Travel

Wednesday

Alex Massie

Rethinking High-Speed Rail

Previously, I’ve supported the government’s plans for High-Speed Rail, even though the “business case” for them has always struck me as being pretty weak*. On reflection, I’m not sure I was right. The case for HSR in Britain is weaker than I allowed. Not because HSR is undesirable (I still think it could be useful) but because reducing train times between London, Birmingham, Manchester and Leeds is, though useful, not enough to justify spending £33bn on the project. Or, to put it another way, I suspect it really is a misallocation of resources since this money might more usefully be spent alleviating congestion in the south-east of England while also

Saturday

Ian Thomson

Still roughing it

We are all tourists now, and there is no escape. The first thing we see as we jet round the world is a filth of our own making. Resort hotel seepage. Takeaway detritus. Travel, in its pre-package sense, can no longer be said to exist. Airports even have ‘comfort zones’ with dental clinics, cinemas and (at New York’s JFK) funeral parlours. Some travel writers, desperate to simulate the hardship of Victorian travel, have imposed artificial difficulties on themselves. The late Eighties saw a glut of such daft titles as Hang-Gliding to Borneo and To Bognor on a Rhinoceros. In every case, however, it would have been quicker to take the

Saturday

Michela Wrong

Not for sissies

Nigeria is not exactly a tourist destination. A colleague chortles over the memory of trying to wangle his way in — without a journalist’s visa — during Sani Abacha’s military regime. ‘Purpose of visit?’ barked the immigration man. ‘Tourism,’ he lied. ‘No one comes to Nigeria for tourism,’ said the official. He was promptly expelled. The official was voicing a truism. Even seasoned Western adventurers avoid Nigeria — ‘is Lagos airport as terrifying as they say?’ you are often asked — while the country’s oil-fattened elite, oscillating between the national superiority complex and hardened self-loathing, regard an international flight as the obligatory start to any holiday. Writing a travel book

Saturday

Anthony Mockler

Rumbled in the jungle

This book is a mess. Simon Mann may have been brought up on John Buchan, educated at Eton and Sandhurst, and taken Conrad and the Iliad with him on his African travels, but his style is appalling — a sort of demotic militarese. Short sharp sentences. Few verbs. Acronyms sprinkled like confetti. The third sentence reads: ‘Rock-crag fingers claw my arse.’ And we skip all over the place, between Angola, Equatorial Guinea, South Africa and Sierra Leone, with flashbacks and fast-forwards and no index. The publisher’s boast that identities would be revealed and the mighty shaken on their thrones turns out to be empty. ‘The Boss’ goes unnamed, as does

Saturday

Alex Massie

Department of Homeland Absurdity

A telling admission from Janet Napolitano, heid-bummer at the ludicrous (though founded for obvious, understandable reasons) Department of Homeland Security: “We are moving towards an intelligence and risk-based approach to how we screen [people at airports],” Napolitano told Mike Allen during a morning forum at the Newseum. “I think one of the first things you will see over time is the ability to keep your shoes on. One of the last things you will [see] is the reduction or limitation on liquids.” In other words, current policy has nothing to do with intelligence or risk and is, by the US government’s own admission, stupid. And, this being government it is

Saturday

Jane Ridley

The call of the wild | 27 August 2011

Christopher Ondaatje is best known as a member of the great and the good and a generous patron of the arts, notably the National Portrait Gallery. The pieces collected in this book give glimpses of another, quite different life as a traveller and writer. Ondaatje’s family were long-established Dutch tea planters in Ceylon. In 1947 Christopher was sent to Blundell’s School in the West Country, a ‘sallow, thin, frightened’ 13-year-old; transplanted from the ‘carefree wilderness life’ of his father’s tea plantation, he was lonely and bullied. He had been banished from the Garden of Eden. Independence for Ceylon came in 1948, and his father’s descent into alcoholism and debt followed

Saturday

Joanna Kavenna

Heroes of the Ice Age

In the early 20th century, explorers were goaded and galvanised by the blanks on the maps — the North and South Poles, and the mist-draped floes and glaciers around them. Ernest Shackleton, Robert Scott, Robert Peary and Roald Amundsen set off with one prevailing purpose: to reach the extremities of the earth. Hardy, maniacal, even at times suicidal, they scattered ‘firsts’ and ‘furthests’ across the ice: the furthest south of Scott’s expedition of 1901-04, Shackleton’s furthest south of 1909, Amundsen’s arrival at the South Pole in 1911. Robert Peary’s claim that he reached the North Pole in 1909 was later disputed, so it may well have been Amundsen who first

Patrick Skene-Catling

A well-told lie

Autobiography provides a sound foundation for a work mainly of fiction. A voyage in an ocean liner provides a sound framework of time and place. Michael Ondaatje was born in Ceylon in 1943 and migrated to Canada at the age of 19. The Cat’s Table is an entirely believable, warmly empathetic novel about an 11-year-old boy’s journey, alone among 600 passengers in an Orient Line ship, from Colombo to London in 1954 by way of Aden, Port Said and Gibraltar. The boy’s first name is the same as the author’s, and the circumstances are depicted so realistically one feels as though the two Michaels’ points of view are identical. The

Saturday

Harry Mount

Junk, day and night

Travelling the 400 miles from Glasgow to London recently, Theodore Dalrymple noticed that the roadside was littered with food and drink packaging, flapping in the wind like Buddhist prayer flags. Roads didn’t look like that in the boyhood of Dr Dalrymple (b. 1949). Nor are they like that on the Continent. Littering, he concludes, is an unusually British disease. And the reason goes beyond mere national hygiene habits into familiar Dalrymple territory — the fall of man or, more particularly, the fall of British man, and woman. Behind the increase in littering lies a decrease in civilisation: 36 per cent of British children never eat meals at a dining table

Saturday

James Walton

Don’t blur the lines

Did you know that on the Central Line’s maiden journey to Shepherd’s Bush, one of the passengers was Mark Twain? Or that The Picture of Dorian Gray and The Sign of Four were both commissioned by the same publisher at the same London dinner? Or that Harrods dropped the apostrophe from its name in 1921, a full 19 years before Selfridges followed suit? My guess is that you probably didn’t — which is where Walk the Lines comes in. Did you know that on the Central Line’s maiden journey to Shepherd’s Bush, one of the passengers was Mark Twain? Or that The Picture of Dorian Gray and The Sign of

Saturday

Ian Thomson

Talking about regeneration

Iain Sinclair, the London novelist and poet, is always on the move. From the industrial sumplands of Woolwich to the jagged riversides of Gravesend, he rakes unfrequented zones for literary signs and symbols, locations of forgotten films and other arcana. His previous book, Hackney, That Rose-Red Empire, revealed that Joseph Conrad had been a patient in the German Hospital in Dalston. Whenever I drive past that hospital (now converted into private flats), it resonates with the presence of the Congo-sick Polish author. Typically, Sinclair explores London on foot, gathering all kinds of off-piste detail as he does so. The swimming pool in Jerzy Skolimowksi’s raw coming-of-age film Deep End, for

Lewis Jones

The last place on earth

Colin Thubron has called Siberia ‘the ultimate unearthly abroad’, the ‘place from which you will not return’. Colin Thubron has called Siberia ‘the ultimate unearthly abroad’, the ‘place from which you will not return’. Many millions have not — Dostoevsky and Solzhenitsyn were lucky — but these days quite a few do, and most of them seem to write books about it. The latest is Jacek Hugo-Bader, a Polish journalist who, as a 50th birthday present to himself, travelled from Moscow to Vladivostok in an old lazhi (‘tramp’, a Soviet jeep), driving 12,968 kilometres in 55 days, at an average speed of 43.8 kmph. That’s when the girls stop walking

Saturday

Caroline Moorehead

Good companions

‘Choose your companions’, says an early Arab proverb, ‘thereafter your road.’ In the 1970s, Hugh Leach’s companion on his travels to Northern Yemen was Freya Stark, and she has become his companion again, in this affectionate hommage of photographs and short, scholarly texts. ‘Choose your companions’, says an early Arab proverb, ‘thereafter your road.’ In the 1970s, Hugh Leach’s companion on his travels to Northern Yemen was Freya Stark, and she has become his companion again, in this affectionate hommage of photographs and short, scholarly texts. Stark herself is all the more present in that she appears from time to time among the monuments, with her small stout figure, beaky

Lee Langley

Wool of bat and lizard leg

When Julia Blackburn and her Dutch husband Herman move into an old village house perched on a cliff high above the Italian Ligurian Riviera they become part of a dwindling community in a landscape of forests and deserted villages with roofless ruins almost swallowed up by the riotous undergrowth. Seven hundred peasants once occupied this mountainous terrain, scraping a pitiful living; shepherds, chestnut farmers, cheese-makers — mezzadri, ‘half-people’, handing over half of everything, down to their last kilo of olives, to the padrone who was virtually their feudal lord; also sharing, when required, their women. They got by on a diet mainly of chestnuts — eaten raw, boiled, roasted, ground

Saturday

Jane Brown

Bella vistas

Many moons ago when I went to Sissinghurst to ask Nigel Nicolson (late of this parish) if I could write about his mother, Vita Sackville-West, he raised his hands, and eyebrows, in horror, ‘Oh! Not another book about my mother!’ These two titles on Italian gardens may provoke a similar reaction, for there has been a recent run of revisiting via Charles Latham’s vintage Country Life photographs, Edith Wharton’s Edwardian musings and Georgina Masson’s 1961 classic, now revived. Many moons ago when I went to Sissinghurst to ask Nigel Nicolson (late of this parish) if I could write about his mother, Vita Sackville-West, he raised his hands, and eyebrows, in

Justin Marozzi

Ways of escape

When I compiled a list of the top dozen travel writers of the past century for an American magazine the other day, it required some effort not to come up with an entirely British cast. Freya Stark, Norman Lewis, Patrick Leigh Fermor and Jan Morris were musts. So too were V. S. Naipaul and Colin Thubron, still writing up a storm, and the Ibn-Battutah-mad Tim Mackintosh-Smith for a younger generation. Although there was no space for Byron, Bell, Thesiger or Chatwin, no great legerdemain was needed to squeeze in the brilliant Dutchman Cees Nooteboom, Ryszard Kapuscinski, the Polish master of literary reportage, the Irishwoman Dervla Murphy and Martha Gellhorn from

Alexander Larman

The other man’s grass . . .

Hundreds of thousands of hardy souls are preparing for a few nights under canvas this summer, often facing sunburn or trench foot while giddily jumping up and down in a muddy field as bands maul their better-known hits. And yet, for most of these people, camping is something that they wouldn’t dream of doing except at music festivals, despite its convenience, lack of cost, green credentials and genuine sense of excitement and adventure. This dichotomy, among many others, is explored with intelligence and wit in Matthew de Abaitua’s treatise on the values and social impact of camping. Subtitled ‘the history and practice of sleeping under the stars’, the book is

Saturday

Ian Thomson

City of miracles

In the autumn of 1984, after an unexplained fall, I found myself in a hospital in Rome acutely head-injured and disorientated. I had been found sprawled on the floor of my flat on Via Salaria; the police suspected an intruder, yet nothing apparently was stolen. Bloody handprints covered the walls where I had tried to steady myself. I was 23 and newly arrived in Rome to work as a journalist and teach. Later, I regained consciousness outside a latrine on the sixth floor of San Giovanni hospital. A group of nuns with elaborate bird-like coifs swished past, each bearing a carafe of white wine. So I was in paradise —

Saturday

Michael Jacobs

Relics of old Castile

Christopher Howse describes Spain as ‘the strangest place with which Westerners can easily identify’. Christopher Howse describes Spain as ‘the strangest place with which Westerners can easily identify’. He has certainly written one of the strangest books on the country in recent years. His approach is gloriously and provocatively unfashionable. Whereas other authors on Spain today might dwell on its innovative new chefs, the modernity of Barcelona and Bilbao, the tawdry Costa del Sol, and such persistent Andalucían-based stereotypes as duende, bullfighting and Moorish sensuality, Howse has concentrated on an aspect of the country that was once no less integral to its image — its austere and spiritual side. This

Saturday

Ian Thomson

Deep, dark mysteries

For Peter Ackroyd, the subterranean world holds a potent allure. London Under, his brief account of the capital’s catacombs and other murky zones, manages to radiate a dark mystery and sulphur reek. ‘There is no darkness like the darkness under the ground’, Ackroyd announces, like a Victorian raree-show merchant. This is an entertaining if slightly daft book, that reveals what a weird world lies beneath our feet. Whether Ackroyd has actually been to all the places he describes is uncertain. Journalists have contorted themselves through narrow, stinking cave-galleries and risked leptospirosis from rat urine in their quest for London subterranea. But the stately Ackroyd? The London sewers are vividly described