Here and There Read online

  Here & There

  AA GILL

  Here & There

  collected travel writing

  Published in 2011 by Hardie Grant Books

  Hardie Grant Books (Australia)

  85 High Street

  Prahran, Victoria 3181

  www.hardiegrant.com.au

  Hardie Grant Books (UK)

  Second Floor, North Suite

  Dudley House

  Southampton Street

  London WC2E 7HF

  www.hardiegrant.co.uk

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publishers and copyright holders.

  The moral right of the author has been asserted.

  Copyright text © AA Gill 2011

  National Library of Australia Cataloguing-in-Publication data

  Author: Gill, A. A.

  Title: Here and there : collected travel writing / A A Gill.

  ISBN: 9781742701622 (pbk.)

  Subjects: Gill, A. A. Travel. Voyages and travels. Tourism and gastronomy.

  Dewey Number: 790.18

  Publisher: Paul McNally

  Project editor: Jane Winning

  Cover design: Design by Committee

  Internal design: Heather Menzies

  Typesetting: Pauline Haas

  Colour reproduction by Splitting Image Colour Studio

  Printed in Australia by Griffin Press

  This book is fondly dedicated to my

  stepmother, Georgina Denison, whose

  ancestor built a small Martello tower in

  Sydney Harbour that still bears her name.

  Contents

  Introduction

  Why do it?

  The market-driven truth

  All in the family

  Battle of the bulge

  Food for thought

  Bombay dreams

  Call of the wild

  Dream world

  Snail’s pace

  Ancient isle

  Galling the Gauls

  Song sung blue

  Catwalk cool

  Luxe gone wild

  Cashmere if you can

  Shore thing

  Nothing to do

  The middle distance

  Empty vessels

  Peak condition

  The pretenders

  Big, bold Budapest

  Excess baggage

  The Swede life

  At last, supper

  For the love of money

  Eye of the beholder

  Behind the gloss

  Burn for you

  Till death us do part

  The anti-travel awards

  Entry denied

  Revel without a cause

  Danger becomes you

  Glazed and confused

  A sense of loss

  New New York

  Plane miserable

  A-grade Belgrade

  Urban maul

  Reality bites

  The last word in travel

  Dawn of a new era

  A roach by any other name

  True believers

  Spice of life

  Flight of fancy

  Out of place

  The holiday pitch

  Down at heel

  The shock factor

  Bohemian rhapsody

  The end of the world

  There’s no place like home

  Between the lines

  Head space

  The fall of summer

  Extreme of consciousness

  Terminal love

  Introduction

  Here and There wasn’t my idea.

  Here and There sounds a bit now and then, hot or cold, red or white, window or aisle. It’s a bit hostess binary. I wanted to call it Aussie Tucker Walkabout, because that’s the name of the file I keep these articles in. My little joke.

  I told Pat, my editor at Australian Gourmet Traveller, that I wanted to call the collection Aussie Tucker Walkabout, and across a dozen time zones, 20 weather systems and 10,562 miles I could hear his eyeballs roll in their sockets. ‘That’s funny,’ he said in the measured tone we keep for foreigners who copy our accents.

  I’m lousy at titles. I’ve had bad reviews just for the titles of my books. And, actually, Here and There isn’t bad. I’m here, you’re there. Or perhaps you’re here and I’m there. If there’s anything that connects this collection of disparate and syncopated streams of peeved whimsy, then it is the hereness of there, and the thereness of here.

  These are night-time thoughts, opinions and observations. They come out of the dark, are written last thing and filed to Australia as they or you start work, and I or they go to bed. I turn the lights out, check the locks and enjoy that peculiar, particular frisson of knowing that my chilly, damp words are now sunny, dry words; that a ten quid thought can emigrate to become a better idea, to be free and work hard and grow up to be a theory that it could never have been back here, or there. There’s a sense of playing truant, a leave of absence in writing something for the next day, for people I don’t really know, and better still, who don’t know me. I have this alter ego now, this doppelganger.

  One of the things that fascinates me about travelling is how places make people. The received travel writing wisdom is always the other way round: it’s people who make places, who go out and carve nations from the rough, speechless, thoughtless wilderness. But over and over I’m aware that the characteristics and beliefs of nations seem to flow from the land, seep up from the earth.

  It’s not simply that people who live on plains are stoic and fatalistic and the people who live in mountains are intrepid and curious, or that island people are sybaritic and have naturally great abs, or that desert people, weirdly, never get lost. It’s more complicated and subtle than that. National character, the collection of traits that make us different and therefore interesting, isn’t random group consciousness or a collective serendipity. Tribal identities, from the taste for food to the love of the view to the sound of nursery rhymes to the jokes you laugh at, are peculiar to geography.

  Australia is a good example. It has one of the most distinctive palettes of national identity on the globe, a way of being that is unmistakeably odd. People come from all over the globe to Australia, from ancient and robust cultures. But within months, sometimes within hours, they’re transformed, made over into Australians. The land grabs them like God’s own changing room. And I like to think that while I sleep here or there, down there, or up here, there is a wide-awake me in stubbies and thongs that is secretly living as an Australian.

  Why do it?

  It might not aid relaxation, or expand your mind, but travel will certainly give you blisters.

  Why travel? I’m serious. What do you expect from somewhere else? Every parable, cautionary tale, every road movie comes to the conclusion that whatever it is you were looking for when you left was actually hidden in a biscuit tin in the spare room under a pillow, or was doing the washing up. People who travel to discover something, the wisdoms are generally agreed, are going the long way ’round to find it. The most annoying piece of portent-filled self-help you can be offered is the warning that however far you travel, you’ll always find yourself there when you arrive.

  The question ‘why travel?’ seems so obvious we rarely ask it. So much of our lives and income are spent planning and affording holidays. But what are we looking for? The travel industry spends a lot of time trying to figure out what we really want. Do you want this: the girl on the beach with the palm tree and the bendy hammock? Or this: the little terracotta fishing port with the lobster and the coupl
e holding hands? In the end, travel agents generally agree that what most of you want is to pay less and go for longer.

  But this simply presses the question: pay less and for longer of what? The most overused word in the travel industry is escape. Escape what? Travelling is time-out between two dimly clichéd places – a here that is fraught, hectic, relentless and infuriating, and a there that is peaceful, comforting, effortless and undemanding. But if that really describes your home and your holidays, then you’re living your life the wrong way around.

  So why do we go? Well, if you ask most people under 50, they simply go on holiday to go and get drunk and laid and tanned. Over 50, it’s the pressing need to see and do things before you die. It’s filling up the winged shopping trolley before the voice on the tannoy says this great round superstore and entertainment complex will be closing for you in six months. You don’t want to be lying there on the waterproof sheet surrounded by people you don’t recognise with the only thought in your head being, damn, I wish I’d seen the Taj Mahal. (By the way, if you’re over 60 and you haven’t seen the Taj, drop everything. Do it now.)

  The great PR lie of travel is that it broadens your mind. Go and ask that illegal immigrant folding the towels in your tennis club if the extraordinarily circuitous journey he made to get to carry your bag broadened his mind. Ask what one-worldly insights the middle-management drone who has to fly to Brisbane, Singapore and Frankfurt once a month gets. Travel doesn’t necessarily make you wiser, nicer, better tempered, more open or calmer. If you travel a lot it makes you well travelled. And that’s something.

  Of all the dumbest reasons for travel, the most thoughtless expectation of a holiday is to relax. Just going to vegetate for a couple of weeks, you’ve bought some trashy novels and some SPF-30, and you’re going to just turn into a softly poached egg by the pool? Well how did checking-in to an international airport, a long-haul flight, checking-out of a Third-World international airport (twice: there and back), changing money, dealing with people who are a thousand times poorer than you in a foreign language without being rude or patronising, not being able to drink the water or eat the vegetables, having to take malaria pills, cholera, yellow fever and meningitis and polio injections – how did all that ever get to be the raw ingredients for just chilling out? If you want to relax, go to bed. Draw the curtains. Watch golf.

  Travelling to do nothing is the great holiday oxymoron, but it’s still a growing part of the industry. There is no corner of the world where you won’t find a spa with a pedicurist and a Thai girl behind the desk telling you that all the massages are booked up until Friday. Mind you, one of the most extraordinary men I ever came across was in a spa. It was in Addis Ababa, of all places. Addis is not by a yoga stretch of anyone’s imagination a relaxing place. It’s utterly fascinating. Ethiopia is possibly the most singular place in the world. Certainly it stands apart in Africa as being kin only to itself. Addis is quite an angry place, or at least it was when I was there for Haile Selassie’s funeral. In the Mercato, the largest market on the continent, there are enough vampire-eyed khat addicts, secret policemen, ex-torturers, trainee kidnappers and poor, bored youths to make strolling around touristically, even in broad daylight, a risky activity. Ethiopia is home to some of the most gallantly vicious and uncompromisingly psychopathic warriors in the world. They don’t offer you a big Caribbean welcome. That’s not to say that they’re unfriendly; they just don’t decide they like you before they know you, or because you’re foreign.

  Rising out of the middle of some of the most hopeless slums you could ever wish to see is a mammoth Mordor of a luxury hotel. The real deal, not the usual African four-star deluxe. Here, everything worked, or did; the aircon, the phones, the lift, the waiters. There was ice, and everything on the menu was available. It was weirdly astonishing, apparently built with Gulf money for the Gulf appetite for the most elegantly beautiful women in the world.

  You could have a massage by the pool, and there was this old man, really old, with long, elegant hands and fingers that were bony and strong, but absolutely assured. They moved about like a troop of slim, burrowing rodents. He was completely blind, had been born blind. Haile Selassie had invented a school for blind children to teach them how to be masseurs. It’s the sort of thing that utter dictators can do on a whim, and it’s sort of brilliant. They were the finest, most sensitive masseurs in the world, and this was the last, the last blind masseur in Africa.

  He had felt interesting times – revolutions, terror, famine, death – all through the bodies of the men who’d caused it, and he had a remarkable gift. My girlfriend went to him and he asked her where she was from. London, she replied. No – he held her foot – you’ve come home. You’re from Africa. And although you couldn’t tell to hear her, she is indeed from Durban. And then, with a firm curiosity, he travelled his fingers over the soles of her feet, and told her every country she’d walked in, never making a mistake, never getting one wrong.

  Our feet have a diary, a passport. We keep a physical journal of the lands we’ve trod. I’m not making any of this up; it’s not a traveller’s tale. And there’s a moral here. Travel doesn’t broaden the mind, but it does give you interesting blisters.

  The market-driven truth

  A market reflects the people it serves – what they have, what they need – except in France, where they’re for worshipping, not shopping.

  My weakness, my pleasure, is markets. Whenever they say, what would you like to see? The museum, the opera house, the red light district, the bridge over the river? I always say the market. I want to see where the women buy their vegetables. I want to see the fish, the butchers, the quarter of cobblers and tailors. You can’t fake a market. You can’t make it what it’s not. It is as true a reflection of the people it serves as anything; what they have, don’t have, what they make and import, and what their pretensions and weaknesses are.

  The Mercato in Addis Ababa, biggest market in Africa: dangerous red-eyed tribesmen, maddened and delusional on khat, unloading bushels of the stuff flown in daily from the ancient cities on the Somali border. The stalls selling coffee and the winding lanes of incense dealers, the gifts of the Magi, smelling of martyrdom and plainsong.

  Tsukiji, the Tokyo fish market: miles of frozen tuna, lying like a thousand unexploded bombs steaming in the dawn as the auctioneers paint red characters on them, buyers cutting tiny nuggets of flesh from their tails to knead for water content. The unspeakable nameless denizens of a dozen oceans flapping and squirming in brine, all the height of gustatory sophistication, or speechlessly depressing, depending on where you stand.

  The fish market in Zanzibar: a slithery soup of scales and guts and too-few fish, the spindly outrigged dhows having to go further and further into the Indian Ocean to find a catch. And then the fish markets of southern Spain, where everything is kept alive, the skate laid on their backs with their squashed baby faces, dribbling blood from their severed tails, looking like mortifyingly religious parables.

  The dawn markets in Saigon: vast and frantic, but beautiful. Thousands of ducks and chickens waiting to be plucked, mountains of flowers. The Grand Bazaar of Istanbul, with its streets of gold-dealers and ziggurats of pastel Turkish delight, the caviar merchants, the bags of nuts and dried fruit. Peshawar’s many, many markets: older than civilisation, leatherworkers making bandoliers and sandals with the soles of old Russian tyres, the pomegranate-juice sellers, and the boys trussing and skewering sparrows.

  Crawford Market in Bombay, the book market in Calcutta, the bird market in Denpasar, the karaoke market in Tashkent. All markets are vitally and vibrantly different, but they’re also fundamentally similar. They work on the universal principles of supply and demand, daily bread, bargains, extravagance and thrift. Markets are the true face of cities and of countries.

  But of all the markets in the world, there is one example that stands as a template for markets – the market’s market, the perfect market against which all others are measured: the weekly m
arkets of southern France. Most white, Western, middle-aged tourists travel to France in the belief that here they will find the apogee of domestic sophistication and taste. Apart from all the hot and tedious haute couture, the museums, the churches, the ruins and the endless, endless art, which must of course be genuflected to and murmured at reverentially, the true civilised genius of France is not what it has made and done, but what it doesn’t do. And not doing anything, with a languid haughtiness, is France’s great contribution to the Western canon.

  The great places of pilgrimage for masterly inactivity are France’s markets. The markets entrance and astonish and comfort the rest of the world because somehow they manage to encompass and impart a way of life that is particularly, peculiarly French. No one outside France has quite managed to codify or explain cogently what this uniquely French existence consists of, so they come up with a French phrase to encompass it all: je ne sais quoi.

  Je ne sais quoi is France’s abiding gift to the world. More je ne sais quoi for your euro is to be found in a French market than anywhere else. We wander down the aisles of trestles and stalls aghast at the marvellous repose of produce. There are peaches warm from the tree, ripe and golden. Figs, green and black, bursting with sweet, ancient, darkly lascivious simile. The smell of fresh lemon, the bunches of thyme and lavender and verbena, the selections of oil and olives, pale green and pungent, and the honey, from orange blossom, from heath and orchard, and the beeswax. The charcuterie, the dozens of ancient and dextrous things to do with a dead pig, in all the hues of pink and pale, fatty cream.

  The smell of the complements of pimiento and fennel, the strings of sausages, of bones, of pâté and rillettes. And then there’s the ducks, with their unctuous, giving, bloated, lustrous livers, poached in sealed jars cuddled around truffles and cognac. And pirouetting chickens, like coutured birds smelling of very heaven with delicate legs poised on a spit. The boulanger, with loaves crisp and hard, plaited and rounded, wheat and rye, malted and dusted. Bitter crusts and soft sour centres, the pastries and sweetmeats, the plates and bowls of little titbits in sauce, the oeufs en gelée, the asparagus, the snails with their puffy green butter stuffing, the store selling napery and embroidery, the beautiful rustic starched pride of peasant tables and French rooms. The fussy caps for confitures and cake trays, the chocolatiers with their outré soft-centres, and the cheeses – the land of a thousand cheeses. The market will wind its way around a boules-rabbled square with pollarded planes and uncomfortable ironwork benches, and at its corners will be the most holy of holies in the je ne sais quoi market: a café. A café with cream and pink woven chairs and little metal tables and a waiter with a long apron and the look of a man who is beaten by his wife. And here you will meet the rest of your party after two hours of worshipping at the long temple of Frenchness and order your café au lait and perhaps just an Armagnac, if you’re having one, and perhaps a tasse of the rough but immensely agreeable local wine – just to smell it is to understand utterly the superiority of terroir over mere talent.