Here and There (11 page)

And that's the point. There is, in the pronunciation game, an implied league table of cultures, some of whom are worth imitating, and some who frankly aren't. So the old European countries get the nod of acceptance, and the developing world gets the mispronunciation of a purposeful snub. The kernel of what bothers me about this is that I suspect it's a peculiarly Anglo-Saxon affliction. Although I don't speak any other language well enough to know, I suspect that the French don't talk of Londres with a cockney twang, and Italians aren't referring to Birmingham by talking down their noses.

This geopolitical snobbery is just ours alone, and I'm collectively embarrassed. I expect Australians might wonder if they've made it into the English first division of Pommy mispronunciation. Well, funnily enough, I've recently noticed that both ‘Sydney' and ‘Melbourne' are being pronounced with a touch of open Aussie argot, but it's done with a sort of knowing ironic comedy, in the way people sometimes refer to ‘Noo Yawk' and ‘El Ay'. Americans, of course, are immune to all this because they pronounce everything wrong with gusto and utter certainty, and they should never ever be corrected. Imagining that Wooster sauce is actually pronounced ‘Worcestershire' because that's what's written on the label is their prerogative. Far better and more honest to pronounce things in a way that suits your tongue than to pretend you have someone else's.

I once saw a chap sing the famous Fred Astaire song, ‘Let's Call the Whole Thing Off'. He'd never heard anyone else sing it, so he read the words from the sheet music, and falteringly started, ‘You say tomato, I say tomato. You say potato, I say potato. Tomato, tomato. Potato, potato' – I'm sorry, but what are you all laughing at? I don't think this is funny at all.

Big, bold Budapest

This Hungarian city has
historically played second
fiddle to Vienna, but Budapest
has survived the misbegotten
adventure of empire, and
several wars, in better shape.

There is a rough old hitchhikers' rule of hitchhikers' thumb that if you want to get a really authentic feel for a country, go to the second city. I call it the Avis equation: they try harder. Second cities are always a bit chippy. Quick to take offence, bigger show-offs, faster to adopt new things, exploit the moment. Think Glasgow and Edinburgh, Milan and Rome, Siena and Florence, Bombay and New Delhi, Melbourne and Sydney, San Francisco and Los Angeles, Rio and São Paulo. It doesn't work everywhere. Birmingham is not the funky boutique alternative to London. There is no French city that comes close to Paris as a destination.

I just got back from a metropolis that has the biggest and most engaging case of Avis-itis in the world, Budapest. It started off as two cities separated by one-upmanship and the Danube. Buda is quiet, residential and ornamental. Pest is paprika, musical and monumental. You're probably trying to think what Hungary's first city is if Budapest is the second. Well, stop. Budapest is the only city in Hungary. There is another one called Szeged down on the Serbian border, but by all accounts it's not worth the bus fare. Budapest was the second city not of a country but of an empire. The Habsburg Empire. They called it the Austro-Hungarian Empire, but that was a bit like Pooh and Piglet. The Hungarians got a severe dose of sibling rivalry. Of all the people in the world, the ones you really don't want to be patronised by in a confined space are the Austrians. The Austrians themselves suffered from being thought of as second-rate Germans and third-rate Italians.

Budapest did the thing that insecure siblings do to draw attention to themselves. They built bigger and bolder, dressed up brighter and fancier and played longer and louder. The first thing you notice about Budapest is the parliament. It is vast, and built in the Neo-Gothic style. The architect went to London to look at the Houses of Parliament for inspiration, and then thought, yes, they're a start. We can do all of that, and add a dome. If this is the mother of parliaments, then we'll build the daddy. It is particularly impressive considering Hungary hadn't governed itself for 400 years. Chucking up a great Gothic pile like this is an act of stirring optimism or ridiculous play-acting. The city boasts some of the most attractive Baroque and Neo-Classical streets dotted with Art Nouveau exhibitionism.

And now that all the bombast and bluster and vanity and hubris of empire is gone, and Austria and Hungary have both been shorn and stripped by two hot wars and a cold one, they have both emerged straightened and convoluted, obtuse leftover nations that seem to have come through a long course of therapy. Austria is now non-aligned but seems more neutered than neutral. It's Hungary that has come through the misbegotten adventure of empire in better shape. Smaller and poorer, but there's a classy feel of hip cynicism and sophisticated expectation here. Vienna lives on nostalgia, politeness and mad dreams, but Budapest has that second-city ability to adapt, to exploit the new. It wears the past, which is almost all bloody bad, with an elegant, rueful grace. Vienna wears it like a shroud.

I wasn't expecting much from Budapest. Most people I asked said it was grey, cold, miserable and to eat before I went. Admittedly most of the people I asked were Viennese. I was lucky with the weather. It was bright and chilly, perfect for walking city streets. The cafés offer blankets so that you can sit outside till the last possible moment. I found excellent food. There is a beautiful central market inspired by Eiffel's engineers, a warehouse of glass and girders. Inside there is a nostril-humping collation of pickles, preserves, paprika and pastries. Hungary is a long way from any coast, and it's mostly a blasted steppe, so it's free from fish or green vegetables, which is such a relief. You can concentrate on the veal stew, the sour cream, the dumplings, the plums and cinnamon.

The city has a deep, abiding rhythm. Gypsy violinists lurk wherever two tables are gathered. The ancient syncopated extortionists of Middle Europe, they stalk the alleys of restaurants and cafés with the insouciant mission of mafia hit-men. I watched one large, gold-incisored grinning fiddler intimidate a Japanese tourist with lightning bow work flicked past the poor man's head like a samurai sword. His victim reached into his pocket and handed over his wallet. The violinist picked out three or four of the juiciest notes and bowed before shimmering off like a hungry shark, trailing Mendelssohn behind him.

I went to an afternoon concert in an Art Nouveau hall where Liszt had once played. The audience was immensely knowledgeable. There is a distinct pleasure in sharing music with people who know a lot more about it than you do. The orchestra knows it, they try harder and the conductor appreciates the applause more. And in the interval, they all trooped out and ate proper tiny opera sandwiches of smoked pig and hard cheese with gherkins and cocktail onions. I noticed that Joe Cocker was playing next month.

I'm haunted by Budapest now, its beauty, its sense of itself. Its café life, the music and the light on the Danube. In between Vienna and Budapest is Bratislava, the capital of Slovakia. It was closed. That's not a joke. Really, it was closed. I was there for two days, and everything I wanted to see, from the Jewish Museum to the Hall of Mirrors where the treaty after the Battle of Austerlitz was signed, to the UFO Restaurant, a hideous communist manifestation that hovers over the ugliest bridge in the world, everything was closed. It was caught in that malaise of disconnected inertia that's so often the legacy of communist countries. Places that sit and wait for someone to bulldoze them or give them a doughnut.

Bratislava has not got many tourists, but it does get the odd English stag party. My guide said that Slovakians tried to ignore them. ‘The English are the worst. There was a bad incident. An Englishman masturbated into the fountain in the main square, in front of everybody.' Really? How awful. But I sort of know where he was coming from. You have to make your own entertainment in Bratislava, and hats off for managing to raise that much excitement.

Excess baggage

When it comes to travel, you are
what you carry, or – more tellingly
– what you leave behind.

One of the great mysteries of a traveller's life is why is it that the amount of luggage carried is in inverse proportion to the net worth of the traveller. The richest people travel with the least. The first-class queue is made up of passengers holding nothing more than a thin watch. Business, they'll be holding one of those hybrid cabin bags with a telescopic handle and detachable computer satchel.

Tourist is made up of families and students shoving vast suitcases, like slaves building a Samsonite pyramid. The most chaotic baggage hall I ever arrived at was Islamabad. The carousel was a revolving jumble sale, taller than a man. The wait and the exhaustion, the sitting in the frozen dark to get halfway around the world, had made most of the luggage give up the effort at being functional – it split its zips, broke straps, popped locks and vomited, eviscerated its contents into the steamy Pakistani afternoon. There were cooking pots and packets of spices and baby milk. Slithering intestines of wire that went with collapsed cardboard boxes and cheap electronics. Hair rollers, Teasmades, music centres and microwaves. There were the disembowelled paper parcels of meat. A collection of bar stools. Bundles of bras and big knickers. Children's nylon bedtime animals. All spinning past a crowd of shrieking, shoving Pakistanis who were finally home after journeys of tortuous inconvenience.

In the most basic markets in Africa, there is always a stall selling large plastic carrier bags. They come in either blue or green tartan and look as if they're made of recycled twine. I work with a photographer who calls them refugee Vuitton. You see them in every airport in the world slumped in corners, lost and separated, often impounded for the 101 infractions that are put there to stop the poor from being poor anywhere but at home. These plastic cases more than anything else mark them out as the globe's slowest, most hopeful and fearful journeyers.

The answer to the conundrum, ‘why do the rich have least and the poor most', is that the rich travel with nothing because they own everything. The poor travel with everything because that's all they own. The rich man gets what he needs at the other end. The poor leave nothing behind.

I obsess about luggage, about bags and rucksacks, money belts and secret pockets, steamer trunks and water-tight compartments, camping equipment. When my flight is delayed and I have to wait four hours, I while away the time designing luggage in my head. In fact, I often try to imagine my head as luggage and wonder if I can pack it any more efficiently and what I'd leave behind if it didn't fit in the overhead locker. Did you really need to take detailed knowledge of a Peninsular war campaign and how to skin and joint a rabbit to Malaysia? And you only need one anecdote about prostitutes and diarrhoea.

I collect bags and smuggle them home. I have to hide them. Usually I hide them in other bags. I have an irrational fear of being separated from my bag in transit. I only carry hand luggage. Hand luggage is in an endless Darwinian war of attrition with people who man aeroplanes. It's a fight between passengers who want to carry as much as possible and an airline who wants to put as much as possible in the lost luggage pile at Schiphol.

I travel with another photographer who is equally exacting about packing. Most photographers are, because their kit is so delicate, provocative and plainly valuable. Once on a long flight of excruciating boredom we were whiling away the hours doing shadow packing and he said you've got to think outside the box. What do you mean? Well, what is a suitcase but a box. Think outside it. Outside it? It's laundry. Outside the box it's dirty washing. No, he said. What would you call a case with arms and a belt? You'd call it a coat. How many coats are you allowed to take onboard? I don't think there's a limit on coats. Exactly. Instead of thinking about small cases, we should consider bigger pockets. I reckon I could pack everything I need into a purpose-built coat.

He had a point. But wouldn't you mind being intimately and thoroughly searched by every customs officer in every flea-bitten airport we stop at? Because walking through customs wearing a lumpy duvet like the hunchback drug smuggler of Amsterdam may save you 20 minutes waiting by the carousel but it'll add an hour whilst rough men examine your secret places with a Maglite. But it's not a bad idea.

I have one bag that has been to pretty much every continent with me. It's leather, about the size of two rugby balls. It has a zip and handle and nothing clever or designed inside it. One thing you want to avoid in cases are designated or pre-assigned pockets and flaps, compartments. Think of a bag like a body and the stuff in it like organs. They keep themselves in place. I could travel indefinitely out of this bag. It's like Noah's bag – I take two of everything. Two trousers, two shirts, two jackets, two pairs of shoes, two books. Usually I'm going to countries that are hotter than London. Most places are. And I can wash as I go.

I like everything to be the same. Identical shirts and trousers and T-shirts. Every foreign correspondent I know is in a constant search for the perfect travelling kit. Exactly the right pair of trousers, the best shirt. Paring down and adding up the multiples of use. We travel with Tabasco and chewing gum and short-wave radios, Moleskine notebook, space pen. Silk sleeping-bag liners – essential for cheap hotels. A small light that will attach to your head, a stash of dollars. The interesting things are the small comforts that correspondents take. Comforts can become incredibly important. I once travelled with a guy who'd eat one jelly bean every night at 10 o'clock. He'd just put it in his mouth and sit very still until it dissolved. Personally I can't travel with pictures of my family – they make me homesick and worried. But I always take a tiny goosedown pillow, which squeezes into nothing.