I read the “No, 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency” books by Alexander McCall Smith which the beloved put me on to (in fact I’ve just recently finished reading the latest paperback release) which manage in their own delightfully simple way to paint a picture of Botswana that is so delightful in comparison to most of what you hear about African nations. I’ve known people go off and live their entire adult lifetimes in Kenya and Zambia, but still, my ‘worry’ radar will start to ping if I ever contemplate going there myself. In my head, despite all the travel documentaries I’ve seen and the fact that I’ve actually stood on that continent myself, the whole notion of ‘Africa’ seems just a little bit scary. Why, for example, does my brain instantly think ‘murder capital of the world – best avoid’ whenever Johannesburg is mentioned and despite the fact that I’ve known people who quite happily head there as often as they have the option to…?
Strangely enough, before I read any of those books, I’d assumed from the book jacket designs that they were all set in India which probably proves something or other that’s not very impressive about my recognition skills when it comes to cultural symbols and iconography. This is probably why I need to travel more, and I need to accept that most places are fine as long as you follow the advice you’re given, read up on a place well in advance and avoid the designated ‘hot-spots’. Maybe another part of the problem is that we tend to prefer to tell our ‘horror stories’ to people rather than dwelling upon how lovely a place is. Maybe we all fear, deep down, that that’s just too dull a tale to tell, and we live in a culture where one of the things we most fear is to be considered ‘boring’ (these musings excepted, of course…).
However, you tend to hear a lot about how ‘horrible’ all kinds of destinations can be from returning holidaymakers despite having found the place delightful yourself. Long ago when former Yugoslavia was still Yugoslavia I worked with someone who returned from there with nothing good to say about the place, yet our family holidays spent there when I was little more than an ankle-biter were fine and lovely (although I did misplace a jacket in Dubrovnik once upon a long ago, something that still irks me…) and it was with a heavy heart that I listened to the news when Yugoslavia went into meltdown during the 1990s, and I was dreadfully upset when I heard about what was happening in and indeed to Dubrovnik at the height of the conflict there. Somehow whenever you visit somewhere you leave a piece of yourself there, and equally you bring a part of it back with you, so there always seems to be some connection with a place once you’ve walked there in your own shoes, I find.
But, of course, no matter what you might discover about a place, and no matter what may happen there to bring it into the media spotlight (and let’s face it, more often than not it’s not for the best of reasons on the whole…), so many people live perfectly ordinary uneventful lives in all of these places and are proud to call them home and look back on their childhoods and their sense of place with as much nostalgic affection as you are I have to the streets that we grew up in, despite how grey, dismal and unimpressive they might appear to the impartial observer.
Of course some people look back at where they grew up and think “I couldn’t wait to get out of there…” but if they actually go there, they are very quickly telling you how it’s changed and who used to live where which probably just means that this fondness for a sense of having once belonged ‘somewhere’ is more deeply ingrained than many of us choose to think, and we can still mourn the loss of those silly little icons of our own past that probably mean nothing at all to anyone else, when a familiar building or street is torn down.
If you believed what you see in American TV dramas, you’d probably never want to go anywhere near the USA, but I’ve generally been fine whenever I’ve gone there, apart from the occasional incident that I put down to my own shortcomings, and I’ve hardly seen any guns at all (although my idea of what New York might be like is a bit scary…). I do, however, find the very idea of being in New York terrifying, quite frankly, although I’ve known people who’ve been and thoroughly enjoyed it. I fear that if I did ever book that hotel just off Times Square that I’ve considered every so often, I might well be just too terrified to leave it. That’s just me, I suppose. I think I’d always prefer a knowledgeable local guide to show me the ropes before I head out on my own, but then I’d bet you’d find very few Americans who could understand that you might feel safer spending a week in South Korea rather than a week in their own great nation.
Did I not once hear that more than 60% of Americans don’t even hold a passport…? I can actually believe that if this story I once heard is true. A former colleague of mine was working in Las Vegas and had a conversation with a guy about the Eiffel Tower in Paris, and the guy said “We’ve got that, here in Vegas”, and had much the same response to mentions of various other European landmarks that followed. The replicas were, in his opinion, just as good, if not better than the originals and he had no intention of going to see those when all he wanted to see were the versions which he could see in Vegas. Interestingly, I know of a British couple who flew to a Las Vegas hotel to get married because it has a replica of Venice in one of the hotels, and were frankly surprised when someone suggested that they could have flown to, er, Venice instead.
The televisual image that America presents to the world is of disaster-prone cities where you daren’t venture out on the streets, even in broad daylight for fear of shooting or worse, or a countryside strewn with freakish ‘small-town’ communities full of psychopaths and weirdos who want to inflict any kind of humiliations on any passing stranger who might fall into their clutches. Either that or homogenised corporate town where no-one is allowed to step out of line or be the slightest bit nonconformist, full of teenage sex, drugs and sports obsessive townsfolk who are continually bursting into song or striving to grasp the elusive American dream. I suspect that the truth is nothing like most of these things, and wonder whether the American Tourism Bureau shouldn’t have a quiet word in the ears of the Networks…
Mind you, and to be perfectly fair, London can be a place that you either think of as being the greatest city on earth or a dreadful place that you’d have to be dragged kicking and screaming to, and I’m sure this is not helped by recent images from those mean streets of rioting and looting. Many Londoners fail to understand how you might think this if you mention it to them. “How could you not want to live there?” they will ask, their eyes wide open in that horror-struck metropolitan dinner-party manner they have whenever you mention a thought that is considered ‘unfashionable’.
Then there are the emigrants to Australia who have left these shores full of hopes and dreams and returned within three years having truly hated the place. I spent eight years of my life living in an area of Manchester that was always considered by people I talked to as being ‘a bit rough’ but I survived it and look back on it with a certain amount of affection. Yes there was an above average level of crime, but you can get robbed pretty much everywhere if you’re not careful.
One of the great pleasures in my life is listening to test match cricket from all around the world, and if I was ever lucky enough to have the means to do so (very unlikely…) I would follow the tours around as much as I could, but I’ve always thought that I might be selective about which of the tours I went on, thinking that I’d maybe prefer to follow the New Zealand, Australian and West Indies tours in preference to the perception of how chaotic it might be to try and follow those in India or Sri Lanka. This is, of course, my own fear that is speaking to me because our “cricket correspondents’ seldom have anything bad to say about any of the countries they visit, and in fact some go as far as to say that any true ‘fan’ of the sport should really experience Cricket in India at least once in their lives, so maybe I’m wrong.
The problem is, I’m never very good if I feel out of my depth or out of control, as I suspect I might in these places. Even now I still wonder how I managed to cope with the fascinating organised bedlam (as I saw it) of Egypt as, if I’m being totally honest, I’m the sort of scared traveller who once had a kind of cultural ‘panic attack’ in a hotel in California and that was despite having been there before and having no language barrier to worry about. I put it down to having just flown in, but when even a country’s light switches or urinals can cause confusion to the unwary, what hope is there for any of us?
 |
| Looking at things another way... |
Most places are home to someone, and most places hold fond memories, too. A place that can look frankly terrifying to an outsider has its own rules and internal logic that works quite happily for the people who live their lives there. After all, even Paul Simon’s love letter to New York contains the line “Looking down on Central Park, where they say you should not wander after dark…” and I guess that home is wherever you are living right now, or a place where you once did, and should be place where you feel safest, and, ultimately, it doesn’t really matter what anyone else might think of it.
No comments:
Post a Comment