I made this little vid to demonstrate the exoticism of international business travel.
Posts Tagged ‘Travel
08
Mar
09
A Room With A View – Rome
I have been to Cologne this week. Flew from Gatwick. God how I detest British airports! The Blair/Brown years have morphed every public environment into a disgusting shopping mall. You sit there, trapped, waiting for them to tell you which gate to go to while numerous shops play disparate music at you. What happened to the ideas of a departure lounge? The bread head bastards at BAA realised this was an ideal place to trap the public and flog them crap. Make the environment so awful and unendurable that you are forced to traipse around and eventually relent and buy some piece of crap.
Only at that last minute will the bastards announce the gate and you are allowed to escape and sit in some squalid glass box before being herded into the aircraft.
I frequently travel, mostly throughout Europe, and fairly often further a field and I can attest that British airports are the most disgusting I have ever endured.
And let me add that this compairson includes Lagos, Port Harcourt and Charles de Gaulle.
08
Mar
08
Tourism
We used to call it tourism but we’re all too pompous to admit to this these days. Instead we go “travelling”. We go to the other side of the earth and drink Heineken and eat McDonalds.
I’ve written on this before. The upshot is that the other side of the earth looks like England and England looks like a bus park.
This image sums it up.
18
Feb
08
Pizza in the void?
I hear that China Mobile have set up a transmission station on Mount Everest to make it possible for climbers to make calls. How convenient.
When mobile phones first emerged in the 80s I predicated that one day you would be able to stand on an isolated beach anywhere in the world and make a phone call. Well it seems it’s now possible.
However, along with the advance of communications technology the ability to travel has become more available. This sounds great. It means we can all see the world. Not only that, we can call home and say “I’m on a bus travelling along Sukhumvit Road” or “I’m on this beach and I’ve just had my fifth tequila slammer”. Now the Chinese have let us say “I’m standing on top of Mount Everest…..what?…..yeh, yeh, it’s bloody cold”.
I guess what I regret about this is that it homogenises the world. The last time I visited Ko Samui I was sitting down with a bunch of Englishmen within hours eating a mixed grill.
The other downside is, of course, green house gas emissions. Our politicians are afraid to increase the cost of travel as they believe it would be unpopular. Not with me. If I am to travel half way around the world to visit a different culture then I do not want to have the option of a mixed grills and I also believe that I should be willing to pay for that privilege; for it is a privilege not a right. I should be willing to pay with my money and my effort.
Of course one can argue that I can afford to pay more than some. Well at the moment I may have the money but I don’t have the time. When I was younger I had less money and more time.
It is worth remembering that cheap international travel not only destroys remote cultures it destroys local culture too. Whenever I walk along the Embankment in London I am vaguely irritated that my view of the river is obstructed by a wall of enormous tour buses.
We destroy our environment to build massive airports, then destroy the environment of our destination by our mass presence. On a recent visit to Bangkok I stayed just off Rama IV and was told that I must visit the shops and restaurants at Lumphini Park. I did.
I can’t say it’s horrible. It was very good. Excellent food and lots of shops and stalls selling clothes and whatnot at good prices. But this is not Thailand anymore than Blue Water is England.
The travel industry panders to our laziness. It allows arm chair travellers to really travel and take their arm chair with them. I am as guilty as everyone else of course.
However a few times when I have been travelling I have actually felt that I had personally achieved something. Probably the best was while working in Nigeria. I took a car and a driver and travelled from Port Harcourt north to explore. Myself and Victor, my driver, ate boiled eggs and peanuts every morning for breakfast while hurtling along at break neck speeds with the windows wide open. Victor cracking the eggs on his forehead.
In the West we are taught to be cautious of everything. We hide behind our TV screens and tour buses and forget that the world existed before accident insurance and emergency services.
My car was an old Peugeot 303. The driver noticed the knocking noise first. We stopped near some traditional round thatched huts. A young man took a look at the engine and drew the dip stick through his fingers. He rubbed his oily fingers together and felt swarf. We stopped at the next town with a “mechanics village” and I had the engine completely stripped down and rebuilt. Three days later we went on our way.
I negotiated countless check points and was held by police in Abuja for driving the wrong way down a one way street.
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- Northern Nigeria
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- Benue State, Nigeria, 1997
No gorgeous beaches, no tourist tat and no fancy food. But I did feel I was alive.
I remember hiring a little motor bike in Thailand and touring around. One Englishman told me he would not do this as he had no insurance.
Modern technology enables an Englishman to be anywhere on the face of the earth in around 72 hours. I think we should ask ourselves: Is there anywhere in the world that actually needs an Englishman delivered in 72 hours?
Is Hastings an option?
Tags: a city, a village, “When I was in Aden”, “When I was in Bahrain”, big city, brighton, Brightonians, busy, Cafe, Churchill, dissatisfied, Ditchling BEacon, full of tourists, Hastings, Hastings is an option, interesting passages and back streets, london, restaurant, sartorial inelegance, small town, the curse of the ex patriot, the curse of the traveller, The Isle of Man, too expensive, Travel, travelled, trendy, Union Jacks, well travelled, When I
Yesterday I drove over to Hastings stopping off at Bexhill on the way. The gossip in Brighton is often that Hastings is an option. A sort of cross between how Brighton is supposed to be and a fall back position. Brightonians argue through the ideas that Brighton has become too expensive, trendy, busy, full of tourists….(take your pick) and that Hastings may be an option.
War Cafe
Hastings has excellent architecture, lots of interesting passages and back streets and, indeed, it seems that the alternative set may be moving in if one judges alternative by cowboy hats, chopper trikes, idiosyncratic shops and sartorial inelegance – not that I decry such inelegance; on occasion I admire it.
We ate in a nice little restaurant which was perhaps a tad too expensive. (£18 for a steak – in Hastings?! With my reputation?!) though the fish was good value and the ambiance excellent. Later we had coffee in a quaint though ghastly little sea front cafe which appeared to have been decorated by some kind of second world was appreciation society. Churchill and Union Jacks everywhere.
approaching Ditchling Beacon
As we drove back Ditchling Beacon looked very impressive on the horizon.
Any discussion regarding relocating to Hastings usually ends with the observation that there is no work there and the rail and road connections are not good. That, then, usually is the end of the matter. However, perhaps there is another reason. On arriving back in Brighton we drove down Grand Avenue and the city felt busy and switched on. It was dark and the lights beckoned us to the pubs. To be sure, Hastings, is a nice little town but it is just that. A little town. One gets the feeling that after frequenting the gaggle of little shops and pubs downtown for a year or so one might feel a little constricted. It lacks the anonymity of a city. As Brighton does to some extend compared to London. This is not necessarily a bad thing but it is, perhaps, difficult when one is not used to it.
Of course, this is not the end of the debate. With me, it is rather like my yen to emigrate to America or move back to London. A constant theme which will, most likely, rattle around my head until the day I die.
It is the curse of those who have travelled and lived in different places to always feel dissatisfied as everywhere will lack something from somewhere else. A city will feel too big or a village too small. Africa will feel too foreign while England too mundane. Many years ago I attended The Isle of Man TT motorbike racing and we did some pubbing with the locals. They told us that The Island full of retired ex-pats who the locals term “When I’s” because they preface most statements by the words “When I” - As in “When I was in Bahrain” or “When I was in Aden”.
A friend is about to go to AntArctica to live for a few months. When he returns, will he yearn for the interminable bitter cold? Perhaps not but he’s bound to miss something.