Steve Shelley with a Special Invitation to Aspiring Travel Writers, and Bonus Content to Help You Travel More

Let’s Go

TravelA collection of travel stories to inspire you to get up and go.

The right of Steve Shelley to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1998. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, without the prior written permission in writing of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser. Version: 1.2 pdf download updated May 2020 Picture credits: author

A LonePenguin book www.thelonepenguin.com

Published in 2018 by Strategic Alignment Ltd, York, England. We’re all travellers

We’re always on the move. Human beings are a migratory species. We travel, just as we breathe, eat, drink and procreate. It’s been hard wired into our DNA ever since our species migrated out of Africa hundreds of thousands of years ago. Travel is what enabled us to survive and populate the planet. Even nowadays, ask people what their ideal life would look like, travel will likely be a part of it. Ask people what they want to do before they die, travel most likely will be on the list. Ask what they want to do more of, travel will be on the list. This book celebrates travel. If you like to travel, it’s for you. If you would like to travel, it’s for you. And if you wish you could just travel more - and do less of the humdrum 9-5 stuﬀ - then it’s deﬁnitely for you. If you’re interested in less stress and a more healthy lifestyle, both physical and mental, the evidence is that travel is important to your wellbeing. But I’m sure I don’t need to argue the case here.

Tell us your story

This ﬁrst edition is a collection of my own stories. But for the next one, I want you to help me ‘co-create’ it. That’s right, I want to hear from you. I want to include a much wider range of stories from travellers who’ve been places, met people, and done things that I haven’t. Let’s together create the world’s most dynamic travel book. Obviously we won’t be able to include everything from everyone. There will have to be a great deal of editorial discretion, I’m sure you understand. But if you are an aspiring travel writer or blogger then please let’s hear from you. I’ve included some guidelines in a later chapter. Selected contributors will be listed as co- authors and you’ll be free to use the book to promote your own travel interests (subject to a bit of small print).

A special oﬀer

Over the years, I’ve been lucky to have had a lot of travel opportunities, going right back to my early childhood. I’ve found ways to make some money from travel, and I’ve met a lot of people whose paths I would never otherwise have crossed. I won’t claim that I have the ideal life but it’s pretty good and it’s important to me to be able to help others get out into the world. In another later chapter, I share my tips on how to get out of the rat race and travel more. For now, I shall only say the sooner you do it, the better.

Enjoy the read, and I’ll see you on the beaches and in the cities and wild places of the world.

Steve Shelley, York, England, April 2018

In case you doubt how much we humans like to travel, here is an image from FlightRadar24.

A few thoughts before we start

• Travel is the best eduction • Travel teaches tolerance and understanding • Travel feeds your sense of wonder • Travel is a journey of discovery, of self discovery

“Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things that you didn’t do than by the ones you did do.” – Mark Twain “Travel is never a matter of money but of courage.” – Paolo Coelho Contents

1 Africa: a road less travelled 3 - An appointment with destiny

2 Island hopping in the Seychelles archipelago 17 - Paradise on Earth 3 Three faces of Spain 22 - Tales from Andalucía, Cantabria and Catalunya

4 Legal alien 29 - Fantasy and familiarity in America 5 Zanzibar: the Spice Island 34 - The aroma of cloves is in the air and on the furniture

6 Grand designs: the opening up of Europe 39 - The world’s greatest visa-free zone

7 A is for Athens 46 - The Greeks continue to party

8 A walk around York 51 - England’s quirkiest city 9 A smuggler's tale 57 - And an alpine adventure

10 In the footsteps of the explorers 61 - In search of the seekers of the source of the Nile

11 A whisky safari 67 - The distilleries of Islay and Jura

12 On the far side of nowhere 71 - The ﬂip-ﬂotsam of Kiwayuu

13 Shopping like an Egyptian 76 - An unlikely place for a shopping expedition

14 Uganda: 'positively reeks of adventure' 81 - Back on its feet (in 2001) 15 Miscellaneous musing and random ramblings 86 - About travel, of course 16 How you can travel more 90 - Make travel part of your ideal life 17 Tips for aspiring travel writers 94 - And how to submit your articles for our next edition About the author 97 The Story of The Lone Penguin 98 1 Africa: a road less travelled

I watched the elephants march across that red dust savanna as if they had an appointment with destiny. I know that I did. That’s why I’m here. But I didn’t realise it until much later. Much, much later.

Do you ever have those moments when you think that the hand of fate is doing more than just beckoning, it’s actually pushing you in a certain direction? I honestly can’t remember what it was that set me oﬀ on my great African safari. But I can clearly remember what kept me there. It was the ﬁlm ‘Out of Africa’: “I had a farm in Africa, at the foot of the Ngong Hills . . .” Thus opens Karen Blixen’s poetic account of her sojourn in Kenya from 1914 to 1931. Seventeen years. Did it change her life? I don’t know. But it changed mine. I managed 30 years. But then she had lost the love of her life. I found mine.

There was a high degree of chance about my going Africa. I was working in London in the days when a pay rise to £4,000 a year meant I had sufficient disposable income, even after paying the mortgage, to afford for the first time to venture out of Europe and fly long haul. Even now, this is a great adventure, to go out and discover that enormous world out there beyond your usual comfort zone. Scanning the brochures for somewhere with good weather, the choice came down to Tobago or Kenya. I can’t recall why the Caribbean lost out but, as my leave came around, we found ourselves on board a Sudan Airways 707 to exotic Nairobi. Well, as it often is in August, it was grey and drizzling. But never mind, it was still exciting. We set out on a classic African safari to the Masai Mara and camped on the escarpment to the west overlooking that vast savanna. It was the time of the great wildebeest migration and there were wild animals everywhere. Lions prowled around our tents at night. Comfort zone, what was that? This was nothing at all like home. It was an adventure beyond our wildest dreams. We were hooked. I went home and bought a Land Rover. I was going to do Africa properly.

Planning an expedition is more logistics than day dreaming, more left brain than right. There was a lot to do. I mean for a start, where were we going? ‘Africa’ is a pretty big target. Just to give you some idea, it’s bigger than the USA, China, India and Western Europe put together. It’s huge. And there weren’t many maps. Even now in the Google era, it’s not much better. I suppose it would have been possible to ‘just go’, but you need to know how much fuel to carry

1 and, based on how long it might take between stops, how much food and water. And money. Route planning would be essential. Then there’s the fact that I love doing it: poring over maps, working out distances, researching places to see and things to do. It’s nearly as much fun as the trip itself. But it’s not the dots on a map that appeal, so much as the spaces in between. And in Africa there were, and still are, many wide open spaces. They went onto the skeleton itinerary: the Sahara desert, the Congo rain forest, the East African steppes, the Kalahari and the enigmatic Okavango ‘swamp’ on its doorstep, the Namib. All of which made the the foot of Africa at Cape Town the natural ultimate destination. Far to go!

It was a challenge to estimate the longest distance between fuel stops, in the absence of much concrete information. Possibly a thousand miles, what with the Sahara and the Congo. At 20 miles to the gallon, forgive my old imperial units, that would require 8-10 jerry cans in addition to the built-in fuel tank. Much later, we got wise and fitted extra tanks. But the hindsight of experience was still far away. There was the issue of spare parts, namely what might break and which we should take. Our Land Rover outfitters provided a recommended list, much of which I’d never heard of in spite of my engineering degree. What’s a half shaft? Why do we need two of them? What makes them break? Do I really need to change wheel bearings? Would I know how? Now what about food and water? We could take tins and dehydrated foods, rice, pasta, that sort of thing. But we would have to assume we could find some fresh foodstuffs as we travelled. How much water would we need to carry? How could you even calculate that? I devised a formula based on drinking, cooking and washing and hoped for the best. It would never be enough, but neither did we want to overload the poor old Landy which already was sagging on its springs. And what about health? What were the threats? We could do something about malaria once we were into the tropics, but was there anything else we needed to know about? We had all the inoculations going: typhoid, paratyphoid, measles, hepatitis, cholera, yellow fever, it was a long list. A doctor friend advised whisky. “It cleans the gullet”, he told us. “Take a wee dram every night”. Finally - it seemed that ‘finally’ would never come - we faced up to the issue of visas. The dilemma was that even if we could get visas in London for countries like Cameroon or Central African Republic (CAR), they would only be valid for three months and it would take longer than that to get there. This was a real hassle, which kind of resolved itself as we went, but it was a constant headache. Unfortunately, it’s only got a lot worse since then.

Everything was ready, but there remained the small matter of actually getting out of England, and out of Europe. Two little things called the English Channel and the Mediterranean Sea. We took the ferry to Calais, crossed the Alps, excitedly trying out the four wheel drive in snow, and wound our way down Italy. There were two possible routes into Africa - at this time the eastern

2 route through Egypt, Sudan and Ethiopia was closed due to protracted wars, nowadays it’s the western route that’s closed, thanks to Islamist terrorists. One was through Spain and across to Ceuta, or Tangier in Morocco. The other, which we preferred, took us across to Sicily and thence from the little port of Trapani to Tunis. Africa lay in wait, as we thought, like a crouching lion on the horizon.

Across this ancient desert

We’d already learned in Europe that stopping overnight in city car parks was not a good idea, so without delay we exited the city and headed purposefully out into Africa. This proved to be a good strategy, one we followed throughout the trip. The main threats to life, limb, car and pocket come from towns and cities. The places in between are safer, healthier and a hell of a lot more interesting. In fact, people find that deserts are amongst the healthiest of places. The absence of people and the dry climate mean fewer germs and less chance for them to proliferate. It’s even surprisingly hard to get lost. There is a great camaraderie amongst desert folk, and amongst travellers, and everyone helps each other out. We might need that. Having left the narrow coastal strip, we’re soon into the sand, though for the time being, the roads are still good. They serve some distant oil installations. We’ve just passed a sign that says we’ve 651 kilometres to go to our first major destination, the oasis of Djanet in the Tassili n’Ajjer. It’s a remote place on the border of Algeria and Libya. But it’s famous for its rock art. I’d been interested for years about prehistoric cave paintings. These provide some intriguing insights into our collective ancestral history. And here in the middle of the Sahara, it would show that life was not always like this. The desert used to be a verdant savanna teeming with wild animals. Some of the images had been touted as evidence that in times gone by we had been visited by aliens from outer space, who, the story supposed, had built the pyramids and brought technology and civilisation to earth. We parked the Land Rover at the camp site, hired a guide, loaded his donkeys with supplies for a week, and set off.

We dress warmly. In December in the Sahara it’s freezing. Hadn’t expected that. Well, we’re here to learn. The trail leads up a vast rock escarpment, and then another. The cliﬀs tower over us. And then we’re into a forest of eroded stone pillars. How anyone ﬁnds their way, heaven knows. It has an aura of absolute antiquity, as if it’s just been the rocks and the wind

3 for tens of thousands of years. Which, of course, is pretty much the case. And as suddenly, our guide ushers us into a shallow cave and there in front of us is evidence written in pictures that this region was once very different. The world’s climate underwent a major change from about 8,000 years ago. Over a period of a few millennia, luxuriant plains turned into the vast dust bowl it is today. And all its people migrated out, probably towards the River Nile. The art is absorbing. Here are antelopes, giraffes, long horned sheep, an elephant. There is a troupe of tatoo’ed black African dancers. A roan antelope, clearly identifiable from its tufty ears. The closest you can find any of these nowadays is far to the south in Nigeria. There are cows, sheep and dogs. Lots of hunters, some with swords. A Roman chariot. The painters were at work here over a very long period of time, it seems. But I’m looking for gods. And aliens. We need to go to a place called Sefar, though ‘place’ is a bit circumspect, it’s just another part of the pillared maze. And here they are. The so-called ‘Great God of Sefar’ is an image amongst many drawn in red ochre on the face of the cliff. It’s artistic, it’s engaging, it’s animated. But it’s not a god. Anyone who has seen traditional African dancers might recognise the the outline of a headdress. The marks on his face are just striations in the rock. But I’m also looking for, eagerly anticipating, the painting of the spaceman. And here he is too. With a similar headdress to the ‘great god’ (I’ve now demoted him), he carries a spear in one hand and a dead chicken in the other. It might be a ceremonial offering, a sacrifice perhaps. Maybe supper. Perhaps the guy is a chef and it’s party night. But he sure is no alien. Myth busted. Indeed, the history of our distant forebears is written in these pictures, on rock faces and in caves, not just here but all over Africa. But it is a story of humanity versus the climate and the passage of time, not of fanciful gods or imagined aliens. It’s humbling to think that someone very much like us sat here with a stick of ochre and made a statement, sent a message into their future. Our present.

We’re on the move again. We pass a heavily loaded Tuareg camel caravan, accompanied by families of laughing girls dressed in their best ﬁnery. They’ve either been shopping or are on their way to a wedding. A delightful conﬁrmation that nothing much changes. I’ve found a point half way between Djanet and Tamanrasset, each not much more than a settled oasis, which is pretty much 200 miles from both. An enormous sense of contentment washes over me. There are no fences, no ‘keep out’ sign boards. It’s just us, the Land Rover and Planet

4 Earth. We can’t tell any longer what day of the week it is. It doesn’t matter. Well it does, shops close on Fridays around here. But there aren’t any shops anyway right now. I keep having odd dreams that I’m late for work. But I’m not. I don’t ‘work’ any more. There are no deadlines. We get up with the sun and sleep when it’s dark. Except here, even in mid winter, it doesn’t really get dark. The Milky Way is emblazoned across the vault of the heavens and the brighter stars, like Sirius and Aldebaran, pop out like spotlights. When the moon comes up, it’s like daylight, bright enough to read by. The only oddity is the silence. It’s so quiet that I can hear the sound of blood coursing through my ears. It sounds like a bit like the distant rumble of motorway traﬃc back home. The background hum of the universe.

But even here we’re not long alone. People have been before us: there is camel dung under the thorn tree. I decide to try it out as a fire lighting survival skill. It’s a no-no to cut trees, there are too few of them. It works, to a degree. More smouldering than burning, but enough to let us cook on an open fire. Soon the birds find us. Little desert wheatears that hop around the fire place pecking for scraps. And although we’ve pulled a good half mile off the ‘road’ (it’s just tyre tracks in the sand), the drivers of the few passing vehicles slow or stop to check we’re OK. It’s the way of the desert.

Into the darkest jungle

We became quite adept at navigating the desert roads as they turned into sandy tracks through Niger but getting into the Congo was a mission. We were able to get visas in Yaoundé, the capital of Cameroon, as well as for CAR from whose capital Bangui that mysterious giant country sat quietly waiting across the river. And wait we did too. There is supposed to be a car ferry. In fact it was moored right in front of our riverside campsite. But, so it was said, the river was too low, there was not enough water to ﬂoat it. In any case, the story went on, the engine had packed up and the captain had gone on leave. But by now, we had learned some of the ways of Africa. All is not always how it seems, or how it is said. There is usually a back story, and it usually involves money. With a number of fellow travellers, and fellow Land Rovers, we debated our options. Drive a few hundred kilometres up river and hope there would be another ferry. Put our vehicles on a barge and go downstream where there may be deeper water. Or dream up a way of persuading the boatmen that their ferry, disabled or not, could actually be got over to Zongo on the other side. It made sense to try this last idea ﬁrst.

5 My thought was this: get them to attach to each corner of the big metal ‘bac’ one of the small dugout passenger canoes powered by 40hp outboards. The combined force surely should be enough to propel the ferry plus a few vehicles the couple of hundred yards to the sandy ﬂats on the other side. Money could be made all round. This suﬃciently motivated our boatmen, their ranks now supplemented by a dozen or more ‘advisors’, supervisors and observers, that they agreed, quoted a price, beckoned us drive aboard, and duly attached said motorised ‘pirogues’. The ferry hesitantly pulled out into the stream. At which point, the price went up. Never forget it’s Africa, we reminded ourselves. Whatever you can think of, they will be one step ahead.

The jungle, for that is what it is, is dark, dank and pretty impenetrable. It’s quite oppressive, although we didn’t realise that until weeks later when we drove out into the more elevated lands to the east and were able to cast our eyes back over the broccoli-like treetops of that vast forest. It appears, however, to teem with life. For the most part though, it’s insect life. We passed great clouds of multi-coloured butterflies that fluttered up from puddles in the sandy track. There were whites and blacks, blue swallowtails, clear winged acraeas, and multi-hued blues and skippers. At night, giant moon moths would flap around our paraffin lamps. Whenever we stopped, clouds of little back ‘sweat flies’ would buzz around our faces stinging any exposed skin. But it was the mosquitoes that dominated our night time sleeping strategies. As soon as the sun showed signs of dipping, out they would come, clouds of buzzing jet fighters of the insect world, laden with bomb bays full of malaria parasites, encephalitis viruses and other things we dared not even think about. This region was HIV Central. The best advice about disease is to avoid catching it in the first place. We learned to put on long sleeves and long trousers, however hot it felt, liberally apply insect repellant (taking local advice as to which types actually work), and don’t scratch even the most trivial of wounds with dirty finger nails. The ulcerated lesions that can otherwise occur on your legs eat into your shin bone and, having made you lame, then attack your nervous system creating fever, delusions and insanity. Difficult to cure, terrible to behold, easy enough to avoid. If you are unfortunate enough to pick up malaria, and it’s common enough in these parts, it’s vital to hit it with drugs without delay. Back home, they would take days to do a laboratory diagnosis and by then you could be dead. Again, local advice will tell you which pills will do the job and where to get them. You won’t need a prescription, it’s an occupational hazard of living in these climes.

You learn some intriguing things travelling away from your customary place of civilisation (that is the point after all!). In the Sahara, there was a curious ﬂash of emerald light on the western horizon as the sun set. I’ve since heard reports of a similar phenomenon from Arizona’s

6 Sonoran Desert, so it wasn’t our imagination. Here in the Congo jungle, as the sun sets and the air temperature falls, the excessively humid atmosphere is no longer able to retain so much water and it falls as fat rain drops from an otherwise clear sky. Odd!

There are expatriates working still in this part of the world. We’re passing through miles and miles of plantations - rubber trees and oil palms owned by Unilever - and we come to a halt in the town of Binga. One of our travelling companions has promised we shall have a cold beer this night come hell or high water. Espying this convoy of three foreign registered Land Rovers, one of the plantation managers, a Frenchman by the name of Hubert, stops to ask if we’re OK. Well we would be if we could find a cold beer, where could he recommend? Hmmm, there really isn’t anywhere, unless you come to my home . . . Lead on, we cry. And we follow. As did the beer. Perfect. In the Congo, we encountered young Peace Corps volunteers and elderly Norwegian missionaries. I’m not sure they’re still there. I hope not. This country was deserted, desolate and inhospitable, and it has since become a lot more desperate. Fresh food was hard to come by. The missions and companies imported theirs from back home in tins. Whereas almost everywhere, including in the desert, you can, at the very least, find stalls selling tomatoes and onions, here in the Congo nothing much grows. In Aketi, we were offered termites. But we declined. It was all there was in a town dominated by a massive stone catholic church. On the other hand, in the regional capital of Kisangani, we were treated by the head of the tourist office to elephant trunk rings and monkey stew. He thought it would cheer us up while we scoured the town for fuel and, in my case, while I learned to become a half way competent Land Rover mechanic. After these months of overland travel, between the rough roads and the overloading, something had finally given way. We’d broken a leaf spring. But hey-ho, there was an agent in town and we’d got a replacement in short shrift. Now all I had to do was unwrap the pristine service manual and figure out how to replace it. With impeccably good timing, this too was when the famously unknown half shaft gave way. But by now, I was under the car, out with the diff, clean up the broken ends, slip in the new one, tighten up the bolts and away we go. This too was when we needed all those jerry cans. From this last opportunity to refuel in Kisangani - and even here we had to negotiate commercial bulk rates with the depot - it was the best part of a thousand miles to Eldoret in Kenya which, at the time, would be the next likely place we could refuel.

Kisangani was a dump, I don’t know if it’s changed since, it’s not on my list of places to return to. And this northern part of the Congo was godforsaken. It’s beautiful in its own way but, oh my, human civilisation has just not taken root here. This next part of our journey was a little lighter as we passed through Ituri, the territory of the Pygmies. These engaging if diminutive people were only too ready to chat and trade as we passed. Tightly packaged grains of panned

7 gold. Elephant’s teeth. Monkey skins. Skin quivers full of arrows tipped with beaten nails. They said a skilled hunter could bring down a ﬂying bird with a good shot. The Pygmies have been marginalised by their Bantu overlords, but their stature is to do with diet rather than DNA. The jungle is protein deﬁcient. Trees and insects grow well here, humans do not.

The narrow dirt roads crossing the Congo can be closed for weeks at a time during heavy rains as trucks slip and block the way, or worse, sink deep into the mud never to re-emerge. Up ahead was a narrow bridge. A man was gesticulating. His bicycle had fallen and was blocking the way. Over it hovered an ill-deﬁned dark haze. We approached cautiously, only to suddenly reverse at high speed. The man had been carrying a haunch of meat in his pannier and he’d been attacked by a swarm of killer bees. Bicycle, haunch and bees were now obstructing the highway. We were told later that these bees are known to attack people, chasing them into rivers. They are carnivorous. Their stings, multiplied a hundred times, are deadly. They will hover above the hapless person as they try to hide submerged in the water. We drove through at speed, windows and vents closed tight.

This part of Congo has more recently become a battle ground for warring factions, fighting each other, fighting for control of the nearby gold mines, fighting the government in far distant Kinshasa, fighting immigrants and rebels from neighbouring Uganda and Rwanda. Just fighting. There is something in the air here that doesn’t bear living with, and it infects everything. But for us, the road rises, the air clears, the tops of the forest trees are behind us, and the Mountains of the Moon and the plains of East Africa lie before us. After all these months traversing desert and jungle, we’re calling it the Promised Land.

God’s own country

There is something truly delightful about East Africa, particularly Uganda and Kenya, and that is its Englishness. Please forgive me! As a Brit, I feel instantly more at home here than I do in, say, Germany or America, or even South Africa. It’s something many of us have felt. If there is something in the air here, it’s reﬂected in the phrase ‘god’s own country’. We had a slight confusion passing into Uganda by road. For all those months driving across the French speaking part of Africa, it had been academic which side of the road you drive on because it was too narrow and too rough to matter. Your just pick your way around the holes and bumps. But now we’re back

8 onto tarred roads and I suddenly wonder why the road signs are on the other side of the road. Oops, it’s we that are wrong, we’re still driving on the right. Good job there was no traﬃc. There’s an hour time diﬀerence too, that we didn’t notice. At this time, Uganda is not a place to linger and before we know it, we’re across the Nile, past the border and into Kenya. It really feels like paradise. A fully functioning, English speaking country where you can get a cold beer and a decent meal. And fuel. We do so take things for granted.

We parted company with our travelling companions after a reunion feast at the Stanley Hotel in the centre of Nairobi. Its Thorn Tree notice board served as a travellers’ telecommunications hub in the days before mobiles. Messages posted here reached us on the overlanders’ grapevine as far afield as Cape Town. But let’s not get ahead of ourselves. It was interesting to see how Africa had changed us all. No-one was unaffected. We had endured weeks of self sufficiency. We had been obliged to be patient, tolerant and inventive. No-one had been there to bail us out. We’d had to forge new relationships, negotiate for what back home would be considered basic expectations. We’d had to find our way on routes that barely existed, navigate rules and regulations that were weirdly flexible. We’d found freedom the likes of which most people never enjoy in their lifetime. And we’d met a lot of really interesting people whose paths we would never otherwise have crossed. There was the country manager for Shell who’d plied us with drinks one Sunday afternoon at a bar by the Niger River just outside Niamey. The team of Israelis serving out their contract at a road camp in a remote part of eastern Nigeria. An Ismaili family in Kisangani who said they had acquired the Tesco’s building back in High Wycombe. Kyriakos, the Greek with the white Jeep who ran a coffee trading company in Bumba, and who explained how, at a very modest cost, we could acquire enough land in the Congo to start a small country. Which nearly got us into serious trouble. Once into Uganda, with the sense of relief of having ‘escaped’ from the Congo, we talked about this idea rather too loudly over bottles of the local bootleg gin known as ‘waragi’. Little did we know, attentive ears outside our ring of darkness thought we were plotting to take over their own country and if we had not moved out rather smartly the following morning, so we heard later, we would have been arrested.

When I met Mike and Shelagh Boyd-Moss, I had no idea how this particular encounter would ripple down the ages. But such synchronicity is not unusual in Africa. Let me explain. Having spent a fair bit of time in exploring the landscapes and wildlife of Kenya, it was time to move on. But before going further south, we determined to divert into the hilly forests of Rwanda to see the Mountain Gorillas. We pass Ruhengeri and up through the forest into the Volcanoes National Park. Strewn across the horizon like a child’s drawing are half a dozen conical volcanoes, their slopes covered in verdant green forest, dank and cold. One of these erupted a

9 few years back, smothering the Congolese town of Goma with lava. The borders of Rwanda, Congo and Uganda converge here. It’s high up, 7,500’. And this little patch of forest is the last home of the few remaining Mountain Gorillas. Visits are carefully controlled but we manage to get on a trip, and the following morning we’re hiking through the mist and the jungle, fending oﬀ giant stinging nettles and clambering over clumps of fallen bamboo in search of gorillas. We hear a cracking of branches up ahead. Our guide hushes us and signals us to get down. Although the gorillas have been ‘habituated’, conditioned to accept people around them, they’re still potentially dangerous. And they are huge. A big male ‘silverback’ pops his head over the bushes to check on us. We freeze. Avoid rapid movement, says our guide in hushed French. Avoid eye contact. But the group relaxes, both humans and apes, and soon we’re snapping photographs. A young gorilla leaves its mother’s breast and scampers up a sapling to take a look at us. It bends under his weight, so he swings oﬀ and drops to the ground, scraping his knuckles the way apes do, and edges his way over to us. He sits at my feet, and now eye contact is unavoidable, He reaches out and touches my arm as if to say you’re welcome.

We stayed on a couple more days, but Mike and Shelagh, who were on the same tour, had invited us to stay over with them. “Our place is oﬀ the main road to Kigali”, Mike said. “So if you’re going that way, come and stay”. It’s the kind of hospitable thing people do in remote parts of the world. So we did. They lived on a tea estate which Mike managed, he’d built it actually. When you’re travelling like this, cooped up in a Land Rover and camping most nights, the little pleasures of a hot shower, a decent meal and a proper bed become great luxuries. One way or another, it was a week or so later that we set out back to Nairobi via the Serengeti National Park in Tanzania. Actually, this was pretty well the only viable route, other than passing through a still risky Uganda. We camped over at Seronera and driving along the river the following morning, who should we see but Mike and Shelagh. While we had taken our time, they had driven up to Nairobi, picked up their son Robin and his then girlfriend Debbie, and here they were playing the tourist bit on their way back to Rwanda.

To complete this particular story, it was several years later when I had returned to live in Kenya that I met Robin again. He was by then a business man and rally driver. We competed together several times in the East African Safari Rally which, in those days, was a great ﬁve day race around rural Kenya. But that is still not where the story ends. Again some years later, I was visiting my parents back in the UK, and walking up Wincanton High Street were Mike and Shelagh. Still not the end. Many more years later, our son went to school where Debbie was teaching and she became his form mistress. Then I was appointed to the school’s board of

10 governors and was instrumental in selecting Debbie as Head. An intriguing set of encounters scattered across three decades.

Down in the delta

Spaces in between. The little sand swept town of Maun in north western Botswana is 200 miles in any direction from the next ‘civilised’ place. It has become quite a tourist centre and is nowadays connected by a tarred road. But it’s still well off the usual beaten track. The approach from the east crosses the great flat salt pans called Makgadikgadi. To the south lies the sand desert of the central Kalahari where San Bushmen still eke a precarious living. To the north is the Chobe National Park with some of the greatest density of wildlife remaining anywhere in Africa. And to its immediate west is the Okavango Delta. This is a geographic curiosity and a wonderful travel experience. The Cubango River rises in the mountains of Angola but, instead of running into the sea, it flows towards the centre of Africa where, when it strikes the barrier of the Kalahari, it spreads into a vast freshwater delta. Much of the water simply evaporates and what’s left disappears underground. The ten foot sand dune that holds it in is the last visible manifestation of the Great Rift Valley escarpment, a scar on the earth’s crust which can be traced on a map from the Red Sea, through Ethiopia, Kenya, Tanzania, all the way, getting smaller and smaller, to this part of northern Botswana. The river floods seasonally according to the pattern of the rains and the Okavango Delta swells and contracts in concert. At one season, it’s so dry you could drive much of the way through it, but at another, it’s an island-dotted world of water.

We camped at a place called Island Safari Lodge, just outside Maun. It was on the banks of the Thamalakane River and from here we could hire canoes to take us into the heart of the delta. They’re dugouts, called ‘makorro’ in Setswana, and made from a single tree trunk. It’s a leisurely way to travel and you don’t cover much distance. But the experience is unmatched. This is nature in the raw, untouched (until recently!) by human hands. The waterways are the haunt of crocodiles and hippos. Herds of lechwe antelopes bound across the floodplains. We camp wild on islands under the spreading shade of kigelia trees. Depending on the season, wildlife abounds. Bird life is especially prolific. One morning without even opening my eyes, I count 26 different songs. Here you can find the rare wattled crane which I’d never seen

11 anywhere else. You get the most amazing cerise sunsets that are immediately identiﬁable by anyone who knows this part of the world.

Travelling by canoe brings things closer than when you’re driving a big noisy four wheel drive. Here we spot tiny turquoise kingfishers. There are a dozen different lily flowers. Our boatmen propel the canoes by thrusting long poles onto the gravel bottom of the stream. The channel broadens into a reed filled lagoon. We pause to trade a couple of catfish from a fisherman. He needs salt, which we’re happy to provide in exchange. The blue above and the green all around align to form an exuberant backdrop to the flight of dozens of glittering rubies, sailing, soaring, and snapping at flies. These aerial wonders are called carmine bee eaters. Jacanas splay their toes across the lily leaves. No wonder they’re popularly called lily trotters. Black herons paddle the shallows, flipping their wings like umbrellas to shade their eyes as they fish in a group. The instantaneous change of shape from bird to feathered dome is remarkable to watch. The maze of lagoons, floodplains, islands, channel and reed beds makes it hard for us to figure where we are, but our boatmen know. They find us a nice waterside campsite and head off to a nearby village, leaving us to bathe in the cool water. It looks idyllic, but we emerge covered in leeches. Time to grill our fish.

We take a more direct, faster ﬂowing channel back. It’s lined with swaying papyrus. Otters dart across the stream. A massive splash is a hippo ﬂoundering out of the way. Our boatmen laugh. It’s a sign of their nervousness, hippos can be truly dangerous.

Namib

Back on land, we head back out into the desert. Unlike the Sahara, much of this part of the Kalahari is fenced oﬀ. This is cattle country, split up into massive blocks of land allocated to ranching companies. Botswana is famous for its beef. We camp one last time in a middle of nowhere kind of place, and we’re woken by the chattering, chirping, clicking and clucking of a band of people. They’re San Bushmen, wearing not much more than loin cloths. We give them a cup of tea and some bread but unfortunately we’re not able to understand their story. We’re on our way into another desert now, the Namib. This coast of south west Africa brings yet more marvels in a continent that has not yet lost its power to amaze. It’s a stark and ancient land. It has a primeval feel about it. The ancestors of these bushmen have lived here for tens of thousands of years. Indeed they may be the last survivors

12 of the original people we’re all ultimately descended from. We may think they lack civilisation but their ways have endured far longer than ours. Some of the paintings and engravings on the rocks in the Brandberg massif have been dated to nearly 20,000 years ago. Somehow, I have a feeling they might be even older. What’s remarkable is that, unlike around the rock art of Europe, there is a continuum here. These ancient people are the true time lords. Their way of life is only now being brought to a close by their encounter with modernism. It’s a sobering thought whichever way you look at it.

The colonial town of Swakopmund has the feel of a Victorian seaside resort with its boarding houses, AA appointed restaurants, and ﬁsh and chip shops. There are car parks, toilets and litter bins. There’s even a pier. But the ‘kuchen laden’ are a bit of a giveaway. We’ve got the era right but not the nationality. This is a German town. The high street is Kaiser Wilhelm Strasse and the esplanade is Bismarck Street. The sea is green and furious. The cold South Atlantic currents have welled up from the far Antarctic. Waves pile up a long way out to thrash noisily onto the shore. The yellow desert dunes pile equally high behind us, cascading right to the water’s edge. This is an unusual combination, hot desiccated air meeting the cold ocean. They come together in a dense mist which rolls in daily over the Namib, its water droplets nourishing strangely shaped weltwischia plants which, neither leafy bushes nor spiny cactuses, look like an evolutionary dead end from the beginning of time itself.

This is one of the most photogenic places I’ve been to. The skies are vast, and the far horizons are, well, far. The shapes and colours are vibrant, waving, rolling. Moonscapes that leave you in no doubt that this has always been a harsh and challenging place to live. Humankind has not made much of a dent on this place. Neither god-given nor god-forsaken, it’s just what it is, far predating anything humans may have considered divine. The country has one last thing to throw across our bows. It’s the Fish River Canyon, Africa’s answer to the Grand Canyon. It looks very similar, a vast, sheer slash across the landscape, nearly 2,000’ deep and 100 miles long. Namibia, a remarkable country.

Cape Town doesn’t disappoint as the end point of this epic journey. The famous Table Mountain hovers into sight, complete with its characteristic ‘table cloth’ cloud cover cascading over the city. We go right to the end of Africa to signal the end of our trip. Next stop, four thousands miles distant, would be Antarctica. Along the beaches of the cape, we come across troups of Jackass Penguins. It’s disorientating.

13 This is Africa, what are they doing here? Makes us smile, anyway. Years later, I adopt one as my personal icon: The Lone Penguin.

Out of Africa

Our travels across Africa ended up lasting two full years. You can do it in two weeks if you’re looking for a place in the record books. It was a long way, and it would be a lot longer going back.

So what was it about ‘Out of Africa’ that kept me all those years in Africa? The scenes where Karen Blixen and Denys Finch-Hatton (Meryl Streep and Robert Redford) went picnicking, and where eventually (for the film) he was buried, were filmed in the exact same location on the Mara escarpment that we’d camped on our very first trip out there. I ended up living in a house just around the corner from Karen Blixen’s old home, just down the road from the Karen Country Club. She’s still fondly remembered here. But as she wistfully conceded as she packed up her own life: “You can’t own Africa, you are only ever passing through”.

Photos: Elephants in Tsavo East National Park, Kenya Tuareg man with camel, Niger The ‘Great God of Sefar’, Tassili rock paintings, Algeria Mountain Gorilla, Rwanda Our Land Rover at the hot springs, Lake Bogoria, Kenya Canoeing in the Okavango Delta, near Chief’s Island, Botswana Sand dunes in the Namib, near Swakopmund, Namibia Weltwitschia plant in the Namib Out of Africa image copyright Universal Pictures

14 2 Island hopping in the Seychelles archipelago

This was an assignment from heaven: “Can you go to the Seychelles and give us a couple of thousand words by next week?” The result was published in May 2011.

Last month, I had the chance to visit the Garden of Eden. Unfortunately, we weren’t allowed to taste the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge. It’s forbidden, as you may recall. In fact the whole forest is now a UNESCO World Heritage site and the tree, nowadays called the Coco de Mer, is an endangered and protected species of palm. Certainly it’s a suﬃciently bizarre product of nature to spawn a few legends of its own. The male and female trees live together in the same forest, apparently identical until breeding time when the male puts out an elongated ﬂower-laden stalk which has an uncanny similarity to a dramatically extended human male organ. Since the trees themselves can’t move, they rely, as do other members of the botanical kingdom, on insects and birds for pollination. At which point the female produces a seed so suggestive of a certain part of the human female anatomy that it’s mythical role as the Eve of trees is hard to dispute.

The seeds grow in clusters to a size of more than 10kg, the largest and heaviest seed in the world. The Coco de Mer is an astonishing plant and its forest home on the island of Praslin so redolent of our concept of Eden that it’s no wonder the ﬁrst settlers here thought they had landed in paradise. The sound of waterfalls tinkles through the Valleé de Mai national park while unfamiliar birdcalls echo across the tree tops. Spice bark trees lend a vanilla-like fragrance to the air and the enormous leaves of the palms - two would fully roof a small house - provide shade and keep the air moving like giant fans.

Here too are other endangered species, the rare Black Parrot and the Magpie Robin. Noisier and more visible are the merles and mynahs, foreign invaders which have come to dominate the forest ecology. But if the Coco de Mer conﬁrms to some the existence of a capricious creator, its lack of biological success might suggest otherwise. It occurs only here and on the nearby island of Curieuse. But it’s a spectacular sight. For that matter, so is the whole island. Like many of the islands of the Seychelles archipelago, another picturesque wonder lies

15 around every corner. Along Praslin’s west coast is Grand Anse - anse means beach in the Creole language - whose glistening coral sands stretch for several kilometres. Oﬀ its deserted shore lie the tiny islands of Cousin and Cousine, reserves for some of the rarest birds in the world - the Seychelles warbler, the blue pigeon and the Seychelles fody. Visitors can also see breeding colonies of fairy terns, noddies and hawksbill turtles.

Cousine is privately owned, guests staying in one of four villas at rates around €1,200 a night with revenue going towards the conservation of the island. This ‘one island - one hotel’ policy has led to a high degree of exclusivity on several of the Seychelles islands and to perceptions of unaﬀordability for ‘normal’ tourists. Back at Grand Anse however, that perception is shown to be skewed. Here are many small guest houses and self-catering apartments at rates below €100 per night. Seychelles, it needs to be said, is an aﬀordable paradise these days.

Cindy Uzice and her husband Adrian are natives of Praslin. Their clapboard house is right on the beach. Adrian makes his living from taking visitors out to the islands on his 30’ motor launch. But it’s hard to make ends meet, he told me, and he’s thinking of selling up.

“When the tsunammi hit us in 2004”, he said, “it took our boats all the way up to the road and washed right through the house we were building.”

Fortunately no-one was killed but it set back the business, and the construction of the family home, quite badly. They had hardly recovered when the global ﬁnancial crisis struck, forcing many of their clients to rein in their holiday spending.

“Now”, says Adrian, “fuel prices are going through the roof. We used to get a rebate from the government but now they are just piling more taxes on top of the already escalating cost.”

With the ever-present threat of attacks from Somali pirates to consider too, it seems unlikely his business will survive without a fast turnaround in fortunes. More people are coming to the Seychelles and overall revenues are up, but it looks like spending patterns are changing.

Not that Praslin seems crowded. Although there are several grand style hotels with their own enclosed beaches and facilities, the only sense of congestion lies at Anse Lazio, a stunning and popular beach on the northern tip of the island. Here, forty or ﬁfty taxis and hire cars jostle for shady spaces in the small carpark. But it’s worth the trip. Anse Lazio has a reputation as the most beautiful beach in the world.

Most visitors to Praslin come from the main island of Mahé by fast catamaran ferry service. But Praslin, with a population of some 6,000 and a size of 12km by 6km, seems a veritable metropolis in comparison with the even smaller island of La Digue, another short ferry hop across the azure waters where ﬂying ﬁsh skim the waves and sooty terns dive for sardines.

16 Dania Morel was born on La Digue. She works there still as a tourism information oﬃcer. Apart from a spell studying on Mahé, she’s spent all her life on this 5km by 3km island. She ﬁnds the others too busy and crowded and she’s happy to stay put. Her boss’s family is also from La Digue and her boss’s boss, the CEO of the Seychelles Tourism Board, also comes from La Digue. It’s the archetypal tourist island, it seems, and the people, fortunately, love their tourists.

For people living on a continental land mass far from the sea, this island life may be hard to understand. But we Brits get it for what it is. If you sat down with a pencil and paper to design your idea of what the perfect island should be, it would come out looking like La Digue. The human mind seems pre-programmed to perceive the colours of tropical islands as amongst the most beautiful on earth. No-one can fail to be moved by the whiteness of the towering cloudscape tumbling to the varying green hues of the forest, the ochre of the beach, the foaminess of the surf, the iridescent turquoise of the near ocean and the indigo of the deep. People ask if the colours of the printed photos are exaggerated. They’re not.

La Digue possesses spectacular verdant forest, some of the world’s most photogenic beaches and a capital ‘village’ at La Passe whose main street is barely 100m long. Its people are welcoming and friendly, even though their numbers are nearly doubled by the daily influx of visitors disembarking from Cat Rose’s high speed ferry or one of the chartered schooners that ply the islands. For such a small and relaxed place, there’s a lot to do on La Digue: hiking trails, beach barbecues, bird watching, snorkelling and fishing trips to yet more neighbouring islands. You can visit the vanilla plantation at L’Union Estate and watch how coconut oil is traditionally squeezed from dried copra using an ox- driven mill. You can see the giant tortoises. You can choose which beach to have to yourself. Or you can explore the coves of the Anse Source d’Argent where weddings and photo shoots take place against what must be the world’s most colourful backdrop. You might find a wannabe model draped over one of the rocks, her curves cunningly contoured into the folds of the ancient eroded pink granite.

You can get around by bike, you can hire an ox-cart, or, if you’re in a hurry, you can walk. And you can sample the delights of Creole cuisine with such delicacies as palm hearts, octopus curries, chicken in coconut, grilled barracuda, battered bread fritters and guava and lychee salad. While you eat, ﬂocks of little red cardinals and cooing doves will feed from your table if

17 you let them. I asked Dania about the rare Seychelles Paradise Flycatcher. “There’s one”, she pointed. “They’re so common now you can see them in town”.

The first settlers came to La Digue in 1798, a boat load of twenty exiled French prisoners. They must have thought there had been some mistake, or that they had already been executed and sent to heaven. The island came ready stocked with fresh water, coconuts, breadfruits, plentiful fish in the sea and ample building materials. There were no other people to displace and no-one to tell them what they may or may not do. This was the very definition of ‘nature’s bounty’ and the start of a free and easy way of life that has evolved and endured to the present day.

It’s odd to think that such an idyllic place - you really do run out of superlatives - owes its existence as a country to colonialism, slavery and piracy, which over a mere 250 years has melded into the unique diversity and congeniality of the modern Seychellois people. You see many kinds of people here, black, white and shades in between. Some seem distinctly African, others with a hint of Indian or European. The mix makes for an attractive people. And mix they do, with little concern for origin, ethnicity or station. They are fun loving and cheerful, ready to strike up friendships and oﬀer real help. Of course there are exceptions. I found the shopkeepers rather dour, possibly because of their lack of English but more likely because they really don’t care if they make a sale. Protective employment legislation has not done much for the work ethic.

The biggest island, the one with the most people and the seat of government, is Mahé with its delightful little capital called Victoria, after the queen whose clock tower forms the focus of the traﬃc ﬂow. They say it’s the smallest capital on earth. To see here is the colourful Sir Selwyn Selwyn- Clarke market, curio stalls and the historic Kenwyn House with its colonial architecture and art galleries.

Only four of more than a hundred islands of the Seychelles archipelago are permanently inhabited, though some have a lodge, a fishing camp or a research outpost. Total population is close to 85,000 inhabitants, against which 175,000 visitors come from overseas every year, of which just 1,000 come from Kenya, the nearest continental land mass. It’s ‘only’ 1,700 km from Nairobi to Mahé, less than three hours flying time. The Seychellois people feel a natural affinity to Africa and there are real precedents for this. The islands were first identified by Vasco da

18 Gama on his voyage of discovery which brought him to Malindi en route to India in 1503. He counted seven islands, the more visible granitic islands of the inner group, which he named the Seven Sisters. But it was only in 1744 that the islands were settled and set up as a provisioning station and victualling base for ships en route from Europe to India in the days before the Suez Canal. Originally occupied by the French, the islands fell into British hands following the defeat of Napoleon in 1815. Full independence came only in 1976. This is a new country in every sense.

In spite of its government oﬃces and airport, Mahé is a lovely island. Although bigger and more developed, it retains the character of a gorgeous tropical island and a tour of Mahé reveals yet another round of spectacular beaches and forest clad mountains. You can drive around it in two or three hours but there is enough to do and to see to occupy several days. The Seychelles Tourist Board aims to put Mahé and Victoria on the map in ever more inventive ways. Earlier this year, they held the ﬁrst Carnaval, a colourful procession in which my guide Sharon was cast as a princess from the Arabian Nights. Later in the year, they plan an ‘underwater festival’ to celebrate the dazzling diversity of the islands’ marine life. Sharon is annoyed. She wanted to dress up as a mermaid but, she says, the costumes are too small.

Make your own excuse and don’t leave it to your bucket list. You will never lose any brownie points for taking someone to the Seychelles.

Photos: Praslin Mahé sunset Grand Anse, Praslin La Digue, Anse Source d’Argent

19 3 Three faces of Spain

Here are some intriguing perspectives on Spain, reflecting a vast canvas on which is painted an inspiring landscape, a deep and amazing culture, and an incredible history. Spain has a special place in my heart because it was the first country I visited away from home. I was ten. Even better, it was just me and a school friend. No parents, which, especially in those days, was pretty unusual. I always thought I would end up living in Spain. But I diverted off to Africa instead. Oh well, there’s still time.

Andalucía

When sights, sounds, aromas and flavours converge with the fl ow of history, I’m captivated. You have no choice. It writes direct to the deep bit of your brain. It was a Sunday afternoon. Young girls were showing off their finest flamenco dresses. Guitar music reverberated off the whitewashed walls. We were being hosted by our friend Antonio and treated to the most exotic seafood spread we’d ever seen. Platters and platters of it. Today was a holiday, a family day, otherwise we’d be waiting until late at night to eat, a Spanish habit I’ve never got used to. Sanlucar de Barrameda. We’d never heard of it. A busy little town at the mouth of the Rio Guadalquivir not far from Jerez and Cadiz. But this place is famous. This, right here, this very river bank we’re overlooking, is where one Christopher Columbus outfitted his three little ships as he prepared to set off to discover the Americas. He turned out to be a terrible navigator, but there you go, the twists and turns of fate and fortune. This is also where the gold and silver looted from the Aztecs and Incas was unloaded, to be turned into the baroque altar pieces you can see in churches and cathedrals across the country. Hedging their bets with the almighty in the face of the guilt of genocide, like the good Catholics they are.

In a country with an unfair number of special places, Andalucía rather stands out. It was one of the last parts of western Europe to catch up with the modern era, so there’s still a lot of tradition. It was occupied by Islamic Moors from North Africa for hundreds of years, so there’s a lot of their residual inﬂuence embracing architecture, music, and language. We think of ﬂamenco as a typical Andalucían guitar music and dance. The most celebrated exponents of the genre include Paco Peña from Cordoba and Paco de Lucia from Algeciras. But while it was

20 no doubt honed in the province, it derives from North Africa. You can readily pick up similar cadences in Algerian music. Algeria, Algeciras, it’s the same root. Many place names around here contain the suffix ‘de la Frontera’ implying their location on the border between the Christian north and the Moorish south. On my first trip here back in the 60s we camped next to the dam outside Arcos de la Frontera. We’d driven up from Gibraltar to meet up with some American scouts from the naval base at Rota, near Cadiz. Farmers here were still using ox ploughs. But on this later trip, we were staying in Jerez, from whose name comes ‘sherry’. The fruity sherries we know are almost unique to the British market. The Spaniards themselves prefer the pale dry ‘fino’ variety. And at Sanlucar the speciality is the characteristic light dry ‘manzanilla’, which served ultra cold accompanies their signature seafood to perfection. Some of the names on the labels are oddly familiar. The story goes that sherry drinking gained popularity in England after Francis Drake sacked Cadiz in 1587 and carried a plentiful supply back home. A number of British families subsequently invested in its production and export. So we have Gonzales Byass, for example. Byass is an East Yorkshire surname. There’s Williams and Humbert. The name Jerez derives from the Arab ‘Sherish’, in turn most likely ultimately from Shiraz.

The fortified hill town Vejer de la Frontera attracts our attention as we pass. We drive up, curious. Turns out I have a family connection of my own here. We happen upon Calle Eduardo Shelley. A distant ancestor must have ventured here, to sire a dynasty of Shelleys in Andalucía. A flip into the local telephone directory confirms it, there are hundreds. There’s no direct connection between Shelley and sherry so far as I can determine. But another street in Vejer is named for the Jimeniz sherry family. Neither Spanish nor British, this comes from the Dutch name Siemens.

We halt for a late lunch in Ronda, famous for the Roman bridge across the town’s deep ravine. A sleepy bar invites us in, or to be precise, we like the look of the haunches of ham hanging in the back. We’re hungry after the drive through the cork oak forests of the Sierra Grazalema. The ‘jamon serrano’ they make in this part of the world is special. The so-called black foot pigs feed on acorns from the oaks, which makes it both very tasty and rather expensive. But a glass of ﬁno and a tapas platter of jamon does the job and we’re ready to go again. This is the region of the ‘pueblos blancos’, well strictly I suppose Ronda is one of them in spite of its larger size. These whitewashed villages set against the spectacular backdrop of the sierra make a picturesque sight. There is a tourist route linking several of them across what must be one of Spain’s loveliest regions.

The most outstanding architectural gems of Andalucía are Moorish. The Grand Mosque turned Catholic cathedral at Cordoba with its remarkable red and white striped arches and

21 forest of pillars. The vast complex of the Alhambra palace at Granada. These cities, in common with many towns throughout Spain, hold colourful festivals on nominated days in their religious calendars. Notionally celebrating their local version of the virgin Mary, the processions that wind through the streets as part of these fiestas are themselves a reflection of the stream of history that flows through this part of the world. The costumes, the musical instruments, even the brotherhoods and sisterhoods that form them, these echo down the centuries back to Roman times, into the Celtic era and the earliest Iberian culture of pre- history.

Going back in time even further, this part of Europe was the last stronghold of our Neanderthal ancestors. Remains in a cave at the tip of Gibraltar have been dated to 40,000 years ago. It was around this time that our own modern species of homo sapiens migrated into Europe on its long march out of Africa to colonise the earth.

Cantabria

Which takes us next to the village of Puente Viesgo in the far north of Spain, a pretty but low key kind of place nestled amongst rolling green hills. It’s a very diﬀerent environment from the brown south. Caves above the town are where humans endured the long millennia of the last ice age. It must have been a tough life and there can’t have been many of them. But foodstuﬀs must have been reasonably plentiful because they not only survived, they had time to paint pictures of their prey all over the walls of the caves. These galleries contain a vivid testimonial of the life and times, meal times to be accurate, of our direct ancestors. The earliest has been dated to 37,000 years ago, a series of hand prints in red ochre on the walls of the cave called El Castillo. In La Pasiega, from a mere 24,000 years ago, are depicted bison, deer, wild horses and a kind of ancient ox called aurochs. This isn’t just an important historical record, it’s artistic too. Evidence that human kind has possessed the capacity for creative genius probably for as long as we’ve been around. Pity the womenfolk didn’t leave us their recipe for bison stew. Nearby, down past the engaging medieval village of Santillana with its Romanesque abbey, lies the better known cave of Altamira where multi-coloured paintings of bison are emblazoned across the low ceiling.

22 Here, then, is the refuge from where humans later spread over much of pre-Roman, pre-Celtic, pre-iron age western Europe. Sea levels were then 85m shallower and the shape of the continent quite diﬀerent. According to DNA records, people from here beachcombed all the way to what later became detached as the British Isles. Many people in Ireland and the west of England hold ancient Iberian DNA in their genes. Before we were overrun by Saxons, Danes, Picts, Romans and Celts, we were mostly Iberian it seems. I wonder if that’s why Spain is even now our number one holiday destination, why it resonates so powerfully with us Brits.

Talking of ancient history, as we seem to be doing, there is an enigmatic stone in Santander museum they call the ‘Atlantis Stone’. It’s the shape and size of a millstone but lacking the central hub. Engraved onto its face are three concentric circles surrounded by the wavy line of the ocean. It’s pretty much as Plato described Atlantis to be. There are a number of similar stones displayed at the Parque de las Estelas (Stelae Park) in the town of Barros. Where they come from, how old they are and what they really mean are a mystery. Some say they may be relics of Celtic sun worship. But the central device has been incorporated into the oﬃcial Cantabrian coat of arms.

A little further inland lies the route of El Camino de Santiago, the old pilgrims’ path to the city of Santiago de Compostela. Since medieval times, this has formed one of the four primary places of Christian pilgrimage. A journey to the end not only earned you a ‘compostela’ (certiﬁcate of completion), as it does even now, but also an indulgence from the pope waiving your sinning ways and ensuring a guaranteed place in heaven. But, actually, the ‘way’ pre-dates Christianity. Although Santiago is named for St James, whose remains are reputedly entombed here, ‘compostela’ comes from a Latin phrase meaning ﬁeld of stars. In French, el camino was referred to as la voie lactée, the milky way, in reference to the perception that the Milky Way of stars in the heavens appears to mirror the route on the ground. But the route’s ancient origins are revealed in its real terminus, a cape called on modern maps Fisterra, in any relevant language the end of the earth. This is, and was, the most north westerly point of the European continent and the end point of the longest trading route across Europe whose eastern starting point lay in the pre-Celtic heartlands on the shores of the Black Sea.

I discovered another intriguing family aﬃliation in Santiago. The scallop shell traditionally adopted as the symbol of St James is also the heraldic mark of our Shelley family. We found another oddity here too, if it’s fair to call it that. The Spanish language is not as we think know it. There are several diﬀerent versions, some still in active use, Andalucían and Galician amongst them. The Castillian Spanish mainly, but not exclusively, spoken nowadays, with its fast paced lisping, is relatively new, a mere thousand year old attempt to standardise

23 communication across the Iberian peninsula. But tucked away in a corner of Spain’s far north under the Pyrenées Mountains lies Basque Country. The Basque language is unrelated to any other known Indo-European language. Maybe it’s what our ice age cave dwellers spoke. Maybe it’s what we all spoke before the waves of migrants started pouring across the continent.

Catalunya

If you want to learn to speak Spanish, Barcelona is probably not the best place to do it. They don’t speak Spanish there. Well, they do and they don’t. Barcelona is now the capital of the wishfully independent state of Catalunya and officially they speak Catalan. It’s sufficiently different from any other Latin language that it’s not going to be much use to you anywhere else. Well, they speak it too in Andorra up in the mountains. But when I asked a waiter there which language they preferred to speak, he shrugged his shoulders and admitted they speak any language their customers needed to hear. Andorra is one big duty free shop, after all. In Dan Brown’s 2017 novel ‘Origins’, his characters are taken from Cantabria to Catalunya and coincidentally, that’s what we’re doing too. Having been astonished at the ancientness of the history in the north, now we have some seriously quirky things to look at here. I mean what other country has so many strangely designed buildings that are weird enough to be labelled as attractions in their own rights? Quirky art galleries and hotels you might expect, and you can find some intriguing examples in many parts of Spain. But Barcelona is some sort of ‘architecture-central’ thanks pretty much to one man called Antoni Gaudí, described as the best known practitioner of ‘Catalan Modernism’. Gaudí’s buildings celebrate nature and break the mould of normal building design. They’re curved, wavy, lumpy and often vividly coloured. The Casa Milà in Barcelona’s main street is a good example. People queue for hours to get into it. You can do a walking tour of the city ticking off his landmark houses and parks as you go. We had a special invitation to La Sagrada Familia, Barcelona’s and Gaudí’s landmark pièce de resistance. It’s still under construction, although there is now a plan to have it finished by Gaudí’s centenary in 2026. It tears up the gothic rule book of church design (it’s bigger than a lot of cathedrals but is not designated as such). Gaudí’s approach was to compose teams of artisans, designers and craftsmen and let them have their own idiosyncratic way under his overarching conceptual plan. He took inspiration from nature, so the soaring vault of the nave resembles a forest, or

24 to my eye a coral reef. The exterior is ‘bushy’. Actually it defies easy description. You have to see it. His buildings are decorated too with fruits. Where do pomegranates, pineapples and fir cones fit into architectural design, for heaven’s sake? But for me, the primary curiosity is the way he seems to break ranks with religious symbolism. That ‘cave’ sheltering the holy family above the east entrance resembles a gaping shark’s mouth, or am I seeing things? That image of Jesus at the west wing is locked in an embrace with another man they say is Judas. Next to them is a numerology square. For a building which celebrates core Catholic belief, there are a lot of funny things going on here. It’s almost as if the architect is challenging us to see things differently from the way the church fathers have been preaching all these centuries. No wonder Dan Brown found it a perfect location in which to set the finale of his iconoclastic novel.

Up in the hills inland from the city lies another of Dan Brown’s locations, the monastery of Montserrat. Nothing ﬁctional about this. But whether it’s religious or touristic in essence is a matter for conjecture. It attracts pilgrims and devotees in their thousands. And the just plain curious, like us. Here is the modern Spanish worship of mother Mary taken to extreme. There is no god or Jesus in this religion of theirs. It’s all Mary, and statues of Mary at that. The one here is black: the Black Madonna of Montserrat. This is another anti-establishment symbolism. There are several black madonna statues scattered around Europe. The church explains away their blackness by claiming they have faded, worn or somehow discoloured - chemically or magically - since they were made, often hundreds of years ago. But the alternative view is that the holy family, as evidenced both in the Bible and in early Christian imagery, was very far from being as white as later renaissance art portrayed them. This one is very black. African black, and no pretence about it. Not that the devotees, who queue sometimes for hours, to wind their way up narrow stairs to have their moment in the Madonna’s cubicle, care one way or the other. All they want is a miracle. I asked our guide about this. Could he list some of the the miracles that this lovely black lady has performed for her followers? Unfortunately he couldn’t think of any. Well that’s the power of faith for you.

There is a theory that Christianity itself derived from pagan sun worship. And it’s a moot point whether it’s Mary or the sun that wins out in this part of the world. For the millions of tourists who ﬂock to the Spanish ‘costas’ each year, the sun is the clear favourite. It was just up the

25 coast here where I had my ﬁrst encounter with Spain all those years ago, a little ﬁshing village called Estartit. This was right at the beginning of the holiday boom that populated the Costa Brava with concrete hotels, villas and golf courses. It’s still a lovely part of the world. But looking back at my photos of that long empty beach, there’s a lesson for us all. Get out and see things now before they disappear under a tsunami of tourists.

Photos: The Pueblo Blanco of Grazalema, Andalucía Painted bison, Altamira Caves The enigmatic ‘shark’s maw’ at La Sagrada Familia, Barcelona The Black Madonna of Monserrat

26 4 Legal alien

I haven’t had much chance to visit America but it’s had a big impact on me, and not for any reason I could have anticipated. As a native English speaker, I had always assumed that Britain and America were close cousins with a similar culture, values and way of life. But I discovered otherwise. It’s all very familiar over there. But from the movies and the music, not from home. I mean who would write songs about Birmingham, Bradford or Bristol the way they do about Galveston, Glendale, Georgia, New York, San Jose, Baton Rouge, Wilmslow, Amarillo and Chicago ( to name but a few)? Or about the A303 . . .

“You’re not from round here, are you?” It was becoming a common question. I assumed it was my accent but in fact it was more to do with the fact that I couldn’t get things to work. I’m at a filling station in Flagstaff, Arizona (towns always have a state suffix, it’s like saying Newark Nottinghamshire. Well, I suppose that makes the point, it’s not Newark, New Jersey, is it?). I’m trying to refuel my hire car, sorry ‘rental’, with petrol, sorry ‘gas’. I’ve driven up the main road, sorry ‘interstate’, from Phoenix. And I’m failing to get the pump to recognise my credit card. It asks for a zip number. And it doesn’t want a post code from back home. So each time, I have to call the attendant out from behind their bullet proof glass and get them to authorise the purchase. Which, each time, they happily do.

“Where y’all from, then?” “I’m from York.” “York? You sure don’t sound like a Yankee.”

I explain that it’s the old York I’m from, not New York. The original York, York England. It sinks in eventually. I get my fuel and a ‘have a nice day’. My hosts back in Phoenix were less polite about this new arrival acting in apparently wilful ignorance of ordinary day to day practices. “He’s just off the boat”, they explained to the Italian waiter (who was himself a bit of a newcomer), as I leafed through my wallet trying to figure the difference between a dollar note, sorry bill, and a fifty. They’re the same shape, size and colour, sorry color. You have to read them. Makes me feel quite an alien.

Here in Flagstaﬀ, I now have to wait while a 2-mile long freight train passes through. Then I’m across onto the IS40 running alongside the railway, sorry railroad, looking for evidence, now

27 somewhat limited, that this is, or was, Route 66. There’s an occasional café, sorry diner, with 66 in its name. But it seems this famous old road has largely disappeared into disrepair. Back in the day, it was the primary route from Illinois in the east all the way across to California, two and a half thousand miles. But, at least here in Arizona, it’s no longer much celebrated. Shame. You’d think they’d be a bit more proud of their history. After all, this was an important staging post for gold diggers and settlers as they trekked westwards. But to be honest, there isn’t much of a history here. Flagstaff, and Phoenix for that matter, were founded in 1881. That’s just 137 years ago as I write. On our European scale, this was just the other day. Queen Victoria was in her prime, we’d colonised much of the planet, oh yes, including north America. Where I come from in York, we have streets and shops in daily use that are five hundred years old. The Vikings were there a thousand years ago, the Romans two thousand, the Celts before that. My Arizona hosts are based in Fountain Hills, just outside Phoenix, a town which was founded as recently as 1970. This isn’t the past, it’s the present! But as I progress further north into the wilder part of the state, I come to a stunning realisation. History is still in the making. This part of the once ‘wild’ west is still being colonised, it’s still being settled. Immigrants are still flooding in. Towns are still being carved out of the desert. The indigenous ‘Indians’ are still being marginalised. Mexico is once more flexing its muscles. Never mind the threat of a wall, the Spanish speaking takeover is well under way. They reckon 30% of the population of these southern states is now Spanish speaking, as it was up to 1850 when these lands were absorbed into the USA. Road signs and billboards are bilingual English and Spanish. Perhaps Latinos are more able to handle the summer heat that drives the wintering ‘snowbirds’ back north. These desert areas are stunningly beautiful with their saguaro cactus forests but can be quite unbearable at times. I’m here in March. There is still a bit of snow on the ground but by midday it’s 30o, sorry 86.

As I cross a vast wasteland towards the Grand Canyon, I’ve got another rude awakening. This bare, wind-blasted terrain is actually part of the Navajo Reservation. Here is a little Navajo village, a diner, a gas station and a few shanty houses. They seem to have what we used to call ‘privvies’ in their back yards. I stop to talk to a man selling trinkets at a stall overlooking the canyon. “My name’s Daniel”, he tells me. I thought it was going to be Black Eagle or Soaring Cloud, or some such. Apart from his rugged tanned face, he dresses and talks like everyone else. Of course, why wouldn’t he? But while I’ve seen ‘Hispanics’ running businesses around

28 Phoenix, you don’t see many Navajo. Or Hopi. Or Apache. They’ve been ‘given’ their land, let them run casinos like the other tribes do. At least that’s what oﬃcial policy appears to say.

On an earlier trip, I’d encountered another lost tribe as we drove over the Smokey Mountains from Tennessee to North Carolina. The Cherokee were evicted from their ancestral lands here to make way for European settlers. They were ‘given’ land in Oklahoma but it was nothing like the lovely hills and forests they’d grown up in. And which were coveted by the colonists. As David Olusoga explains in the BBC ‘Civilisations’ series: “From the 1830s it became oﬃcial US policy to drive native Americans from their homelands into poorer harsher environments. Those who resisted were deliberately starved, hounded out or massacred”. This forced relocation under the Indian Removal Act of 1830, signed by U.S. president Andrew Jackson, was aimed at clearing former Native American lands for white settlement. The Cherokee called it their ‘Trail of Tears’ and cry about it even now. Those that are left. Elsewhere in the world, Burma for example, or Bosnia, they’d describe it as ethnic cleansing and call in the United Nations or NATO. But in the USA in the 21st century, I can’t ﬁnd anyone who wants to talk about it.

The Grand Canyon, it has to be said, is stupendous. Superlatives run out of syllables in the face of this gash in the earth so big it was obvious from 35,000’ as I ﬂew over from Salt Lake City. I thought that Africa’s Great Rift Valley was pretty spectacular (it is!), but this is on a diﬀerent scale. An American sort of scale. With nary a nod to neo-British notions of health and safety, you can stand right on the precipice, and even join a crowd out on a pinnacle overlooking this death-defying 3000’ drop. My fear of heights was cured at a stroke, I kid you not. As a national park and major visitor attraction, it is, I have to say, very well organised. I had a lovely cabin in the woods with deer browsing outside my window. It was just a short drive or brisk walk to key canyon lookout points. The restaurant was a bit limited but the only real oddity was that my room contained two huge double beds. I still can’t quite get my head around the friendly family formula that would have two couples cohabiting. Well you live and learn, isn’t that what travel is all about?

I turned down the chance to go on to Las Vegas on the grounds that it’s totally fake. But hey, on another trip we found ourselves in Orlando, Florida, which is of course equally artiﬁcial. It’s built pretty much solely for tourists and theme parks. Native Floridians barely acknowledge its existence. (Some Americans barely acknowledge Florida’s existence, but that’s another story.) I loved it for several reasons. One was that we got to swim with dolphins. Another was that we

29 got to meet the real Mickey Mouse. This is what America does to you, it destroys the boundary between reality and fantasy. Everything here seems so familiar, until you realise it’s only because of the movies which, pretty much by definition, are mostly fictional. The dolphins were at Discovery Cove, a delightful day out on the beach, an artificial beach with an artificial lagoon, but with real birds and real fish nibbling at your feet. And real soft rock played through real weather-proof Bose speakers. Here, they’ve turned money making into an art form. Hand over your credit card and have one of ours. Doesn’t seem like you’re spending real money (you’re not). Until you leave, when it’s all charged back to your actual (real) card. But having been to some amazing white coral sand beaches around the world, I can confidently state that the fake American one was better.

Disney, on the other hand, makes an art form out of fantasy. You either get it or your don’t, and long queues (which thankfully we managed to avoid) don’t help the perception. But once you’re into Main Street, USA, with it’s view of Cinderella’s castle (modelled on the ‘real’ Neuschwanstein Castle of King Ludwig II of Bavaria), you’re hooked. Encounters and photo opportunities with every childhood cartoon character are guaranteed. I didn’t even know half their names. But I loved it.

There are people who claim that the entire US space programme (sorry, program) was fantasy too. But a trip out to the Kennedy Space Centre (sorry, Center) at Cape Canaveral makes it pretty obvious this is (was) the real thing. NASA has stopped manned launches from here since the retirement of the shuttle but you can see the old original Saturn V rockets which took men to the moon back in the 60s and 70s, as well as a lunar module of the type which landed on the surface. You can go onto the ﬂight deck of a shuttle. The pilots used to glide these down from orbital altitude to a precise ‘dead stick’ landing on the runway here. Nowadays, it’s mainly military, and more recently privately owned, satellites that are launched from Cape Canaveral.

At the end of these trips, I have to admit a grudging respect for a country and people that makes its own reality out of what to others looks like hype and fantasy. But I still felt like an alien. I was a ﬁsh out of water in America more than ever I feel in, say, Spain or Germany or even Africa. In Europe, we’re so accustomed to a conversational “Where are you from?”, that it comes as a surprise that this is quite a meaningless question, or even taken as an insult, in America. The most recent answer I received was something to the eﬀect: “Well my ma was half French from Louisiana, her dad was from Puerto Rico, my dad’s dad was Italian and his mum I

30 think Norwegian. We’ve got Irish somewhere, at least so my dad claimed.” On balance, frankly, we have less of a shared culture and childhood upbringing with modern Americans than we do with the countries of western Europe and even of the wider Commonwealth. My lasting feeling was of foreignness and familiarity totally intertwined. To paraphrase Sting’s song, “I’m an alien, I’m a legal alien, I’m an Englishman from the old York”.

Photos: Main Street, Disney World, Orlando, Florida Saguaro cactuses near Phoenix, Arizona The Grand Canyon, Arizona Lunar Module at the Kennedy Space Centre

31 5 Zanzibar: the Spice Island

This was going to be an article about islands and why we seem to love them. As a Brit, I’m an islander myself. Wherever you are in the UK, you are never more than 70 miles from the sea. We can get a bit intimidated by continental landmasses. Islands are altogether more ‘knowable’. You might well be able to tour the whole thing in a day. In terms of landscape and culture, they are often quirky and intriguing, a kind of tightly packaged multi-sensory experience. Think of the beaches, villages and parties of Ibiza and Majorca. The history and mythical coves of Cyprus. The exotic beauty of the Seychelles or Fiji. One of my own earliest holiday memories was of a family holiday to Jersey in the Channel Islands. At night, we could hear the lions roaring in Gerald Durrell’s zoo. Later on, I got to know Corfu and its tiny neighbour Paxos. Santorini and Crete in the Aegean. Then further aﬁeld to the Indian Ocean islands of Mauritius and the Seychelles, which, although being neighbours (sort of, they’re more than a thousand miles apart), have almost nothing in common with each other, other than their isolation. As I mapped out the outline for this article, I realised that each one of these lovely places could rightly form a feature in its own. So I’ve homed in on Zanzibar, for the simple reason that it takes the biscuit for quirkiness. My ﬁrst visit was in 1994 and I’ve been several times since, the most recent being at Christmas 2015.

They say you can smell the cloves everywhere you go. It’s true, at least in the Dhow Palace Hotel, which is a kind of sleep-in antique shop. It’s full of ancient Swahili furniture. The bed creaks under my weight, the posts supporting the mosquito net tipping gently inwards. It’s an antique and it’s going to take some care sleeping in it. The odour of cloves permeates the room. The wooden furniture seems to be infused with it. It’s the scent of the ages. The scent of the legendary Spice Island we’ve come to see. To smell, I should say.

Actually, we’ve been invited to a conference. It’s about eco-tourism, how to keep the impact of tourism low and in the best interests of local communities. There’s a ﬁeld trip to Nungwi, a settlement on the north coast of Unguja, the main island which, together with neighbouring Pemba, makes up Zanzibar. Everyone gawps at the stunning white coral sand beach, the

32 turquoise ocean, the distant peaks of the African mainland, the traditional construction of ocean-going sailing dhows, a turtle come ashore to breed. This place has been passed by the tide of modern ‘civilisation’. That’s why it’s amazing to be here, to see it as it’s always been. And the villagers are concerned. They’ve been told that the government wants to dole out concessions to Italian hoteliers. They’re having nothing of it. But it seems to us something of a lost cause. Money speaks louder than the subdued voice of these hapless villagers. Modern Zanzibar may have been forged in a popular revolution, its people may think they live in an idealistic socialist state. But it’s more Soviet than communist and the government will do what they want to do. A few years later, after not very much debate, the hotels, highways, decadent bars and brawling tourists come anyway. But it’s still beautiful.

In Nungwi, you can still meet the local people. That’s not the case at many of the big hotels that have sprung up in the intervening years, insulated by gates and guards ostensibly for the security of their guests but at least as much to discourage foreigners from corrupting the fragile and deeply religious communities around them. Zanzibaris are mostly friendly and polite, but they are their own people and it is in their nature for tempers to erupt from time to time under the inﬂuence of the tropical heat and the need to comply with Muslim practices. The fasting month of Ramadan is a particular challenge. Everything grinds to a standstill as people sleep away their days and feast away their nights.

Islam came early to these islands. The oldest concrete record is a Kuﬁc inscription at Kizimkazi in the south which is dated 1107. It is said that the ﬁrst substantial occupiers of Zanzibar were Shirazi Persians who, observing the Koranic injunction that they may not enslave fellow Muslims, sailed down the coast of Africa seeking alternative sources of labour. Over the subsequent centuries, this became big business. Expeditions were launched into the interior of Africa, and Zanzibar became for a time the world’s premier slave market. These ‘caravans’, typically led by mixed Bantu-Arab people called Swahilis, forged the routes that enabled European explorers to penetrate the ‘dark continent’. But by that time, the Arabs had been there for years.

As a trading post beyond the far reaches of early empires, Zanzibar has a long history. It is referred to as ‘Menuthias’ in the ‘Periplus of the Erythraean Sea’, a sailors’ guide to coastal navigation from the ﬁrst century commissioned by the Roman-Egyptian king Ptolemy. Evidence

33 of trade between this Swahili coast and the Roman Empire, as well as with India and the far east, has been found both in Zanzibar and on the nearby African mainland. There are intriguing hints that this ancient trade route was exploited too by Assyrians and Sumerians in the earliest times of our known history.

The Portuguese occupied Zanzibar from 1503 until their expulsion by Omani Arabs in 1698. The islands, plus a ten mile wide strip of the mainland, were controlled by the Sultan of Oman until 1840 when his base of operations moved to Zanzibar itself. This is how the European empire builders found it when their own age of exploration brought an inﬂux of adventurers, traders and aspiring colonial administrators. Zanzibar was positioned as an ideal staging post for expeditions across into Africa. The British staged a palace coup in 1890 and declared a protectorate which endured until independence in 1963. After a brief but messy revolution, when an African population descended from Swahilis and freed slaves rampaged against their former Omani overlords, the isles joined Tanganyika to become the nation of Tanzania. This ﬂow of history, with its intertwined eras and ethnicities, is all too evident as you walk the narrow alleyways of Stone Town, the ‘capital’. Colonial history exists cheek by jowl with an incongruent modernisation. You can just imagine this is where David Livingstone bought his airtime scratch cards, where Richard Burton had his Range Rover serviced, and where British consul John Kirk let out his spare bedrooms on AirBnb. The consulate is labelled as a world heritage site but it’s a bit run down these days. These stone-built houses are made of lumps of coral, thinly plastered over. In the humid tropical heat, they decay fast and what looks like a ruin may be in reality just a few decades old.

There’s a derelict church and orphanage at Mbweni whose state of disrepair in Europe would place it at hundreds if not thousands of years old. But it’s only from the recent colonial era. Nevertheless, it reeks of ghosts, haunted by memories best forgotten. Like the slave market on the edge of Stone Town, where, after marching half way across Africa, humans were stored in dank underground cellars, put up for auction, and shipped oﬀ to Arabia. Cows and goats were treated more ‘humanely’.

Nearby, we’re assaulted again by smells. It’s the city market, full of butchered meat, which is somewhat nauseating at this hour. But push your way through the crowds and we’re into the aisle of spices. Here you can stock up on chilli, cardamoms, cumins, pepper, ginger, nutmegs

34 and rolls of freshly cut cinnamon bark, odours which linger more elegantly in the senses. These spices are what these islands became most famous for. Clove trees were introduced from Molucca in the East Indies and the spice trade quickly grew to dominate the economy in the nineteenth century. We take a trip out into the forest where they’re grown. It’s hard to distinguish the different trees but an agile guide shins up a tall sapling and returns with a handful of leaves and a flower. This is a ‘cananga’ tree. It confuses the senses: we are expecting an ‘eating’ smell but this is perfumed. Apparently, we know it as ylang ylang. He scrapes a patch of grey bark, ah yes that’s the cinnamon we know. Underneath a mass of elongated leaves lie tubers of ginger and turmeric. From another tree come the little flower buds that harden into the cloves we’ve been sniffing on the air everywhere we go.

Sensory confusion seems to be the norm here. It’s old and it’s new. It’s alien and familiar. It’s fresh and it’s dank. But it’s hallmark are its anachronisms, ripples in space-time. Here is the house where David Livingstone stayed while he plucked up courage - and funds, supplies and people willing to go with him - to venture across the straits to the real Africa beyond. The house hasn’t changed much in the intervening century and a half. It overlooks a muddy creek which stinks badly at low tide. His budget didn’t run to more luxurious accommodation in town. Here is the palace of the late sultan, the ‘Beit el Ajaib’ or House of Wonders, so called because it was the ﬁrst place in Zanzibar to be connected to electricity. At three stories, it was claimed to be the tallest building in Zanzibar. The rows of 1960s Soviet style concrete blocks of ﬂats are bigger. They also appear out of place and out of time for a population more comfortable with mud, wattle and coconut thatch which make for cooler living in this classically tropical climate. The House of Wonders had plenty to amaze the sultan’s subjects back in the day. Here are early examples of bakelite plastic, and the sultana’s very own Sony Trinitron TV. None of it quite adds up.

We do like the curio shops though, and hidden in the dark recesses of the town’s alleyways are some real treasure troves. They’re like Aladdin’s proverbial cave, and we poke about amongst the detritus of the ages: Yemeni daggers, Indian lamps, Masai carvings, and cheerful dyed kangas, the traditional Swahili women’s wear. This is a place you

35 can still ﬁnd real curiosities, if not actual bargains any longer. We ask about the seemingly traditional glazed bowls we’ve seen everywhere built into walls and hung in hotel receptions. They’re collected - and priced - as if they’re antiques. Well they are, in a sense. They’re rice bowls, mostly produced in Holland after some earlier Chinese pattern, and they were used on ships to feed their passengers en route from Europe. A nice collector’s item but far from truly valuable. They were also sometimes set into the masonry of Swahili tombs to help feed the deceased on their journey into whatever lay ahead. Big brass-bound chests are another speciality here. Those you will see in the shops are rarely old, but the ‘Zanzibar chest’ is another nice curiosity.

At the airport, a couple of Meridiana charter jets have landed. The population seems temporarily to double before this horde of Italian tourists bustles onto coaches and fans out to the various all-inclusive resorts scattered around the island’s coastline. They’re building a new one, but we shall be nostalgic for this tiny old terminal building and its surly money grabbing visa oﬃcers. I was once treated to the ‘luxury’ of sitting on the plastic chairs of the air conditioned VIP suite with the head of one of the UN agencies. Once I was able to hitch a ride in a Cessna 308 with the British honorary consul who runs a local airline. And once we drove on a power boat with an Italian restaurateur called Saverio who had come over to the island to pick up some ‘duty-free’ goods. But that’s not for these pages.

Back at Nungwi, the beach is as pristine as ever, the water as clear, the turtles as engaging. There is a whole row of bars and B&Bs now, but it hasn’t been fully subverted to mass tourism. It has a kind of neo-hippy feel about it. No doubt the villagers feel they’ve lost their heritage but I suspect many of the newer generation are grateful for the jobs and the tourist euros. It might not be a complete win-win, but it’s not far oﬀ.

Photos: Silhouette of a dhow under sail The beach at Nungwi The old and the new in Stone Town The Sultan’s palace and a corner of the Portuguese fort

36 6 Grand designs: the opening up of Europe

Britain has an ambiguous relationship with Europe. But for the moment (I write in 2018), the 28 countries of the European Union, and the slightly diﬀerent list of 26 members of the Schengen visa area, form the largest visa-free travel zone in the world. You can, if you so wish, drive from the far north of Norway all the way to the south of Portugal, visiting dozens of countries without stopping for passport checks or customs. This huge travellers’ open zone is unprecedented. But it may not last. The ‘grand design’ of a greater Europe lies at the heart of Britain’s concern about what it sees as a political project which is largely undemocratic in nature. But for travellers from outside Europe, this is - for the time being - a holiday-maker’s paradise.

When the Berlin wall came down in 1989, it signalled the end of the Soviet era, but it also triggered an expansion of the EU. In 2004 alone, ten countries signed treaties of accession, of which no less than seven were former Soviet vassal states. The geographic area we could now easily access expanded enormously. Back in the day, I’d made an adventurous train journey to the former Czechoslovakia, passing through the miles of fencing and gun towers we called the Iron Curtain. This was at the height of the so-called ‘Prague spring’ but only a year later, Russian tanks rolled in to bring that brief moment of semi-freedom to an end. It took another 21 years to throw oﬀ this yoke which had suppressed the lives of millions since 1945. I’ve included a couple of photos at the end of this chapter which show the diﬀerence, based on the crowds which nowadays throng the Charles Bridge. In 1967, by comparison, on a summer Sunday afternoon, it was pretty well deserted.

I would like to think this visa-free zone demonstrates how unnatural borders are, devised as they are for the benefit of tax collectors and to massage the egos of rulers. But I’m far from convinced this brave experiment is sustainable. Many of the former eastern bloc countries benefit economically, but their governments are not all committed to this alien notion of democracy and freedom. And there are those who feel much the same about the vast Belgian bureaucracy that runs the EU. The hurry to absorb new members, the misalignment of policies around the euro, and significant differences in culture and governance have all contributed to the de facto collapse of the economies of countries like Greece, Italy, Spain and

37 Portugal. Greece in particular has been obliged to mortgage its sovereignty to the European Central Bank, or worse, some would say, to the Bundesbank. Germany in a meaningful sense, pretty well ‘owns’ Greece now.

We’re in Portugal. After a delightful few days in Porto, we’ve hired a car, searched AirBnb, and we’re heading into the rural areas to see what this country is really all about. So far, compared with, say, Spain or France, it’s low key, relaxed and easy going. People are friendly, no ‘attitude’ that we can see. Their team is on a run that will result in them winning the EUFA Cup, which helps the national mood. But now we’re venturing off the beaten track. It’s what I like to do. Unanticipated surprises always work wonders for my spirit, especially when we discover hidden gems we didn’t even know existed. We’re following signs, as instructed, for Covilha and Arganil. This is where our beaten track is supposed to come to an end. Our instructions read: “At the 1st house on the left, turn left into Rua de Lavadouro. Drive 1.6 kms through the forest along a dirt road. Keep to the centre, don’t turn off left or right. You come to Vale de Ovelha. This is a tiny village. On the left you'll pass a grey house, then a white house, then a yellow house. On the right a small chapel. Our house will be in front of you, apricot colour with a flower tile panel at the maroon gates.”

First attempt, we miss it and, in spite of help from the nice lady at Google Maps, we ﬁnd ourselves in Tabua, which is not on the route at all. We’re looking for lunch but the little town seems dead. Windows are shuttered, there is a look of abandonment. Admittedly it’s July and it’s warm. But the Portuguese don’t ‘celebrate’ the afternoon siesta the way some other countries do. This is weird, it’s like aliens have beamed everyone out. We satisfy ourselves with a small supermarket and a quickly prepared picnic by the roadside. Eventually, we ﬁnd our destination and ask Gillian, our host, about the apparently deserted town.

“I would rather have suggested you try Arganil”, she says. She’s from South Africa, the accent is telling. “But even Tabua will be busy next month.”

This desertion of the towns seems to be happening all over the country. They blame the government for mismanaging the economy. People have had to leave to ﬁnd jobs. They’ve gone to England, to Holland, to France. “But they come back in August”, says Gillian. “For the holidays. And to bring much needed cash.”

38 Ah, yes, the famous European August when everywhere is simultaneously crowded and closed. And hot. Best avoided. But for the rest of the year, Portugal’s inland towns have emptied out. I’m betting this is the same in parts of Spain, in Italy, in Hungary, in Poland and in Romania. All those immigrants serving in British restaurants and cleaning British hotels have left empty homes all over Europe.

France, on the other hand, seems to be full of Brits. Many of the rural towns, at least in the south west where we’re heading on to next, have become almost English-speaking enclaves. People have been moving here for years and, by all accounts, being made quite welcome. The mayor of Exideuil tells us proudly that fully half of his 600 population are British, without whom the village would have died. This rapprochement with the French surprises and delights me. Wasn’t this what EU membership was supposed to be about?

Puivert is in the foothills of the Pyrenées. We’ve been invited to an evening ‘cook-out’ run by the local community by the lake. There’s a band and a few craft stalls. And vast platters of snails, moules frites and paella. It seems like a proper rural French experience. Except for one thing. Many of the trestle tables have been reserved for parties of Brits. At least they’re behaving themselves. Everyone is just having a good time. And the food and wine is great.

We’ve come to this part of the world on one of my ‘myth busting’ missions. You don’t have to have a reason to travel, but I love to learn new things, I love to see and experience really old things. But most of all I love look for places and things I’ve read about and go see for myself. Especially if it’s a place associated with signiﬁcant events in history or theories about human origins. Even more so if there is some sort of mystery or conspiracy. I’m looking for the fortress at Montségur. I had originally aimed for Rennes-le-Chateau which featured in certain writings a few years ago as a focal point of a conspiracy about the supposed ﬂight of Mary Magdalene after the death of Jesus and its cover up by the established church. A former priest was rumoured to have discovered a vast treasure left hidden here by the Knights Templar in the twelfth century. Well I’m sure the church has covered up a lot of things, but it now seems that this particular conspiracy was less of a theory and more of a hoax. Otherwise the little chapel dedicated to Mary Magdalene would be overwhelmed by curious tourists. Which it isn’t. Neither is Montségur, when the mist clears over its peak. The view from the top over the hills and forests to the still snow capped peaks of the Pyrénées is spectacular.

The story attached to Montségur is that of the Cathars, a sect to which the Catholic Church took exception on the grounds that their beliefs seemed to diverge from the then approved dogma. Pope Lucius III authorised a papal bull ‘Ad abolendum’ in 1184 to abolish ‘malignant heresies’, and in 1208 Pope Innocent III declared a crusade speciﬁcally against the Cathars. In turn, in 1234 Pope Gregory IX set up the French Inquisition, and for many years, members of

39 the Cathar community were ruthlessly hunted down and slaughtered under these papal dispensations. The Cathars based themselves in a series of impregnable hilltop castles, the remains of which can still be found around the Occitan south west of France. Montségur was reputedly the Cathars’ ﬁnal stronghold. It was besieged by papal forces and its remaining occupants massacred in 1244. I was curious to see for myself just how this strategy might have been executed (sorry, unfortunate double-entendre).

Getting in and out of the castle is, and would have been, a perilous proposition. Hill forts were designed and built for this very purpose, to stop enemies getting in. Likely the ‘lords of the manor’ who owned them also beneﬁtted from the way they dominated, even intimidated, the local landscape. They had great views, but would have been a pain to live in. Nevertheless, the fort itself was ringed by houses in which lived, at Montségur, a sizeable population of Cathars. There is, however, no way that this narrow peak could have held hundreds of people for any length of time. It’s just too small, even allowing for a multi-storey construction, and even allowing that the castle has been rebuilt since its destruction following the extermination of its hapless occupants. On the other hand, a half way decent army could simply besiege it, because the delivery of the necessary volume of supplies would be easy to disrupt. And that seems to be what happened. Only symbolically was Montségur associated with the ﬁnal demise of the Cathars. In reality, it was only a handful of surviving followers who were forced to surrender and duly killed by the Catholic forces after many decades of ruthless pursuit and persecution.

Echoing up the slopes on the mellow summer air were the etherial notes of a hang drum (or hand pan) played by itinerant Belgian musician Curt Ceunan. It seemed ﬁtting that this indisputably ancient site should have some spiritual connection, a requiem for the Cathars in the form of his exotic music. What is clear to me is that medieval European society was dominated by castle-owning warlords who, mostly, exerted their inﬂuence for, on behalf of, and together with the religious powers of the day.

You can ﬁnd hilltop castles and villages all over Europe. We head for Italy, speciﬁcally the hill town of Montalto della Marche, inland from Ancona. We’ve been invited by our friend Michaela whose family lives here. It’s August - of course - when everyone either goes home or goes on holiday. As we’ve seen in Portugal, it’s likely to be hot and crowded, or possibly deserted. Luck

40 of the draw. Montalto is suﬃciently unknown that it’s neither one nor the other. Its claim to fame, as proclaimed on billboards across the town, is that the boy who would become Pope Sixtus the Fifth was born here in 1521. Ordinarily, nothing much happens here. Until today. The Saldari family has set out tables and chairs in the street. Mum is in the kitchen, a typical Italian mama, sleeves rolled up, steaming pots of pasta on the boil. We’re sent up to the ‘Sisto V’ bar in the piazza to keep us out of the way while the feast is prepared. This is real hospitality. The town comes to a halt while the Shelley family is fed, watered and entertained. Well to be honest, we’re just on the periphery of this family get together. But it still feels like an honour.

Food and drink is - for us, at least - a vital ingredient of travel. Many places are characterised by their food offerings. And a decent red wine for €3 a bottle works wonders for the mood. In Portugal, it was the seafood, dominated by the ever present ‘bacalāo’, cod fish. Traditional cod dishes are based on salted and dried fillets. We prefer it fresh. In Porto, you cannot escape the eponymous port, especially since the main cellars, from where barrels used to be shipped, still dominate the south side of the Douro river estuary. A parallel experience in France was a tour of the Courvoisier factory at Jarnac, just upstream along the Charente from the brandy town of Cognac. Jarnac is a pretty little town, Cognac more industrial, dominated by the product of the surrounding vineyards. Eating out in France is, however, something of a paradox. I mean, French and cooking often go together into the same hushed sentence. Aside from our delightful community cookout, we failed dismally to find interesting restaurants, though surely they must be there. In fact, the French predisposition for taking care of themselves first, according to their employee-comes-first ethos, means that restaurants may close at the very time we need them: mealtimes. But let’s not forget that Michelin was a tyre maker, not a company of starry eyed chefs.

Prague is not so much of a culinary centre. Like much of central and eastern Europe, the Czech diet revolves around pork and beer. Decent beer was pretty much invented here. Pilsner takes its name from the town of Plzen, Pilsen as we call it. They don’t complicate your life here. There’s no endless array of unknown craft ales, no complexities of hoppiness, bitterness and colour. It’s just light or dark. The choice is enough. Both are great, and go well with the typical pork knuckle, or ‘pig knee’ as the menu has it, with mash and gravy. Prague has

41 become famous for hosting stag and hen parties, but I suspect that’s as much due to the availability of cheap flights rather than cheap booze. But it’s a classically elegant city, and the skyline of the Hradčany beyond the Charles Bridge is one of Europe’s great sights. And it has now shrugged off much of the influence of its Soviet past.

On the other hand, while the Hungarian capital Budapest has become something of a gastro destination, this, as in its old days, is not somewhere you talk about politics. Its baroque parliament building overlooking the River Rhône is again one of Europe’s essential photo opportunities. But I doubt it’s experienced much in the way of democratic process over the century or so it’s been in use. Back to the boulevards and restaurants, much more interesting, and much more satisfying. Budapest’s streets are huge, the intersections vast, and the buildings lining them rather Parisian in style. Our random choice of evening eateries scored a 100% success rate. I’ve never seen (eaten) such succulent duck, the legs were enormous. Goose liver was delicious. The sauces were ﬂavourful. We were here for Christmas and the market, held in a square in the main shopping district, was as quirky and welcoming as a Christmas market should be. As well as the ubiquitous ‘glühwein’, there was a good range of interesting street food on oﬀer. Yes of course including goulash, but plenty else. I think it takes the edge compared with Prague’s Tyn Square market.

Back in the day, as they say, I’d come to Budapest on an extended road trip with a mate from university. My old Morris 1000 carried us all around Europe before it broke a crankshaft and died, but that was after we got home. We did have some trouble with the brakes, which put us in harm’s way amid Croatia’s turquoise lakes. Parking on a slope, the car decided to roll downhill and was only prevented from nosing over the cliff by the urgent efforts of half a dozen panicked campers. This was in the days of the former Yugoslavia, notionally the free-est of the eastern bloc countries. It’s break up and subsequent genocidal wars of the 1990s truly alarmed us. We’re been there. We’d stayed in Sarajevo, which became the epicentre of Serbian armed might trying to blow to hell the civilian population of Bosnians. I have a friend here in York as I write who escaped Sarajevo and even now more than 20 years later cannot easily talk about the atrocities she witnessed. But on our earlier visit, it was quite clearly a relic of the Ottoman invasions, at the front line between the Christian Europe of the Hapsburg empire and the still expanding Islamic empire. In many ways, the recent conflicts were just another

42 battle in this protracted war. More recently I had the opportunity to visit Belgrade, the Serbian capital. It’s another intriguing city, the site of an ancient Roman fort strategically overlooking a bend in the Danube. The Serbs, it seemed to me, are confused. They see themselves as the front line troops on this old cultural fault line, protecting Europe from the Muslim hordes. And they can’t understand why their notional allies in NATO chose to bomb them instead. The broken states of the Balkans still simmer on as Europe’s most unstable political hotspot, even as they’ve dropped out of the headlines.

It seems odd to me, with my memories of the Cold War, Soviet Bloc and Iron Curtain, that this part of Europe is now - largely - part of the visa-free area. Take up of the euro currency has been less enthusiastic, though. With the exception of the Baltic states of Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia, most of the new EU members have retained their own currencies. Can this ‘Greater Europe’ survive the stresses of its own diversity? Can it survive a resurgence of Russian antipathy? Can the euro itself survive? Or, in spite of the augurs, is Europe’s heyday still to come? You know what I suggest? Get out there now and see what you can see. This past year I ﬁnally managed a tentative exploratory entry into Russia itself. But I fear this will only get harder to do. Shame. Forgetting politics and insane leadership, we’re natural allies. ‘Europe’ should encompass all that amazing culture that still lies eastwards of the EU’s present boundary, at least for we travellers.

Prague’s Charles Bridge in 1967 and in 2015.

Other photos: Hradčany Castle, Prague; Piodão, Portugal; hill fort at Montségur, France; Montalto della Marche, Italy; Parliament building, Budapest, Hungary.

43 7 A is for Athens

This article was ﬁrst published in 2012, not long after the collapse of the Greek economy and its takeover by the European Central Bank.

I had expected to ﬁnd a country on its knees, bankrupt and begging. Street mobs, tear gas and daily demonstrations. I mean, from what we’ve been hearing on the news this past year, Greece was supposed to be the mother of all eurozone basket cases, a case study, in fact, on how to mismanage an economy. If the developed world had been living beyond its means for the best part of a generation, then Greece was to show what could be achieved from a decade of protracted public proﬂigacy and the deliberate abrogation of transparent governance.

“We called the finance minister ‘The Wizard’”, one European banker is quoted as saying. “Because his statistics made a thumping loss look like a fantastic profit.” One of the tricks was to turn subsidies of unprofitable state enterprises into ‘investment assets’ for reporting purposes.

What does a bankrupt country look like? What happens when a whole country cannot pay its debts? What happens when the currency can’t devalue because it’s controlled from outside The answer, my friends, is that you carry on partying. The streets of Athens were indeed full of noisy people. But they were eating, drinking and dancing to bouzouki music long after the sun had gone down.

“What’s going on?” I asked our business partner, Kostas. “We expected that everyone would be staying home, spending less and worrying about the future.”

He laughed. “That’s what we Greeks do! We go out. We eat out, we drink and laugh together. It’s not possible to stop.”

A lady called us to come and eat in her restaurant as we passed. “Where are you from?” she asked, seeing an unfamiliar mix of black and white faces. “Kenya? We’ve never had anyone from Kenya before. I saw a documentary, and what’s going on in your country is really sad”.

“Well, we saw a documentary about Greece and what’s going on here is really sad!”

44 She laughed, obliged to agree. But neither she nor anyone else I talked to was ready to admit their country had come apart at the seams. The most they would say was that the government had really got it wrong and they were now worried that equally inept extremist political parties might win favour at the upcoming election.

Greek politics has long been about incompetence, extremism, and violent swings from right to left and back again. All against a backdrop of democratic objections, student riots and personal despair. The day we left Athens, a destitute pensioner shot himself in the street and the ensuing demonstrations brought the city centre to a standstill. It was the kind of personal political statement for which Athenians have long been famous.

This is the city which, history tells us, brought the very concept of democracy into public parlance. This is the nation which virtually invented the concepts of philosophy, participatory politics, mathematics, geometry and drama which underpin all of European culture - and much of that of the rest of the world - to this day. And if ever there was a place where the stream of historical consciousness ﬂows right in front of your eyes, Athens is it.

We’re sitting in the roof top bar of our hotel, A for Athens (yes, that’s the name of the hotel!). It’s a trendy, happening place full of smoking and drinking Athenian professionals. And a handful of foreign tourists like us. Right in front - ‘in your face’, actually - is the majestic sight of the Acropolis, ﬂoodlit at night.

The Parthenon, the two and a half thousand year old temple of Athena, is bedecked with cranes, indicators of a massive reconstruction project. Over the hill is the theatre of Dionysus where Euripides put on his plays. There is the arena where Socrates taught his idiosyncratic political model and where, for his pains, he was poisoned to death. That very rock on the slope to the right, the Areophagus, is where an itinerant Syrian preacher called Paul promoted a new religion which came to be called ‘Christianity’.

Closer lies the almost intact Thisseon, a temple to Hephaestus, the god of learning. Closer still is the Agora, the market place from Roman times. And the pillars of the library built by Emperor Hadrian. Right beneath us lies the busy square of Monastiriki with its mime artists, jugglers and fruit sellers. I’ve never seen such enormous strawberries, they’re the size of apples. The narrow shopping alleys of Plaka and Psyrri fan out on each side. People are strolling arm in arm, looking for a place that entices them to eat, savouring the aromas of the

45 traditional dishes laid out in the windows. A bouzouki trio strikes up a cheerful song outside the metro station.

Along Ermou Street are department stores and designer outlets. These are the real thing, Zara, Diesel, Hilﬁger, Prada and Jimmy Choo. There’s nothing pirate or fake here, apart perhaps from the Bulgarian girl selling shoulder bags for a euro apiece. There’s even a proper Nike shop, named for Athena Nike, the goddess of victory. The streets are packed. From 10am to well past 10pm, this place is humming. And not with foreigners either. Greeks travel, Greeks shop, Greeks eat and drink. It seems never to stop. When do they go home, we wonder? We leave the smokey bar, in spite of its great music, adventurous cocktails and attentive service. It’s time to join the throng.

There’s culture and there’s culture. Some of us hate the sight of yet another set of ruins. To others, it’s our heritage. Some of us are sick to death of traipsing round the shops. To others, this is paradise found. Some of us love ethnic dishes like moussaka, kleftiko and taramosalata. Others think they are little better than bland stews, left too long in the oven. But if you’re going to Greece, you might was well immerse yourself in it. You certainly can’t escape it. But in spite of the plethora of restaurants, there is a high degree of ‘sameness’ about them. By the time you’ve tried the chicken skewers (‘souvlaki’) and the sliced lamb in pitta bread (‘gyros’), you’ve pretty well exhausted the repertoire. There are no curry houses or Chineses around here to give a break from the Greek.

But no-one can deny it’s fun. The atmosphere is heady. If you can’t enjoy Athens like this, you shouldn’t have come. And it is the real thing. Little is put on for the tourists. There is a bouzouki shop, for example, where they actually make these traditional instruments in three and four stringed varieties. They sell alongside Fender and Gibson guitars. Stephen Tyler of Aerosmith and American Idol fame came here shopping for ‘ways to make noise’, as he put it. Trinket shops are full of worry beads, but these are not tourist items either, all the men carry a set to play with as they walk or sit.

Like any city, the capital is not the country and Athens is not Greece. It didn’t even exist as a viable capital till the mid 1800s. And longer ago, in the middle ages when a succession of Macedonian, Venetian and Turkish invaders came, plundered and left, the notional capital was moved out to the islands. And that is where we headed next.

46 The seas around Greece are full of islands, many of them highly developed as tourist destinations but many quite unspoilt. Years ago, a holiday in the Greek Islands was my idea of heaven. Over time, I managed to clock up visits to Crete, Santorini, Naxos, Paxos and Corfu. There are dozens more. This time, our ‘one-day, three-islands’ cruise is taking us from the port of Pireaus to Hydra, Poros and Aegina.

These islands are so unlike each other that there’s little risk of that ‘oh no not another island’ feeling. Hydra has only one tiny town, no roads and no motor vehicles. All transport is by mule or on foot. It’s a place to sit at a harbour front café and watch the ferry boats come and go. If you wanted to retreat from the world and write a book or a concerto, Hydra might be a good choice. Poros is for the serious yachting fraternity. It boasts a long waterfront where boats from many countries tie up and plug in to electricity and water. The narrow strait between Poros and the mainland is totally sheltered. Gales are few here.

Aegina is another story. Aegina was once the capital of Greece while the Turks were being expelled from the mainland after years of occupation under the Ottoman Empire. Nowadays, it’s the pistachio capital of the world, with orchards that dwarf even the ubiquitous olives into second place. It’s also a highly religious place, for some quite unusual reasons. Oldest of the religious relics is the temple of Aphias, standing proudly on the island’s central hilltop, not unlike the Parthenon in design. The curiosity here is the goddess to whom it is dedicated. Aphias, apparently, means ‘invisible’ and the story goes that an amorous god chased her oﬀ into the woods where she couldn’t be found. Quite why the ancients would wish to invest such time and energy - and money, no doubt - in such a grand construction project dedicated to such an unknown lost ‘patron’ remains a mystery. But the site turns out to be in an exact triangular alignment with the Parthenon and the temple of Poseidon at Cape Sounion, so more likely geometry, geography or astronomy could provide some credible explanation. Ancient temples nearly always possess a strong sense of place as well as forgotten meaning.

Between this high spot and the village of Aegina on the coast lie the ruins of no less than 38 medieval Christian churches, while the spirit of investment in the afterlife lives on in the guise of the Orthodox church of St Nectarius, started as recently as 1975 and already the largest church in the whole of Greece. It’s modelled on Istanbul’s Agia Sophia, arguably one of the world’s most beautiful religious buildings.

47 The Greeks take Christianity very seriously, our guide tells us. “It’s what liberated us from the Romans”, she says. What she omits is that it was Roman Emperor Constantine who adopted Christianity as the only permitted oﬃcial faith in a last ditch attempt to unite the Empire against collapse from within and without. What apparently worked for the Greeks didn’t, in retrospect, achieve quite the same fortuitous result for Rome.

The inter-island ferry was a fast and pleasant way to travel. We had lunch on board and the crew were polite and attentive. Only the repeated playing of Mama Mia let things down and even that was something to laugh about (it was the wrong island!).

The highway between Pireaus and Athens is lined with glitzy steel and glass buildings housing credit banks and up-market car dealerships. British high streets look more recession-bashed than do these. Greece is an enigma. It seems vibrant and exciting. Clearly we’re missing something.

“If you think this is busy, you should have seen it before”, explains our taxi driver on the way back to the airport. “And if you think €7 is expensive for a drink, honestly there are bars charging more than that.”

That’s quite a bit more than we’d expect to pay back home. Greece - under the euro - is not always cheap. Having said that, it’s only €12 per person to visit the Acropolis complex, one of the wonders of the world. And it’s free for under-18s.

Nowadays, Greece is the poor relation of Europe, oft quoted as an example of how not to run a country. Yet in times gone by, its empire under Alexander of Macedon stretched as far east as Persia and as far west as Egypt and southern Italy. Under the Greek Ptolemaic dynasty which ruled Egypt into the current era, Greek crews navigated the East African coastline as far as modern Mozambique. And they were able to write about it for posterity. The Greek language was the de facto tongue of the Roman Empire. Greece has handed down an astonishing legacy which has catapulted Western European culture into the modern age. A random list of words shared between English and Greek makes the point completely: democracy, ethics, photography, hypothesis, thermometer, therapeutic, economy, theology. Many important texts, from the epics of Homer, to the writings of Plato and the ﬁrst versions of the Bible, were all written in Greek. And between Zorba and Mama Mia, I reckon we’ve all got a bit of Greece in us, even now.

The airport, built for the 2004 Olympics (that’s another thing Greece has given us, along with the marathon and pentathlon), is quiet, just ﬁve or six planes lined up outside the terminal building. Even then, they manage to misdirect one of our bags. We’re on Turkish, a modest layover in Istanbul where the airport is humming. On the way in, we circle for 30 minutes

48 before getting clearance. To judge from the departures board, as many ﬂights are leaving in a couple of hours as in the whole day from Athens. How things have changed. Once the dominant force of the Eastern Mediterranean and occupier of much of what is now Turkey, Greece is no longer a match for its neighbour. The Turkish economy is now twice the size of Greece’s. I wonder what happened. But that’s a tale for another day.

Photos: Restaurant crowds, Athens Parthenon and Monastiriki from A for Athens Athens’ Plaka district The island of Poros

49 8 A walk around York

It’s a moot point what York is most famous for. There is a long list of candidates. To judge from the queues outside Bettys, we can start with this emporium of tea, cakes and chocolate. It doesn’t seem to matter time of day, season or climate. There are always queues. People come to York in order to line up for a cup of tea. Betty’s is that famous. But, honestly, it is only a tea shop. It occupies prime position right in the centre of the city, which kind of conﬁrms the theory of location. Maybe their tea is really good. I don’t know, I hate queues.

They have a quirky back story (I use the word ‘quirky’ a lot in the context of York). The first café was opened in Harrogate in 1919 by a Swiss confectioner, baker and chocolatier called Frederick Belmont who came to England to seek his fortune. I suppose with all the fuss about immigration and Brexit such things won’t be happening much any longer. Shame. They opened in York in 1937 and, during World War 2, became a popular haunt for airmen from the many nearby airfields. Bettys is now part of Taylors of Harrogate who, amongst other things, market Yorkshire Tea. What an epic rebrand! They don’t even grow tea in Yorkshire. Somebody in this outfit knows a bit about marketing. There is no record of the origin of the name, by the way, but people come all the way from China to take tea at Bettys.

While we’re in St Helen’s Square, we might as well take a look around. York is full of quaint buildings, medieval, Georgian, Victorian, and here we’re surrounded by them. There’s the octagonal latticed tower of the quaint St Helen Stonegate church, old insurance emporia turned into chain restaurants, and Mansion House, the abode of the Lord Mayor of York. I was invited to dinner here by the Lord Mayor, along with a couple of dozen assorted citizens of York. It’s where visiting dignitaries, diplomats and princes alike, are wined and dined. There are not many cities, I dare to suggest, where you may be accosted in the street by a friendly greeting from the Lord Mayor, who, in the order of such things in Britain, is second only in ‘importance’ to the Lord Mayor of London. The Archbishop of York is also ‘second in line’ in the Anglican Church hierarchy. After Canterbury, York’s minster, a short walk up the little changed medieval Stonegate, qualiﬁes as one of the largest and most important in the country. It’s a central landmark, 900 years old, and we stroll casually past it every day. I graduated in these hallowed precincts with my MA in 2014. Some of York’s most interesting buildings are located

50 in its immediate precincts: the Tudor Treasurer’s House; the fourteenth century Grey’s Court, now a luxury hotel and tea garden; the Minster School. There’s a Roman pillar standing in the square, a reminder of the continuity of York’s ancient heritage. There’s also, nearby, a statue of Minerva, described as ‘the goddess of wisdom and drama’, just to hedge our religious bets. And talking of Romans and religion, here too is a bronze statue of a good looking chap called Constantine. There is some dispute as to whether he was born in York or in Serbia, but it is accepted that he was declared emperor here in York on the death of his father Constantius in 306 AD. His mother was Helena, daughter of King Coel II. She was thus a Celtic princess and as an early convert to Christianity she no doubt exposed the young Constantine to this dissident ‘superstition’, as the Romans called it. Constantine went on to found the city of Constantinople, from where he not only ruled the Roman Empire but, by reversing previous policy, mandated Christianity as the only legal religion. He is recognised as a saint by the Eastern Orthodox Church. York’s very own saint.

The city’s royal connections echo down the ages. Richard the Third was the last of the House of York and famously the last king to be killed in battle, thereby allowing the red team to win the Wars of the Roses. When his bones were found under a Leicester car park, historian David Starkey suggested that York was well rid of the legacy of this ‘useless king’. Nevertheless, York has frequently served as England’s ‘deputy’ capital. As the Roman ‘Eboracum’, the city was declared capital of ‘Britannia Inferior’ by Emperor Severius. It served as the Anglian capital of Northumbria, and was later called ‘Jorvik’ by the invading Vikings, until they too were subdued by the invading Normans. York was considered royalist during the English civil war. Guy Fawkes grew up here and plotted in nearby Hull to blow up the Houses of Parliament, a treasonous act of terrorism which we celebrate with glee and with ﬁreworks every 5th November. At this time, York was the third largest city in England after London and Norwich. By great fortune, the tides of industrialisation passed it by, and it avoided much of the destruction suﬀered by other cities during the subsequent wars. Which leaves us with some of Britain’s best preserved medieval streets and buildings.

We can wiggle our way through some of York’s quirky ‘snickleways’ passing one of the many thirteenth century churches to Goodramgate where a Chinese restaurant occupies a row of houses reckoned to be amongst the oldest in the country still in use. Round the corner is King’s Pool, now a square, where we’re likely to ﬁnd a busker playing or a juggler entertaining

51 the crowd. We’re looking for The Shambles, the most visited street in Britain. It’s a street of medieval butchers, now occupied by gift shops, fudge emporiums, ale houses and the ubiquitous Italian restaurants. There are likely to be queues at the Harry Potter Experience and now you look at it we could as well be in Diagon Alley. We can stop for lunch at the narrowest pub in York, the Golden Fleece with its skeleton at the bar in the back. Like many pubs, this claims to be the most haunted. Ghosts are big business in York. Commentators have not yet come to a conclusion regarding pubs and churches in York, namely which there are more of. It’s really easy to lose count. So far as churches go, you can take a tour of York just for these alone, so quaint, picturesque and old are many of them. There are certainly more than meet modern needs and many have been converted to alternative uses. They used to be big business in the city, perhaps as pizzerias are now. In the middle ages, everyone, whatever their position in society, whatever their income or resources, lived in abject terror of purgatory. But the church oﬀered a solution: pay the wages of a cantor to sing for you, sponsor a pew, build a entire church. Salvation was thus guaranteed. Not sure it worked, but there you go. Some may have avoided purgatory, but many were left in poverty.

It’s worth diving into the Jorvik Experience, which takes you on an underground journey into the life and times of the York Viking community. This gives a graphic animated view of daily life in York a thousand or more years ago. I ask one of the costumed guides a question that has been bothering me. “What happened to the Vikings?” I mean, there are traces of most of our other historical invaders in our culture. Apart from the north-south divide of the old ‘Danelaw’, and a few Scandinavian place names, what other traces might there be? Where did they go? He looks askance. “Look around at the people of York, what do you see?” I’ve sometimes wondered about the preponderance of tall blue eyed blondes, of both sexes. “We’re still here”, he says. “The Normans became the country’s ruling elite and relegated the Vikings into a subservient position in society. But we never left”.

We need to cross the river for the next part of our walking tour of York. The Ouse splits the city right down the middle. York started on the east bank but it grew on the west. Let’s pass the castle mound and use the Ouse bridge. That way we can venture up onto the city walls on the other side. York’s walls are another reason to visit the city. They are multi layered, originally

52 constructed in Roman times and renovated right up to just the other day. There are several access points and you can circumnavigate the entire city in an hour or two. The elevated walkway gives a unique and memorable perspective on the city, its buildings and their back yards.

This route will bring us round to the Micklegate Bar from where there is a lovely view down the cobblestoned street with its arty shops, gastro pubs and a couple more old churches. We’ll come down by the railway station but not before snapping the best view in the city looking over Lendal Bridge all the way up to the Minster. The view of the station reminds us that York is a surprisingly accessible place, equidistant - two hours either way - from London Kings Cross and Edinburgh Waverley. Leeds is just 20 minutes, Sheﬃeld an hour, Manchester an hour and a half. Even without the long touted ‘northern corridor’, it’s easy to get in and out of York. It is something of a railway city, hosting, amongst other things, Britain’s National Railway Museum, one of the best and cheapest (it’s free!) days out ever. Kids of all ages can clamber over an amazing collection of locomotives and rolling stock and learn a lot more about railway history than we have space for here. Stephenson’s Rocket, The Flying Scotsman, The Mallard: a requiem for British engineering.

Although it has to be said that learning and high technology still have a strong presence here in York. Right next to the Minster is York St John’s University, famed for its arts and business schools. York University with its state of the art research facilities and ‘innovation centre’ is a little way out of town at Heslington. York is also internationally recognised as a UNESCO City of Media Arts, which constitutes two curiosities in one. I mean, some might know about UNESCO, the agency of the United Nations which oversees heritage sites, amongst other things. But ‘media arts’? What is that? I’m still not sure I really know, although I’m proud to be a founder member of the York Guild of Media Arts, the ﬁrst trade guild to be established for 300 years. We generally understand it as any artistic or creative endeavour that is underpinned by some sort of technology. This e-book is an example of ‘media art’. York is a creative city as much as it is scientiﬁc and technological, and there is always a festival or two going on, literary, historical, early music, food and drink, for example. And there are three great theatres which attract big name tours.

53 But there is one aspect of York I don’t ‘get’. Come here on a race day weekend in summer and the city will be thronged with poshly dressed men and women staggering around the cobbled streets in an ever more drunken state. There will be burly guards at the entrances to pubs and restaurants, and yellow jacketed police officers maintaining a high profile in the station. People come from as far afield as Newcastle and the West Riding (not a term of endearment here!). The city clubs attract that uniquely British phenomenon, ‘hen parties’, groups of girls of indeterminate age, and random shape and size, sheathed in shiny figure-hugging dresses and emblazoned with sashes stating ‘Mother of the Bride’ and the like. I’m always amazed that someone is going to marry one of these in a couple of weeks time. I hope she can stand up by the time she gets to church, or that the poor chap is equally hung over. I’m sure many other cities suffer this sort of invasion, but it’s not a pretty sight.

In spite of which, according to a survey published by The Sunday Times on 18th March 2018, York is the UK’s best city to live in: “This mini metropolis has a rich history and grand ambitions to be one of the best-connected hubs in Europe, with cool cafés, destination restaurants and innovative companies”.

You can make your own judgement about what appeals most, but appealing it is.

Photos: Bettys tea shop, St Helens Square York Castle The Shambles The Flying Scotsman steams into York

54 9 A smuggler’s tale

This was ﬁrst published as ‘An Alpine Adventure’ in 2011.

Nestled in a sheltered valley surrounded by 3,000m peaks in the far east of Switzerland lies the tiny village of Samnaun. It’s a remote location, barely accessible, and not far from the Austrian and Italian borders. No highways lead here, it’s not on a route to anywhere, but, like many things Swiss, it’s dedicated to making money. In a rather unusual way. Samnaun is the haunt of smugglers – European, twenty-ﬁrst century smugglers.

For centuries, the hardy folk from the Tyrolean mountain villages of the Paznaun valley across the border in Austria have made the arduous trek over the mountain passes in search of commodities not so readily available back home. Even now, when Austria is a member of the 28 state European Union – while Switzerland is not – tax and duty rates are diﬀerent enough to make cross border trading an inviting proposition. You might think that this would be illegal but the ever inventive Swiss, in search of the tourist euros it would bring, simply declared Samnaun a duty free zone and the EU turned its back.

Hard nosed venture capitalists quickly followed, building a highway in the sky, a series of five cable cars which ferry visitors from the Austrian ski resort of Ischgl over the Alps to Samnaun. The first is an open chair lift which carries you up the first stage to Idalpe. Then comes an up and downer in an enclosed cabin up to Viderjoch where even in summer remnants of the winter glaciers provide meltwater to feed the valley’s rivers. Here is marked the border – no customs, no immigration – right in the middle of the mountains. The next cable run takes you down into a massive enclosed valley called the Silvretta Arena which is now a winter playground for skiers and snowboarders. In summer, it attracts hikers and bikers – and smugglers. From here, there is one more chair lift to the edge and a final, double decker cable car down to the station in the valley from where a free bus takes you into the village of Samnaun.

There’s a party atmosphere in Samnaun. It’s sheltered from the cold northerly winds and orchards of peaches grow here. Every building is decked out with boxes of ﬂowers in the Tyrolean manner. And almost every building houses a duty free shop. There’s everything. The ladies in our party exclaimed that Samnaun was better than every airport duty free mall put

55 together. They came back loaded with pots and potions cheaper than they had seen anywhere else. The boys found hunting knives and the dads cameras, high tech gadgets and booze.

The more serious trippers from over the border came to load up with duty free sugar from a self- service kiosk on the street side across from Hangl’s restaurant where those of us less retail inclined gorged on apfelstrudel and vanilla sauce.

You have to leave Samnaun by 3pm or you will be stuck in the mountains when the cable cars halt for the night. It made me wonder what goes on there when the tourists have gone. Counting the takings, no doubt.

You might reasonably wonder what took us to this rather unknown part of Europe. Especially as we were actually staying in a place called Kappl, even smaller and less known but at least on a main-ish sort of road. It was a family reunion, one part coming from Hamburg in northern Germany and one from Nairobi, Kenya. One family plotted an eight hour drive south and the other an eight hour ﬂight north. About half way, in time if not distance, lay the Austrian Alps, the region called Tyrol. Relatives on the German side had visited before and recommended the Paznaun Valley for its peace and quiet and Kappl for its absence of tourists. They were right on both counts.

In winter, this place buzzes, but August is low season and no-one goes there, which makes it rather attractive. It’s almost eery finding an empty European tourist resort in the height of summer but that’s how it is. Tyrolean villages still function as farming communities, letting the cows graze on the mountains while the pastures grow and bringing them back when the snow falls. Each house stores its own hay and firewood against the winter when deep snow drifts prevent access to the fields. And nearly every house takes in paying guests.

What brings people here in summer is an endless string of hiking trails that go up and down both valley and mountain. Villages are linked by a reliable hourly bus service and each has its cable base station from where visitors can be transported into the hills. A multi-day pass entitles you to travel on buses and cable cars for many miles around.

We started our visit with a short hop up the local mountain to a Tyrolean festival they called ‘Das Grosse Sunny Mountain Sommerfest’, with oompah band, grilled wurstl (traditional sausages) and plenty of beer. Next day we took a more adventurous hike to the Fluchthorn

56 peak which at 3,400m still shelters a massive glacier even at this season. We trekked 20km there and back, stopping for beer and cheese plates at traditional ‘alm’ farmhouses brought to summer life by the families who farm nearby. The meadows echoed to the sound of tinkling cow bells and shone yellow, white and blue with carpets of wild ﬂowers.

Another day, we took the bus to the end of the valley following the Hochalpenstrasse – a road only open in summertime – to where the Silvretta lake glistens grey green, backed by the high peak of Piz Buin over in Switzerland. Our destination was the neighbouring valley of Montafon, secluded and sheltered and full of cherry and apricot orchards. What we didn’t know was that the road winds down no less than thirty four 180o hairpin bends, each turn leaving the end of the bus hanging over the void as in that classic ﬁnal scene of The Italian Job. We stopped for lunch in the village of Schruns, famous apparently for a visit long ago by Ernest Hemingway and one more recently by Angela Merkel who, we are told, likes to hike there.

Food in the Tyrol is good and inexpensive but it’s mostly pork in a rather limited variety of cuts and recipes. Schnitzel (veal) is common too. Mountain communities bulk up with carbohydrates so it was no surprise to ﬁnd Swiss style spaetzle and roesti as well as a local speciality called groestl which consists of sautéed potato slices cooked with onions and topped with a fried egg. My favourite was pork medallions in a rich creamy pepper sauce (‘schweinmedallions mit pfeﬀerraumsaus’). There is a wonderful selection of tasty breads, and breakfasts typically revolve around cheeses and various wursts and salami style sausages. Austrian wines, like German, tend towards sweet even in the reds, but the beer is wonderful.

The northern slopes of the Alps where the Tyrol lies consist of a series of almost parallel valleys scoured by glacial run oﬀ. Each valley has its river, its string of farming villages and its own character. We ventured too up the Oetztal where the river runs rough and loud through a steep sided canyon where skiing would be impossible. Instead, this valley has been turned over to watersports – kayaking and wild water rafting – where the River Inn swells on its way towards Innsbruck and eventual merger with the Danube. Rock climbing, paragliding and thermal spas are other attractions here.

The mountain villages are strongly Catholic and there is a spired church in every village. Even the smallest of hamlets may consist of just one house and a church. Many churches have onion

57 shaped domes reﬂecting a shared history with the earlier days of orthodox Christianity. Figurines of their saviour are placed along hiking trails and street sides, at cross roads and mountain tops, with the intent of warding oﬀ disaster and catastrophe. Avalanches and road accidents still happen, however. But the latest threat comes from global warming, which is reducing winter snowfall in winter and extending the summers.

Some creative marketing will soon be necessary to reinvent these villages and their valleys as summer resorts less dependent on the skiing fraternity. Already, this is a summer highland hikers’ paradise. Walking is well recognised as a healthy pastime but here its taken to literally new heights as people hike from alm to alm along mountain top trails. Nordic hiking with long sticks is popular and there are hundreds of mountain bikers who enjoy the long downhill runs. ‘Wellness’ is another fashion item with oﬀers including astrological readings, reﬂexology, chromotherapy, crystals, aromatherapy and meditation. For us, the clear air and the hiking trails provided enough wellness to last for another year at least.

I was fascinated by the attention given to the environment in Austria. After all, the Tyrol is one long testament to man-made landscape engineering where the shape of the valleys, the villages, the transport networks and the mountain slopes themselves are all designed, constructed and maintained. The rising temperatures are being countered by snow machines placed alongside the pistes. You just don’t see electricity pylons and telecommunication masts – they are not red and white to stand out but dull green to fade in. Household waste has to be sorted in no less than six separate bins and bagged accordingly. Each house heats its water primarily with south facing solar panels. Insulation is thick and in winter roof restrainers ensure that a thick layer of snow also stays on the roof. These homes are cosy beyond belief.

We went to Austria, to Kappl, for a family reunion not knowing the area at all, but if you ask me this is a piece of paradise. If you prefer ready vacancies, discounted rates, free parking and no crowds – in the middle of everyone else’s high season – then this is Europe’s hidden secret summer holiday hideaway. Oh yes, and we did all our duty free shopping there too!

Photos: Approach to Samnaun Samnaun duty free shops The chapel at Kappl

58 10 In the footsteps of the explorers

We’re on our way from Johannesburg north to Botswana and Zimbabwe. But it would have been just as easy to say we’re trekking from Mafikeng through Bechuanaland in search of the great Zambezi. Never mind Zimbabwe, it’s not even Rhodesia yet. We’re in a time warp and it’s easy to get confused. Botswana - Bechuanaland, as it was - is all desert. Its few tarred roads circle the perimeter of a vast flat sand sea they call the Kalahari. Finding campsites is not hard. You just turn off onto the sand and head off into the pink skied yonder. We create our own tracks here. It feels like we could be the first people to pass this way. We usually look for some sort of landmark. It might be a rocky outcrop or a low hill. Tonight though, it’s a clump of trees forming an island amongst the sandy plains called Nxai Pan. But these are rather special trees. They’re ancient baobabs. To judge from their girth, they are thousands of years old. But we’re intrigued by a much more recent connection. A mere 150 years ago, a missionary by the name of David Livingstone also camped here. He was trekking from his base in the northern Cape in search of a river he hoped would offer a viable route from the interior to the coast. The clump of trees, our camp site, was recorded for posterity by his expedition artist Thomas Baines.

It hadn’t really dawned on me that so much of the world - particularly Africa and the Americas - has only so recently been put on the map. At the beginning of the nineteenth century, the interiors of these enormous continents were barely known to the outside world. But by the end of that century, they had been explored, mapped, settled and colonised. It was a remarkable expansionist era. Africa was known as the mythical source of the River Nile, which was shown on ancient maps as ﬂowing from twin lakes in the region of the ‘Lunae Montes’, the Mountains of the Moon. There were rumours of mountains with snowcaps but, since these were located close to the equator, this claim was surrounded with a great deal of suspicion. There were a number of motivating forces for an exploration of Africa. Curiosity and trade were amongst them. Religious zealots saw Africa and Africans as in dire need of conversion and salvation. And a little more altruistically, some wanted to stamp out the slave trade. David Livingstone was amongst the ﬁrst to persuade his church to back his ventures. But while heathen conversion was on his agenda, so too was exploration. He felt that opening up the

59 ‘dark continent’, and the trade that would ensue, would make it easier to eliminate slavery. What he sought was a viable route into the interior. Livingstone’s early forays commenced from South Africa but in retrospect this made it unlikely he would be in a position to tackle the big issue of the day, namely the ‘Nile Question’. Trekking north, he did however ﬁnd the Zambezi, and soon happened upon the spectacular Victoria Falls, ‘Mosi-o-Tunya’, the smoke that thunders. But unfortunately, these, plus the Cabora Falls closer to the sea, made it impossible that the Zambezi could be navigated by boats for any useful distance. Livingstone wrote of the falls "No one can imagine the beauty of the view from anything witnessed in England. It had never been seen before by European eyes; but scenes so lovely must have been gazed upon by angels in their ﬂight.”

Victoria Falls do indeed challenge one’s descriptive powers. But they are very different from one season to the next. Towards the end of the year after the long southern African dry season, the falls shrink to a meagre flow over the Devil’s Cataract. One day we walked over the bridge from the Zimbabwean town of the same name to the Zambian side near the town called, after our missionary, Livingstone. It was possible, with a degree of care and foolhardiness, to walk pretty well all the way back across the river so low was the water level. Not so once the rains have filled the stream and the waters surge across the full mile of its width. At this time, up to and around March and April, there is so much spray it can be seen from afar. But close up, you cannot make out much through the mist, although the sound of the water falling 350ft ensures you don’t fail to appreciate its ferocity. There’s a patch of rain forest here that is nourished only from this seasonal the spray of the river.

Having failed to ﬁnd his route to the sea, Livingstone marched upstream, following the Zambezi to its source in the highlands of north western Zambia close to the border with Angola and Congo. He became the ﬁrst to cross the African continent when he ended up close to modern day Luanda. But there was no viable route here either. Not one to give up, easily or ever, Livingstone returned to Africa with a boat, the Lady Alice, which he assembled in Zanzibar, sailed down the coast and attempted to sail up the Rovuma, which nowadays marks the border between Tanzania and Mozambique. But this too proved impassable and he had his porters carry the boat in pieces up to Lake Nyassa, or Malawi as we now call it.

60 Livingstone’s presence in Malawi was more successful than his efforts to find either the Nile or any navigable river. Following his pioneering, in 1876 the Church of Scotland built a church which still stands proud in the city of Blantyre, named after Livingstone’s birth place in South Lanarkshire. Blantyre is a pleasant little town, a centre of tea growing and the former commercial capital before Lilongwe more recently become the seat of government. Lake Malawi itself is a delightful if low key attraction in its own right, reputedly containing one of the world’s most diverse ranges of tropical fish species.

While Livingstone was wandering around south- central Africa, ticking off some exciting discoveries but failing in his primary mission, two other explorers had set off from Zanzibar with instructions from the Royal Geographic Society to settle the Nile Question once and for all. As army officers, John Hanning Speke and Richard Francis Burton probably had a better chance from the start than did the indefatigable Livingstone. They set out from Zanzibar in June of 1857, crossed to Bagamoyo and marched into history. I have in front of me as I write a photograph of the plaque which still stands a little outside the town. It reads: “On 27th June 1857, Burton and Speke set off from Kaole near this site on their expedition to Lake Tanganyika.” A little way beyond is the ‘caravanserai’ where their porters and pack animals were loaded. And a little beyond that flows the Ruvu River. Here, it’s a wide expanse of boggy terrain that not long ago required a push me-pull you ferry to get cars across. But that doesn’t bother us today. We turn left - south west - and follow the river. The track follows a low ridge which is, I suddenly realise, the exact path taken by Speke and Burton. In fact, right up to the end of the nineteenth century and the coming of the colonists with their roads and carriages, this modest little riverside track was East Africa’s primary highway into the interior. Of course our explorers used it. Your journey’s route would have to follow the water. Rivers did indeed provide a highway, even if you couldn’t sail on them. And in any case, their guides had been using these trails for years.

It’s not easy nowadays to follow the river all the way with a car, but we can pick out key points on the caravan’s route. The river loops south before turning to the west, which is where we want to go. We cross it again past Morogoro but from here, their trail led north through what is now Mikumi National Park. Our explorers, following the Arab traders, marched from one watering place to another, like the animals whose herds they passed. From here, the route

61 crosses more arid country. There’s a railway these days, has been since colonial times, but the road takes a different direction. Passing what is now Dodoma, Tanzania’s seat of government, the caravan winds its way across the desert of the Wagogo towards Kazeh, now Tabora, a substantial settlement where they would take a break. It was the 7th November, four months into their journey . Both men were ill and had fallen out. Burton’s photos remind me of the late Freddie Mercury, a strong character who, whatever his undoubted strengths, might be difficult to get along with. Nevertheless, they reached Ujiji on the shores of Lake Tanganyika in February 1858, only to learn from local reports that no river flowed out of the lake. A number of small rivers flow into it, but none out. They returned to Kazeh. Burton was too ill to travel, and Speke’s eyesight was failing. But having heard rumours of a big lake to the north, he took off alone and reached it close to Mwanza on 30 July 1858.

Mwanza is a pretty little town with characteristic rocky outcrops. It overlooks a creek and a big bay rather than the main body of the lake itself. It’s called Speke Gulf, but our man could not have fully realised what a great discovery he had made. This is, after all, the biggest lake in the world, and he had barely seen a tenth of it. For their purposes, it was indeed the source of the Nile, although the ultimate source would prove to lie in the mountains of Rwanda - or Burundi depending on your definition of ‘ultimate’. Two little rivers feed into the Kagera River which in turn flows into Lake Victoria. The Nile itself pours out over a waterfall at Jinja on the northern side, though modern hydro-electric schemes have rather changed this. In spite of finding the elusive lake, which, remember, was just a rumour until now based on its appearance on ancient maps, it had yet to be proved the undisputed source of the Nile. Speke returned in 1860 together with James Grant. This time, they travelled around the lake to the west and located the outflowing of the Nile in 1862. Speke stayed on in the court of Mutesa, the Kabaka of Buganda, for some months before heading down the Nile to rejoin Grant and return home. The huge falls he found on the way he named Murchison Falls in honour of his sponsor, the president of the RGS. Livingstone meanwhile was still roaming around Lake Malawi far to the south.

In all fairness to these brave and adventurous people, this ‘Great Lakes’ region of central Africa does have a confusing geography. As he passed down the Nile, Speke managed to miss the fact that it ﬂows through the top end of yet another lake. Only two years later did Samuel

62 Baker ‘discover’ this lake which he named Albert for the Queen’s consort. Even this caused some small confusion when he realised that it too was fed by a river, which could, in theory, have been one of the ‘Niles’. It is actually the Semliki, fed directly by the seasonal meltwaters of the Ruwenzori, the fabled Mountains of the Moon. Nearby are the much smaller Lakes Edward and George connected by the Kazinga Channel, and from which flows the Katonga into Lake Victoria. From these headwaters, everything flows north. But Lake Tanganyika is not far away and, as we’ve already noted, no river flows out of it. Yet barely as far to the west as Lake Victoria is to its east, the massive Congo streams northwards, rivalling the Nile in volume. Livingstone had determined already that his river, the Zambezi, flowed south and east, and that the smaller Shire flowed out of Lake Malawi in the same direction. By 1867, he was now engaged in trying to figure out the Congo. He still thought that the Nile Question had not been fully answered and that the Lualaba might yet prove to be the ultimate source. This rose in the same general region of northwest Zambia as does the Zambezi, and indeed the Congo itself. But it is a tributary of the Congo. The Nile headwaters are at a higher altitude and rivers cannot flow uphill. Livingstone spent a great deal of effort in trying to ascertain what flowed in and out of Lake Tanganyika, and it was here, at Ujiji in November 1871, that he famously met up with the intrepid journalist-turned-adventurer Henry Morton Stanley. As stubborn as ever, perhaps more so, Livingstone declined to be ‘rescued’ and returned to his old haunts around the swamps called Bangweulu. Somewhere here, he thought, there could still be a river which flowed north instead of east or west. He died in this spot in 1873. Stanley took on the explorers’ mantle and between 1874 and 1877 carried out his epic crossing of the continent from Bagamoyo in the east, to the mouth of the Congo in the west, recorded in his published memoir ‘Across the Dark Continent’. He confirmed once and for all that Lakes Victoria and Tanganyika had no connection and thus finally was settled the question of the Nile.

By then, nearly all the main players and their troupes of supporters had died. Africa was a dangerous place and we tend to forget that people paid with their lives for their brief moment in the spotlight of history. And of geography. Grant had documented graphically how he had been incapacitated by a suppurating tropical ulcer on his leg. Burton had been obliged to endure much of his journey on a stretcher. Speke nearly lost his eyesight, but died back in England in a shooting accident. Everyone suﬀered from repeated bouts of malaria. And between this and the rivers they were all searching for lies the explanation of a question no- one has asked: Why was it that Africa didn’t suﬀer a genocidal colonial occupation which replaced its indigenous people with immigrants, in the way that happened at the exact same time in America?

63 Turns out that America has several big rivers that offer navigable routes far into the interior. Africa, as Livingstone found to his cost, doesn’t. Indigenous Americans were killed off by a combination of settler wars, colonial legislation and diseases of European origin. In Africa on the other hand, disease tended to kill off the immigrants before they could settle in sufficient numbers to do any lasting damage. Africans may complain their people suffered under colonialism. But compared with the original Americans? I think not.

I’m going to end this chapter with two quotes. The first is from Richard Burton: “The gladdest moment in human life, me thinks, is a departure into unknown lands.” And this one comes from Joseph Thomson, an altogether different kind of explorer who was the first to demonstrate, by successfully crossing Masailand in 1883 to open a more direct route to Uganda, that if you treat people with respect, they tend to do the same to you: "He who goes gently, goes safely; he who goes safely, goes far."

We went in search of those who sought the Nile. Our paths crossed but ﬂeetingly, and even then 150 years apart. But I think we found them.

Photos: Baobabs at Nxai Pan, Botswana Victoria Falls, Zimbabwe The Caravanserai at Bagamoyo View over Lake Victoria at Mwanza

64 11 A whisky safari

One of the greatest things about travel, especially when it’s to somewhere new, is discovering things you previously had no idea about. I had no idea that these scattered islands oﬀ the west coast of Scotland were once the realm of the Lords of the Isles. As inheritors of the mantle of heroes who chased away the terror of the Norsemen, these ‘kings’ ruled the Hebrides quite independently from Scotland and England. And they did it from their legendary castle at Finlaggan on the island of Islay. I had no idea that ‘Scotch’ whisky actually comes from Ireland. To the chagrin of the Scots, it is now widely acknowledged that both the people and their distilleries derived from the Emerald Isle as part of a pattern of migration that long ago displaced the Picts. And for sure I had no idea that so many of my favourite whiskys come from the island mischievously called Islay but pronounced ‘Eye-Lah’. Moreover, I had no idea that Jura, the marque that introduced me to single malts, was the close neighbour of Islay to the extent that you can only really get there by traversing that island. This was obviously going to be a good trip.

Before we went very far, there was one thing that worried me. Scotland’s restrictions on drinking and driving surely made it diﬃcult to enjoy a visit to a distillery. I asked Fiona, our host. “Don’t worry”, she explained, “They’ve closed most of the police stations. Tourism is more important.”

You cannot easily get around without a car. We would try to behave ourselves, but there was no way we were going to miss out on the tastings. The drive up from England is long, and north of Glasgow there is only one route via Inverary and the sea food capital of Loch Fyne. Past Tarbert, where we overnighted, you take the well appointed Caledonian MacBrayne ferry across to Port Ellen. We were lucky, it was a pleasant passage with no discernible swell. It’s not always like this. Not infrequently, gale force winds stop the ferry from running at all.

The run in to the island gives us an important orientation. We pass Ardbeg, Lagavullin and Laphroaig. These distilleries draw their water from the peat bogs we can see up in the hills behind them. In the distance, you can make out the rounded hills they call the ‘Paps of Jura’. But our visits here are a couple of days away. We’re going to start with Bowmore which, until I

65 discovered the others, was my favourite brand. This is not just a distillery, it’s a town, one of the island’s bigger towns, in fact. Its other claim to fame is an unusual circular church called Kilarrow at the top of the high street. This is not really the place for full details of the process of turning seeds of barley into the elixir of life they call ‘uisge’. But we do need a quick overview. It’s part agriculture, part chemistry, part alchemy. And a lot of art and craft. You’d think the process would be pretty much the same at every distillery, but there are significant differences, particularly in the shape of the big copper kettle stills that lie at the heart of the fermentation process. Scotch whisky can only be called so if it has been stored in Kentucky bourbon oak barrels for at least three years. It can only be called ‘single malt’ if it’s the product of just one distillery. And it can only be shown as a particular age if it is unblended with any other year’s production. The chief distiller, the magician, does have a few variables up his sleeve, both to provide competitive advantage and to create a memorable ‘expression’. Ageing over a longer period is one. The longer a whisky stays in the wood, the more colour and flavour it tends to absorb. There is an immediate depth in a 10 year old compared with the standard 3 years, and proportionately more in 12, 15 and 18. Decanting into different sorts of barrels is another delightful trick. A ‘triple oak’, for example, might have spent three years in American bourbon, a year or two in an Andalucian sherry cask and a few more in a French brandy barrel. They also use madeira and port barrels for variety. You can taste the fruitiness in these whiskies. Peatiness and smokiness are further variables to play with, the one deriving from the water, the other from the way the barley is malted. So it seems that the initial distillation is just the start of a protracted process. The key to success is more to do with prolonged storage. Bowmore, like several of the other distilleries on Islay, claims that its proximity to the sea adds saltiness and a hint of seaweed to the flavour.

Across the big bay they call Loch Indall is Bruichladdich, who describe themselves as unashamedly experimental ‘progressive Hebridean distillers’. Their trademark turquoise clad dumpy bottle is instantly recognisable on airport duty free shelves. This standard ‘Laddie’ range is unpeated, more in the Speyside style though perhaps with a bit more character. But peat they do, and they do it in spades. Their Octomore is the world’s peatiest whisky, delivered in a characteristic slender bottle sheathed with a black and red label. This is for Islay aﬁcionados, it’s not for the faint hearted. I expected whisky production to be somewhat conservative as businesses go, with a traditional culture to match. But the growth in single malt drinking in recent years cannot have been driven by conservatism. The corporate culture at Bruichladdich is not only experimental, it’s youthful and trendy. You get the impression that a bunch of college kids have come together to sit around the bar scheming what new and mischievous recipes they can come up with next. They also make gin, which shows not only an

66 innovative streak but an ability to second guess the market. Gin is now rapidly growing as the trendy spirit of choice in bars around Britain.

Up in the ﬁelds beyond Bruichladdich lies the Kilchoman farm distillery. The tourist oﬃce describes this area as ‘remote, even for Islay’. This relatively recent entrant into the business started out pretty much as a backyard operation but has grown modestly. Lower levels of production presumably make it harder to penetrate a highly competitive market. At the time I visited, it was still owner managed, but I suspect in the nature of things it may have been sold on to more corporate type investors by now. Are venture capitalists and private equity funds the kiss of death for an artisan product like Scotch whisky? I suspect not, as we shall see in a moment. But before we move on, we’ve got a derelict church and an ancient graveyard to look at. A raven drops out of the sky to perch on a stone cross. He cocks his head and caws: “Who are you and what are you doing here?” It’s a good question. Look around at the bleak moors, the leaden skies and the steel ocean. What are we doing here?

Christianity came early to the western isles. You might have heard of St Columba and his monastery on Iona. Here is a remnant of those times, a pair of Celtic crosses. At the opposite end of the island, the Kildalton cross is even older, dated before 800AD. It has an intricate Celtic pattern on one side, and biblical scenes on the other. Covered in green lichen, it exudes antiquity. The graveyard here also contains several medieval knights’ tombs with their images carved into the stone. But it’s a thing about islands that the weather changes constantly and we set oﬀ again with blue skies and warming sun. It should be: it’s midsummer after all.

We’re going over to Jura. Which means we have to drive across the island to Port Askaig and get the ferry which shuttles across the straits every hour. There are two more distilleries here, but we’re going to have to skip these. There’s Bunnahabhain and Caol Ila, the latter named for the mysterious but dangerous whirlpool that springs up in the channel at certain seasons. If getting to Islay felt like an adventurous journey, Jura is a step beyond. We’re the only traﬃc moving on this lovely winding road that hugs the coast around to Craighouse, the ‘capital’. There’s a row of crofts, a hotel and the distillery, That’s about it. The week long Jura whisky festival was last week. We missed it, and they’ve run out of samples. Oh well, it was a nice drive. And by now, we’ve seen a few malting ﬂoors, copper stills and spirit safes. Cresting the hill on the way back, we can see all the way over Islay. The ferry is just slipping its mooring on the other side, let’s race it! Can we make it

67 around the narrow winding track? It’s eight miles, he’s only got a few hundred yards. There are no speed limit signs but we can clearly see the entire route all the way down to the jetty at Feolin. Until the ferry pulls in, there’ll be no traﬃc. This feels like a Top Gear episode, let’s pit a BMW against a ferryboat. Of course we made it, in time not to have to wait another hour.

Now the question is, have we saved the best until last? The three distilleries we are still to see are more corporate, owned by some of the world’s biggest drinks companies, but I’m suspecting their brands will be amongst the best and I’m not disappointed. They’re prettily set out and their visitor tours are well organised. And they’re generous with their samples. The ranges - and prices - go progressively up market along this little stretch of Islay coastline. Laphroaig has a quirky marketing ploy. They give you your own title to a square foot of peat bog and you’re expected to come back once a year to claim your wee dram as ‘rent’. Lagavullin is next, their range starting with an entry level 16 year old which is a delight on the palate. And Ardbeg pushes both the peatiness and the pocket. I love them all. Well, Bowmore was nice too. Oh, and those others. Hmm, let’s not do favourites. They’re all different. Like the craft ale craze which has hit the world, and the fast emerging gin botanicals. Enjoying these ‘designer’ whiskies may be an acquired taste, but we’re not finding it hard to acquire sufficient expertise to go home and bore everyone with our new found insights.

Naturally, we say we’ll be back soon. This was an epic safari. You have to have a reason to go to Islay - and Jura. Fortunately, there are eight very good reasons.

Photos: The Lagavulin distillery, Islay Jura coast The Jura distillery

68 12 On the far side of nowhere

The island of Kiwayuu lies to the far north of Kenya, not far from the Somali border, which has rather put people off going. Shame, since it was already pretty much deserted in spite of there being two really nice rustic lodges there. For my first visit, we went as two families the hard way, driving down from Nairobi to Lamu, from where we boarded a dhow to sail north through the channels, fishing as we went. A second time, I flew in myself, showing off my new PPL. I’d been advised the runway was not much more than a sandy path snaking through the palm trees, and that the aiming point was the village playing field. I got in OK, but didn’t get a wink of sleep trying to convince myself of the accuracy of my calculations for taking off uphill along that winding sandy strip. Watching the air speed indicator with one eye and a looming row of 50’ palm trees with the other, while trying hard to trust my training, is one of my lasting memories of Kiwayuu and a highlight of my brief flying career. Needless to say, we made it. A third trip, which resulted in the article that follows, was a photo shoot for a local airline. It was published in 2009.

As you ﬂy eastwards out of Nairobi, the terraced hills soon give way to a thinning patchwork of shambas (smallholdings) which marks the end of civilisation. There follow miles and miles and miles of nothing, 300km of nothing to be precise, ﬂat featureless desiccated scrub scarred solely by a few old surveyors’ cutlines. No-one lives there, no-one visits, hardly anyone passes through. But on the far side of this expanse of nowhere lies a piece of paradise. It’s called Kiwayuu, which in the Swahili language means ‘high island’. Its sand dunes, rising nearly a hundred metres, have long formed a welcoming landmark for ocean navigators as they do now for aspiring desert island holiday-makers.

From the air, the verdant channels and sultry islands of the Lamu archipelago are set out in an ancient estuarine delta, though no river now ﬂows here. Kiwayuu lies between these mangrove-edged creeks and the azure waters of the Indian Ocean, a sandy strip 12km long but barely one kilometre wide. There are no beachboys, no touts, no concrete buildings, no cars, no bars, no discos. Of the few boats stationed there, most are sailing dhows and local

69 ﬁshing craft. There are not even many visitors, though there is a good choice of places to stay and things to do.

One morning, I beachcombed Kiwayuu’s eastern shoreline scouring the high tide line for nautilus shells and bits of flotsam. Hiking to some hollowed coral cliffs before turning back, I could see nearly the entire length of the island. I was the only person on that long sun- drenched stretch of sand. A pair of plovers made a lazy attempt to chase a couple of ghost crabs. It was the only activity. There was no cell signal, I had left my laptop at home and there was not a soul in sight. Total peace and complete solitude. Just another typical Kiwayuu Monday morning. Climbing back across the dunes, you get a 360o view of the creek and the ocean. Eastwards lies the open ocean and to the west is mainland Africa. It seems like we are no longer part of it but somewhere different, between the land and the sea.

Mike Kennedy came here in 1983 and never looked back. “We bought a dhow and ran safaris for a while from Lamu”, he tells me. “Then with my sister Caroline we raised some money and built a small camp.”

That camp, now nine years old, has seven beautifully appointed and carefully situated cottages, each with its own view and complete privacy. It is called Munira after the dhow, signifying ‘light of the moon’ in Arabic. But most people still refer to the place as Mike’s Camp. The rooms are spacious and airy, set atop a cliﬀ overlooking the creek and ideally placed to do what is natural at sundowner time, watch the orange globe of the sun sink gently into the mists of Africa while nursing a cold Tusker. All the rooms and public areas are walled and carpeted with ‘mkeka’, natural woven palm frond matting that serves as a screen against sand, sun and wind.

Mike is a natural host, together with his dog Tigger, performing tricks at the bar, regaling stories of ﬁshing and exploration, chatting with those guests who are eager to know and politely leaving those who just want to be alone. All the supplies have to be brought in from Lamu, the nearest shopping centre, if you can call it that. But seafood is abundant and fresh. The islanders bring in a daily catch – crabs and oysters are plentiful. Lobsters are hunted here by hand. The lobster catcher utilises a captive octopus on a stick to scare the lobster into a carefully positioned sack.

In season, the fishing is spectacular. The ocean just off Kiwayuu, and north towards Kiu, has brought record catches this past year. In October 2008, several boats tagged more than thirty sailfish in a single day and in December Alistair Franklin, fi shing from Mike’s boat on 50lb tackle, brought in a record 500kg 3.72m Blue Marlin, again tagged and released. This prolific season was attributed to the threat of piracy keeping away the Japanese fishing fleet. Mike

70 sent us out with his boatman Hashim. We were going snorkelling but decided to throw out some lures and troll the ocean swells where ﬂocks of terns were diving for sardines. Suddenly all four reels screamed in unison as we passed through a shoal of yellowﬁn tuna. We hauled them in enthusiastically, thinking sashimi and barbecue on the beach that night.

Often in these waters, dolphins, whales and turtles are sighted. We jumped off over some coral gardens near the ‘mlango’ (gateway) between the outcrops at the southern end of the island. Here, tidal rips can be treacherous but at the right state of tide and season, the snorkelling is dazzling. Back on the beach, Mike was demonstrating his ‘boys’ toys’ and encouraging the girls to have a go too. He set off at speed in his sand yacht, a fast three-wheeler with a windsurfer mast and sail. The skill is to catch the wind at just the right angle, and turn fast enough to flip round the sail but without running so fast as to roll over. Just like sailing a boat, in fact. Next up was a two metre para-sail kite which flew powerfully enough in the ocean breeze to lift its flyer from the ground if attention drifted even a little. On offer too is scuba diving, kite surfing, water skiing, donutting, wake boarding, kayaking and sailing.

Over the char-grilled tuna that night, under a brilliant starscape, we talked about the olden days. Long long ago, the Swahili settlements of this Azanian coastline formed a vibrant trading colony which eventually stretched all the way down to Kilwa and Sofala. More than fifty stone built towns have been identified. Many are unexplored, most are unexcavated. The towns of Lamu, Shanga and Pate were amongst the first and most affluent of this nation, trading for millennia as far afield as Egypt, Arabia, Oman and India.

The vast delta region from Lamu to Kiwayuu was shaped by the Uaso Nyiro and Tana rivers during a period of much greater rainfall than we now receive. But climate change six hundred or more years ago caused the volume of water to reduce and the channels to shift. The Tana now reaches the sea near Malindi while the Uaso Nyiro plunges uncertainly into the Lorian Swamp in north eastern Kenya, nowhere near the sea. But ﬁshermen tell of upwellings of fresh water far oﬀshore where the ancient aquifer still pumps deep into the ocean. The drying up of the water supply and the arrival of marauding Portuguese in the late 1400s coincided to constrain trade and collapse Swahili civilisation into fewer but larger centres such as Malindi, Mombasa and Zanzibar. Many of the old towns were abandoned. Chinese chronicles dated

71 1225 AD tell of a certain Tiung-Lji, a centre of trade on the East African coast which historians equate with Shungwaya, the legendary capital of this once great trading nation. As early as 1071, emissaries from Shungwaya were entertained at the Chinese court and in 1421 Chinese sailing junks visited this coast, taking a giraﬀe presented by the Sultan of Malindi and leaving behind their DNA, as identiﬁed by a National Geographic project on Pate Island. Shungwaya has never been found. But its lost remains may lie somewhere amid the meandering upper reaches of the Dodori channel, concealed by a proliferation of mangrove forest.

We challenged Mike on his ‘eco’ credentials so prized these days by hoteliers and travellers. Apart from being constructed fully from natural local materials and employing islanders throughout the camp, Munira is totally self-suﬃcient in power. A wind turbine runs day and night to feed a bank of batteries and a 2.4 kVA inverter. With a solar back-up, this is one place where electricity is so abundant that nobody minds if you leave the light on. The great beauty of Kiwayuu lies in its remoteness and its simplicity. Overseas visitors give their eye-teeth for such an unspoilt getaway. For couples, it’s a wonderfully aphrodisiac retreat. For families, it’s a fantastic playground. Either way, you seem to get the island and its 12km beach to yourself. You come to Kiwayuu to switch oﬀ, leaving the urban world and – I dare you – your mobile phone, far behind.

In the village, men are sewing sails and repairing their nets under the baraza tree. It’s Sunday and Shahane Bwana, the headmaster, is rested enough to show us around. His daughter Zahara swings quietly in the garden while small boys burrow for bait worms in the bay. We’ve come here to see flip- flops, or at least the things the village ladies make from them. The villagers collect the washed up flip- flops which arrive on the tide in vast numbers and process them into the most colourful and ingenious goods – bead curtains, reef fishes, flowers, boats and bangles. The colourful designs are exported around the world. It’s so successful, not only as a business but as a waste recycling operation, that there is a looming shortage of flip-flotsam, so the villagers now face the challenge of extending the search for their raw materials.

To create an income for the villagers and provide an incentive to preserve the island, Etienne and Lucy Oliﬀ helped set up an NGO as a vehicle for the craft business and for a new lodge they call Champali. The camp formerly served as a base for ﬁlm-makers Mark Deeble and Vicky Stone. Etienne and Lucy worked with them and stayed on, producing their own award winning

72 film ‘Flip-Flotsam’ which tells the story. Champali – ‘Kiwaiyu’s Communuity Camp’ – is located on its own idyllic beach and consists of three lovely family cottages which overlook the cove. Stylish and luxurious in its own way, the lodge operates on a self-catering basis and is staffed by local villagers trained by Lucy and Etienne. Guests can obtain seafood but should plan to bring all their food and drink with them. Provisions can be obtained in Lamu by advance arrangement. It takes some effort to get to Kiwayuu so it makes sense to treat the journey as part of the adventure.

Photos: The long beach at Kiwayuu Under sail by dhow from Lamu Flipﬂop ﬂowers

73 13 Shopping like an Egyptian

A quirky take on Egypt, originally published in 2010 before the ‘Arab spring’ and the subsequent upheavals that have riven that country.

You don’t find many foreigners shopping in Kardessa. But some people can sniff out a bargain from very far away, even via the internet. Which is how we found ourselves one late afternoon in the distant outskirts of one of Cairo’s farthest suburbs right on the fringes of the Sahara desert. Not that Kardessa’s sole main street is a real shopping centre, but it’s not a tourist site either. You can browse for ‘hookahs’ (water pipes) with twenty flavours of tobacco. There are shops selling engraved brass coffee tables and the little cups from which the locals drink Turkish coffee or mint tea. And then there are the dresses, cotton and linen, the whole point of our excursion, shop after shop of them. Long, embroidered, elegant, colourful dresses. If you want to dress like an Egyptian, you had better shop like one, but don’t expect to make a fashion statement unless you are planning to join a Bedouin camel caravan.

Shopping in Egypt, it must be said, is a challenge. In a nation full of polite and hospitable people, the exception are the commission agents who sell in shops. There is an urgency in their greeting, designed to halt you in your tracks. Unless you walk smartly on, the second stage of the entrapment continues, an attempt to engage you in conversation and get you inside. Now you are their prey and an apparently friendly oﬀer of refreshment is simply the next part of the plan.

Egyptian shopkeepers are incapable of answering the one question on all shoppers’ tongues – “how much?” Pick up an article and you are invited to make an oﬀer. “You know how much? What you want to pay?” Ask the price and the answers will span the spectrum from “How many you want?” to “You see the quality?” Anything other than a price.

Even when you do elicit a figure, the opening offer is so inflated that it makes you get up and walk away in shock. An instant 50% discount may sit you down again but that’s where the hard bargaining starts, assuming you have been able to examine the wares and make a choice. That’s difficult too. Use your eyes and don’t say a word until you are ready to start haggling. A

74 good negotiator comes across as mean, hard and unemotional. That’s the only way to get them down. Many tourists ﬁnd it less stressful simply to pay up. But you should end up paying less than a third of the original asking price. If you were escorted by a tout or tour guide, their commission will be factored in too. You know you’re getting somewhere when the salesman (they are nearly always men) says he will have to consult his boss. In other words his own commission is being nibbled away, along with the proﬁt margin.

It works for you if you can speak a language they have never heard of. Compared with the usual patter in Spanish, German or English, it ﬂoors them if you address them in Polish or Swahili, for example, and gives you some small advantage. It also helps to tell them you have to convert everything into your own currency, which you can claim to be weaker than the Egyptian pound. We honed this technique in the ancient alleyways of Khan El Khalili, Cairo’s old bazaar now sanitised and protected by tourist police and barricades to keep cars away. Here you can ﬁnd an amazing variety of goods hidden away amid a fairy tale maze of minarets and archways – brass incense burners, camel hide jackets, silk carpets, silver and gold jewellery, Ottoman furniture and vast amounts of pseudo-antiquities. It’s on everyone’s itinerary and the tourists come here in droves. And so they should - Khan El Khalili is pure entertainment, with the occasional bargain thrown in if you are lucky.

Cairo also has it’s modern malls and ATM cash machines like every capital city and it surely has more mosques per square kilometre than there are medieval churches in York. For a country that wears its Islam lightly, religion permeates the landscape. That’s what attracts tourists in the ﬁrst place, of course. It’s a mistake to think of Egypt as ancient. Rather it sits astride a ﬁve thousand year historical timeline with a sense of continuity that is breathtaking. Ancient and modern sit comfortably alongside each other. The famous pyramids at Giza, for example, attract crowds of local families at weekends and holidays. The kids get to ride camels and horses. Aunts and uncles take snapshots in front of the Sphinx. And everyone ambles happily around as if it’s some kind of giant theme park. But there’s nothing fake here. The pyramids are a real testimony to clever engineering and a bold scope of work that has barely been matched since 2450 BC when the biggest was supposed to have been built. King Khufu’s Great Pyramid is the only survivor of the original seven wonders of the world and it’s still top of many modern tourists’ lists of things to see before they die.

75 It remains a moot point whether the pyramids were religious in nature. They were accurately orientated towards the cardinal points and to certain revered stars such as Sirius which heralded the annual rising of waters of the Nile on which the country’s agriculture depended. Without doubt, they were the focal points of rites and rituals which saw the royal procession carried in a ceremonial boat from the east side of the Nile across to the west where the pyramids lie. For Egyptians to miss a ceremony or fail to please their gods was to risk doom and disaster. But there are no inscriptions in these the biggest of the pyramids, nor was any body ever found within them.

At nearby Saqqara, a 20km drive along the edge of the desert, several less well preserved pyramids are located and these provide a diﬀerent perspective on the ancient world. Inside the pyramid of Unas are the ﬁrst examples of the written spells and charms designed to ensure the immortality of the king. These so-called pyramid texts are amongst the earliest examples of writing in the world. The origin of the language, the hieroglyphic alphabet and the texts themselves is unknown. They appear to have sprung into use fully formed but from where no-one knows.

The kings of the old kingdom had their capital at Memphis just outside modern Cairo. A thousand years later, the kings of the new kingdom had moved six hundred kilometres up the Nile to Luxor. You can take an overnight train nowadays and experience a dramatic time shift from the hustle and bustle of Giza to the more placid but barely less ancient sights and sounds of the capital that used to be called Thebes. The town of Luxor is built around the temple of Amun which dates to 1400 BC. Here again is that enigmatic evidence of continuity. At the back of the temple’s inner sanctum is a Byzantine Christian shrine, and within the temple complex is a more modern mosque. Religions evolved, each succeeding sect taking over aspects of the old and layering on their own beliefs, practices and imagery.

A few kilometres away is the yet greater temple complex of Karnak built in celebration of the victories of the all-conquering king Rameses II. Listed amongst the world’s greatest buildings, you can wander for hours in awe at the vast columns still adorned with painted decoration more than three thousand years old. Connected by an avenue of ram-headed sphinxes to a now dry dock, the Karnak temple is just one part of an enormous complex which encompasses the temple of Queen Hatshepsut under the pink limestone cliﬀs of Deir el Bahari and the enigmatic and secretive Valley of the Kings, all on the other side of the river.

Propitiating their gods and ensuring a place in the afterlife seems to have been the primary occupation of the kings and queens of old. But the tombs and temples record too how these monuments fulﬁlled a much broader role in daily life. The temples served as the banks, shopping malls, hospitals and universities of their day, providing a focal point for the economic

76 and social activity of the city. As for the tombs, their treasures removed to museums all over the world, they now form a theme park of the dead, overrun by tourists and accessed by electric shuttle trains.

Nowadays the Nile keeps within its banks and the temples are marooned far from its water. This is due to the Aswan High Dam built by Russian engineers in 1960. We cruised on a 75- room floating hotel upstream via the temples at Edfu and Kom Ombo to get to Aswan. There are nearly 300 boat-hotels stationed in Upper Egypt, far more than terrestrial hotels. The dam and its associated turbines keep the entire country, as well as some of its neighbours, comfortably supplied with water and electricity. Power is cheap still in Egypt. The rising of the dam waters threatened to submerge several important ancient monuments but UNESCO mobilised an enormous rescue effort during the sixties and seventies and the temples of Abu Simbel was reconstructed at a higher level. The island temple of Isis at Philae was taken apart stone by stone and put back together on a more elevated nearby island where it now stands. Philae shows again how successive faiths made their mark. Hieroglyphs have been scratched out and the blackened ceilings show even now how the emerging Christian sects of the first few centuries of our current era set fire to these magnificent buildings. Romans and Greeks before them had happily left the temples intact, perhaps adding a statue or colonnade. Christians carved their own symbols into the pillars, crosses with symmetrically curved arms quite unlike the stark shape which became the norm later on. Egypt was one of the major centres of early Christianity until its Coptic version of the faith was renounced by the Roman emperor Constantine, who in imposing an approved doctrine of Christianity some four hundred years after the death of Jesus, sounded the death knell for the old Egyptian civilisation. It should be sobering to think that Egypt’s culture and civilisation had endured largely unchanged under successive waves of colonisation for three and a half thousand years but was annihilated in a mere two centuries first by Christians and then by Islam.

We shopped for spices, indigo and kohl in Aswan’s intriguing market before taking the train a thousand kilometres back to Cairo. Here our next port of call was a Coptic church with service in full swing. The chanting from the inner sanctuary, the smokey incense and the sun rays beaming through the east window could all have been two thousand years old but it was now. They could also have been seen and heard in much the same way in the neighbouring Ben Ezra synagogue, though Egypt’s few remaining

77 Jews keep a rather low profile these days. The synagogue shows signs of Islamic architecture and has Christian features as well as a resting place for the scrolls of the Torah. In the same complex is the so-called Hanging Church, a memorial to the supposed hiding place of Mary and Joseph when they fled Herod’s threat to kill fi rstborn boys. If you are confused by the abundance of religious influences, be ready for more. The Christian Church of St Sergius is also dedicated to St Bacchus (echoes of wining and dining in the Grecian era) but is now called Abu Serga. And then there are the mosques. When Islam commenced its expansion out of Arabia following the death of Mohammed in 632 AD, Egypt soon fell into the Muslim sphere of influence and the old religions slid into obscurity. The most visible minarets in Cairo are those of the Turkish style Mohammed Ali mosque which dominates the skyline alongside the tenth century citadel of Saladin, parts of which are reckoned to have been constructed with surplus limestone blocks filched from the site of the pyramids. A thousand years old – that’s new on the scale of things here.

Our ﬁnal burst of shopping led us variously to a perfume shop, a papyrus studio where they paint your name in hieroglyphics while you wait, and a carpet weaving factory. But by now we knew the rules of the game and ﬁnally came away with some modest bargains. Shopping in Egypt may not be for the faint hearted but any trip there cannot be less than a lifetime adventure

Photos: Cairo’s Khan el Khalili bazaar Family day at the pyramids A spice stall in Aswan’s market

78 14 Uganda: ‘positively reeks of adventure’

This article was originally published in 2001, twenty years after my ﬁrst visit to Uganda. I’d been fascinated by the whole Idi Amin story, but by 1981 he’d been ousted and the Tanzanian army was in occupation. There was no fuel, no money, in fact nothing much going on at all. We didn’t stay very long. This time, I’d been invited back to tour the country and advise on its tourist potential. Its President, Yoweri Museveni, had been hailed as a saviour and I was curious to see to what extent peace and prosperity had replaced the fear of the former thuggish regime. Since then, Uganda has changed again. Kampala is as congested as any other capital city, and Museveni has stayed on long past his sell by date. It’s a story typical of Africa.

The article was headed ‘Uganda: back on its feet’, and subtitled ‘a land which positively reeks of adventure, and where the years of madness seem ﬁnally to be over’. Hmmm . . .

The elephants are back on the Kazinga Channel. We spotted them through a gap in the papyrus fringes, a family group of ﬁfteen, as we drove down the river track from Mweya in Uganda's Queen Elizabeth National Park. It's come to something when you get excited about seeing a few elephants, but they have become a bit of a rarity here these days.

I last passed this way back in '81. My safari diary shows a handful of Uganda kob, a few score of hippo - and nothing else. Once renowned for some of the biggest herds in Africa, the park had by then been pretty well turned into an 'elephant-free zone' after a decade of relentless poaching. The elephants that could escape ﬂed westwards to neighbouring Zaire (now Congo) and the relative safety of the Virunga National Park. Now, twenty years later, Uganda as a whole has calmed down, and the Queen Elizabeth park is back in business.

The hippos are as numerous as ever. They can be seen and heard in hundreds from the promontory at Mweya where the Kazinga Channel pours into Lake Edward. They graze at night on the lawn of the lodge, a place of faded but discernible elegance which makes an acceptable, if over-priced, base for exploring southwestern Uganda.

The stunning scenic beauty of the park stems from the lake, the channel and the proximity of the brooding Ruwenzoris, the fabled Mountains of the Moon. It lies in the western arm of the

79 Great Rift Valley, a broad, lake-dotted plain nestling between the Ankole escarpment and the continental divide of the Ruwenzoris and the Mfumbira volcanoes. This side of the mountains, rivers connect with the Nile. On the other side, they ﬂow into the Zaire (Congo) River and across two thirds of Africa to the Atlantic.

On the plains around Katangula village, we saw herds of golden Uganda kob, stolid black buffalo and stately deer-like waterbuck. The Defassa waterbuck here possess much longer horns than elsewhere in East Africa. Later, lions and hyenas added to the cacophony of an African night already filled with the snorting and bellowing of a lovesick hippo. At dawn, resounding thwacks echoed up the channel as Kazinga fishermen chased tilapia into their nets with flat-paddle smacks on the water.

It was May and in western Uganda, that means rain. But storms are brief, though torrential, and clear blue, cloud-patched skies are the norm. You can see a rainstorm coming miles away, a pillar of cloud joining a black heaven to a steaming earth. The odour of rain hangs in the air like newly watered greenhouse peat.

A pair of fish eagles called hauntingly over the channel and skeins of cormorants, egrets and pelicans wafted out over the lake in search of new fishing grounds. This is one of the finest spots in Africa for water birds, especially during the European winter when the migrant flocks fly in. Uganda National Parks run a launch trip down the channel, giving some unrivalled views of both birds and hippos. The papyrus beds offer a tantalising chance of glimpsing the rare whale-headed stork or shoebill.

The road south to Ishasha is shown on the map as iﬀy when wet. Fortunately, it was passable. A month or so earlier, thirty trucks had been held up along a particularly boggy stretch, blocking the route for weeks. We ourselves passed a twenty-tonner that had keeled over in the soft ditch. The route skirts the Maramagambo forest, the largest protected rain forest in Uganda and home still to chimpanzees. In the distance was the cone of Mgahinga, the most northerly of the string of volcanoes whose forested slopes contain all that's left of the world's population of mountain gorillas.

There is a good deal of irony here. Years of dedicated conservation eﬀort went into Rwanda to protect the gorilla and create a tourist industry that beneﬁted local communities - now, guerillas have taken over instead, and tourism has collapsed. The stark contrast with Uganda

80 is that after thirty years of utter chaos. with no conservation nor tourism, Mgahinga holds more gorillas than Rwanda. Mgahinga and the Ruwenzori Mountains have now been declared national parks, in a bold move that brings Uganda's total to six, and underlines the government's commitment to the future of wildlife-related tourism.

Uganda has become a safe haven for gorillas, but no-one would have considered it safe for anything for a long time past. Idi Amin banned tourism in 1973 - he thought it was a Western plot to destabilise him. Ugandans admit that the Amin years were a time of madness. But the country is at peace with itself again, and recovery and renovation are the name of the game. Everywhere we went, people were friendly, polite and welcoming. In 2,000 kilometres of driving, we encountered only two police checkpoints. "Please tell tourists that we want them to come here," said the oﬃcer in charge at one. "But may we look inside your vehicle? We had to arrest somebody yesterday for smuggling crocodiles and snakes".

At Ishasha, the camp is in a belt of forest by the river. Across a brown, fast-flowing stream lies the Democratic Republic of Congo, Dr Congo, as the Ugandans call it, Zaire as we knew it. A loud cackling in the forest canopy is a pair of great blue turacos. A flash of turquoise is a black bee-eater, lost among the leaves as soon as seen. Away from the forest, the park is just that broad grassy plains dotted with acacias and wild spreading fig trees. It's in the branches of such trees that the Ishasha lions lie up, digesting at leisure last night's topi kill. Spilled across the plains are long strings of kob, knots of topi and more big buffalo herds. Scanning with binoculars, I counted six to eight hundred animals, including a few warthog. It's a view to match any in Africa.

Back in camp, a red-chested cuckoo screamed its call: "Rain will come". But the clouds had gone, and it was just another beautiful summer Sunday afternoon.

We returned to Kampala via Lake Mburo, travelling on excellent tarred roads and stopping for lunch and a moment's culture shock at the Agip Motel in Mbarara. Lake Mburo is a small national park that contains Uganda's only remaining impala - an antelope that is common elsewhere in East Africa. Its niche is taken by the kob in much of Uganda. It's worth protecting since it gave its name to the capital (Kampala means 'the place of the impala’). Lake Mburo is a pleasant, gentle retreat, fast becoming popular with weekenders from Kampala. There are no big predators here. The gate ranger told us that the lions were poisoned by the local cattle

81 herders "while we were away during the war". The herds of Ankole cattle are still there, magniﬁcent with their vast-spreading prehistoric horns.

Murchison Falls National Park is classic African safari country. For a start, it's a five-hour drive from Kampala just to reach the park. Past the rusted wrecks of burned out tanks on the until recently rebel held Gulu road, we turned off to Masindi, a decayed plantation town, seemingly in the middle of nowhere. There is a defunct railway station, a modest hotel and three or four filling stations - with not only petrol but even electricity to work the pumps! The next thirty miles was over virgin jungle tracks, rain-eroded, with only the single spoor of a villager's bicycle to help us pick a route. Elephant grass swung in from either side like a curtain around the forest. Clouds of yellow, blue and orange butterflies fed at the sandy edges of the streams we crossed. Then, horror of horrors, we were into a belt of tsetse fly woodland and half an hour was spent firing salvos of spray and taking pot-shots with rolled-up newspaper at these helicopter gunships of the insect world.

We broke out of the forest atop a low escarpment, and the park was spread before us. To the west glinted Lake Albert, against the backdrop of Zaire's gold-bearing Montagnes Bleus. The rolling green hills and tree-dotted valleys are like nowhere else in East Africa. The early explorers called it the Pearl of Africa.

Murchison Falls themselves are a highlight in a continent of wonders. The raging river Nile, or at least a good proportion of it, pours into a six-metre wide chasm and reverberates 42 metres into a wide foaming pool. The morning sun paints a rainbow over the spray.

The path to the bottom of the falls - 'UP to the bottom', says a sign - climbs over a hill and snakes down to the very edge of the frothing pool. A precarious vantage point on a rock by the water allowed us to look right into the steaming cataract. Away from the noise, two six-metre crocodiles quietly waddled from a sandy beach into the turbulent water. One of Africa's biggest remaining populations of crocodiles still thrive here, feeding on the huge Nile perch that venture up from Lake Albert. These and the fighting tiger fish provide fine sport for anglers.

To judge from guidebooks published in the ﬁfties and sixties, tourism in Uganda was in a class of its own. You could take a stern-wheel paddle boat from the source of the Nile at Jinja to Masindi Port, jump on a train to

82 take you around the rapids, then pick up another six-cabined steamer to cruise up Lake Albert. Gazing down the ancient papyrus-fringed river from the falls, I wanted to do the same, cruising on through the Sudd to Khartoum, past Abu Simbel and the Valley of the Kings, emerging months later at Alexandria.

Such a prospect may seem overly fanciful, but Uganda is barely a hundred years old and, away from the towns. the patina of civilisation is hardly discernible. As it did in the days of Speke and Burton, and Mutesa and Kamrasi, Uganda positively reeks of adventure to those who have already 'done' the regular safari circuits.

An ambitious EU-funded programme helped rebuild roads and lodges. It has made a good start and the park is open for business, though few tourists are coming. The park needs the revenue - park rangers have been paid on a scale starting at fourteen hundred Uganda shillings a month, or less than three US dollars. It's just enough to live on for day. No wonder staﬀ had become unproductive. It's a miracle they are there at all.

An old-style professional Staﬀ Sergeant ranger accompanied us across the ferry to the northern part of the park, and led us to the wreckage of the Pakuba Grand Lodge overlooking the Albert Nile. It was a depressing sight, looted and burnt, a grim testimonial to the years of madness. But all around , groups of oribi, hartebeest and kob dotted the grassland.

We passed through a forest of borassus palms where buffalo were placidly grazing. In the distance, we could see a pair of Rothschild's Giraffes. There were more oribi than I've seen anywhere else in Africa. As we returned past the old disused Paraa airstrip, our ranger pointed over the shell of a wrecked Trilander aircraft eerily rusting in the long grass. It was a herd of elephants. I counted fifty, but there were more across the ridge. Some were standing in the shade of a spreading kigelia tree, flapping their ears like fans in the heat. Others were rolling in a mud bath.

This is where it all happened. The slaughter of Uganda's elephants. And here they are again. The elephants are back on the Kazinga Channel. They are back on the Nile, too. Uganda's national parks are back in business.

Photos: Ruwenzori, the Mountains of the Moon The road to Ishasha Ishasha lion Murchison Falls

83 15 Miscellaneous musings and random ramblings

Time ﬂies

I’m writing this on board a Boeing 787 ‘Dreamliner’ en route from Nairobi to London Heathrow. It’s a highly reputed plane, this one, fêted for its quietness and fuel economy. Much of it is made out of composite materials which are lighter than conventional alloys. Outside, it’s hot and dry, at least at ground level where I left Kenya in the ravages of a burning drought. On long flights, I prefer to travel by day because I can rarely sleep in the narrow confines of these seats. But this aircraft has a real oddity. The windows are electronically photochromic and already the cabin crew have dimmed them. I know later they will darken the cabin completely to give an illusion of nighttime. It’s cleverly designed to subdue the passengers and reduce demands on the stewards. It seems to work. But for those of us who want to stay alert and do something, the residual blue light is quite weird. Surgical, is a word that comes to mind. I’m just hoping the chap in the seat ahead of me doesn’t recline because that will put paid to my writing session. There’s simply no room for an open notebook when the seat back is a hand’s breadth in front of your face. And there’s something about the angle of recline of my own seat that is doing lasting damage to the base of my spine. The selection of movies on offer, while plentiful, is uninspiring and the sound quality is poor. But in any case I’m happy to switch to the GPS page and monitor our route. They’ll serve breakfast just now, people will rest, watch something, read or whatever they choose to do to wile away the time. And after all that we’ll still only be over neighbouring Sudan, Africa’s largest country. But once we track down the Nile towards the Mediterranean, I’ll know we’re nearly home. Just another three hours to go. All of which has set me thinking about how air travel has changed over the years.

My first flight experience was in a Douglas DC3 Dakota, from Herne (Bournemouth) to a holiday in Jersey. If I remember right, it seated twenty or so. It was sufficiently exciting, and I suppose affordable, that my dad decided the following year that we would take the car with us. We flew in a Bristol Super Freighter with two other families and their cars. As teenagers, we were a bit crazy about aeroplanes and would cycle the 20 miles to Heathrow Airport where we could roam pretty much onto the apron, at least at the London Airport North terminal where the intercontinental flights used to park. PanAm’s triple tailed Super Constellation and double- decker Stratocruiser were being phased out in favour of a new generation of faster planes

84 such as the ‘whispering giant’ Britannia and DC6s and DC7s. But even these turbo-props were quickly replaced by the faster jets, the Boeing 707 and Douglas DC8. Within Europe, BEA operated the futuristic Trident.

Air travel back then was genuinely exciting. But a couple of things changed to make it a very different proposition. Don’t get me wrong, personally I still find all kinds of travel exciting. I suppose once flying became a mass transport system as opposed to something of a novelty and luxury, it was bound to change. Out went the charismatic VC-10 and elegant Concorde and in came the workhorse 737 and 747 which between them have probably carried more people to more places than everything else put together. And talking of the VC-10, it was a certain Yasser Arafat and his Black September movement who kicked off modern terrorism when they blew up a BOAC VC-10 on the tarmac at Amman in 1967. But it was only after aeroplanes themselves were used as terror weapons that life for us travellers began to get a lot more demanding. Not to say irritating. The 2001 attacks on New York changed everything and it’s hard to see it easing up any time soon. We can’t take our kids onto the flight deck any more. We add an hour to our check-in times to allow for multiple rounds of security screening. We endure the ignominy and inconvenience of removing belts, shoes, electronic devices, lotions and liquids, anything, in fact, that could in somebody’s wildest imagination be adapted to conceal an explosive. Security technology, coupled with intelligence gathering, has, it must be said, done an amazing job in protecting the flying pubic. But at what an enormous cost to the travel experience! While governments around the world seem incapable of facing up to the attacks on our civilisations more directly, this seems the best we can do. So we grin and bear it.

Another significant change is in the way we book flights. Online booking engines have made it easy to find routes and carriers, and make your choice of time, duration and cost. This convenience has, however, driven relentless price based competition which has put some airlines out of business and which has contributed to a decline in service levels throughout the industry. As travellers, it works against us when there are so many add-ons to the highlighted fare that gets our attention at the top of the listings. You can no longer tell what you will end up paying. Marketing psychologists play games with our heads to capture us with apparently low fares which are actually nothing of the kind. Personally, I feel it’s time for a ‘traveller revolution’. Let’s rebel against these tricks and ‘cattle class’ service, and go back to using airlines that are straight with us before they too go bankrupt.

Fortunately, if you love travel as I do, the rewards still more than compensate for the irritation. And to judge by the mosquito patterns scattered across the map of the globe on ﬂight radar apps, it doesn’t look like we’re going to stop ﬂying any time soon. There was a moment a few

85 years ago when air travel was branded as a major cause of climate change through its emissions of carbon dioxide. But the fact is, collectively we still want to travel. And the probability is that aircraft will continue to be designed to carry more, for longer and further. The next generation of ‘Dreamliner’ is likely to be able to ﬂy for up to 20 hours non-stop. Already, it’s done 17 hours from Perth to London. It’s only a matter of time until we can circumnavigate the globe non-stop (though I’m not sure what would be the point). By then, perhaps personal air taxis will be in regular use for that last leg in and out of airports. Air travel has always been exciting. To be honest, I think it’s just going to get more so. The way this world is going, the more we can get out of the conﬁnes of our head and the constraints of our homes the better.

The stuﬀ we buy

The stuﬀ we buy, honestly! A box full of commemorative teaspoons, a shelf full of mugs, ﬂimsy beach shirts we’ll never wear. Caps we keep losing. Magnets that slip every time we open the fridge. Oh, and ‘souvenirs’, whatever they are. Miscellaneous useless items we feel obliged to hunt out as presents for the unappreciative folk back home. But amongst the kitsch and rubbish lie reminders and reminiscences that trigger memories, smiles and stories. Sometimes enough to get us out on the road again. Or at least that’s the theory.

Amongst my collections is a castanet I brought from my very first trip abroad. There’s a penguin from Cape Town. Some sort of clicking instrument from Russia. Greek worry beads. A Masai bracelet. A Navajo dream catcher. A piece of Egyptian papyrus. A colourful cock from Portugal. A photocopied hundred million dollar note from Zimbabwe: they photocopied them because they had to be reprinted every few hours with a few more zeros added. A 1976 shilling from Uganda, which held the record at that time as being the least valuable coin on earth. As the currency devalued, you paid for a meal out with a carrier bag full of ‘bricks’ made up of thousands of thousand shilling notes. No-one bothered to count them, it didn’t make any difference. There’s the teaspoon I brought my mum from Prague when I went there by train as a teenager. One from Sweden where I took my first serious girlfriend to see her relatives in Stockholm. She dumped me on the way back.

But amongst all this, one or two items hold a special place in my back catalogue of traveller’s tales. There’s an Indian Head nickel given to me by an elderly aunt we visited in Tennessee. A Maria Theresa silver dollar, or ‘thaler’, dated 1780 which I found at a market stall in Addis Ababa. They were used as common currency in times gone by and are still worn as amulets by Ethiopian ladies. Then there’s the dagger I acquired from a Tuareg chief somewhere in the middle of the Sahara. I can’t remember his part of the deal but I can clearly visualise this

86 haughty man mounted high on his camel. I really wanted his sword. “A tuer beaucoup de gens’, he told me proudly (‘It’s killed a lot of people’). And asked ﬁve hundred US dollars. I took the dagger.

So at the end of the day, there is some point in our collections of bits and bobs from around the world. Just like photographs, they trigger memories and stories. And remind you that it’s time to go again.

Let travel ignite your soul

Travel opens your mind. It takes you out of the confines of your head, your house, your town, your country, your culture, and your preconceptions, and out into that great big world where they do things differently. As I use the term here, ‘travel’ is not just about taking holidays, though there’s nothing wrong with that. It implies something a bit more, more adventurous, more curious, more discovering, more ‘let’s go and find out what goes on over there’. It’s a journey of discovery, discovering yourself as much as the places you go, the people you meet, the things you do, and the experiences that shape you. I often find myself asking which is the real world, this or the one I left behind? It doesn’t matter any more. They’re all real to someone. And all exciting to someone. It’s that sense of wonder that I’ve wanted to celebrate in this book. Travel should set light to the soul, especially when you visit somewhere new for the first time. My memory banks are seared with enduring emotional images: the confluence of the White and Blue Niles at Khartoum, the pyramids at Giza, an eruption of Mt Etna seen from 40,000ft, the soaring vault of La Familia Sagrada, reading by starlight in the Sahara, that flash of green as the desert sun sets, encounters with Bushmen, Pygmies, a Masai witch doctor, lions. Bach’s Toccata and Fugue in D minor played in Notre Dame, a chamber orchestra playing Vivaldi in a Venetian church, ice age rock paintings etched by our distant ancestors, shaking hands with the ‘real’ Mickey Mouse. But travel should also bring a sense of humility that the way we do things is not necessarily ‘right’ or ‘best’. Journeys are at the heart of deep and meaningful experiences and writings. My author role models include Paulo Coelho, Wilfred Thesiger, Bruce Chatwin, William Dalrymple and Isak Dinesen (Karen Blixen). Great writers, but I have to say their genius would be rather meaningless without travel.

87 16 How to live your ideal life

In this chapter, I want to share some thoughts for those who would like to travel more and, more particularly, would like to escape the rat race and gain more fun, freedom and fulﬁlment in their lives. Is this you, I wonder?

I’ve been lucky throughout my life to have had numerous opportunities to travel. Sometimes it seems that I’m always on the move. I also escaped the eternal hamster wheel of conventional employment at an early age (I was 30) and that too was thanks to travel. At times, my work has taken me travelling but these days travel and work have all become rolled up in one. What do they say? If it’s your passion that pays the bills, then it’s not work. I’m going to assume, since you’ve made it this far through the book, that travel might be your passion too.

There are several ways that you can make money from travel, and I will share a few, but let me start by talking a bit about a ‘balanced life’. People talk about ‘work-life’ balance as if work and life are two separate things. It’s more complicated than that. There are (at least) eight factors you need to think about.

Some people like to add other headings to this ‘Pie of Life’, for example spirituality. The principle is to examine where you are now in each segment of the pie, of your life, and where you want to be. So far as I am concerned, travel acts as an essential component in nearly all of these.

88 I cannot tell you what your ideal life should look like but, obviously, travel features heavily in mine. Here are a few questions you might ask yourself:

• what do you really like doing? (Find a way to do more of it.)

• what do you really dislike having to do? (Stop doing it!)

• which of the Pie of Life segments demand some action? And some practical tips:

• brainstorm action items under each heading

• allocate time accordingly

• focus on what you know needs to be done

• don’t obsess on studying and strategising

• just get on with it.

For many years, although I was running my own business, I still had to ‘work’ in order to get paid. Freedom yes, but a qualiﬁed freedom. What changes the game is passive income, the ability to pay the bills regardless of how your spend you time. There are a number of ways of achieving this, most of which require that you have a substantial pot of cash in the ﬁrst place. But recently, I had the good fortune to be introduced to a global travel community which combines many of the opportunities and needs set out above. There are many people these days claiming to be able to rescue you from the doldrums of a 9-5 existence but they all seem to demand a subscription to their website or training package. Trust me, it’s easier than that. Without necessarily suggesting it’s for you, or for everyone, I would like to share a bit about it with you here, if you’ll indulge me.

It’s an invitation-only, members-only travel club. I was introduced to it by means of one of their training events. I’ve been a professional trainer for many years and I was intrigued to see how they do it. After all, it’s only a club, isn’t it? Well, I was blown away. The calibre, professionalism and impact was in a league I had never seen before, even in the big corporations who had been my clients. So that was the ﬁrst beneﬁt I found: extremely high grade personal development. I met a Zimbabwean lady who worked as an accountant in Manchester, England. She had made $100,000 out of this ‘club’ as a business. She told us that making money wasn’t what drove her so much as the ability to help her people back home. By sharing this business opportunity, many of her people were now able to make a few hundreds or thousands of dollars each month that wasn’t previously possible in that basket case of an

89 economy with something like a 90% unemployment rate. That’s beneﬁt number two: the chance to give other people the opportunity to transform their lives.

Of course that wouldn’t be possible unless there was a business proposition tied to it. There is. You can join simply as a travel member and take advantage of their portfolio of trips. But at remarkably low cost, you can also take up a licence to run it as your own business. In fact, it’s one of the lowest cost-of-entry businesses I’ve ever come across in a long career as a business advisor. It’s here where the passive income opportunity lurks. With the right approach - supported of course by the great training they provide - it’s possible to set yourself up with significant long term residual income. Like any business, success is proportional to effort, but there are people making millions from it. That’s benefit three: your own business with passive income potential.

But it is at heart a travel club, and members join because they love to travel. I mean, you wouldn’t join a golf club if you didn’t want to play golf. Accessed through a highly sophisticated app, a massive list of trips is available to destinations all over the world. These are curated and hosted but there is no obligation to travel as part of a group. The booking engine allows you to make your own plans if that’s what you prefer to do. But I have found the people you meet on these trips to be a valuable part of the experience. And they come from literally all over the world. So that’s beneﬁts four and ﬁve: fantastic trips and a wonderfully diverse community of like minded people.

For me, and many of the people I know, this is a pretty ideal life. Like I said, it’s not for everyone. Hey, but why not! This wasn’t intended to be a sales pitch, and perhaps I’ve got a bit carried away. Which reminds me that it’s time to book another trip. But if you would like to know more, please just email me directly (contacts provided at the end of the book) and I’ll be happy to provide more. That’s your own personal special invitation! Come and join us!

So, what other ways are there to funds your travels, or make money by travelling? I like to write from my own ﬁrst hand experience, so I’ll just stick to three that I know. One is to buy and sell. One lady I know used to trek around Afghanistan on a camel buying indigenous jewellery and then selling to well-heeled clients around the world. That country may be a challenge nowadays, but items of value are more likely to be found in places that are hard to get into. Another chap I know travels the interior of Africa buying up ancient artefacts and selling them in the USA. There are, of course, people who simply buy and sell clothes and shoes from China and Dubai.

Then there are people who make money by producing blogs or podcasts about their travels. The model that makes it viable depends on creating a substantial following who are then seen

90 as a potential target market for advertisers, or in this context ‘sponsors’. These are likely to be travel related, perhaps airlines or hotels, for example, but it would be an advantage to employ a high degree of creativity in seeking such sponsors. The third area I know is to host tours or retreats yourself. This too is a specialist area and there are numerous websites that can give you some pointers.

Believe it or not, the biggest obstacle to living your ideal life is not a lack of opportunity. It’s you. Well, not you personally, I hope! But the evidence is that people ﬁnd it hard to change. It’s easier to stay stuck in your zone. That’s why it’s described as ‘comfort’. They complain that it’s others who get all the luck. But travel opens up opportunity and luck is a just matter of being exposed to, and open to, opportunity. In any case, ask yourself what’s so special about a world where traditional opportunities are disappearing, where the education system fails to equip our kids for an unknown and uncertain future, where health care is actually ‘sick care’, where our leaders fail us at every turn, where the taxman seeks to squeeze every last penny out of our pockets. I don’t know about you, but I’ll join any movement that wants to disrupt an established system which delivers neither hope nor opportunity.

“Travel is disruptive,” says our travel club president. “Travel disrupts our perspective. It helps us think about things that we might not otherwise think about.”

Let’s be disruptive. Let’s create our own luck. Let’s go travel.

91 17 Tips for aspiring travel writers

If you would like to contribute to a future edition of Let’s Go Travel, your name will be listed as an editorial contributor, so you will be able to use this book directly to promote your own interests, blog, business, or whatever. The rules are simple. Just send me 2000-3000 words about a place you’ve been to that stands out in your mind for some reason, and which you think would help inspire others to get up and go. The address to send to is : [email protected].

Although my mission is to persuade people to travel more, I also want to encourage a resurgence in travel writing. It seems to have fallen a bit by the wayside as a genre. Perhaps writers have defaulted to blogging nowadays. But unless we follow you, we don’t get to share your pearls of wisdom. There are some good writers in the print press still, and you can get an idea of good travel writing from their features. But often they’re overtly promotional, their trips sponsored by one or other tourist agency or airline. I have no issue with that, I do it myself, but here we’re promoting travel in general and it’s not the place to push any speciﬁc interest, especially if it’s commercial.

So now I would like to share a few tips on what a good travel article should look like, and a few dos and don’ts.

The obvious thing is that a great travel feature is going to provide a strong sense of place. As readers, we want to get a feel for it, not just information about it. This is not a guide book. Just like photographers, painters or poets, we writers need to communicate an emotional connection with our chosen location. To achieve that, we must use words with impact that describe not just the place itself but its character and what it does for us. But unlike a photographer, for example, we can also convey something about what’s going on behind the scenes, the ‘why’ and ‘how’ as well as the ‘what’. And we can also include people, the ‘who’ of good writing. Meeting and understanding people is one of the prime motivators in travel, not just seeing the sights. Feel free to share your own experiences. Readers might not care much who you are but they will be interested by the eﬀect the place had on you, and your reactions to the various experiences you were exposed to.

First person or third person? Mixed advice here, I think it’s a matter of style and choice. Professionals favour third person: convey your story through other peoples’ eyes and mouths. But to be honest, you own personal ﬁrst hand perspective is just as valid. But please

92 remember that we do not want to read your itinerary or diary: we went here, then we did this, now we’re going here, and my family and dog are with us. Nope!

As travellers, we like to learn something new. So do our readers. So try to include some new insight, large or small, that communicates powerfully that this was a meaningful experience, not just a visit. Make people want to follow in your footsteps. Part of our job as writers is to help people understand what goes on in the world outside their own immediate lives. There is a mission here: a lot of the trouble in the world is caused by people failing to accept, appreciate and celebrate others’ diﬀerences. We grow up conditioned to believe that ‘our way’ is the only way. But it’s not. Travel writers can and should guide their readers towards this greater understanding, greater tolerance, and a lot more curiosity about people and places.

You do also need to be a competent writer and show some understanding that writing is an art form not just a record of your research findings. A non-fiction topic like travel is neither a fictional story nor an academic report. Yes, it conveys a certain amount of information, but it does so with elegance. And while it may not need much of a plot, it will benefit from some sort of ‘beginning-middle-end’ structure. A journalistic style may be partly appropriate, particularly in providing quotes from actual people, for example. But the traditional ‘what, where, when, who, how and why’ of journalism is not quite enough. We want to carry people along with our narrative right to the end. And we should aim to leave them with something that makes them think or smile, or log onto their preferred travel booking website.

Some speciﬁc writing tips:

• elegant construction but no wasted words

• absolutely no adverbs (ie no adverbs)

• consistency in spelling conventions, abbreviations and punctuation

• be conversational in your writing style: how would you tell your story to a friend?

• utilise the richness of the English language, don’t restrict yourself to common usage, slang or clichés

• and get it ‘right’, for example the use of apostrophes: it’s dos and don’ts, not do’s and dont’s! I don’t claim that the chapters in this book are the best travel writing you will ever see. I’m quite pleased with how some of them turned out, and several have been published before. But I shall be more than delighted to see what you have to oﬀer and I look forward to hearing from you.

In the event that we receive large numbers of submissions, I will have to take full and ﬁnal editorial responsibility for what goes in and what doesn’t. I shall be guided by the following:

93 • I want to get a very wide geographical coverage from all parts of the world

• it needs to be well written in terms of grammar, spelling, construction and ﬂow, but I will not hold it against you if English is not your ﬁrst language

• I’d like to know how you plan to use and help promote the book if you are accepted as a contributor.

Finally, I’m looking for different perspectives, experiences, activities, and insights, not just a catalogue of the usual tourist attractions. There are two powerful reasons for this. One is that it’s just a lot more interesting for the reader to learn about places they wouldn’t otherwise know about. The other is to do with the pernicious influence of the so-called ‘bucket list’. The world’s most famous sights are becoming over-visited and over-controlled, thereby negating much of their initial attraction. Maybe it’s just me and my dislike of crowds and queues. But if part of the joy of travel is to do with the experience, I would prefer my memories to relate to that not to the hassles of getting there or getting in. I’m thinking, for example, of the crowds on parts of the Great Wall of China, the barriers put up at the Iguazu Falls, the circles of minibuses around lions in the Masai Mara. By all means have your own bucket list, by all means write about it. But let’s not contribute to the destruction of the very things that attract us in the first place. What do they say? Leave only footprints, take only memories.

94 About the author

Steve is a writer, international business consultant, trainer, coach and long time traveller. He started travelling overseas when he was nine years old and has not stopped yet. In addition to his many ‘conventional’ holidays, he has done several extended expeditions. One was a six month trip around Europe and North Africa. Another, which he admits to having been life changing, was a two year overland expedition across Africa ending up in Cape Town. Steve knows from direct personal experience how travel engages the soul, liberates the spirit and creates opportunities that would never otherwise exist. He’s a member of the WorldVentures travel community and has a long list of places still to visit.

Steve writes from passion and personal experience. He has lived abroad for a number of years and is currently based in York, England. His range of books – so far – covers wildlife, climate change, business, leadership, religion and health.

Find out more on www.thelonepenguin.com.

Please contact Steve directly by email on [email protected].

Send your travel articles to: [email protected].

95 More e-books by Steve Shelley . . .

JOURNEY INTO AFRICA A photographic celebration of Africa’s wild spaces and wild species

THE END OF THE WORLD AS WE KNOW IT Climate change and other existential threats and what you can do about them

REBOOT YOUR BODY Nutritional secrets and lifestyle habits that can add years to your life and help avoid disease and debility

CONSPIRACY! The dark secrets of religion they didn’t want us to know

WRITE AND PUBLISH USING THE APPLE ECOSYSTEM Everything you need to know

The author’s UK online bookshop > and the US online bookstore >

You can order printed paperback versions from the author’s Amazon bookshelf >

Support Independent Publishers – please leave a review!

96 The Story of The Lone Penguin

Every year as the Antarctic summer ends and daylight fades into the long dark night of winter, colonies of Emperor Penguins set oﬀ from their feeding grounds near the sea to their breeding grounds inland. Taking the cue from the change in the season and from each other, they form meandering lines and wander oﬀ in procession for sixty miles. Tens of thousands of them. These lines of waddling penguins converge at their ancestral breeding ground hidden away on the sea-ice in one of the remotest and most hostile places on earth.

The first task is to hook up with last year’s mate, failing which an elaborate and noisy courtship ritual ensues with the aim of attracting a new one. After everyone is paired up and have completed the necessary mating tasks, the female lays a single egg, holding it carefully on her webbed feet. All of this may have taken two months, from April though to June, during which time, far from the ocean, none of them has fed. It’s now mid-winter, in perpetual darkness, at minus sixty degrees with winds gusting to two hundred kilometres and hour. Within a few hours, the female shuffles her egg over to the male, carefully avoiding any contact with the ice. He nestles it onto his own feet and covers it with the feathery blubber of his tummy. If the egg rolls off, the chick will die. Many do. It’s a hazardous undertaking.

Now the females set oﬀ in line back to the ocean to feed and fatten, leaving the males huddling together for warmth as they incubate their eggs. To conserve energy as they endure blizzards and conditions which would freeze anything else to death, they sleep for twenty hours a day. Six weeks later, the eggs begin to hatch and soon after the females return to feed and nurture their chick. And to relieve their mate who by now has fasted for nearly four months and has lost half his body weight. Now the males set oﬀ in long lines, weakly waddling back towards the ocean in search of a good feed. Meanwhile, the chicks grow, fed by regurgitation from their mums. For some of the males, they’ve had enough. The spouse can handle the rest. But others return yet again to the breeding grounds, carrying fresher food for the youngsters.

By November the chicks are huddling together themselves, spring is in the air and soon they can all start the long march back to the sea and their summer feeding grounds. But even now the adults face a dilemma. If they leave too early, the chicks may not yet be strong enough and will die en route. If they leave it too late, they themselves will not be able to feed again as their winter feathers moult and lose their waterprooﬁng.

Just imagine for one minute . . . if a smarter than average penguin thought: “Hey, why do we do this? Why don’t we just stay by the sea and save all this walking and exposure? We’d lose far

97 fewer of us, and our chicks would grow faster and bigger. And we’d wouldn’t have all that hassle of hiking backwards and forwards in the snow.”

He would die alone, because he would have no mate.

The lone voice of reason will always be drowned out by the baying of the crowd. But my motto is dare to be diﬀerent. It’s more fun.

A LonePenguin book www.thelonepenguin.com

Published in 2018 by Strategic Alignment Ltd, York, England.