Here and There
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
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. âThat'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.
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 âwhy 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 couple 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 â 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 â 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.