Travels with Myself and Another (2 page)

PREFACE

We can’t all be Marco Polo or Freya Stark but millions of us are travellers nevertheless. The great travellers, living and dead, are in a class by themselves, unequalled professionals. We are amateurs and though we too have our moments of glory we also tire, our spirits sag, we have our moments of rancour. Who has not heard, felt, thought, or said, in the course of a journey, words like: “They’ve lost the luggage again, for God’s sake?” “You mean we came all this way just to see this?” “Why do they have to make so damn much noise?” “Call that a room with a view?” “I’d rather kick his teeth in than give him a tip.”

But we persevere and do our best to see the world and we get around; we go everywhere. Upon our return, no one willingly listens to our travellers’ tales. “How was the trip?” they say. “Marvellous,” we say. “In Tbilisi, I saw . . .” Eyes glaze. As soon as politeness permits or before, conversation is switched back to local news such as gossip, the current political outrage, who’s read what, last night’s telly; people will talk about the weather rather than hear our glowing reports on Copenhagen, the Grand Canyon, Katmandu.

The only aspect of our travels that is guaranteed to hold an audience is disaster. “The camel threw you at the
Great Pyramid
and you broke your leg?” “Chased the pickpocket through the Galeria and across Naples and lost
all
your travellers’ cheques and your passport?” “Locked and forgotten in a
sauna
in Viipuri?” “Ptomaine from eating
sheep’s eyes
at a Druze feast?” That’s what they like. They can hardly wait for us to finish before they launch into stories of their own suffering in foreign lands. The fact is, we cherish our disasters and here we are one up on the great travellers who have every impressive qualification for the job but lack jokes.

I rarely read travel books myself, I prefer to travel. This is not a proper travel book. After presenting my credentials so you will believe that I know whereof I speak, it is an account of my best horror journeys, chosen from a wide range, recollected with tenderness now that they are past. All amateur travellers have experienced horror journeys, long or short, sooner or later, one way or another. As a student of disaster, I note that we react alike to our tribulations: frayed and bitter at the time, proud afterwards. Nothing is better for self-esteem than survival.

It takes real stamina to travel and it’s getting worse. Remember the old days when we had porters not hijackers; remember when hotels were built and finished before you got there; remember when key unions weren’t on strike at your point of departure or arrival; remember when we were given generous helpings of butter and jam for breakfast, not those little cellophane and cardboard containers; remember when the weather was reliable; remember when you didn’t have to plan your trip like a military operation and book in advance with deposit enclosed; remember when the Mediterranean was clean; remember when you were a person not a sheep, herded in airports, railway stations, ski-lifts, movies, museums, restaurants, among your fellow sheep; remember when you knew what your money would bring in other currencies; remember when you confidently expected everything to go well instead of thinking it a miracle if everything doesn’t go wrong?

We’re not heroic like the great travellers but all the same we amateurs are a pretty tough breed. No matter how horrendous the last journey we never give up hope for the next one, God knows why.

Grumetti Serengeti Tanzania, early 1970s

One

CREDENTIALS

I was seized by the idea of this book while sitting on a rotten little beach at the western tip of Crete, flanked by a waterlogged shoe and a rusted potty. Around me, the litter of our species. I had the depressed feeling that I spent my life doing this sort of thing and might well end my days here. This is the traveller’s deep dark night of the soul and can happen anywhere at any hour.

No one suggested or recommended this sewer. I found it unaided, studying a map on the cheap night flight to Heraklion. Very pleased with myself too because I’d become so practical; before leaping into the unknown I actually telephoned the Greek Tourist Office in London and received a map of Crete, a list of hotels and the usual travel bumpf written in the usual purple prose. Reading matter for the plane.

Way off there, alone on a bay, was a place named Kastelli with one C Class hotel. Just the ticket; far from the beaten track, the C Class hotel was sure to be a sweet little taverna, clean, no running water, grape arbour. I pictured Kastelli as an unspoiled fishing village, sugar cube houses clustered behind a golden beach. All day I would swim in lovely water, the purpose of the journey; at night I would drink ouzo in the grape arbour and watch the fishermen lollop about like Zorba under the moon.

It took as long to get from Heraklion to Kastelli, by three buses, as from London to New York by Jumbo Jet. All buses sang Arab-type Musak. Kastelli had two streets of squat cement dwellings and shops; the Aegean was not in sight. The C Class hotel was a three-storey cement box; my room was a cubby-hole with a full complement of dead flies, mashed mosquitoes on the walls and hairy dust balls drifting around the floor. The population of Kastelli, not surprisingly, appeared sunk in speechless gloom, none more so than the proprietor of the C Class hotel where I was, also not surprisingly, the only guest. On the side of the Post Office, across from my room, a political enthusiast had painted a large black slogan. Amepikanoi was the first word, and I needed no Greek to know that it meant Yank Go Home. You bet your boots, gladly, cannot wait to oblige; but there was no way out until the afternoon bus the next day.

I had made prodigious efforts to reach this death trap for the purpose of swimming and swim I would. In the morning, a twenty-minute walk past a disused factory and some hideous small unoccupied villas brought me to a café by the sea, which provided unspeakable food and a closet half filled with mouldy potatoes for undressing. And so to the beach, like a minor garbage pit, the sea having cast up rubbish to join the crushed cigarette packs, tin cans, dirty papers, bottles left by previous swimmers. Anyhow nobody else was here and the water looked fine, transparent and calm over sand but too shallow for swimming. Beyond the little promontory, the waves were choppy with whitecaps, no obstacle to a dedicated swimmer. Once out into the deep water the current grabbed me and began to move me at speed westwards. Next stop Malta.

We are supposed to learn by experience; fat lot of good that does if you only remember experience too late. Flailing for shore, I remembered the circular current of Mauritius where I was caught and borne for a time on a fast scary round trip of that island. Such currents might be a disagreeable feature of large isolated islands; the kind of information it would be helpful to know. A few minutes earlier I had been warning myself not to get dashed against the promontory on the return trip; a few minutes later I did my best to get dashed and clung with fingers and fingernails, washed away, clinging again, until I could pull back into the still protected water. And now sat on the sand, bleeding gently from scratches, somewhat winded, and in despair.

Où sont les plages d’antan?
I remember when beaches had no debris on them except seaweed and were safe and often so deserted that I was the sole naked tenant. The coves around the small Caribbean islands, the water turquoise and Nile green; bays in Cuba surrounded by jungle; Mexico on the Gulf and on the Pacific; beaches backed by umbrella pines along the Var coast, the Mediterranean side of Italy all the way down to Calabria, the Costa Brava and the great beach at Zarauz; marvellous beaches in the state of Washington; miles of white sand by the Indian Ocean in Kenya. The natural world is my true love; therein my particular love, the beautiful junction of sea and land, was lost forever, defiled and overrun. I was reduced to a contemptible muck heap outside Kastelli. The future loomed coal black; nowhere to go that was worth going to. I might as well stop travelling.

Stop travelling?
Come, come. That was carrying despair to preposterous lengths. I’d been in much worse places than Kastelli. Furthermore millions of other travellers set forth with high hopes and land symbolically between a waterlogged shoe and a rusted potty. I was not unique, singled out for special misfortune. Besides, I was in the same position towards travel as a leopard is towards his spots. I had been a traveller all my life, beginning in childhood on the streetcars of my native city which transported me to Samarkand, Peking, Tahiti, Constantinople. Place names were the most powerful magic I knew. Still are. And I had been hard at the real thing since my twenty-first year, when I decided that it would be a good plan to see everywhere and everything and everyone and write about it.

A pep talk was called for and delivered. If you can’t learn from experience at least you can use it. What have you done with your long rich experience of horror journeys and fetching up in dumps like this? Moaning is unseemly; get to work. Work is the best remedy for despair. Okay. All right. Agreed. But first, let’s get out of Kastelli.

The trouble is that experience is useless without memory. Serious travel writers not only see and understand everything around them but command erudite cross references to history, literature and related travels. I couldn’t even remember where I’d been. I think I was born with a weak memory as one can be born with a weak heart or weak ankles. I forget places, people, events, and books as fast as I read them. All the magnificent scenery, the greatest joy of travel, blurs. As to dates—what year? What month?—the situation is hopeless. I am still waiting for the promised time, said to arrive with advancing age, when you forget what you ate for breakfast but the past becomes brilliantly clear, like a personal
son et lumière.
I know exactly what I ate for breakfast, can reconstruct the main events of the last month if I try, otherwise the past is veiled in cloud with gleams of light.

The lowest points of some horror journeys were unforgettable but I needed details. For the first time ever, I began to search through old papers, archaeology in the sitting room. Like the moss-free rolling stone, a roving writer gathers few papers. There were letters to my mother who wisely saved perhaps ten percent of the avalanche total, and nine diaries scribbled only to remind me where I’d been that year and not looked at since, and some confused notes and published and unpublished bits and pieces. Rummaging in that stuff made me unhappy. Even when glimpses of the past were funny they were sad because the years were gone and the people with them. And my memory was growing more—not less—muddled. A different approach seemed indicated.

Before selecting the best of the worst journeys, I ought to remember the countries I’d been in. By been in, I mean stayed long enough to learn something of the local life and customs. Not like India (India then) where I landed at Karachi and took a quick look at the cows and the poor scabrous children and made a beeline back to the airport to get away. Or French Guiana where I spent a mere three repelled hours. Or Venezuela or the Philippines, absolute amnesia. It was slow work. I kept remembering a country in the middle of the night. Finally my list was complete: fifty-three countries, which includes every state in the Union except Alaska.

When I tried to think of islands, memory fainted and failed. The Caribbean is pock-marked by islands; it was easier to remember the names of the four where I had not been, Barbuda, Barbados, Isla de Margharita, Jamaica. And the Greek islands from Corfu to Rhodes with plenty of little ones between, and Capri and Ischia and Sicily and Mallorca and Elba and Corsica and Gozo and Comino and Bermuda and Bali and Honolulu and Hawaii and Guam and Midway and Wake and Macao and Gran Canaria and Sao Miguel and probably others.

This is the countries list, willy-nilly as I remembered them. France, Great Britain (four parts), Germany, Austria, Switzerland, Liechtenstein, Italy, Spain, Andorra, Canada, Mexico, Cuba, Greece, Surinam, Haiti, Dominican Republic, China, Hongkong, Burma, Malaya, Netherlands, East Indies, Portugal, Finland, Holland, Denmark, Sweden, Poland, Russia, Cameroun, Chad, Sudan, Kenya, Uganda, Tanzania, Egypt (including the Gaza Strip when Egyptian, and later when Israeli), Israel, Lebanon, Jordan, Yugoslavia, Luxemburg, Mauritius, Tunisia, Morocco, Algeria, Thailand, South Vietnam, Turkey, San Marino, Republic of Ireland, Czechoslovakia, Costa Rica, Malta, the United States of America up, down, and across.

Once launched on this memory exercise, statistics went to my head. I calculate that I made repeated trips to twenty-four of those countries, ranging from two sojourns in the Netherlands East Indies to countless travels in Europe, the Caribbean, and East Africa. As a base, from which to move, I lived in seven countries where I established eleven permanent residences. A residence is a flat or house that you rent or buy or, if insane, build. I built one and a half houses in two countries and in my opinion house-building is far worse than any horror journey. The point is that you start from scratch with the notion that you are going to live there quite a while, maybe for the rest of your life. You then use the residence for several years and abandon it, usually with all its contents.

Residences are different from temporary furnished quarters of which I remembered seventeen before I stopped trying to remember. Some temporary furnished quarters preceded permanent residences, some were linked to jobs, but mostly they were and continue to be bolt-holes for writing. At home, wherever home is, there are interruptions. I settle in temporary furnished quarters in foreign places where I know nobody and enter into a symbiotic relationship with a typewriter. This is stationary travel in contrast to travelling travel and I love it. No matter how unsatisfactory the work or how drab the furn. bdstr., I have the scenery, chosen with care, sea or mountains, and the joys thereof.

How very odd that one bends one’s own twig and it stays bent. Who could have foreseen the permanent effect of childhood journeys on streetcars? No other manner of living would have interested me so much and so long and I will surely go on until I drop trying to see more of the world and what’s happening in it.

Despite the amount of ground covered, I never thought of writing about travel. Here goes.

With Hemingway and Madame Chiang Kai Shek in China, 1941