by A. A. Gill
Whilst travel writing may well be the best job in the world, writing for travel is one of the worst. Touring through Andalusia, eating at little local tavernas, is a joy; having to eat in every taverna in Andalusia would be a Spanish Inquisition of rare cruelty. The secret to an exciting, accomplished and memorable life is judicious editing. It’s essential when you’re travelling. The most important decisions are what you choose not to do, not to see, not to eat, not to pack and not to get tattooed on your backside. The pitiful guidebook hack has to do it all. Every last slummy nightclub and sticky internet caff, every lodging house and campsite, and every bus terminal and puppet theatre, so that others who come after don’t have to.
Guidebook writing sounds like a blessing but is, in fact, a curse. The writing rarely rises above the level of an instruction manual. It’s a constant headache of opening times, addresses and directions. The pay is negligible, the expenses frugal and you’re not allowed to accept freebies or bribes. When I travel, the first thing I say is, ‘I’m the man from Australian Gourmet Traveller, bring on the dancing girls and the cornucopia of largesse.’
At last, a guidebook author named Thomas Kohnstamm has written a memoir called Do Travel Writers Go to Hell? about his days writing for Lonely Planet. He specialised in Latin America, apparently, and what with the lack of cash and the slimness of the deadlines and, presumably, the largeness of the countries and the shittiness of the roads, he apparently sold drugs, gave glowing reviews to restaurants whose waitresses slept with him, plagiarised other guides and, best of all, wrote part of one for Colombia without ever having gone to the country.
Now here’s the thing: I’m immediately more interested in reading the imaginary tour of Colombia than I am in any actual plodding been-there-done-that guide. In fact, I’d rather read a magic-realism introduction to Latin America written by Finns who’d never left Scandinavia. There’s definitely a niche market for fantasy tourism. They always say it is better to travel hopefully.
The other guide I’d really like to have is ‘100 Things You Thought You Wanted To Do But You Really Shouldn’t Bother’. Travel writing always starts off with the tacitly agreed assumption that whatever place you’re looking at is one of the best, friendliest, most exciting, rewarding, beautiful places on earth, with charmingly friendly people, memorably delicious food and indigenous handicrafts that will grace your home and body forever. And, of course, it can’t be true of everywhere. Some places and things have to be disappointing. It would be really useful if someone would write and tell us where they are. So let me kick off with my ‘Top Nine’:
1. The Silk Route.
Sounds like the most romantic destination in the world: the great trade route that stretches from China to Constantinople. In fact, Central Asia is a catastrophe of soil erosion, pollution, autocratic totalitarianism, police states, poverty, disease, growing Islamic militancy, and some of the most mistrustful, taciturn people you could hope to meet. Places like Samarkand, Bukhara and Tashkent have the ring of Arabian Nights romance about them, but actually they’re decaying slums of Stalinist architecture built to intimidate subjugated people, with occasional stunning 10th-century buildings that just remind you how ghastly everything else is. And the food is inedible.
2. Gondola rides.
The minute you gingerly step into these gay canoes, you know it’s a mistake. First, there’s the unsmiling oarsman who looks like a cross between a pork butcher and a French mime and is, in fact, a member of one of the most vicious closed shops in Europe. He will precariously punt you up the narrow ditches that are Venice’s canals. You will be serenaded by a stream of gothic curses and threats as he bellows at the other denizens pushing tourists up and down. Being so much closer to the water, you can get a much better smell of Venice’s effluent and while you can’t see anything, everyone on the bridges can see you. They’ll stare and think, ‘Isn’t that bloke too fat to be afloat?’ It’ll cost more than everything else you do in Venice put together, and all the above also applies to gondolas in Vegas.
3. All the rest of Las Vegas.
I’m not going to argue with you about this. Las Vegas is possibly the worst man-made thing in the world.
4. Camel rides.
Don’t ride the camel anywhere, ever. If you do get bullied into sitting on one, resist the urge to shout: ‘Onward to Aqaba; no mercy, no mercy!’ Every camel-owner has heard every single Lawrence of Arabia joke, and none of them have seen the film. There is one overwhelming reason why you should never ride a camel: they don’t want you to. Camels hate you. Much the same goes for elephants. Once a year, an elephant goes mad, reaches back with his nose, grabs a pink tourist and throws him to the ground before stamping on him. Don’t ride the donkeys down the Grand Canyon, or the horse-drawn carriages around Central Park.
5. Swedish massage in Sweden.
It’s a huge disappointment. You imagine something Swedish, liberal and erotic performed by Anita Ekberg. In fact, it’s a massage done by the woman from the kitchen appliance department of Ikea, and it really isn’t site-specific. It’s much the same as a Belgian massage.
6. Whale-watching.
Smelly, noisy boats with a constant tannoy, chugging about trying to find immensely boring fish that look like badly folded mattresses. All they do is swim aimlessly. Worse than the whales are the other people on the boat with you. A pitiful collection of homespun hobbits who will bellow tearfully at the water and be moved to ecstasy, and you’re going to be stuck with them for four hours.
7. Turkish massage in Turkey. If you want to know what it’s like to be covered in soap suds and become the sexual kebab play thing of a 16-stone man with a back that’s hairier than a Polish folk festival then, by all means, give it a go.
8. Railway journeys that take longer than one night or
two meals. Yes, it sounds romantic and authentic. In reality, it’s like being trapped in a horizontal lift with 15 consumptives and an open sewer. Ask yourself: which long-distance train journey would you make in your own country for fun? So why do you think it’s going to be that much better in someone else’s?
9. Greece.
Entry denied
After years of persecution, the Roma – or Gypsies – are still here and still suffering the implacable racism of middle Europe.
I’m back in France and this column’s very late. Very, very late. If you’re reading this, it’s a small miracle of speed, typing and the printer’s inky art. I forgot I was supposed to be in France again this summer, and then the bags appeared in the bedroom and I said, ‘Hey, where are you going?’ and she said, ‘We’re going to France on Monday.’
‘I’ve got a lot of writing to do.’
‘Well, you can do it there.’
So I felt a little lighter, a little jollier, for the rest of the day because that’s what France does to you. The happy surprise that in two days I’d be in Provence played a petite accordion in my soul. All over the world it’s the same. Statements that you’re going to France on Monday turn the brain to croque monsieur. And the odd thing is that the pleasure of knowing you’ll be in France is in no way mitigated or spoilt by the knowledge that you’ll be surrounded by French people.
So here I am. I’m not going to bore you again with a middle-aged Englishman’s maunderings at the joys of the vie artisanal. I’m sitting in the sun by the pool, smelling like an abused coconut, my cheeks sticky with warm fig seeds. I’m not actually thinking I’m here. I’m somewhere further north and east.
A couple of years ago I made a journey along the Danube, starting in the Black Forest and ending at the Black Sea. I must have mentioned it – it was a memorable and resonant trip. I loved it as much as I’ve loved anywhere I’ve been. It was the story of Mitteleuropa, the heart of Europe, written in water. I finished with a sob of violins.
When I got to Constanta in Romania on the Black Sea coast there was a ruined and abandoned synagogue, and I realised that all the way down the river there had been synagogues that were now cult
ural centres or Jewish museums. There were Jüdenstrasses and the distinctive spices and baking of Jewish cuisine. There was plenty of evidence of Jews and Jewishness. There just weren’t any people – not the Jewish people. The Danube had been their river; the river of Jews. They had traded up and down it, and every city on its banks had had large Jewish populations. But no more; they had been wiped away. The Jews of the Danube were dust and ashes, or they lived as the Jews of Tel Aviv, the Jews of New York and London, Buenos Aires and Melbourne. But here they were ghosts, ripples on the water, a sigh in the lapping of an ancient dock.
I filed the piece and it went to press. It was okay, but I realised there was another story I hadn’t told because I hadn’t had the space. If I’d started, it would have been another 1000 words, and it was contentious, current and political. The other story of the Danube is the story of the Roma – the Gypsies. They shared the same unthinkable persecution as the Jews, died alongside them in the same camps, were exterminated and displaced. But they didn’t disappear – they’re still here and they’re still suffering the implacable racism of middle Europe.
The greatest number of Romanies are in Romania, and they live a separate, apartheid life. They have their own language and food and the women dress differently. And the Romanians talk openly and easily about how dreadful they are; they vilify them with a comforting familiarity. The racism, the distaste, the disgust at Gypsies floats through Europe like a secret, intimate sexual infection; everyone has it but no one talks about it to strangers. In Hungary, Gypsies are beaten and burnt out of their homes. When Czechoslovakia split amicably in the Velvet Revolution between the Czech Republic and Slovakia, they divided the army, the gas board, the post office and the ornithology club, but neither nation wanted to take responsibility for their Gypsies. In Vienna, the Austrians add Gypsies to the already overcrowded list of their prejudices.
Through all of Europe, Gypsies are denied education, health care, employment benefits, housing benefits. They live outside official systems. They’re prevented from getting insurance. They can’t run businesses or get loans or credit. The Gypsies are forced to work outside the law; they are universally believed to be endemic recidivist criminals, and so often intolerance creates the conditions to prove itself right.
I’m thinking about all this because, here in France, the Gypsies are being deported en masse back to Romania. Once more, trains of unwanted untermensch are being trundled across Europe. These people, identified by their racial origin, are asked to account for themselves because of some eugenic code that says they were born to be criminals, to be a burden, to be a stain on a civilised country.
There’s precious little fuss being made. Hardly any other Europeans stand up to be counted with these dispossessed. Any criticism is mostly from people who want to score points off Sarkozy. The Romanians are a disposable stick to beat the president with; precious few are shouting, ‘How can this be?’
How swiftly we forget. How can a nation that has had its own citizens shipped east so easily and glibly do it to others, to these fellow Europeans who have shared this continent with the rest of us for millennia? Here in the south of France, in the flat fields of bulls and white horses, the picturesque version of the Gypsies and Gypsy life is a tourist attraction, a cultural treasure – their guitar music, their songs, the bright patterns of their cloth. In Spain they dance; in Hungary it is their haunting violin.
Gypsies have a fugitive culture. If it came from anywhere else in the world Europeans would be holding charity dinners and forming committees to defend it. But now the nation that with such vaunting pride proclaims itself the birthplace of liberty, fraternity and equality is transporting the most needy and persecuted minority in the European continent. Although the Gypsies shared the same status as Jews during the Holocaust, no one ever called for a Roma homeland because nobody believed they would ever need one. Why would they? They belonged here with us in the most civilised continent in the world. From Donegal to Andalusia, Gypsies were one of us. Their problems were Europe’s problems; their music, our song.
Obviously not. This is all beyond shame, beyond dishonour. But it isn’t beyond the warning of memory. This is how it begins.
Sorry, this isn’t what I was supposed to be writing about; it’s probably not what they wanted.
Revel without a cause
The problem with extravagant shindigs and elaborate children’s parties is that they’re attempts to manufacture happiness – and happiness never sends out invitations.
There is a cocktail-stick rule of entertaining that I think can be found in an appendix of Newton’s Principia Mathematica, or perhaps it’s a footnote in the Book of Revelation, that parties are great in inverse proportion to the time, effort and money that are allocated to them. A party is a collection of random and extemporal moments that somehow collide to make a collage that turns out the next morning to have had a plot: a beginning, a middle and a happy ending. Planning a party is like setting a trap for mist: the more elaborate and diverse, the more impressive and ostentatious the decoration and the lighting, the more baroque the bait of entertainment, the lure of cocktails and wine fountains and spitted hogs, the more you notice the absence and the will-o’-the-wisp that is that magic that makes a party.
The most extravagant and elaborate bash I ever went to took a year to plan, a Third World debt to pay for, and the imagination of at least three Oscar winners. It was costumed and pyrotechnicked to within a couple of feet of God. Every possible wish, whim and spoilt demand was catered for, from midgets carrying silver trays of coke, to bunny girls offering Cohibas and champagne. There were chill rooms and dance floors, banquettes and bars, pools and fairgrounds, benches, armchairs, divans, waterbeds, li-los and a rack. As we the guests turned up, exhausted with expectation and the gorgeousness of our costumes, we just stood in awe, struck mute and shy by the grandeur and the brutal excess. We traipsed around the party whispering, like prospective buyers being shown around a house that we knew we couldn’t afford. The largesse was so overwhelming that we’d all gone home by 11.30pm, defeated by our own failure to rise to this occasion.
Contrarily, the best party I’ve been to was decorated by a fire on a beach. It wasn’t meant to be a party at all. There were no invitations, no dressing up, a couple of bottles, some lobsters, a cappella singing, and the vast Milky Way by way of fireworks. Come to think of it, all the best parties are decorated by fires, that circle of light, Promethean and elemental, the connection and the community made by fire, the ring of warmth in the chill. But because I live in the middle of a city, and serendipitous bonfires are frowned upon, I don’t throw many parties. I find more than half a dozen of my friends in a room confusing and rather depressing.
But because latterly I’ve become a father again, I’m now flung back into that strange fun of children’s parties. There is a list of all the things that I’d forgotten about kiddie get-togethers. And the first item right at the top, in caps, underlined, with exclamation marks, is: children’s parties are not fun. They’re not at all fun. They’re not at all fun for anyone. I’m talking about parties for the under-fives, you understand. For little kids. Little kids’ parties are high-stress events. The children made to wear weird stuff. They don’t know what’s expected of them. They have to share food with strangers. Their cosy, comfy safe houses are full of people they don’t know. The furniture’s moved around. Then either some other little moppet is getting all the attention, which is worrying – maybe this is a competition and mummy’s going to take the new one home – or they’re getting all the attention, which is terrifying. Other grown-ups are coming up and kissing you and they’ve set your dessert on fire and then they chant some sort of curse and it’s the worst day of your life. So you have hysterics and regurgitate and your mother hates you for ruining whatever it was this was supposed to be. For most children, their first birthday party is their first social humiliation. This is where we all learn what to expect from our lives.
What bothers me m
ore than the obvious misery and insecurity parties are going to inflict on my kids is the desperate misery and insecurity they’re going to inflict on me by proxy. There is some weird, and frankly unfair, genetic amplifier that turns up the pain of life through your children. If I lose a race (this is hypothetical, the chances of me racing anything or anyone are nil), I go ‘Hohum, I’ve lost a race’, I’m really not that bothered. But if my small child loses so much as a sack race, I know it’ll be a sickening blow that’ll feel like a high velocity bullet. The only thing worse than your own birthday party is your child’s birthday party. An infant human’s natural instinct is to burst into tears when confronted with a flaming cake and a clown.
We have to be taught to like parties like you have to learn against your better instincts to enjoy smoking and hard liquor. It’s no coincidence that all these things come wrapped up in the party bag. I used to hire a children’s entertainer called Naughty Nigel, or perhaps he was called Evil Edwin or Recidivist Richard. He was a paragon of his calling, a balding, sad, half-cut, thwarted, ill-tempered loner who incubated a Sahara of dandruff and had teeth that reminded you of a komodo dragon. Through long experience of kids he’d grown to loathe them, almost as much as he loathed parents for having kids. His act never varied. He was never surprising, or entertaining, or original. The children sat cross-legged watching him with a wary moribund concentration, because children will look at anything with a wary concentration: fish tanks, Spongebob Squarepants, their parents having sex. They always resisted Pedo Pat’s encouragement to join in – again it’s hardwired into our DNA that audience participation never led to any good. The birthday child had to be bullied and dragged, whimpering and shivering, into the spotlight for the clown to give him or her the prize. In Naughty Nigel’s case, this was always the same: from an apparently empty box he would produce a terrified chinchilla, which was obviously as thrilled to see another child as the child was entranced to be presented with a surprise rat made out of fairy floss.