Here and There

by A. A. Gill

  I see you’ve been staring at our women, my joke-telling guide said. No, no, go ahead, Serbian women are famous for being the most beautiful women in the whole world. A discussion on which nation has the most beautiful women in the whole world could collapse the United Nations. All I can say is that Serbia would be unlucky not to find itself in the quarter-finals. Serbian women are very striking: lanky and heavy-chested, long straight hair, generally of some kitchen blondeness, high cheeks, wide eyes, strong features set in expressions of man-killing disdain. I never saw a Serbian woman smile. Not once.

  I mentioned this to my hilarious guide. No, they don’t have a sense of humour, he said. Oh, so your sense of humour is solely a male, masculine thing? Yes, he said, it’s not nice for women to laugh. Would you like your woman to laugh? Maybe she’d laugh at you. Yes, I can see that would be difficult.

  I really did love Belgrade, and I wanted to love the Serbs. They are a nation on probation, and have been for a hundred years. They suffer from being squeezed between larger, gaudier, richer neighbours, the Ottomans and the Habsburgs. Serbs dreamt of a greater Serbia, and they got Yugoslavia instead. They desperately want to be relaxed and laid-back and turn up at the party correctly dressed. But they can’t leave the history thing alone.

  There is some fantastic food here. I ate brilliant slowcooked buried lamb, one of the best dishes of mixed offal I’ve had for years and marvellous Serbian coffee with doughnuts and a sort of yoghurt cheese sour-cream thing. (Serbian coffee is really Turkish coffee, but without the punch in the throat for calling it Turkish.)

  Really, you should go to Belgrade. You know, my guide told me, we are the only city in Europe that’s been bombed four times in the 20th century. Oh yes. Once in the First World War by Austrians, twice in the Second World War by Germans, and then Russians, and last and not least by NATO. Well, fancy that.

  Urban maul

  Of all the slums in the world, none is beneath hope or beyond care and optimism. Except those aesthetic and intellectual shanties that money buys.

  Last year, somewhere on a street that probably doesn’t have a name at a door without a number on the outskirts of a hot, dirty city in a suburb that’s been called something collective and unlikely, a tired man with a fearful family finally put down his meagre but heavy enough collection of plastic bags and worn buckets and sticks and tarpaulins, sunk to an earth floor, looked at a tin roof and said, we’re home. His wife would’ve sent a child to get some water while she lit a fire. They weren’t to know this, this frail, delicate family, but they were a tipping point. As they stepped over this particular threshold, they marked an astonishing and memorable moment in the march of mankind. They will never know it, and we will never know who they were; all we do know is that somewhere, out there, someone moved into some city and turned the world urban.

  For the first time in all of history, indeed in all the history of all the species that came before our species, more humans live in the city than in the country. We are now more metropolitan than rural, and that has taken 10,000-odd years to come about. From the first settled agrarian communities in the fertile crescent between the Tigris and the Euphrates till now, there has been a steady drift towards pavement and brick. We are civic hominids, collective folk. We may not like or trust each other’s company. We may need to make elaborate rules and etiquettes just to hang out together, but it does seem to be our preferred habitat. We are street-corner creatures rather than the denizens of hedge and copse.

  The most common address in the world, the place you’re most likely to find most of us, is a slum. I’m fascinated by slums. I’m fascinated mostly because I don’t have to live in one. Very few people visit slums. I’ve only ever come across two cities where they do tourist trips to their slums: Rio and Johannesburg. In Rio, you can go to a favela on a safari in a Land Rover driven by a guide dressed up like Sanders of the River in an African white hunter’s hat. You’re told to keep your hands inside the vehicle and not to antagonise the wildlife; if confronted, don’t make any sudden moves. The favelas in Rio are integral parts of the city. They climb up hills and have famously the best views.

  All slums are places that exist outside of control, without regulation or plan. They are amateur and desperate and extreme. They have an energy and an ingenuity that is inspiring and depressing. Like the ‘flying toilets’ of Kibera. Kibera is a huge slum outside Nairobi, possibly the biggest in Africa. There is precious little water and absolutely no sanitation for one million people, so they defecate into the thin ubiquitous plastic bags of Africa and then fling them with abandon, possibly with joy, into ditches, onto roofs, at passers-by. The bags collect in great stinking heaps and wait for the rains to wash them into the water table, through people’s bedrooms and kitchens and across the slimy roads.

  Slums are always temporary. No one moves into one or builds one and thinks, this is me, this is forever, this is Dunroamin. But they remain, calloused and crumbling, always evolving, growing like human aviaries. Slums are at once disheartening and a terrible indictment, an accusation, but they are also a marvel, a hope, an ambition. And they have the intrinsic beauty, the majesty even, of the human will. Like the packing-case-and-plastic shanties that crawl up the motorways and roundabouts and the corners of Bombay, a city that is such a magnet to the subcontinent that it’s considering locking itself away behind a wall like a vast gated community, insisting on invitations to get in. It is a great economic nightclub.

  My top six slums are: the Mercato, the rambling warren of a market in Addis Ababa, where khat is sold. The shantytowns of Antananarivo, the capital of Madagascar, that look quaintly like huts in Dutch paintings, in this, one of Africa’s most beautiful cities. Glasgow East: tough and gritty, an ancient enclave of hardened arteries and attitudes, but with an indomitable grim humour. The Afghan refugee camps in Peshawar: this was the most beguiling and is now possibly the most hideously dangerous city in the North-West Frontier Province. Kaliningrad, a Russian enclave on the Baltic between Lithuania and Poland: utterly forgotten, once a closed military city, now a festering pocket of organised crime, pollution and decay. And by far and away the worst slum in the entire world, the City of the Sun in Port-au-Prince, sprawling along the shore, bisected by sluggish rivers of sewerage, this great shadow Hades of greed, black magic and fear is the most mesmerising place I’ve ever been. A silent set-aside of depravation and terror where, conversely, I met some of the kindest and warmest people in all of the West Indies. The City of the Sun is the bottom of the bottom of the pile, the end beneath which it is difficult to fall. But still here you see children carrying satchels going to school, nurses in uniform going to comfort richer sick people, workmen carrying bags of tools to make nicer cities more habitable.

  Nowhere is beneath hope, beyond care and optimism or do-it-yourself miracles. Except the slums that money buys. I’m writing this in New York, and New Yorkers spend a lot of time complaining about the gentrification of Manhattan. The city has grown monstrously expensive; money has seeped into every poor corner and knocked it through and exposed its brickwork and put renewable hardwood floors over it. Money has bought order and quiet and civic responsibility and health and safety and an early bed. It’s improved the coffee and the sushi, but it’s also driven out the things people move to cities to get. The enthusiasm, the naughtiness, the young, the pretty, the unpublished poets, the unhung painters.

  All cities move up and down an organic scale, from the flying toilet to the dog-walkers. All cities are making a slow progress from bottom-rung to we’ve-arrived. There is a point in the middle where they are for a moment, for a decade, so marvellous a cosmopolitan mix of grit and ambition, of anger and laughter. Of all the slums I’ve been to, the two very, very worst, by a long street, were Monte Carlo and Las Vegas. Nothing is as filthy and dispiriting as the places money made for its own edification and greed. Aesthetic and intellectual shanties, moral flying shit-bags.

  Reality bites

  If you want an authentic travel
experience, try Albania: there’s something very liberating about visiting a country with nothing going for it.

  We don’t travel to see places. We travel to see things in places. For instance, I’ve lived in London all of my ambulatory life and in that time I’ve never once been to St Paul’s Cathedral, and neither have I seen the changing of the guard, and I haven’t had tea at The Ritz. They’re just not part of my city. But for many people passing through, they are the city.

  I’ve always wondered how many natives of Bangkok have had soapy four-hand stress-relief massages, such a central feature of the sophisticated executive visitor’s visit. When I asked a masseur, she said almost every bloody man in Bangkok was up for a bit of stress management, including her worthless, good-for-nothing husband. I should say that I am the only round-eye man I know who has been through Bangkok and not had a massage. Frankly, I get performance anxiety on my own. So the point is, I have a strangely inauthentic memory of Bangkok.

  Never trust or travel with someone who says that they can show you the real somewhere or take you to the city that the locals know. If you’d been visiting London last week and seen my local city, you’d have read the papers for an hour, then sat in a doctor’s waiting room for half an hour, got a prescription, gone to the chemist, waited another half an hour, walked for 10 minutes, then retraced your steps back to the chemist’s because you’d forgotten the razor blades, and then you’d have gone to the supermarket and bought four bananas. You’d have eaten a banana in the street, then walked home to watch an old John Wayne film all afternoon. See, it’s authentic, but it’s not any more real than going to the Tower of London, Madame Tussaud’s, eating jellied eels, sinking 10 pints of warm brown bitter and doing the Lambeth Walk.

  Nobody has secret access to a real country, as if the rest of the country was unreal. I was thinking about this because I just got back from a place without any places in it at all, Albania. Its only memorable monuments are Roman, and no one’s ever going to come up to you at a party when you get back and say, with an imperious drawl, did you manage to see the temple or the church or the palace or the museum? I wish you’d told me you were going, I could’ve given you a few tips and some addresses.

  The problem with Albania is that it’s way too real. There are no unreal bits to retreat into. The moment you step off the plane at Mother Teresa airport, it slaps you with the cold fish of reality: the place is a mess. It’s not just a mess, it’s a punch-drunk mess. The wonder of this Adriatic sliver of the Balkans is that it’s still standing. It has gone 12 rounds with every political and economic system known to hominids and a couple of them that are exclusively its own, and it has lost on points to all of them. Communist, fascist, warlord, monarchist, you name it, Albanians have been beaten senseless by it. Punchy, but still game – that’s Albania.

  And there is something very relaxing about going to a country that has absolutely nothing to recommend it. Normally, you travel and you get a list that’s longer than a Chinese menu of places that you simply have to see, and you spend your time committing cultural triage in churches and palaces and feeling rushed and guilty and oppressed by the piles of cultural beauty. Well, there’s no danger of that in Tirana.

  No, there’s nothing to see, and there’s nowhere to be. There’s not even anything to eat. This is the only country I’ve been to that doesn’t have a national dish. Or even a disgusting local delicacy that you have to take home with you in a tin with a picture of a smiling peasant girl hugging a cow on it, or a cardboard box that leaks nameless fat from whatever preserved body part it holds.

  Tirana has nothing to commend it at all. There is a fetid canal, of which the main claim to your attention is that it used to be worse, and a big out-of-town supermarket where they search your bags on the way in, presumably to stop you leaving confusing and subversive stuff on the shelves. The countryside has even less in it than the city. It’s just big, deserted, green and mostly perpendicular. The seaside is the Adriatic, which isn’t really a sea at all, more a non-tidal warm brown effluent soup that slops between Albania, Italy and Croatia.

  It is all a blessed relief from the obligations of being a responsible traveller. You can properly live like a native: that is, not do anything at all or go anywhere. Anything you choose to do, by its very nature, is authentically local, because there is no tourist thing to do. At all. I met a public relations official for the tourist board. What do you do all day, I asked. Well, he said, like everyone else, I sit in cafés and deal in foreign currency and speak to my brother in Milan and get him to send me designer sunglasses. But what do you do about tourists? What tourists, he asks, suddenly worried and looking over his shoulder. No, not real tourists, pretend, future tourists – the ones you’re supposed to be attracting. What would you tell them. Oh, I tell them we are the land of unspoilt possibilities. Well, that’s true except for the unspoilt bit. It’s more a land of spoilt possibilities.

  And then I tell them we’re going to be the next Croatia.

  You’ll be beating them off with a shitty stick.

  You’re just saying that, aren’t you?

  I’m afraid I just am.

  Although I enjoyed Albania almost more than I can say, I feel bad that I haven’t recommended a single thing. There should be at least one attraction to make tourists feel guilty for missing and that, in turn, you can superciliously ask a returning businessman if they saw. So this is it, the must-see … It’s Tirana’s natural history museum. It’s easy to miss, because it looks like a condemned building. Indeed, in any other European country, it would be a condemned building. But walk in, and don’t mind that there’s no one else there. There’s never anyone else there. Just two floors of the worst stuffed animals in the world. Gimpy gannets, lopsided goats, fish that look like sausages, a bear that has the face of a hairy Quasimodo. Rooms full of nameless bleached things in urine-yellow bottles. And boxes with pinned flies inside cases full of random dead flies. I have never been to a national gallery that is such a perfect and poetic metaphor for the country it lives in. It is perhaps the greatest national museum in the world. You simply have to see it. Just remember to turn the lights out when you leave.

  The last word in travel

  Living to tell the tale (and telling it well) is almost as important as the trip.

  I have a thing about thesauruses (thesauri?). I can’t be bothered with them; won’t have one in the room I write in.

  I know it’s a snobbery and a stuffiness that seems to go along with ‘I’d rather be lost than ask for directions’ and refusing to have luggage on wheels. It’s not the words I mind. I’ve got at least a dozen dictionaries, and I’m staring at four serried shelves of reference books. I’ve got books of quotations, books of slang, etymology, classical allusion, classical history, biblical concordances, opera, film, national biography and the birth of South Africa, but I just won’t have a thesaurus. It’s a question of propriety.

  You can only travel as far as you can describe. I’ll put that the other way around: you can travel to the extreme edge of your vocabulary – after that, you might as well not bother going. There is certainly little point in coming back. The inability to describe what you’ve seen and done is a chronic, terminal intellectual disability. You know how overwrought adolescents say, I couldn’t love anyone who couldn’t love The Outsider or late Picasso or Nirvana, and you always say, oh for God’s sake, get over yourself? Well, I realise I hold something similar. I couldn’t love someone who couldn’t tell me where they’d been, what they’d done and what they loved in a compelling manner.

  I once met an explorer, not an adventure tourist – a real heart-in-the-mouth, mapless, first-foot explorer. He’d been up mountain passes in the Tien Shan that had never been mapped, strung between mountains that had no name. In the company of the most remote and introverted people on the globe, he’d walked on his own with a yak and a small mute boy for a month.

  He’d been kidnapped, escaped, arrested, shot at. He’d had a bit of a time. And w
hen I asked him what it was like, he said: cold. Cold and? Wet. Cold and wet. And had he come back from the roof of the world with any insights? Yes. Pack a spare pair of shoelaces. Broken laces were a constant worry, apparently. And that was it. He took a sort of taciturn pride in the unspoken journey, locked away like a schoolgirl’s diary in his head. And I thought, that place is still unknown. The untrodden paths and the nameless peaks are still anonymous. Your experience was a waste of breath. And shoelaces.

  On the other hand, I once found myself with nothing much to do but wait in a village in northern Uganda. Uganda’s a peerlessly beautiful country, its burnt red earth a bright undercoat colour that dusts everything with a rusty orange. I sat at the side of the road with a 13-year-old boy who couldn’t go to school because his mother was ill and he had to help her. I asked him to tell me about the three-mile journey he made to get to the schoolroom. He made it an exciting odyssey, a high adventure. Each step had moment and significance. This was where he’d seen the eagle pick up the kid. This was where his grandfather had fallen off his bike. There was the best mango tree, but you had to fight the monkeys for them. On and on, I was utterly engrossed, his singsong reedy voice drawing form over the colours. It was the only journey he’d ever made from his village. And the next day, I had to drive to his school in an NGO’s Landcruiser. The journey took 20 minutes, and it was just another road in Africa, but I watched it like a movie.

  The lesson is, if you want to increase your vocabulary, don’t read more, get out and look harder and farther. And that’s the reason I don’t like thesauruses. They sell you other people’s words. They’re not yours. The language isn’t the verbal evocation of your experience, it’s some tenbob adjective which is what you think will decorate your experience more elegantly. The words you choose need to be really yours. Ones that travelled with you. The vocabulary that saw what you saw and saw what you did, not some smart-talking PR you hire later to tart up the experience.