Today's essay : What Travel Has Taught Me
Lists: Overrated and Underrated Holiday Destinations


See also:

My London blog (photos and ramblings):
www.williamruby.blogspot.co.uk

My novel, Kindness is a City:

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Kindness-is-a-City-ebook/dp/B009N0DCY4/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1359279700&sr=8-1

LATEST ESSAY:

What Travel Has Taught Me

In childhood

That you are supposed to be scared of nature. I got lost in a pine forest near our caravan site at Lowther in Cumbria. It was evening, darkening. I was about nine. The trees got taller as I wandered, then taller still. They were threatening; looming and sinister. They didn’t want me to be there. When I found my way out of the forest I was thrilled: by my escape and by the cold reality of the natural world. That day, I learnt to respect it

That some of the best fun is illicit. My father and brothers fished perch from Coniston Water for countless hours one day. Nobody stopped them; we knew we shouldn’t have been there. The multi-coloured fish were livid and jewelled in the late afternoon light. I looked out at the lake and tried to imagine a blue machine arcing to its doom.

That some of the people you meet briefly are incredible. On St Michael’s Mount in Cornwall was the most beautiful girl I had ever seen. I was near to her for maybe an hour; like me, she was with her parents, tourists. She knew she was lovely and she knew that I was transfixed by her. Then she was gone. Now I have no idea even what she looked like.

In youth

That if you are a young European student and you go into a Native American reservation bar in Phoenix, Arizona, and get into conversation with middle-aged prostitutes who want to introduce you to their ‘daughters’ back at trailer parks outside the city, then you’re asking for trouble. Likewise if you take a short cut through the roughest neighbourhood in New Orleans to save a bit of time. And hang around New York’s Port Authority bus terminal too long back in 1987. Oh, and sit next to a guy with a kitchen knife in the back pocket of his jeans on a Greyhound bus heading to Baltimore, particularly if he is foaming at the mouth.

That people of other nationalities will infer certain things about you simply because you are English. The little Spaniard beach attendant at Lloret de Mar had a quite obviously set view when he accused you of inventing Concord and living in Buckingham Palace but being totally unable to put up a ‘fucking umbrella’.

That people doing menial jobs in the tourist industry do not have to like you. I only told the young Algarve waiter that one of the legs of our table was too short. He thought I meant one of his legs. The tight-lipped sarcasm and long-suffering I saw in his subservient smile has been memorable to me ever since.

That you need to sometimes just stand and stare. You’ve taken a group of your pupils to Crans Montana in the Switzerland, and are excited about skiing for the first time. You realise that you aren’t going to be much good at it and you sulk a little (you are twenty-five). You begin to wish you hadn’t agreed to come but then discover an incredible thing: the snow-capped Alps in April sun: Monte Rosa, the Matterhorn, and the Mont Blanc Massif. You have seen wonderful sights since, but nothing better.

That landscape has a character that has to be learnt. Endless ambulation along the paths and lanes of Lancashire’s Hodder Valley and Derbyshire’s Manifold Valley over many years of helping teenagers earn Duke of Edinburgh expedition awards has lent an appreciation of nuance, detail, the love of familiar things that the casual observer might find mundane. Still today, I have a stronger feeling for farming landscapes than I do for wildernesses. Wildernesses are to be admired, feared, left to their own sometimes ferocious devices. Farming landscapes can be wild places still, but are clipped and neatened by the loving hand of man.

That were Scottish midges ten or twenty times their natural size, they would rule the earth.

That you truly can’t understand a man until you’ve walked a mile in his shoes, even if it is on holiday. The paleness of my skin drew attention in Kenya on more than one occasion. I was studied unceremoniously, and I felt the eyes upon me. Briefly I was that proverbial ‘Man Who Is Everywhere’, abused on the street in Nairobi by men who would never know me. When my shorts came off in the Indian Ocean surf (an accident!) at Mombasa and those African mothers covered their children’s eyes, I could surely be forgiven for detecting that they may have been sparing their offspring the offence of my colour, along with obvious other things.

That you will delight in the unexpected. The mountains of central Turkey were at least a match for any of its glorious coastline. The fact that we weren’t supposed to have seen them this close was an added bonus. We will gloss over the standard of our minibus driver’s road skills; indeed, all of the travel arrangements. Suffice it to say: fuck me.

In relative maturity

That food enjoyed on holiday will become increasingly important to you. Those pasteis de nata delighted you in Lisbon, and then that steak in Calgary was the best you ever tasted. You survived (just!) the eating nightmare that is Cuba, only to soon after discover foodie heaven in Madrid through the ornate doors of the Mercado San Miguel. Here, for example, is to be found lots and lots and lots of pata negra, God’s ultimate gastronomic gift to Man, courtesy of the humble acorn and some fat black pigs. Travel, eat, live.

That you will tap more and more into atmosphere rather than spectacle. The melancholy of the still bullet-ridden Jewish ghetto in Budapest is counterpoint to good-natured Euro-centric love-ins to be had in Hamburg pubs during World Cup matches. So too the regret so keenly felt in autumnal Krakow when contrasted to sun-drenched Dubrovnik cocktail bars; war touched both of these places, but the former wants to bottle the awful memories that the latter seems to wants to let go.

That you will search for and keep unusual souvenirs of your travels: a shiny white cobblestone from a Lisbon street, a paprika-stained restaurant flier from Hungary, the cork from a bottle of 1999 vintage Penfolds Grange from Australia, a very poor sketch of oneself on a paper napkin, by a beach urchin in Hawaii. You look like Harold Lloyd in it. You will keep all of these things in a little box of memories.

That you will also start to revert to a form of childhood on your travels, revelling in occasional non-conformity and mischief. This might include getting yelled out for touching the marbles of the Parthenon or getting yelled at for touching the apron of the pitch at Real Madrid’s sacred Bernabéu . It may even manifest as a nudge from a knee into the small of the back of a particularly brattish and noisy American child on a cruise ship heading to Athens (or was it Split?), particularly if his parents are not watching and it means he ends up face-first in his own ice cream.

That you will begin to realise that time will win and you won’t get to see everything after all. So you will plan your travel destinations even more assiduously, anticipate your travel with a keenness that can still surprise you, savour its significant moments all the more calculatedly.

And finally………

That you may discover relatively late in life that travelling somewhere simple and enchanting (say, the English Lake District in early spring, with snow still dusting the fells and a crisp light illuminating all its beauty) is one of the greatest pleasures that good fortune and opportunity can bestow, particularly if love has travelled with you to that place, and these pleasures are shared.

Latest Lists

Overrated Holiday Destinations

Hawaii
Ibiza
Barcelona
Australia
Thailand
Cape Town
Vegas
Florida
Amsterdam
Dubai


Underrated Holiday destinations

Lisbon
Lanzarote
Marseille
Non-coastal Turkey
Vancouver
Northumberland
Bruges
Monetenegro
Madrid
Winchester