like a little rant today. I am tired of travel-by-numbers journalism. In fact I am tired of anything-by-numbers journalism.

Ten top sights of Cambodia!

Five best landscapes in the world!

Seven things to do in Rome on Wednesday morning if it rains!

48 hours in Mumbai!

100 best films of all time! (Doesn't include a single Kurosawa or Bergman, or Once upon a time in the West, so how good are these 100 best films? Hm?)

Yes, I'm a hypocrite, I write these articles myself sometimes. Editors tell me they are popular.

But what does it do, this 10-best mentality? It reduces travelling to tick-boxes. I've seen the Vatican, the Pantheon, the Colosseum, the Capitoline, the Forum, the Lateran, tick, tick, tick, I've seen Rome. (What? and not seen the amazing burning sky mosaics in Santi Cosma e Damiano? the amazing rococo townscape around Sant'Ignazio? the head of Saint John the Baptist - or at least, the one that's not in Amiens or Damascus?)

It implies that if somewhere isn't on the list, then it hasn't 'made it', it's 'failed' as a tourist sight, it isn't important or worth seeing. So all those lovely little discoveries, tiny simple churches or sudden surprising outbursts of fantasy, aren't worthwhile.

It stops you getting the kind of obsession that can transform your life. Tick-list Rome has room for at most three Berninis - St Peter's, the Cornaro chapel, and the Chigi chapel at Santa Maria del Popolo. I've never seen the perfect Sant'Andrea al Quirinale on a 'top ten' list, though it is definitely on mine (as is the creamy perfection of Borromini's Sant'Ivo). My Rome is transfused by little veins of Baroque - I've been tracking down more little Bernini works every trip, and I still have lacunae in my list, because a church was unexpectedly closed, or I didn't have time to get across town. Even a simple tombstone (no, scratch the word 'simple' - nothing Bernini did was ever simple) - even a small tombstone on a pillar is worth my tracking down.

And so when I came to Versailles, through mirrored galleries under golden ceilings, the moment of real splendour was when I saw, suddenly, Bernini's Louis XIV - amid the faked up glories of a hollow regime, a flash of insight, spontaneity, genius. (I'm told Bernini worked directly in marble for this bust, without making a maquette first - typical of the sculptor, and perhaps the reason the work feels so immediate and vivid.)

Ah, spontaneity. That's the other thing missing from the top ten lists. Travel-by-numbers is about 'let's see sunset over Fez from the Merinid tombs. Done'. What it's not about is staying up there, listening to the dusk muezzins starting up like sirens, echoing each other in clusters of notes till the valley rings like a Tibetan singing bowl. What it's not about is meeting a couple of Americans on the way down who tell us the best muezzin they've ever heard is at the Marrakesh bus station, of all places; or walking into 'our' banana juice bar to a great smile from the guy behind the counter, who always poured in too much sugar with his trembling old hands (until we got to like it).

Travel by numbers is the opposite of psychogeography. It's seeing things on the surface, never delving below.

Travel by numbers doesn't have time for reading the landscape, for making comparisons, for learning what's really underneath the culture. (I've just been reading a marvellous book, Houses of God, by Jeannette Mirsky. It has wanderlust-provoking photos of Borobudur, the Parthenon, Angkor Wat, the Kinkaku-ji... but it explains the philosophical underpinnings of the architecture; how the world-mountain idea develops, for instance, through Hindu and then through Buddhist works, or how Buddhism itself changes in nature as it spreads through different countries and cultures.)

Travel by numbers means you never meet anyone. You never really get to know Bernini, or Louis XIV, or the anonymous woodcarver who put pigs dancing to a bagpipe high up in the roof spandrels at Elm church, near Wisbech.

So why is travel by numbers so popular? I wonder. It can be useful; like the catch-all question, 'have I missed anything?' at the end of an interview. It can be a good way to provoke interest in a destination - I read a 'top ten' of Turin recently that made me think I really need to go there.  And of course it's going to be popular with PR people for the various sites, hotels, restaurants that find themselves in the top ten. (Tell me I'm too cynical. But I'm not sure that I am.) I've found the 'top 100 films' features sometimes useful in alerting me to movies that I didn't know about - but then, reading a good film studies book is what I really should have been doing, not messing about with 'top 100' web sites...

It's just that if we let the 'top ten' dominate our view of the world, we're not really travelling. We're just collecting. Ticking boxes. Being consumers. Giving and receiving nothing.

I was tempted to head this piece 'Top ten reasons why top ten lists are evil'. I didn't.

 

The landscape changes

Sometimes when we travel we just want to see new things. So we give one day to one city, one day to the next. We walk our linear paths to Santiago, or Canterbury, or up the mountain and down the other side.

And we miss a lot.

I was reminded of this as I ran by the Wensum this morning - back in Norwich after a month and a half travelling.

The sky is leaden though the sun is out, shining palely. The leaves of trees by the river are dark green, and fleshy, heavy, almost sinister. Everything seems heavy, lethargic, and I can feel thunder in the air.

A line of swans passes silently, two adults and five cygnets in their greyish brown fuzz. Their wing feathers are just beginning to grow out white.

Yet two days ago, running at evening, I saw a different world; one in which the low sunlight dappled the path through glowing leaves, and the one streetlamp that always comes on early added its orange-pinkish glow to the scene. A world of luminosity and warmth, so beautiful you could almost cry.

The purple loosestrife is out, tall spikes of garish flowers, swarmed by bees. Ladybirds are everywhere. The first blackberries are ripe (I missed the flowering), and the mulberry tree has spattered the pavement with black. Autumn is coming, this morning; yet two days ago it was still summer.

This is what you miss when you travel too fast. When you walk a street for the second time, you see how it's changed; different light, a different time of day. You get to know it a little.

I know the temptations. The list of 'places I must visit this holiday'. The map that shows the Pennine Way, neatly coloured in as far as I've gone today, and the lure of the uncoloured path - the desperate feeling that you must finish it, you must press on. The desire to stick pins in the map; 'been there'.

And yet resisting this onward pull is what real travel is all about. Instead of forging a path forward, letting yourself sink into the surroundings; staying a few days, finding your footing. Slow down, rest, allow the small things to tell their stories.

Real versus ersatz experience

An article in the Daily Telegraph asks whether tourists on organised tours are missing the real experience of the places they visit.

The answer has to be yet. Tourists are taken to an 'approved' mall. They miss the 'touts' and 'gypsies' - that is, people who are not approved of by the cruise line.
They miss the street markets. They get a slice of life served up in 45 minutes. They see the city through the windows of a coach.

They see India without poverty.

And there seems to be a slight paranoia encouraged by the cruise line. All the locals are seen as scroungers, touts, thieves. No matter that in fact, like my friendly old ladies in St Petersburg and my beer drinking train driver friends in Milan,  they just want to practise their English and get a feel for the world outside their own boundaries.

So the answer to the question posed in the article header is obviously; yes, you are travelling in a vaccuum. You're letting someone else's views determine your own experience.

Now obviously as a provider of audio tours, I'm in some way imposing my own views  on whoever is taking the tour. I've been subjective in deciding what to see, what to omit; how long to spend on a particular church or artwork; what to say about it.

On one level I embrace that subjectivity. My tours are about art and architecture, about deepening your experience of art, about history, about finding a direct relationship with the past through eyewitness accounts of past events. If you're after a quick tour of clubs in Bangkok, Podtours is not the right medium.

I've just taken on someone to write tours of the WWI and WWII battlefields. And I've done that because he has the same values - he's not a tank buff or a battle statistics nerd, but someone who cares deeply about the real human beings who fought in Flanders fields. And I'm sure his tours will do the same.

On another level, I'm deeply suspicious about the way audio tours can try to replace the reality that you ought to be experiencing for yourself. I don't generally use sound effects - because the audio ought to supplement what you're seeing, not replace it. I like the Independent's travel podcasts a lot, and they use plenty of sounds from a Marrakech souk to traffic noise in Marseille - but  they do something different; they try to bring a place alive when you're not there.

Ultimately, if someone is moved nearly to tears by Caravaggio's martyrdom of St Peter, or experiences a little nirvana looking at the geometry and purity of the Pisa Baptistery, and they turn the audio tour off to explore those feelings on their own - I'm pleased.

Because ultimately, the only real travel is the travel you do alone. The travel you do in your mind. All an audio tour can do is help.

"There's nothing there!"

I want to go to Iceland.

I'd loveto take a horse, I don't know, a car, a bike - and go from one side to the other. From icy sea to icy sea.

I said this to a friend. He said, "There's nothing there."

That's exactly why I want to go.

Our everyday world is so full. Full of things. Full of advertising. Full of information. Full of people. It's a monstrous flow of attention-grabbing stuff.

Even the English or French countryside is full. Birds, hedges, trees, villages, roads, road signs, ploughed fields, dry stone walls, barns, corrugated tin shacks, coppices, cows. A very full landscape.

And my life is too full. Too much work. Too much reading. Too many books. Too many pictures on the wall. Too many plans. Too many people.

So I'd like some emptiness in my life.

The funny thing is, I think if I'd said the Sahara, my friend would have understood.

Distinctive locality

I've written before about local distinctiveness - what makes a region or a city special, what gives it that certain almost indefinable flavour that distinguishes it from anywhere else.

Such distinctiveness is of course under threat. Chain stores, the spread of 'one size fits all' architecture, a certain feeling that local traditions are uncool or plebeian, all tend to impose homogeneity on our townscapes and landscapes. Agricultural colleges teach a single 'best practice' for all countryside - no respect for the distinctive feel of terroir there.

So it's nice to celebrate a couple of organisations which are fighting to preserve this specialness.

First, Maisons Paysannes de France, an organisation which promotes authenticity in the way older French houses are restored. It's a truism in the UK property press that 'only Brits buy old French houses, the French like them new'; but fortunately there are many French owners of old houses who do care about their local vernacular building traditions.

Maisons Paysannes offers links to conservation orientated building professionals, as well as publicising good restorations of period houses. In France, where you'll often see a period house that would be grade II* listed in the UK with modern double glazing and a PVC conservatory stuck on the end, they're fighting a tough fight.   Good luck to them.

Common Ground is a UK based charity that focuses on the ways people can celebrate their local distinctiveness.

One of the threats they identify is abstraction. In a recent Guardian interview Common Ground founder Sue Clifford picked out some particularly nasty ones; 'sites' for streets or fields, 'the public' for people, 'natural resources' for woods and streams. Even the word 'environment' makes her suspicious. Abstract words blind us to real distinctiveness.

(What she didn't go on to elaborate is that local words are another component of 'real place'. What would Norfolk be without bishybarnabees - ladybirds - or dodmen - snails? And we have lokes, where northerners have ginnels and York has snickelways - though the latter is a fairly recent coinage.)

Common Ground's web site suggests ways that people can celebrate the distinctiveness of their own place - ABCs of differences, photographs, parish maps. These maps are not 'objective' (regular readers know I have difficulty with the idea of any map being really objective; the very assertion of 'objectivity' displays a biased idea of what mapping is about). Instead, wilful subjectivity rules - the maps are written, painted, knitted, embroidered; they include dialect words, pictures of wildlife, old stories and legends.

It's back to the 1960s in a way for Common Ground. 'Think globally, act locally' has been replaced by 'think locally! act locally! buy locally!'

Travelling local

There was a really good piece about Slow Travel I noted recently (Josh Kearns, on Brave New Traveler). Slow Travel isn't just about speed; it's also about taking time to appreciate the locality, and the lives of local people. Not just seeing them as 'character' for a photo, a bit of local flavour - but seeing them as potential friends, with their own desires and needs.

It's about helping a child understand how solar installations work rather than just giving him a pen or a sweetie. Or helping fix a motorbike or dig a field. Or having a long, rambling talk with someone about their lives - rather than just visiting the top three tourist attractions.

I had a little Slow Travel moment in Seville a while back. Definitely my least favourite of the three great Andalucian cities... till I walked into the Hospital de San Juan de Dios, and met a charming black-clad little old lady. (She was little, too; she didn't come up to my shoulders, and I'm only 5'4.) She showed me round, and we chatted a bit, and passed a happy quarter of an hour; and she was honestly proud of her city.  I wasn't actually Slow Travelling - I was getting some research done for an audio tour; but I made the time for it. And I remember Seville with rather more warmth than I would have done.

So if Slow Travel is really ethical travel - perhaps we should all be doing it?

I suppose Couchsurfing is one way of doing slow travel. Find a local friend. Hang out. Chat. Have a few beers. See their city through their eyes. It's just a pity Couchsurfing is so much a Club 18-30 thing - youngsters for the most part. And at just over 40, I@m really feeling my age.