Berlin, Potsdam, and some surprises

A recent visit to Berlin turned up some fascinating facets of German culture, and a few surprises in terms of unheralded but fascinating sights.

Modern German life:

• Railway stations sometimes have bike repair shops as well as bike parks.
• Nearly every kebab shop now advertises vegan doner kebabs.
• Germany is still 100% paper towel. Hot air hand dryers have zero market share.
• Beer does not go on shelves at the supermarket. You buy it from the crate. Or, of course, you just buy the crate.
• Supermarkets sell bike tyres and puncture kit, often next to the kitchen utensils.
• 'Caffe creme' is not café crème. It is an espresso, with no milk in at all.
• What is the best cuisine in Berlin? Vietnamese!

I found that some of the most interesting places to go were not well known, even in Potsdam. Sans Souci and the New Palace are crowded, with expensive tickets. But walking around the gardens (entry to which is and apparently always has been free) I found the delightful Neptune Grotto, decorated with abalone shells and waterfalls in stone; the Dragon House, a vineyard manager's house in the shape of a Chinese pagoda; and the wonderful Belvedere on the Klausberg.  All of these were part of the same building programme as Sans Souci itself, Frederick II's creation of a world of imagination and fantasy.

But the best two euros I spent in Potsdam was in the superb Botanical Garden, which belongs to the University of Potsdam. It's as if someone got hold of Kew Gardens and tried to shrink it into five greenhouses and a couple of rockeries - and succeeded. The signage is fascinating, treating subjects as diverse as German colonialism, making cocaine, and how ferns reproduce. 

I particularly enjoyed the cactus house. It's clearly designed to work aesthetically as well as thematically - if you designed a garden to look this good you'd feel happy - and the range of cactuses is immense, from tiny penny-sized pretties to three metre tall monsters. 

My guidebook doesn't even mention the existence of the Botanical Gardens, or the Paradise Garden the other side of the road, a little dell tucked in underneath the Orangery Palace, planted with ferns, heathers, and grasses.

And this was in the dead of winter. In summer, it must be spectacular.

On to Berlin, where I ate Vietnamese food every night. Of course I saw Nefertiti, and she worked her magic. I find her smile far more enigmatic than the Mona Lisa's, with her lifted eyebrows giving an impression that she knows a secret that she might tell you... but then again she might not.

But my favourite museums? Hard to choose, but the three that make the cut are the ones that come far down the list for most people.

1. Schloss Koepenick ('outpost' of the Kunstgewerbemuseum). This museum includes several complete rooms brought from other palaces, with a Renaissance marquetry room and a yellow lacquer Chinoiserie room, as well as magnificent pieces of furniture from the 15th to the 18th centuries. The palace still retains some of its stucco ceilings, and you can go right up into the roofbeams where the study collections are located. And when I came out, snow was drifting down slowly...
2. MEK, the Museum of European Culture. I have no idea if 'normally' this museum would be on my list, because the two most impressive exhibits were both temporary exhibitions; one on the Sami culture, and another on basketry which included a huge architectural installation. If all their exhibitions are this good, though, it would never fall off the list.
3. The Humboldt Forum. This is a big favourite because, exceptionally for Berlin, it's open on Mondays, when all the other museums are closed, and it's also free. But that's not all. Its collections are amazing. African art, including (for the moment) some fascinating Benin bronzes, South American art, two reconstructed cave temples from the northern Silk Road... and more Nepalese and Gandhara Buddhas than you can shake a large number of sticks at. But the thing that perhaps most affected me was the story of Rudolf Douala Manga Bell, king of the Douala people of Cameroon - told by his great-nephew, a teacher in Germany. 

Which brings me to two things these museums are getting right. The first is that they are examining the history of colonialism, and correcting biases of the past. For instance, artists were rarely named when artworks were collected from 'primitive' peoples; something that MEK corrected by inviting Sami craftspeople to examine the collection and create works using ideas from the collection. 

The second? They are using audio and video in interesting ways. I've seen a lot of videos in museums and they're often boring. Getting the great-nephew of a fallen king to tell his story? Not boring. Getting a Newari craftsman and a Buddhist monks to give their views of a Nepalese artefact in the collection? not boring. Filming basketweavers as they search out their materials in swamps and forests? Also not boring.

To some extent Berlin museums must have benefited from a huge public investment in culture - which looks like it may be coming to an end this year as the city government makes significant cuts. But they have spent their money wisely and, which is important, imaginatively.

A strange Dutch Obsession

 I recently visited a friend in the Netherlands, who enquired whether I needed anything from the supermarket. Milk, for instance? Something for lunch? or...

"Do you need any peanut butter?"

Now the concept of *needing* peanut butter was a new one to me, but I thought that could be quite agreeable.

To my surprise, the supermarket - and this was just a little neighbourhood shop, not a big store - had a whole shelf devoted, from top to bottom, to peanut butter. Different brands of peanut butter. Peanut butter with caramel. Peanut butter with chocolate. Peanut butter with chili. 

"Well," said I, "This is splendid. We don't get this kind of thing in France."

"Oh, this is nothing. You should go to the Peanut Butter Shop."

Wait! There's an entire shop devoted to peanut butter?

Indeed there is. He wrote its address down on a piece of paper so that I'd be able to find it. Pindakaaswinkel, 102A Grote Houtstrat.

(Now that's intriguing. For the Dutch, peanut butter is peanut cheese. It's butter to anglophones, the French, and the Germans, Italians, Spanish and even Czechs and Ukrainians. But for the Dutch, it's cheese.)

An airy shop; a clean, white, well lit space with shelves full of jars of peanut butter. I tasted different varieties. Chili and lemongrass was a hit; onion and garlic was a miss. Sea salt caramel? Definitely a hit. Coconut, unexpectedly, not as good as I thought it should be, but Mokka probably the best of all.

So why did the Dutch become obsessed by peanut butter? One explanation I heard was that they acquired the taste from Indonesian satay dishes, made with peanuts. (The Pindakaas staff suggested I could use the lemongrass and chili version as a satay sauce by just mixing it with my stir fry.) Someone else said they picked it up from WWII GIs - and it is true big brand Calvé didn't start producing peanut butter till 1948.

They even sell peanut butter at the open air museum of Zaanse Schans, where the spice grinding windmill produces spice and herbal blends. 

Other Dutch food obsessions include buttermilk, hagelslag (chocolate sprinkles for putting on buttered bread), and The Asparagus Season (the reason I was in the Netherlands in the first place). But peanut butter is definitely the oddest.

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. 

What to see in 2022

As always with a New Year, the lists will be coming out.

"Must-see destinations of 2022."

"New destinations for the New Year."

"2022's top new attractions."

Probably there will be a mix of places that are already tourist magnets par excellence, like Paris or San Francisco or Angkor Wat, with places that are currently unspoilt and wild, so that thousands of tourists will immediately rush there and spoil them. You can almost read some of the articles as "Rush to see Klongpongtiwamchang before all the other readers of this article get there first".

 Or Staryborodinogradski, or Saint-Cul de Merda, or Santiago de las Grandes Botegas, or wherever.

So I'm going to offer a slightly different take on what to see in 2022.

• Covid probably means your options are limited, anyway. So discover your own back yard. Literally, if you have a back garden; lie down on the grass and smell it, look for insects, watch birds, hide in the shrubbery, experience your garden as you never have before. Keep a journal, or record a short trip round the garden every single day. Spend a night under the stars (make sure you have a comfortable sleeping pad, though). Discover your back yard as if you were a child again, all the strangeness and amazement of it. (Eating dirt is optional.)
• Walk the streets round your home. Never take the same way twice. Find things to look at - that old post box, the overgrown garden full of butterflies, tiny acts of subversion like the garden where Buddhas oversee the garden gnomes, a cat looking out of a window at you. Former government adviser Alastair Campbell runs a 'tree of the day' photo spot on Twitter - find something you care about (manhole cover of the day? peeling paint of the day? front door of the day?) and do the same.
• I also suggest walking because let's face it, some of us are, right now, a bit anxious about taking public transport. Or get a bicycle. 
• That gallery you always meant to go to, and never have? Go! The church you never went into? if the door's open, go in: there might be a Romanesque madonna inside, or a fascinating epitaph, or a lot of stacking plastic chairs. You never know.
• Think about trips you've taken that you really enjoyed, and why. You may never have realised you were interested in a particular thing. I have just realised that I am fascinated by temple food - prasad in Indian temples, the langar in a Sikh gurdwara, Korean Buddhist monasteries with their highly ritual meals. So once things get freed up, I'm going to see if I can work in some of these communities. I may even go back to Mount Girnar, if the little kitchen there will let me stay. 
• Give yourself a 'stretch' aspiration, whether that's your first solo trip, a long trek, a tough summit, a trip to a different culture or back to your long distant roots. (Norwegian Americans, take note!) For me, it will be a really long hike through Zanskar, Lahaul and Spiti, and finally getting to visit the Abbot of Stakna. My first long hike since I got my arthritis diagnosis. Of course you could also get a pedometer or a fitbit and "climb Everest" up and down a local hill, or "hike the Appalachian Trail" from your front door to the park and back every day. Or your aspiration could be learn Japanese in lockdown ready for a trip when we all ope up again.
• Vow to go somewhere just because it's there. Like Manchester. Or Birmingham, Alabama. Or just take a road or a railway because it's there. Nowhere scenic. Find the interest in the everyday.

And stay safe, everyone. The sooner we get the coronavirus banished, the sooner we can get back to the freedom of travelling just anywhere we want.

Soundscapes

 I was in the village the other day when the Angelus began to ring. The bell has a loud, brassy, slightly cracked timbre with a weird resonance; quite unlike the bell in the next village, which sounds flat and hollow, like a dustbin being whacked with a broom.

We tend to think of travel visually: Instagrammable views, architecture, light, bright turquoise skies or the virulent viridian of the Northern Lights. But with my eyes closed I can tell the difference between different soundscapes, and as Covid-19 is still putting a crimp in my wanderlust, I decided to daydream my way around the sounds of the world this morning.

• Early muezzin in Sur, Oman. A deep, warm bass voice in what, already, is not quite the silence of night.
• Duelling muezzins of Istanbul. I'll swear it's personal between the Sultanahmet Mosque and its nearest competitor. A very different kind of muezzin from the factual recitation of the Omanis; here, it's operatic, with fluent melismas, digressions, ornaments, stretching every breath out as far as it will go, and underneath the melody the incessant honking of taxis on the meidan.
• A valley in Uzbekistan where suddenly, every single donkey started to sing out and the valley resonated like a bowlful of braying.
• The plink, splash of icebergs slowly melting in an Icelandic lagoon. Every so often I'd hear one that had become top-heavy suddenly crash down into the water, and the ripples from its collapse, and then it would be back to the plink, plink in the vast midnight silence.
• The whistle of swans' wings as seven of them flew in arrowhead formation over my camp at Pensthorpe, Norfolk, in the early morning.
• Chai garam chai, chai garam chai, the song of the tea vendor on an Indian train. 
• "Ladies, get your husband a new tool here!" the cheeky stallholder at Brick Lane. His rudery only matched by the stout lady who sells new season white asparagus on the market at Ezy-sur-Eure.
• In Mirabai's temple at Chittorgarh, someone sings bhajans to a small harmonium. The melodic line never stops; note after note, meandering, wandering around itself, plaintive and unfulfilled.
• Ethiopian priests rattling their sistrums as they chant, and then the big drums coming out for prayers and hymns in a joyful shout.
• Staying in a guesthouse on the banks of the Chao Praya river in Ayutthaya, I hear the big barges going up and down the river all night. The low growl of the motors, and then as that dies down, the ripples of the wake hitting the pilings below the guesthouse, slap slap slap, and then again, silence, till the next boat.
• Explosions in the dark in Colombia. And then shouting and music. The start of the annual fiesta in Barichara - but we were worried for a moment!
• A zampogna playing its pastoral tune in front of a Christmas crib in Rome.
• A Catalan picnic, with a gralla player sitting on a car bonnet, his instrument emitting raucous squeals, and drum players each side rattling away - this apparently being a quite normal way to celebrate the weekend. (And later, back in Barcelona, I danced the sardana in the cathedral square to the sound of the band - clarinet-rich, but with a tiny strident whistle leading every tune.)
• Monsoon rain in Tamil Nadu, less weather than a 360 degree waterfall effect.
• If petrichor is the smell of earth after rain, there should be a word for the sound of motorcycle tyres hissing through rainslick just after a storm.
• Egrets and sacred ibises in a tree in Dire Dawa, squabbling and gossipping.
• The lapwings calling whee, whee on the uplands of the Drouais.
• Owls calling at night, the whoo-whoo of the little tawnies and the screech of the barn owl.
• Horns of Indian traffic, never silent, "Please be horning". Personalised horns like personalised ringtones only even more annoying.
• Ping ping PA-dum, the French railway announcement tone. SNCF appear to have the copyright as no other railway in the world uses it (or not to my knowledge. Maybe they do in Andorra. But then Andorra doesn't have any railways.)
• And the marvel that is Binche carnival, with its 26 brass band tunes. Though my favourite is the little morning tune played just on a single clarinet as the Gilles gather in the outlying villages and suburbs and start making their way into the town.

A FEW OF MY FAVOURITE THINGS

 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?

In praise of the boring places

 "I'm bored with this town already," I heard from three different people in Luang Prabang. "There's nothing to do. Only one street and some temples."

Towns like this Luang Prabang are the kind I love. Because they're the kind of place you can slide into gently, take your time to feel your way around. In Luang Prabang I found myself celebrating Buddha's birthday with a family picnic in the local temple, I wandered the market in the early morning, I talked to the curator of a photographic exhibition who showed me a photo of himself as a young monk, and one day when I'd walked the other side of the Nam Khan river, I ended up at a wedding dancing with drunken dads and wicked old ladies.

(Lao sound systems are LOUD. It took me a while to get the ringing out of my ears after that. Or was it just the effect of the whisky? It certainly took me a lot longer to walk back than it had to get there...)

I spent a week in Hampi. Just walking, biking, climbing mountains, watching the elephants get their bath, seeing the landscape from different viewpoints. Sitting in the Virupaksha temple courtyard, watching pilgrims come to the temple.

I spent a month in Orchha. For most people it's a day trip, but I stayed, and took side trips, going to Gwalior, Chitrakut, Sonagiri, Datia. I walked around, I made friends, learned to play karrom, drunk ridiculous amounts of sweet milky chai all morning, made friends with a Korean who was learning to play violin, Indian style, and ran my own street gang of local urchins who showed me all the best stepwells.

I rather like Bishkek. There's not a lot to it, but people are friendly, there's a good market, a great craft beer bar, a women-run brewery, a German beer hall, it's all walkable. There are parks with odd sculptures, and a whole load of old grave marker steles outside the national museum.

I like Bari. Ages ago, I spent a week there, using the railway line to get to all the great Romanesque cathedrals of Apulia. I got a free lift to the amazing Castel del Monte, Frederick II's hunting lodge in the hills, because the hotel owner was visiting a friend there; we had the whole place to ourselves. I was even invited to go down to the harbour early morning to see the fish catch (and ate part of it later on). Maybe not top on everyone's list but I love it.

Mechelen, former capital of the Netherlands. Dire Dawa, described as no more than a transport hub by most guidebooks, where I saw the epiphany play, danced and sang hymns, ate the best Indian food in Africa, talked about New Delhi with my hotel owner, heard trains hoot in the night.

Girivi is nowheresville, Georgia. Go much further and you're in Russia. It's a rough grid of a couple of dozen compounds and guesthouses. But it has better wifi than the rest of Tusheti put together, lovely scenery, beautiful walks, a clear river tumbling over huge red pebbles. In the morning you can watch the sheep flowing out on to the mountainside like snow, and in the evening they come back, with the dark, thin, shy cows. I wish I'd had more time to hang out there.

True, some cities are just very boring. But more towns, particularly the smaller towns, have some charms, and have a life of their own. It's worth settling down for a bit. Difficult, perhaps, if you only have a couple of weeks - easier if you have three, easier still if you have a few months. But worth doing.

Because the restless whistlestop tour gets boring, after a while. And you see ten monuments, a market and a couple of airports, but you don't get a feel for the country. 

I can't recommend a boring town for you. But you'll know it when you find it. It's the place, or just a neighbourhood in a city, where you make a couple of friends, you stay an extra day; where someone tells you about a really nice place just up the road, or a quirky little place to visit, or you manage to find little places that aren't in any of the guidebooks, or you just spend all morning at the same little cafe peoplewatching.

It's the place where you just want to take life as it comes. It's the place where, instead of just visiting, and rattling around it like a pea in a big box, you actually find your place, a lifestyle just the right size for you to fit. You find a routine - a swim in the freezing river in the morning, a sunset walk every evening, playing karrom under the peepal tree or drinking craft beer in the same bar. 

These places are waiting for you. You just need to keep your mind open to them.

And keep your schedule open enough to take the opportunity.

Car boot sales and flea markets: a sense of place

 You can tell a lot about a culture from what gets sold in junk shops and at car boots (garage sales if you're from the US) and flea markets. Here's a sense of France, or to be very particular, a little slice of France in between the huge wheat fields of the Beauce, and the valley of the Seine, about an hour from Paris by not very fast train.

• Firemen's helmets. The Sapeurs Pompiers are something special. A lot of them are volunteers. There are old-fashioned helmets with a feather crest like a Roman centurion's moulded into the metal, and new shiny astronaut-like bubble helmets. You see a lot of these. (Army and police stuff? not so much.) Often, the same table holds a collection of model fire engines, too.
• Enamel coffee pots. Yes, this is vintage France. The little wooden-bodied cubical coffee grinders with a metal funnel and handle on top are also typically French. What I didn't know till I looked what that they used to be a major product for Peugeot - as did woodworking tools; Peugeot was a general foundry and at some point I suppose they decided they might as well make cars, too.
• Occasionally you see a collection of teapots. But they are either Berber fake-silver teapots (and Moroccan tea is a whole different thing) or they are collector's teapots. What you almost never see is the plain brown pottery teapot beloved of generations of Brits. Sorry, no PG Tips here.
• Le Creuset casseroles. I have a lovely collection of these now; casseroles, dishes, frying pans, ramekins... in the classic orange colour, in grey, yellow, red, and my favourite, lime green. But there are other brands, too - and often not enamelled but just big cast iron cauldrons. Never mind cooking the Christmas goose, I've seen one you could probably get a whole pig into. See this, and understand how French cooking ticks.
• Souvenirs from Morocco, Algeria and Tunisia - once part of the French colonies. Less often, lovely cloths from French-speaking West Africa. I've pretty much furnished one entire room with Tunisian blue and white carpets bought at car boots.
• Souvenirs from elsewhere in France - bright Quimper pottery, Eiffel towers (usually in ridiculous quantities: do people collect them?), dolls in French regional costumes. A car boot can be a miniature tour of the country if you want it to be.
• Glass jars. Why? Because there is a massive tradition of making your own conserves - not just jams, but chestnuts in syrup, potted meats, all kinds of stuff. (And I know there still is, because the supermarkets suddenly start selling preserving jars and industrial amounts of sugar the moment the jam-making season begins.)
• Agricultural equipment, because this is farming country; and riding kit, because this is horse country. Old pitchforks made entirely of wood, scythes, sickles, cast iron tractor seats, horsecollars, riding boots, and occasionally, a saddle so shiny and smelling of leather that it can only have been used once or twice (I wonder why).
• Old flutes, oboes, clarinets, and musical instrument making tools. And this is in our tiny little area between La Couture-Boussey and Ivry la Bataille and Ezy-sur-Eure, just a few kilometers. Why? Because there were musical instrument makers everywhere back in the nineteenth century. Today, Marigaux still makes oboes here, and there are businesses making accessories like reeds and the felt for key pads.
• The buvette usually sells a choice of chipo-frites or merguez-frites (regular or spicy sausage with chips). The barbecue is a solid iron affair, hand-made by some local with a bit of welding experience and some agricultural scrap. There's almost always a choice of wine, kir, and beer, as well as various canned drinks; Lipton's Ice Tea is still more popular than Coke around here. And someone has always cooked a tarte tatin, upside-down apple tart, at a euro a slice. 
• I mustn't forget; the set of corkscrew and wine thermometer, and the little metal wine-tasting cups. Even though we're on the borders of cider country here, wine is part of the nation. Liberty, equality, oenology.

But my favourite find is nineteenth century historical or satirical plates. The first one I found was de Lesseps drawing his plan of the Suez canal. Then I found the French lion-tamer who went to the Great Exhibition in London. Then the Exposition Universelle in Paris - which had pretty much the same idea as the London exhibition, a chance to show off the entire world and promote French commerce and industry.

Then I found 'Le Club des Femmes', a little piece of (anti-) feminist history. A chap wearing an apron sweeps the dust off his doorstep and promises to get dinner ready while his wife strides off to the Womens' Club saying 'Back later, be good'. And a plate celebrating Montgolfier's balloon. And an extravagant plate, part of  a set showing you how to do different dances - this one is the polka, and they're really enjoying themselves!

I don't think I've ever paid more than a euro for a plate. The ones I don't buy are the puzzle plates. There are loads of them; the turn-it-upside-down-and-it's-something-else plates, the rebus plates (like a tablecloth, water, and a lion spelling Nappe-Eau-Lion or Napoleon), the Ouere's-Ouallie plates (well, their nineteenth-century equivalent).  I don't quite get the humour and to be honest, most of the French people I've asked don't either.

And then of course all the stuff you'd get anywhere. The kids' clothes that kids have grown out of. Last year's fashions. The old cutlery and the old toys and the jigsaw with one piece missing. But it's the items I've mentioned that tell me yes, I'm in France. 

I wonder what German flea markets are like? or Spanish? do they have them in Japan? ... maybe some time I'll get the chance to find out.

#MeToo - sexism and tourism

 Two little vignettes from my journal of Egypt.

An English couple in one of the temples, I think it was Karnak. The man gave his partner his mobile phone and went to stand in front of a colonnade view.

"Take the picture then."

"I don't know how your phone works."

"It's very simple. The yellow button."

"I can't see a yellow button."

"On the screen."

"I can't see it."

Angrily, he walked over, grabbed the phone, showed her, shoved it back in her hand, went back to pose in front of the colonnade.

She frowned and squinted, trying to see the screen in the bright sun. The phone clicked.

He came to look.

"Well that's bloody useless, isn't it? You should have used the zoom. Look, you can hardly see me at all. Use the bloody zoom."

Back he went. I wondered if the next photograph would satisfy. It didn't.

"Look, you've got one more try. Then we've got to get back on the bus."

"But I haven't even..."

Her words were already directed at his back. She clicked. He came back, grabbed the phone, started off towards the entrance.

I thought: for God's sake, let him go. Just let the bugger go. You're better off without him.

But she followed, and I could see the droop of her shoulders. Just how many years of this had she had to take?

***

"That one is the Red Chapel," she said, looking at the plan in the guidebook. "That is the white chapel of Senwosret, and ... yes, that one is Hatshepsut's."

"Ah," he said. "It's pretty."

"And then, if we go here," she pushed a fingertip along a line in the book, "we can see the Rameses temple, the one we missed earlier, it has Osiride statues and a barque shrine."

"OK," he said, "we have time for it all?"

"Yes, it's hardly two, we have all afternoon."

I was amazed.

A man and a woman, and the woman is reading the guidebook.

And the man is listening!

I have travelled in India, Africa, Europe, the US, South America, the Middle East. I have travelled off the beaten track and I have seen the big sights. And here was something I had never, ever, seen before.

(They were French, by the way. Vive l'égalité.)

***

In a week that's seen domestic violence and sexual harrassment hit the headlines in France, and a woman murdered in the UK, I couldn't help my thoughts turning to these two little episodes. I'd like to think they are the way of the past and the way of the new generation. I'd like to hope so.

But it's a fairly slender hope. 

I'll never forget that poor woman's slumped shoulders as she followed her partner towards the exit.

Lockdown travel: the Photo Game

 This is a game I play with myself sometimes when I'm travelling, if I'm tired, if I'm stuck waiting for a bus or a train or a plane, if I'm eating out, particularly in street cafes. It's a great game for lockdown. Or just to give yourself a challenge.

Rule One : Your backside is glued to your chair. 

Rule Two: You must keep taking interesting photos. (Choose a camera with a good zoom lens or function.)

Rule Three: There is no rule three.

I can do it today as I sit at my computer. If I were going to take photos now:

• the sun falling across a little statue of Shiva I have on the windowsill
• the fish on my Vietnamese blue and white mug
• a bookshelf where all the books are leaning at twenty degrees
• the thin fanning of pages of a book I left half-open on my desk
• the texture of the plaster on the wall
• some very odd patterns made by reflections and the shadow of the blinds
• the furry texture of the top of my paintbrushes in their mug
• a whole landscape of dust on top of a writing box (really must get round to dusting)
• two horses going up the street outside
• the cat looking in at the window
• his tail disappearing
• a scatter of pencil shavings where I knocked my pencil sharpener over

Sometimes these photos are brilliant. Sometimes you look at them later and think "Why on earth did I take that?"

But the point is not the photos. It's the looking.

Oh actually, that's rule three. You have to see the photograph before you pick the camera up. You look with your eyes, not with the lens.

In fact, if you don't have a camera, you can still play the game.

Happy looking!

A place to sit

 I travel hard. I've walked up to 40 km in a day. I don't really do lunch. I quite often get up with the dawn.

But sometimes you just want a place to sit. And sometimes, those places come back to your mind as little places of peace and contentment.

I was at the Pechersky Lavra in Kyiv on a saint's day. It was busy; monks in dirty gabardine with ancient army surplus backpacks in from the country, women in bright floral patterned headscarves, VIPs in shiny suits and stiletto-wearing blondes, long queues to see some particular shrine, the odour in one of the churches of incense and candle wax and burning wicks and unwashed bodies. 

Glittering domes of gold. Chanting. Smoke trails rising from the candle racks. Golden icons shimmering in heat haze.

A huge cobbled ramp behind the main court leading down to the catacombs. Bearded patriarchs in their coffins, in velvet slippers and embroidered robes. A press of pilgrims in the tiny rock-cut chapels, kissing each glass case in turn.

After a while I was worn out. I wandered to a little church further south. It was closed. Outside was a cemetery with a rose garden. I sat; I can't remember whether there was a bench or whether I just sat on the wall. I just sat, and felt the breeze, and smelt the roses.

One time on the way to Santiago I found a rock that was shaped just right for the contours of my body, and on a cool December day, warmed by the sun. I lay on it and watched the sky, bright blue with white clouds, and felt myself almost falling into the sky at great velocity; and then I closed my eyes.

That day smelt of gorse and dry grass, and there were charms of goldfinches, but I remember the deep relaxation of that rock as if it cast a spell on me for the whole day.

There's a grove of huge cedars at Hemis Shupackchan in Ladakh - above the village, already some way out. In an arid, high-altitude desert where every field has to be built up over generations of fertilising - I'd passed women raking last year's composts out over the fields in the morning - there are no forests, and few trees, but here there were beautiful spreading trees and green turf under them. I spread myself out for half an hour in the warm shade. I've rarely felt so at peace.

And sometimes, in towns, you find your little place. In Orchha, for me, it was the tiny space next to the griddle of potato patty man. I watched pilgrims and tourists go by, and sometimes an ash-faced sadhu with long braided hair or a saffron robed sannyasi with the white and red marks of Vishnu on his forehead. Lunch was there most days, a 20-rupee potato patty, and it was one of my happy places.

Then there was Ram Babu's fruit stall. A little stool dragged out from underneath it, and I was ready to sit and wait for my juice. Sometimes goats came and tried to grab an orange or some greenery while his back was turned. Sometimes one of the local cows had to be dissuaded from sidling up to the stall and leaning on it. Once, Ram Babu treated someone for bad knee pain with his special iron knife - I hadn't realised he was the village magician. I met charming gents from Bhopal and Indore, other customers who came to Orccha every year. I learned to play karrom. That was my second happy place to sit.

And my third? I sat there only once, one bright morning, very early, when the old blind sadhu who lived in the Chaturbuj temple and the younger sadhu who looked after him were singing in the rising sun. The old man had a kind of tin can fiddle with one wire string which he played with a ring on his finger, and when they'd finished a bhajan they smoked their bong, offered me a toke, coughed plentifully, and started another bhajan; and as the sun rose, the stone warmed up, and we warmed ourselves, and the misty shapes of the town came into focus.

These memories come to me now, when because of covid I've not been more than forty kilometres from home for nearly a year. And they don't come as photographs, but as memories full of atmosphere, and smell, and coolness or warmth, and touch. 

That is why you travel. When you need your memories, they will come; and they're a form of sustenance.

"Don't go at the weekend"

 People will tell you not to go to places at the weekend. It's too crowded.

In some ways they're right. I like the Louvre on a rainy Thursday afternoon, for instance, or Venice early in the morning, half past six with the sun just rising out of the mists. I like Bermondsey Market when it's still nearly dark and the sizzling of bacon is only just beginning to make that meaty, salty aroma rise from the breakfast stand.

But visiting Jerash on a weekend was wonderful - apart from the fact that no one asked for my ticket going in. Jerash was full of Jordanian families enjoying themselves.

Little girls pelted across the great oval colonnaded entrance to the city playing football. Little boys tried to climb up every pile of rocks in sight. One climbed a pillar and jumped off, and then suddenly all his friends were doing it, flying, arms spread, for a brief moment before hitting the ground with the thump that pushed all the breath out of their lungs.

Men sat on tartan or tiger-striped picnic rugs smoking their shishas and looking over the ancient hippodrome towards Hadrian's gate. Young women posed for the camera in front of the Nyphaeum; a young man climbed as high as he could on the temple of Zeis, to the highest point of the city, and sat completely unafraid of the precipice below.

And through the whole city wandered flocks of goats and sheep with their herdsmen.

As the crowds died down I wandered towards the gate. The two men sharing a shisha were still there; we had a little chat. One little girl was left kicking a football, but her older brother grabbed it, and her, and off they went. It was a nice, low key, end to the day.

Or so I thought. But just outside the gate were the bright lights of a funfair; how could I resist? 

And to my great surprise, I heard my name being called. It was the younger of the two shisha smokers, and he wanted to show me his sister's new baby. I've never seen a prouder uncle, or a man more in love, even though there was, I'd guess, at least a 25 year difference in their ages. The whole family had their portraits taken, and then uncle was left, literally, holding the baby as sister and her husband decided to take a ride on one of the more sedate attractions. 

That's Jerash at the weekend. It was much more boring when I went back the next day.

A country in two icons

Sometimes you can sum up an entire country in an object. I've picked two that, for me, say an awful lot about France. These are:

• The Citroen Deux Chevaux, and 
• the Duralex 'Picardie' glass.

Duralex. A classic but modern design. It came out at a time when other countries' glassmakers were all trying to make pseudo-'crystal' glassware, that looked like it came from a Victorian brothel. This is uncompromising modernity. But the elegant curves prevent it feeling brutal or cold.

Economical. This is a glass everyone could afford to have in their kitchen. Let me refer to the principle of égalité: the equality of citizens in France isn't just about 'equal before the law', it goes further than that. It's about schools that ensure everyone has the same basic cultural references, about cheap restaurants offering good, solid French cuisine for a working man's (or woman's) lunch. Getting good design for a few francs - that's practical equality.

Tough. This is good industrial design too. Not always a given in France - French gardening tools always disappoint me (except their pruning saws and mushroom picking knives, which are fantastic) and most door handles these days are rubbish. But this is a tough, reliable, quality item. (I don't rely on it to bounce if I drop it on the floor... but I have dropped one, and it did bounce.)

...égalité again. When the British made a car for the masses, it was the Mini. A design classic, but look at the subtext; a car you have to get down into. A shrunken car. A car in which you drive along with your bum only a few inches above the tarmac, while Milord in his Bentley can look down at you from a great height. A car which, I'm afraid, is cramped and uncomfortable. "You get what you pay for," say the Brits, albeit the Mini does look very cute in The Italian Job (original version, which if you haven't seen, you should).

But the 2CV commands the road. It has space. Enough for two sheep in the back, someone told me once. You don't give way to the big black Traction Avant, you look it in the face. 

Liberté too. Why stay on the road when the 2CV's suspension lets you go down a green lane or a field track? I asked French friends whether the story about the 2CV being designed to carry a box of eggs on the back seat down a bumpy farm track without breaking any was true, and they all said 'yes'.

And the design. Again, striking, and again with some lovely curves. Robust. 

Most French people these days use drinking glasses from Ikea - though a couple of years ago one supermarket had a special offer of coloured Duralex glasses and they proved quite popular. And if they drive a Citroen, it will be a Berlingo or a C4 Spacetourer. 

But these icons are part of France at a deep level. And they illustrate something about the country and its values.

Remembering....

I got back from Jordan to France a week before the lockdown. That will be my last travel for a while.

For a while, we'll all be travelling only in our minds and in our memories.

And it's odd how the places I remember aren't always the ones that came with five stars in the guidebook, or that I thought at the time I'd remember.

I'm sitting at my desk, thinking of the Burana Tower, an hour or so on the bus from Bishkek in the Kyrgyz Republic. I'm thinking of the friendly taxi driver who took me there, and on the way back, stopped so that I could go into the fields and see the strawberry farmers, and eat handfuls of freshly picked strawberries.

I'm thinking of the broad and open plains of the Chuy valley, and the shivering poplars, and the oddity of a fighter plane parked on a roundabout.

I'm thinking of the Uzgen minaret, way south of Bishkek, and the view down to the valley, over a tumbled mass of slope scattered with the black-painting iron railings of graves. The little fairground next door, with the lady who reached over to take a little boy's arm and help him 'fish' the rubber duck out of the pond which entitled him to a prize, after many fruitless and frustrating endeavours - her gentle smile and his great wide grin.

I'm thinking of the lovely gentleman who sold me a book on melons and sang to me in the park in Bukhara. And a family building a house in a village near Wadi Rum, who filled my water bottle and poured me sweet tea and showed me the way to the canyon I wanted to find.

And I'm thinking, too, of my favourite salon de thé in Paris. Which, for the time being, is just as inaccessible and loaded with just as much nostalgia.

Bodh Gaya: A Tour of Asia in Miniature

Buddha was enlightened here, under the great bodhi tree. More than two millennia later, the tree is still here - or rather, one of its descendants, a cutting brought back from Sri Lanka, from a tree that was itself a cutting of the original. The great Mahabodhi temple, built a hundred years or more after Buddha's death, is still here - or rather, the temple that replaced and expanded emperor Ashoka's first building, and this temple itself much restored over the centuries. Everything remains, yet nothing remains; a striking illustration of the Buddhist tenets of impermanence and flux.

Bodh Gaya attracts Buddhists from everywhere. There are Americans - Californian New Age Buddhists who combine a meditation regime with an Instagram account full of dakini pictures and requests for everything with avocados; serious Koreans; slight Thai ladies who circumambulate every stupa in sight and leave flowers; clusters of white-clad Sinhalese Buddhists with their saffron-robed Venerables; Bhutanese monks in robes the colour of dried blood; and stateless Tibetan refugees who fly south here for the winter and return to Dharamsala in the spring, men in dark tunics, women with brightly striped aprons and crooked smiles.

All of this gives Bodh Gaya another singular attraction; there are monasteries here from most Buddhist nations, so that effectively you can take a tour of Buddhist Asia in a single town.

I'd already had a foretaste when I visited the Korean monastery in Sarnath, a wonderful cool building with polished wooden floors where I was welcomed courteously and shown the library. Sheltering from the dry heat of the afternoon, I read up on temple etiquette; how to eat "without attachment," holding the food bowl up to hide your mouth as you eat. The detailed, precise usage of the four bowls (balugongyang, "four bowls containing food"); one for rice, one for soup, one for kimchi, one for water. The bowls are unwrapped and laid out; the food is served, the water is served, the diners eat in silence. At the end, each bowl in turn is cleaned with tea and a piece of kimchi; the water in the smallest bowl is used to rinse the other three, then tipped out, and the bowls are placed one inside the other, and finally wrapped up in grey cloth to be put away. It is orderly, frugal, respectful, simple. (And very Korean.)

Here in Bodh Gaya I stayed in the Burmese monastery; simple, clean, and full of extravagantly coloured cockerels. Huge pots simmered in the kitchens, and the temple was a hotchpotch of fuchsia, lime green, acid yellow, and robin's egg blue, a typically Burmese colour scheme. The Buddha had a rich lipstick pink mouth and gloss porcelain ivory skin.

But in the Japanese temple (one of two) the Buddha was golden, huge, flat-faced, inexpressive. The statue dominated the simple space, all air and dim light and gleaming wood that had been planed to absolute smoothness. Zen: economy of means, lightness of spirit.

I grew to love my Burmese monastery. Unlike many Indian temples, everything was clean, remarkably and truly clean. The toilets were slushed down with water every five minutes, the kitchens were spotless, the pots scoured bright every day, plates washed down with huge amounts of water in the garden. I only stayed there three days, which the monastery says is the maximum allowed; but an American in another room said he'd been there a month, and was studying the sutras, and "You can really stay as long as you like, if they think you're serious."

Seriousness may be in short demand, though. Later on, when I went to Rajgir and stayed in the Burmese monastery there, one of the monks complained about the pilgrims, who, he said, were just tourists with a Buddhist veneer.

"Ten years ago it was so difficult for our people to come," he told me. "When a pilgrim came here, you knew he had really made an effort, that it was important for him, that he was serious-minded. Now it's so easy for them. They buy a ticket, they fly, they come in a bus, they buy hats with silly messages and souvenir t-shirts, they make noise in the monastery, they eat too much, they don't get up in the morning, they treat it as a holiday, just a holiday."

While Japanese and Korean monasteries value calm and simplicity, Tibetans have a very different style. In one of the Tibetan compounds, a monk with a wrinkled face and goofy smile played football with three little boys; in another, little yapping white dogs with curled-over tails like ostrich plumes ran about excitedly, trying to impress a caretaker who regarded them with tolerant amusement. The Tibetan temples glow with colour - warm reds, bright yellows, green, blue, primary colours taken from a five year old's poster paint box in incredible profusion. Every mandala, every halo of flames, multiplies and complicates outlines, introduces new richness into what's already a rich melange of colour and form. This is a world of thousands of Buddhas, of flames and clouds, a universe deep and full and always changing. Wrathful deities have extra arms, extensive rows of heads, each head with extensive rows of fangs. The simplicity of Zen is cut loose; in the phantasmagoria, every threat, every protector, every thought has its deity, the struggles of the mind in meditation enacted in a world of primal drama.

Compared to this, the Sri Lankan temple feels like an outpost of the Ambridge Mothers' Union, innocent and respectable. Piles of biscuits are heaped in front of the Buddha as offerings (and the brands appear to be a Sri Lankan selection, as India's love affair with Parle G biscuits is not in evidence here), with flower arrangements and cellophane-wrapped hampers. There's a celebration going on to commemorate the relic of Buddha's tooth, and there are flowers everywhere, and everyone is in white dresses and white suits.

The Thai temple is readily recognizable, with its upturned eaves ending with gilded, sinuous dragons. But there's no one there when I visit. By contrast, the Bhutanese monastery is bustling; monks are hard at work making butter sculptures, bringing in buckets of cold water, and - in a corner - boiling kettles and making tea. Just one of them speaks English, and tells me the preparations are all for tomorrow: "Come and see us tomorrow at the big stupa," he instructs me.

So I turn up, and they are all there, sitting on the platforms facing the temple, with all their butter sculptures set up on an ornate altar in front. They're chanting at breakneck speed from the scriptures; a pair of great trumpets blasts bass harmonies which roar and growl under the chanting, while oboes squeal and bleat, and all the while the front row of six drummers set the pace, with a rainstorm of red drumsticks on taut skin. The music is savage and unrelenting. And suddenly, there is silence.

It's break time. Monks who have sat immobile for an hour stretch, then turn to each other to chat; two young boys carry round a teapot. The English-speaking monk leans over and gives me tsampa, which is like Rice Krispies rolled in butter, and motions the lads to pour me tea, rich and buttery and oily in the mouth. A minute later, the boys are collecting up the teacups and the drums crash into action, and here we go again.

There's a Bangladeshi monastery here, too. It's a big, rectangular room, with three cusped arches at one end, and prayer mats. It feels like a mosque, only in what might have been a mihrab there's a small Buddha.

And there are Hindus. (In fact, the governing body of the Mahabodhi temple has a majority of Hindus on the board.) Which may seem strange till you remember Buddha is claimed as an avatar of Vishnu, and so he is worshipped here in a slightly different way, and long-haired, bearded sadhus mingle with the shaven Buddhist monks and nuns. So even while I'm touring Asia in Bodh Gaya, I'm well aware that I'm still in India, still within the Hindu mainstream.

***

I missed one thing in Bodh Gaya though. My mini tour of Asia showed me a lot of styles, a lot of ways of living, even quite a few different cuisines. What it didn't show me, in this very poor state of Bihar, was the immense contribution of Buddhist charitable work. One of the Japanese temples runs a kindergarten and a free medical centre; another Buddhist organisation treats leprosy cases. Compassion isn't just a nice feeling but a goad to practical work. (That's why bodhisattvas exist; beings which have deferred Buddhahood in order to help suffering sentient beings.) I found out about all this later.

And everywhere in India that there are Buddhists, there are Tibetans. There are hard-as-nails Tibetan women who are the world's most expert and persistent bargainers; no merchant in the Istanbul spice bazaar, no insurance or double glazing salesman, would last a minute against their skills and obstinacy. There are monks. There are wizened old men in chubas and young men in jeans and Ray-Bans who run momo stalls and have grubby photos of the Dalai Lama pinned up in the corner. These are the Tibetans who fled their country when the Chinese took over - some more recently - and their children and even grandchildren, all stateless till, very recently, the High Court in Delhi ordered the government to give those born in India full nationality. That makes Bodh Gaya, in one of its incarnations, a huge refugee camp.

***

There is always more to a place than you see. I started with a tour of the picturesque that was perhaps little more than visiting 'France en Miniature' or Legoland Windsor; I ended up with a tour of the human heart. Bodh Gaya is at the same time everything I had expected, and a huge surprise. I wonder if it's like that for everyone.

Petra off the beaten track

The Treasury is what everyone comes to see. Its red stone, its broken pediments, its delicate ornamentation: everyone knows it from photographs, it's the one thing you have to see even if you spend only an hour in Petra (though at 50 JD a ticket, it's an expensive hour).

And that's a bit of a problem. There is one way in, the narrow Siq, a kilometre of walking in a narrow defile. In mid-morning the deep opening containing the Treasury is loud with the shouts of vendors, the buzz of conversation, tour guides talking at the tops of their voices, carriage wheels on the stone-paved road.

But Petra is huge. To walk from the Siq to the Monastery (Al-Deir, another Nabatean tomb on the same roughly Hellenistic lines as the Treasury) is about 8km; and the corrugated, mountainous terrain forces trails to wind and snake around wadis and over cols. For the more adventurous traveller with a good head for heights (or the determination to ignore their increasing uneasiness and vertigo) there are a number of alternatives to the cauldron of the Treasury.

• First of all, get up early. The site opens at six. One morning I found myself walking the Siq in complete solitude. The quiet won't last long, but you will never forget the hushed gloom of the Siq, the serenity of the Treasury in dawn light.
• Secondly, take the trail to the High Place of Sacrifice and then come down Wadi Farasa. The steps leading up from near the Theatre are steep enough to deter most from making the effort; the track winds up the side of a narrow wadi, then crosses to the neighbouring peak and climbs again towards the High Place with its amazing views. From there, the trail descends the side of Wadi Farasa, with almost unvisited rock-cut tombs - a wadi that has a gentleness and charm absent from some of the more spectacular sites. 
• Another trail ('Al-Khutba') leads from the end of the Royal Tombs up to another High Place, and then to a tea tent with a superb view over the Treasury. From here, the din of the crowds shrinks to a low hum, as if the hollow place has become a Tibetan singing bowl. When I was there, about ten people had made it this far, and we were being entertained by two very cute kittens.

(By the way, on the Al-Khutba trail, when you encounter an official brown sign giving the direction as straight on, ignore it - go left instead. There's an arrow painted on the ground a bit later on; you descend broad steps to a valley floor and then take a right turn down the valley. It's a much easier way to get to the Treasury viewpoint.)

I didn't take the third marvellous trail, but I wish I had. The problem is that you need to get your Petra ticket first, and you have to go into the visitor centre in Wadi Musa first. 'Petra through the Back Door' starts at Siq el Barid, 'Cold Siq' or 'Little Petra', and then takes a relatively easy track through desert and rocks to the Monastery - from where you can walk down to the centre of Petra, and out past the Treasury to the town of Wadi Musa. (It's part of the Jordan Trail, which runs all the way from Umm Qais in the north to Aqaba in the south.)

I am sometimes disappointed by the reality when I go somewhere I know from photos. The Taj Mahal I found underwhelming; likewise Abu Simbel. But Petra is far, far more than the classic photo of the Treasury, and the more I wandered its trails, the more I loved it.

Stay longer, pay less

I'm just back from a very enjoyable trip to Jordan, where I hiked Wadi Rum, visited both a crusader castle and an anti-crusader castle*, saw Byzantine mosaics and Roman theatres, and hung out with Jordanian army bagpipers and Jordan's only Duke.

And I found that among other surprises, Jordan has implemented a policy I've long wanted to see - making it cheaper for tourists to stay longer.

The Jordan Pass discounts admission to Petra together with the Jordanian visa, and admission to many other interesting sites such as the Roman city of Jerash. Given Petra is Jordan's prime tourist destination - the one thing that every visitor wants to see - it's a pretty good deal.

But it gets better. To add a second day visiting Petra to the Pass costs $5 more. Two days, $10 more. Given that the one day version of the pass already costs JD 70, that's incredibly cheap. (If you buy your Petra tickets on site, the calculations are similar. One day is expensive - three days good value.)

Most of the people I know who stayed longer in Petra decided to walk trails off the beaten track, like Wadi Farasa or the Al-Khutba trail. That takes pressure off the "must see" Treasury and the main trail through the site. And of course, while they're staying in Wadi Musa, these people are contributing to the local economy through their hotel room rate, restaurant visits, and taxi rides.

Why did Jordan implement this policy? I suspect it has a lot to do with two major factors. First, Jordan is heavily dependent on Petra. And secondly, it's an Arab country which has a unique relationship with Israel, which means quite a few people visit it on a daytrip. The Jordan Pass and the Petra ticket structure aim to change daytrippers into longer stay tourists.

I wish more places would implement similar schemes. There are a number of towns which really should consider it - places like Toledo, which is often visited as a day trip from Madrid but really deserves two or three days to itself, or Fatehpur Sikri, which gets daytrip business from tourists staying in Agra but has more than enough interest for an overnight. Giving people a real incentive to spend more time in these destinations could help improve the prospects for tourist businesses there - and help offset the stresses and overcrowding from the "if-it's-Tuesday-this-must-be-Angkor" brigade.

Central Asia - what I learned

My summer visit to Central Asia came about because various family commitments led to my cancelling a South American trip, and choosing a location in a bit of a hurry once I could get away. So I was less prepared than usual, though with a few ideas. But I learned a lot over my travels.

• First off, Central Asia is massive. Kazakhstan could be a continent all on its own. Distances are immense, trains and buses are slow, roads are not great. It's easy to spend an entire day on a bus just to get from one place in Kyrgyzstan to another. And half the time, there are no buses, and you'll spend three days working out how to get from where you are to where you want to be. Next time, I'll take a motorbike.
• The distances mean it's best to be ruthless about focusing on where you want to go. I know I missed some interesting trips. But given my time again, I would spend more time in southern Kazakhstan, and a lot more time at Song Kul, and I wouldn't, probably, bother with Issyk Kul (a heresy would upset many of my Kyrgyz friends).
• Secondly, while Uzbekistan has Disneyfied many of its major sites, you can still get off the beaten track to places like Chor Bakr, near Bukhara, where pilgrims enjoy feeding the tame pigeons, or the quiet Bahauddin Naqshband mausoleum with its engaging signboards carrying quotes from the Sufi in Persian, Uzbek and English. I was surprised just how few travellers even manage to cross the road from the Registan in Samarkand, but there are some beautiful small mosques off the main drag.
• People are wonderful. Uzbek grandmas made me dance. Kazakh families took me off on a pilgrimage that involved jumping naked into a freezing river, put me up overnight, and made me drink tea with jam in it (for which the British Tea God punished me with indigestion). On any local bus you will find a grandma, a student, or a local elder who will take care of you, even if you don't share a single language between you. Whenever I was in trouble, I could find someone who would help. All I had to do was look lost, start to cry, or kick something.
• The food is dreadful. I had roadkill shashlik in Khiva - fifteen separate shards of bone in a single mouthful of chicken. I know, because I counted them as I spat them out. Take a good knife and you can buy succulent melons; get figs, apples and plums from the markets; but don't count on restaurant food to make your life worth living.
• On the other hand, the green tea is always good. 
• Vegetarians, note that according to most cooks in central Asia, sausage is a vegetable.
• Then I found ashlanfu. Two kinds of noodles, plenty of chili, plenty of vinegar, 30 cents a dish. If only the eastern Kyrgyz could convert everyone else in central Asia to eat ashlanfu, I'd be happy.
• Language. Russian is invaluable. There will always be someone who speaks Russian. Younger people often speak English.
• Mastercard. Don't take it. For some reason this is a Visa zone.

I learned some non-practical things, too. For instance, how Islam here is blended with the animistic and shamanic beliefs that were here before. Kazakh pilgrimages involve squeezing yourself through tiny holes in the rock, climbing up rocks using footholds slippery with age and the feet of thousands of pilgrims, jumping into rivers, drinking from sacred fountains. Sacred sites in Uzbekistan have notices forbidding worshippers from making sacrifices, which is a bit of a giveaway that it's something that people needed to be told not to do. At Shahrisabz, I saw pilgrims in one shrine pouring water on to a tombstone; when it collected in the hollow at the end of the stone, they scooped it up in tea bowls and drank it, and put what remained after everyone had drunk in a thermos flask to take it away.

I learned that Kyrygz chocolate is amazing, and Kazakh chocolate is cheaper but comes with sour cherries in it. I loved both. 

I learned that the downside of staying with nomads is that every time you step outside the tent, your boots will get covered in animal shit. Again.

I learned that Almaty has Costa Coffee and Marks & Spencers and Mercedes showrooms, but it was bloody hard to find an ATM. I learned that Almaty is full of Indian medical students, because it's where you go to study if you can't afford the US or UK. 

And I learned that there is an old man in the Samani Park in Bukhara who will sing to you, and kiss your hand when you go, if you chat to him (and are female: men get a handshake or a hug).

Authentic is as authentic does

As a photographer I love the picturesque. Women half wrapped in transparent silky floaty scarves. Men wearing sarongs or longyi, sadhus with long dreadlocks and virulent red swipes across their foreheads.

As a traveller, I know that what's picturesque isn't always authentic, and it isn't always good. At one mosque the imam looked absolutely the picture - till he took off his robes and joined the crowd in his jeans and check shirt. One woman I met looked the picture of the happy girl in colourful  traditional dress and multiple scarves, till in between the lines of her bright chatter I realised her husband was having an affair with another woman and she wanted my advice.

Tourists in Laos pay plenty to meet the Hmong, with their distinctive black and red traditional dress. I met loads of Hmong in Luang Prabang, without going out of my way; they were youngsters who had come to the nearest big town to get an education. While they were dressed just like any other local, in jeans and t-shirts, their self-identification was still absolutely Hmong, and they chatted to me about the differences between 'big town life' and 'life in the village'. ('Big town' is relative: Luang Prabang has a population of 56,000 all told.)

So I was amused to read of the tricks being played to present the "noble hunter gatherer" to tourists (https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/dec/02/ditch-harmful-myth-noble-hunter-gatherer), For me, one of the most charming elements of travelling life is the mix of ancient and modern - the gorgeous incongruity when right after dusk prayers in the desert, rock music suddenly fills the air and a Bedouin fumbles in the pockets of his dishdasha to grab his mobile phone. Or the way a whole souk of Indian electronics traders helped me find the SD card I needed for my camera, which for some reason wasn't a common one in India though it was easy to find elsewhere.

I look at women in India and I see how sisters now are fighting for their place in the world - from "Auntie Cat" who looks after all her colony's animals (just as Jain temples often look after sick birds) to feminist journalists and film makers, and women studying at universities and management schools. How glad I am that they are looking to the future, not back to a picturesque past in which they were firmly put in their place.

Yes, maybe "Auntie Cat" in her dress and Manolos doesn't look at cute as she would in a sari and sandals (though actually, I think she does). Maybe a photographer's lens is dying for the students in jeans and t-shirts to change into salwar kameez and dupatta. But they have their lives to live, and that's their authenticity. And actually, I'm glad that when I've made their acquaintance, I've been allowed to see a little of their real lives, which are often inspiring and never dull.

People everywhere are struggling to find their place in a world that keeps evolving - sometimes with tragedy and sometimes with joy, like the Burmese Rasta I met at Yangon Central Station or the ex-police inspector whose clipped English and spit-and-polish attitude persisted under his newly adopted sadhu's robes and dreadlocks.

Putting these people firmly back in a box marked "PAST" is actually not nearly as much fun as seeing how modernity and ancient tradition get along with each other once they've been introduced.


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After writing this, I discovered a book review which puts many of my feelings about authenticity in relation to travel photography and writing into perspective. How to cover the life of a red light district without being salacious? or the acts of an abusive 'god-man'? By being authentic - true to and respectful of the individuals concerned. And by putting real work into the job - getting to know people, which is not a quick fix but in same cases can take a decade or more.

*Do* go when Lonely Planet tells you not to!

Guidebooks seem to do this regularly; they advise you to miss out places during their festivals, because the hotels are booked up and there are too many people there. Don't go to Pachmarhi at Shivatri Mela, don't go to Pamplona for the Running of the Bulls, don't go to Palitana for the great mela. Don't go to Lalibela at Christmas, the hotels are too expensive and the churches are full of Ethiopians...

Oh come on! This is when these places are most alive!

I could have climbed Charaugarh any day. It's a half good mountain; a stiff climb, some good views, a cool forest beneath. But it's not that special - except at Shivatri Mela.

At Shivatri Mela, I was able to climb aboard a jeep full of Indian pilgrims singing bhajans, which delivered us to the huge car park at the bottom of the hill. I wedged myself between two fifty-year-old ladies who held me tight as the jeep swayed its way up the serpentine road, leaning into every curve and belting out a cloud of exhaust, dust, and incense behind it.

At Shivatri Mela, a little boy dressed as Shiva poked me with his trident because I didn't give him enough money. Another thrust a cobra in a basket at me, and sniggered when I flinched.

At Shivatri Mela, someone stole my Coke out of my backpack. At Shivatri Mela, five other people grabbed my bottle of Coke back and gave him a stern tongue-wagging for bad behaviour.

At Shivatri Mela, I hung out with a Hyderabad brass band. I was invited to tea in their camp, I sang with the band, I had fun with their kids, I bathed in the band leader's sunshine of a smile.

At Shivatri Mela the caves were full of the sound of coconuts being smashed in the courtyard. The air was full of incense.

At Shivatri Mela, thickset men were dancing in ecstasy with the huge, heavy iron tridents of the god on their shoulders. Men and women in trance sat on the ground, howling gently or swaying and singing, some with friends gently holding their shoulders. The fire blazed up, black smoke drifting into blue sky. Shy women and braggart men dressed in their Shivatri best came to ask me to take their photos.

All this I'd have missed if I'd done what the guidebooks told me. I would have found a genteel hill station where all the sights are too far apart to visit without a jeep, where there are no decent hiking trails, and the town seems asleep most of the time. I would have got very bored very quickly. And I'd never have met that brass band.