Rock and Hard Places

by Andrew Mueller

  It doesn’t help.

  “I will be your guide.”

  “Nooooo.”

  “Very good price.”

  “Go awaaaayyy.”

  The stand-off continues.

  “Please, sirs,” says a voice we haven’t heard before. “It is better to have one mosquito working for you than to be fighting a swarm.”

  He’s even shorter than the others, and is talking nonsense. But it’s nonsense with a certain poetic, sage-of-the-orient charm. He also promises that he has no commercial or familial ties to any of the shops in the medina. We hire him. He marches us around the bazaar at double time and delivers us to a spice shop. The doors clang shut behind us. “Please meet my brother,” he beams.

  When we are allowed to leave, an hour later, we are heavily laden with vials of essential oils, sachets of scents and bags full of funny-smelling bark fragments alleged to cure piles, kidney stones, impotence and gout—a sales pitch I suspect has more to do with an astute reading of the customers than the truth. At a souvenir shop we pass on the way back, to the mortification of all present, the man from The Daily Mirror not only buys a fez, but insists on wearing it. He will live to regret this. For the rest of the night he will be plagued by claret-sodden hacks tottering up to him, announcing “I’ve forgotten your name, but your fez is familiar,” and laughing until they weep.

  BY WAY OF a warm-up for Def Leppard’s midnight performance, a ceremonial dinner is held in a huge marquee tent in the hotel courtyard. The food is adequate, the wine appalling, the entertainment terrific. A variety of local artistes, all of whom look like they’ve recently returned from a raid on the wardrobe department of Eastbourne Amateur Dramatic Society’s production of “Ali Baba & The Forty Thieves,” eat fire, bellydance, twist themselves into improbable shapes and charm a snake. The snake-charming turn makes me think the same thing I always think when I see someone doing this: I wonder who the first bloke was who, when confronted by a rearing cobra, decided that the thing to do was not scream and run away, or whack it with a shovel, but sit down cross-legged four feet in front of it and play the bloody thing “The Sheik Of Araby.”

  As is the way of these things from here to Butlins, a few of the audience are embarassed into participating—though not, disappointingly, in the snake-charming act. Def Leppard guitarist Phil Collen volunteers to be carried around by a large bearded chap in a turban who walks barefoot on broken glass. Over dessert, we are treated to the rarely edifying spectacle of drunk European women trying to belly-dance: it gets uncomfortably reminiscent of the hippopotamus scene from “Fantasia.” Outside, Moroccan soldiers put on a show for us, charging around on camels, firing guns into the air and shouting. At least, we assume they’re putting on a show for us. It looks more like they’re putting on a coup d’etat, until they dismount and ask if anyone else fancies a go.

  The finale of the sideshows is a performance by four men with traditional instruments (“traditional instruments”: universal euphemism for “unwieldy contraptions made of goat-bladders, horse tails and cat’s whiskers, which sound like someone cutting rusty tin with a hacksaw, and which nobody around here would normally be caught dead playing”) who play us some traditional music (“traditional music”: “fearful, tuneless caterwauling about donkeys, dead kings and/ or God which nobody around here would normally be caught dead listening to”).

  Before we leave, a be-fezzed photographer wearily makes the rounds of the tables, offering for sale polaroid snapshots he’s been taking of revellers during the evening. To his disappointment, nobody really wants a picture of themselves looking drunk in the presence of a camel. He has only one item of in-demand merchandise: a beautifully lit and delightfully framed shot of the eye-wateringly gorgeous blonde woman who is here acting as producer with some cable television crew. “I’ll have that one,” says someone, daubing it with sticky rosé fingerprints. “No, I want it,” says someone else. “I saw it first,” objects another voice, not a million miles from Sweet. A scuffle ensues.

  IT IS THE kind of statement that would normally cause people to back slowly away, trying to not to make any sudden movements, but Def Leppard’s show comes, all things considered, as something of a relief. The press are poured into mini-buses and driven to the venue, deep inside a complex of beautiful caves near the seaside. As we duck between the stalactites, those of us who’ve grown tired of the fez joke are now giggling, “Hey, I suppose a rock’s out of the question,” and listening to our hoots echo off the stone.

  On the stroke of midnight, Def Leppard appear on the stage that has been erected in one of the bigger caves, and we gentlefolk of the fourth estate are herded away from the punchbowls in the ante-cave in which we’re gathered, and towards what we’re supposed to be writing about. A few protests are made (“We’ll be able to hear them perfectly well from here,” says someone. “You won’t be able to hear them at all,” pleads an emissary from Def Leppard’s record label. “That’s what I mean,” comes the reply). At least one broadsheet reporter tries to hide under a table.

  Def Leppard’s set is an acoustic-guitars-only unplugged kind of thing, consisting of stripped-down versions of a few of their hits and several entrancingly predictable cover versions: The Rolling Stones’ “You Can’t Always Get What You Want,” T-Rex’s “Get It On,” David Bowie’s “Ziggy Stardust,” Jimi Hendrix’s “Little Wing”—PJ Harvey’s “Sheela-Na-Gig” has obviously been dropped due to time constraints. In fairness to the Lep—I feel I can call them this—there’s a minor revelation in that those turbocharged vocal harmonies, Def Leppard’s signature on every one of their utterly fatuous but irresistibly catchy choruses, are not just a product of Mutt Lange’s Mission Control-sized mixing desk. Tonight, on “Animal” and on, er, others, they’re absolutely spot on, sounding like several jet engines being revved at once.

  Def Leppard depart to an ovation from the competition winners, polite applause from the media and, from somewhere up the back, a slurred rendition of “You’ll Never Walk Alone” from one hack who has evidently been at sea too long. Buses arrive to take us back to the airport. Predictably, a head count reveals that we have less on board than we arrived with, and a couple of put-upon local guides are dispatched back into the caves with torches to locate those missing in action.

  By the time we get back to the airport, it’s three in the morning, with the flight not due to leave until five. The entertainment available at Tangiers airport is somewhat limited at this hour, so people make half-hearted attempts to sleep on any flat surface. It looks like an evacuation from some variety of disaster, and in some small way I suppose it is. Those who haven’t lasted the bus ride conscious are deposited in sad little heaps on the floor by the departure gate.

  WE ARRIVE AT The Bottom Line club in Shepherd’s Bush, London, with three hours to kill before Def Leppard’s second performance of the day. Mutiny is in the air, especially among the press not due to carry on to Canada in the afternoon. The two leitmotif phrases of the morning are “Do you know what time they’re going to open the bar?” and “Bugger this for a game of soldiers, I’ve had my fun, I’m off.” A full-scale rebellion is only narrowly averted by the serving of an immense buffet to we accredited scroungers.

  A few of us nonetheless get bored enough to go and do our jobs, and head outside to talk to the punters waiting for the limited free tickets for the show. The people at the front have been queueing 24 hours, huddled in sleeping bags next to their camp stoves. “It’s a privilege, man,” one of them shouts. “It’s history in the making.” It must be wonderful, to be so easily pleased. He shakes a fist triumphantly and tries to give me a hug. Further along the line, a film crew from one of those insufferably bright and chirpy breakfast television programmes are encouraging some fans to sing their favourite Def Leppard songs for the camera. It isn’t pretty. Those harmonies, like air traffic control and neurosurgery, should not be attempted by amateurs.

  Shortly before the doors are opened, Def Leppard assemble behind the crush
barriers at the front of the stage for a brief press conference. They say that, gosh, wow, this whole thing is just so crazy and, hey, you don’t have to be mad to work here but it helps, ha ha. I toy with the idea of adopting a stentorian Finnish accent and feigning outrage at the corporate decadence of it all (“Yes, Mr. Leppard, please. I am Sven Svennsenn, zer rocking and zer rolling correspondent of zer Daily Reindeer of Helsinki, yes, undt I am sinking zat perhapz you could haff been buildink zer hospital for zer unhappy children with this money, is? I am sinking zat perhaps zis means—ho!—zat your rock is out of my question, hey?”) but I can’t find a way through the rank of cameras. Besides which, the canapes are really rather good.

  THE SECOND SHOW is much the same as the first, and after they finish, Def Leppard leave the building for Heathrow and their flight to Vancouver, along with the representatives of those press organisations deemed important enough to go to all three continents. Melody Maker is not among them, as they probably thought we’d only take the piss, so Sweet and I stuff our pockets full of caviar sandwiches and walk out into the sun, looking for a taxi.

  11

  EYE OF THE GEIGER

  Chernobyl

  APRIL 2004

  THIS IS A declaration that may well prompt throbbing of veins and empurpling of complexions, but here goes: being a travel writer isn’t as easy as it looks. I feel that this is something I should qualify hastily, i.e., in less time than it takes someone to load a gun and discover my address. I therefore urge you to understand that I’m not about to complain that the fold-down beds in business class don’t quite accommodate all six feet of me (they do), or that staying, at someone else’s expense, in hotel suites with bathrooms bigger than your entire apartment isn’t marvellous (it is). The travel part of travel writing is a doddle. It’s the writing that’s tricky.

  I’m talking specifically about what has come to be understood as travel writing as you generally see—or, I’m willing to bet, far more often ignore—in the travel sections of newspapers and magazines. To an even greater degree than other segments of an increasingly craven and uncritical mainstream media, these sections are hopelessly beholden to the idea that nothing that appears in their pages must be affronting or confronting to anybody whose eyes may happen to rest upon them, and especially not to their advertisers (who are, almost invariably, the people who actually pay for the writers’ travel). So these outlets are, with a few honourable exceptions, difficult to write for on two counts. First, they’re rarely willing to let you go anywhere interesting. Second, they won’t let you say anything interesting about the dull places to which they are prepared to send you.

  This observation is like everything else in this book, rooted in a strictly personal preference—it may well be that millions of people enjoy consuming eye-glazing advertising copy phoned in by some junketing hack idly rearranging the lexicon of travel section clichés (“land of contrasts,” and so forth). Such a revelation would, I confess, make no less sense to me than the way that millions of people choose to spend their own holidays—which is to spend them in the sort of places people take holidays. There is no body of people, not even the religiously devout or jazz fans, that baffle and boggle me more than the travelling public. I simply don’t understand why they go the places they go—which is to say, the places everybody else has been already. And I don’t understand why they do the things they do when they get to them—i.e., the things everybody else does. The defining absurdity of modern mass tourism is the crowd perpetually gathered in the Louvre, beneath the Mona Lisa, taking pictures of it. Assuming that few if any of these people are commendably ambitious art thieves, what are they doing with these photographs? How does that conversation proceed when they show their snaps around back home? “And that’s the Mona Lisa.” “Really? Is that what it looks like? I’ll be damned.”

  This should not be construed as the lofty railings of a misanthropic snob with a rampaging ego who perceives himself as a capital-T Traveller as opposed to a mere tourist. I mean, I am a misanthropic snob with a rampaging ego, but I’m perfectly happy to acknowledge that, when I’m working abroad, I’m really just a tourist with a press card and a certain implicit license to ask people annoying questions and generally get in the way. I also appreciate—that is, am frequently briskly reminded by friends who work for a living—that if your professional life is an arduous and regimented one, then the traditional holiday of sunbaked idleness punctuated by various ritualised merriments provides welcome opportunity to lift weary eyes to a view other than the grindstone. The problem is that the vista isn’t going to be all that interesting, and certainly not surprising.

  Smart-aleck travel writers making fun of travellers is a tradition dating back to the 1869 publication of Mark Twain’s Innocents Abroad, his account of touring Europe and the Holy Land with a gaggle of American pilgrims. It’s a matchlessly funny book, but back then there actually was good reason to visit the obvious places, and see the obvious stuff. The tourist’s world was still substantially mysterious, rather than a checklist of landmarks that look like the pictures (Stonehenge, if you hadn’t seen a thousand images of it, would be impressive and moving; now, it’s just smaller than you imagined). Most importantly, a century or more ago, such a trip would have been an adventure, a struggle, an accomplishment—three elements key to any worthwhile enterprise and three things missing from a sorry percentage of the modern jobs from which the modern tourist vacations.

  Nobody needs to spend further time on a palm-fronded Balinese beach. Not one of the six billion human beings presently breathing wants to see another photograph of the Coliseum. Not even your closest friends and family—or, I reckon, you—are interested in a yarn about Disneyland, or the Tower of London, or the Taj Mahal. So I guess the travel feature that follows is a kind of plea to travellers, and to travel editors, to recognise that the world is bigger place than they might think, and that almost all of it is startling, fascinating and wonderful (apart, perhaps, from Lunderskov, Denmark, where in September 2008 a local innkeeper answered my enquiry as regards what a visiting reporter might do on his afternoon off by mournfully intoning, “We have a pond.”). Even—or, perhaps, especially—when you decide to try taking a holiday in pretty much the last place anybody would.

  A DOSIMETER IS a grey, rectangular device about the size of an early-90s mobile phone. On its LCD screen, numbers flicker. These measure the radiation to which the dosimeter is being exposed. Yuri, our guide, explains what the number means in merciless technical detail, but I don’t really take it in. This is partly because I never really take in any technical detail, but mostly because the one technical detail I have taken in is concerning me a bit. Yuri has told me that in areas of normal background radiation, like any reasonably-sized city, the display on his beeping, whirring dosimeter would read 0.014. Maybe a bit more, maybe a bit less, but 0.014 or thereabouts.

  While Yuri has been explaining this, I’ve been watching the numbers on the device in his hand climb past 0.014—quite a way past 0.014. I’ve watched them clear 0.020, 0.050, 0.100, and then carry on, like a space shuttle’s speedometer at take-off: 0.200, 0.300, 0.400. At about 0.500 I start holding my breath, which I exhale at 0.700 when I admit to myself that holding my breath isn’t going to make much difference. Up past 0.800 the display goes, flickers past 0.900 and then settles at 0.880: about sixty times normal background radiation.

  “They’re called microroentgens,” says Yuri, as I write it down. “M-I-C-R-O-R-O-E-N-T-G-E-N-S. About 880. No, hang on, 900. Something like that. Don’t worry. It won’t do you any harm.”

  About 200 metres away stands what must be the least visited famous building in the world, the most ostracised member of the fraternity of distinguished landmarks, the one edifice doomed never to dine at the cool buildings’ table with the Sydney Opera House and the Taj Mahal: the giant grey sarcophagus that shrouds Reactor No. 4 of the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Station, which exploded in the small hours of April 26, 1986, belching a colossal cloud of radioactive d
ust across Europe and wreaking damage which may not be comprehended for centuries. Photographer James Reeve and I have come to redress the balance. As we wave the dosimeter about in search of more spectacular readings, we’re doing the equivalent of posing goofily in front of the Coliseum, or buying postcards of the Eiffel Tower.

  We’re tourists.

  THE CHERNOBYL TOURIST business is the least developed part of Ukraine’s undeveloped tourist business. There are no hotels inside Chernobyl’s Exclusion Zone, the 4,300 square kilometres around the ruined plant, blocked off by military checkpoints. The authorities don’t want anyone wandering around the Zone unsupervised, so Chernobyl is strictly a day trip from Ukraine’s capital, Kiev, a two-hour drive to the south. You book through one of the companies in Kiev that organise the excursions. They fix the paperwork necessary to enter the Zone and provide a car, driver and guide. There are no restaurants in the Zone, either, though lunch is part of the deal (the food, you are solemnly assured, is trucked in from a very long way away). And neither has any provision been made for people who might wish to purchase souvenirs. A shame, as the possibilities are spectacular: glow-in-the-dark fridge magnets, gloves with six fingers on each hand, t-shirts saying “I visited Reactor No. 4 and all I got was sixty times the normal background radiation.”

  Our driver, Sergei, forty-seven, knows the Zone well. In the 1980s, he was a driver for Soviet news agency Tass, and he took reporters into Chernobyl after the accident. Later, he ferried the engineers who built the sarcophagus over the simmering reactor. After Sergei negotiates the checkpoint at Dytyatky, which marks the edge of the Zone, the most immediately surprising thing about the Exclusion Zone is how unexclusive it is. This is no incandescent moonscape bereft of life but for the occasional five-armed zombie. There are thick forests of fir and birch and many, many animals: deer, birds, stray dogs and cats.