Here and There (20 page)

Tirana has nothing to commend it at all. There is a fetid canal, of which the main claim to your attention is that it used to be worse, and a big out-of-town supermarket where they search your bags on the way in, presumably to stop you leaving confusing and subversive stuff on the shelves. The countryside has even less in it than the city. It's just big, deserted, green and mostly perpendicular. The seaside is the Adriatic, which isn't really a sea at all, more a non-tidal warm brown effluent soup that slops between Albania, Italy and Croatia.

It is all a blessed relief from the obligations of being a responsible traveller. You can properly live like a native: that is, not do anything at all or go anywhere. Anything you choose to do, by its very nature, is authentically local, because there is no tourist thing to do. At all. I met a public relations official for the tourist board. What do you do all day, I asked. Well, he said, like everyone else, I sit in cafés and deal in foreign currency and speak to my brother in Milan and get him to send me designer sunglasses. But what do you do about tourists? What tourists, he asks, suddenly worried and looking over his shoulder. No, not real tourists, pretend, future tourists – the ones you're supposed to be attracting. What would you tell them. Oh, I tell them we are the land of unspoilt possibilities. Well, that's true except for the unspoilt bit. It's more a land of spoilt possibilities.

And then I tell them we're going to be the next Croatia.

You'll be beating them off with a shitty stick.

You're just saying that, aren't you?

I'm afraid I just am.

Although I enjoyed Albania almost more than I can say, I feel bad that I haven't recommended a single thing. There should be at least one attraction to make tourists feel guilty for missing and that, in turn, you can superciliously ask a returning businessman if they saw. So this is it, the must-see … It's Tirana's natural history museum. It's easy to miss, because it looks like a condemned building. Indeed, in any other European country, it would be a condemned building. But walk in, and don't mind that there's no one else there. There's never anyone else there. Just two floors of the worst stuffed animals in the world. Gimpy gannets, lopsided goats, fish that look like sausages, a bear that has the face of a hairy Quasimodo. Rooms full of nameless bleached things in urine-yellow bottles. And boxes with pinned flies inside cases full of random dead flies. I have never been to a national gallery that is such a perfect and poetic metaphor for the country it lives in. It is perhaps the greatest national museum in the world. You simply have to see it. Just remember to turn the lights out when you leave.

The last word in travel

Living to tell the tale (and
telling it well) is almost as
important as the trip.

I have a thing about thesauruses (thesauri?). I can't be bothered with them; won't have one in the room I write in.

I know it's a snobbery and a stuffiness that seems to go along with ‘I'd rather be lost than ask for directions' and refusing to have luggage on wheels. It's not the words I mind. I've got at least a dozen dictionaries, and I'm staring at four serried shelves of reference books. I've got books of quotations, books of slang, etymology, classical allusion, classical history, biblical concordances, opera, film, national biography and the birth of South Africa, but I just won't have a thesaurus. It's a question of propriety.

You can only travel as far as you can describe. I'll put that the other way around: you can travel to the extreme edge of your vocabulary – after that, you might as well not bother going. There is certainly little point in coming back. The inability to describe what you've seen and done is a chronic, terminal intellectual disability. You know how overwrought adolescents say, I couldn't love anyone who couldn't love
The Outsider
or late Picasso or Nirvana, and you always say, oh for God's sake, get over yourself? Well, I realise I hold something similar. I couldn't love someone who couldn't tell me where they'd been, what they'd done and what they loved in a compelling manner.

I once met an explorer, not an adventure tourist – a real heart-in-the-mouth, mapless, first-foot explorer. He'd been up mountain passes in the Tien Shan that had never been mapped, strung between mountains that had no name. In the company of the most remote and introverted people on the globe, he'd walked on his own with a yak and a small mute boy for a month.

He'd been kidnapped, escaped, arrested, shot at. He'd had a bit of a time. And when I asked him what it was like, he said: cold. Cold and? Wet. Cold and wet. And had he come back from the roof of the world with any insights? Yes. Pack a spare pair of shoelaces. Broken laces were a constant worry, apparently. And that was it. He took a sort of taciturn pride in the unspoken journey, locked away like a schoolgirl's diary in his head. And I thought, that place is still unknown. The untrodden paths and the nameless peaks are still anonymous. Your experience was a waste of breath. And shoelaces.

On the other hand, I once found myself with nothing much to do but wait in a village in northern Uganda. Uganda's a peerlessly beautiful country, its burnt red earth a bright undercoat colour that dusts everything with a rusty orange. I sat at the side of the road with a 13-year-old boy who couldn't go to school because his mother was ill and he had to help her. I asked him to tell me about the three-mile journey he made to get to the schoolroom. He made it an exciting odyssey, a high adventure. Each step had moment and significance. This was where he'd seen the eagle pick up the kid. This was where his grandfather had fallen off his bike. There was the best mango tree, but you had to fight the monkeys for them. On and on, I was utterly engrossed, his singsong reedy voice drawing form over the colours. It was the only journey he'd ever made from his village. And the next day, I had to drive to his school in an NGO's Landcruiser. The journey took 20 minutes, and it was just another road in Africa, but I watched it like a movie.

The lesson is, if you want to increase your vocabulary, don't read more, get out and look harder and farther. And that's the reason I don't like thesauruses. They sell you other people's words. They're not yours. The language isn't the verbal evocation of your experience, it's some tenbob adjective which is what you think will decorate your experience more elegantly. The words you choose need to be really yours. Ones that travelled with you. The vocabulary that saw what you saw and saw what you did, not some smart-talking PR you hire later to tart up the experience.

Words are important. They don't have to be posh or rare, they just have to be honestly come by. I think I can always tell thesaurus writing. It has a spongy overstuffed pout, a slippery, out-of-sync fuzziness. Sentences that obscure rather than illuminate. The test is to speak them out loud. If it doesn't sound like a plausible statement, it's thesaurus writing.

I know it's a bit late to introduce a subject, a theme to this column, but I was asked to write about luxury, and that's what made me think about the thesaurus, because luxury is a word I almost can't bring myself to use without inward mockery. And here we come to the problem with the language. Generally, if you have a breakdown while manoeuvring English, it's your own fault. And it's because you're mistreating the finest mouthful of expressions ever invented. If you can't say it in English, you can be pretty sure you can't say it at all. But there are some things you can say, but you wouldn't want to. Like luxury. And luxurious. Luxuriant. And, nastiest of all, luxuriate. For all its subtle, muscular chiaroscuro, English is particularly duff at figuratism. The descriptive terms for effortless, thoughtless supine enjoyment are all embarrassing, to say or to write. They make every sentence sound like the brochure for a health farm.

I enjoy a pleasurable experience as much as the next man. There's nothing wrong with being rubbed, scrubbed and grubbed into a pinkly gleaming state verging on insensibility, if that's your cup of single-estate first-flush orange pekoe. It's the word that sticks in my craw. Luxury, for me, has associations with tastelessness, snobbery, waste, boredom, blandness and insincerity. It rarely arrives on its own, usually travelling with the help of ‘timeless' or ‘effortless'. On a dirty weekend, luxury can usually be found luxuriating with sophistication, creating the glacially botoxed thrill of sophisticated luxury, an expression which is inevitably attached to two-inch wider, three-degree more acute airline seats.

Luxury, and its braying, swilling, posing and poncing mates, lives in the half of the world I travel to avoid. (The trips to St Tropez and the Caribbean being merely part of my gruelling working life, that is.) Of course, having written all that, I had to go and get a thesaurus just to see who luxury sleeps with. Here is the unadorned list, and I think it's rather profound. I still won't use one, but it's given me a little more respect for the old lexicon.

Maybe there is a beat of irony behind all the synonyms. Read this as a poem:
convenience, comfort, cosiness,
snugness, creature comforts, luxury, luxuries, superfluity,
lap of luxury, wealth, feather bed, bed of down, bed of
roses, velvet, cushion, pillow, softness, peace, quiet, rest,
repose, quiet dreams, sleep, painlessness, euthanasia.

Dawn of a new era

Post-apartheid, Johannesburg
has become the luckiest place in
the unluckiest continent.

A tokoloshe is a Zulu demon, a nightstalker, a sprite goblin. Familiar, it lives under your bed and comes to you in the dark. South Africans put their beds on bricks, on tins, wrap spells around them to prevent the tokoloshe climbing up.

What he'll do to you, if he does, is never mentioned. It's too horrible. The tokoloshe isn't some cosy fairytale because of naughtiness to add a frisson to bedtime, he's a real five-star terror. And what makes him different from every other night-sweat apparition, what makes every tokoloshe unique, is that he's singular. Each of us invents our own. He is the creation of our deepest, most horrific fears – a bespoke, made-to-measure personal demon.

So when you wake in the stillness and you can hear the faint scratching of hard fingers on the headboard and the sharp-toothed muttering, you know it's coming just for you. It isn't interested in anyone else. The tokoloshe can't be bought off with lies or flattery. You can't trick him. He knows you outside in.

The tokoloshe is a particularly brilliant and terrible invention, a horror version of psychoanalysis – the psychoses, irrational fear, the weakness that is inside all of us manifest as homunculus. It's also particularly apposite to South Africa.

Ten years after Mandela and de Klerk, truth and reconciliation and elections, South Africans are still soggy with disbelief that they've managed to avoid a civil war. The longer they go on with majority rules, the more astonished they are that it still works. They've become immensely forgiving of occasional outbursts of irrational fury or bad behaviour because, ‘Oh, it could all have been so much worse,' they shake their heads and sigh. For 10 years, they've got away with it and there's no obvious rhyme or reason. Africa is the very last place you'd bet on having a mass agreement of contrition and forgiveness. And South Africa is the only country in the world to uninvent a nuclear bomb.

Of course, everybody gained. It was a platonic triumph. One up for humane civilisation. But – and it's a huge but – in practical terms most people are, if not worse off, not doing much better. Unemployment could probably beat employment in a fight. And for the first time, this is as bad for young whites as blacks. Affirmative action has reduced their options. The finance minister is running a very Thatcherite strict economy which thrills men in suits in New York and London but is testing the long view of the townships. And then there's AIDS and illegal immigration from every other country in Africa. There's a strong export-stifling rand and a drought. It's tough all round but – and this is an equally big but – it's also ridiculously hopeful. South Africans smile and look at the sky and say ‘Pinch me, am I dreaming, did we get away with it?'

The last time I was in Jo'burg six or seven years ago, it was a frightening city, unravelling into medieval crime. People who had stuff lived behind barbed wire and spikes with multiple dogs and alarms and private security firms. They drove like fighter pilots sealed in 4WDs with snub-nosed .38s on their laps. Their kids were taught to run in zigzags and lock themselves in their bedrooms and put their fingers in their ears. They all still cooked braais in the garden, played tennis, got drunk, but the strain was terrible. You could see it in their eyes – the wear and tear of terror. Jo'burg rode its luck until it almost died of nervous exhaustion. Everyone knew someone who'd been, well, never mind, we don't talk about it. The centre of the city emptied and died, the suburbs became mid-western shopping fortresses.

But now, this time, I got out of the airport and was amazed – it's a new place, really astonishing. Areas you'd never have walked through have grown cafés and boutiques. There's an atmosphere. It feels like a collective decision to get better, to get on and up. There's still miles of razor wire, you've still got to watch yourself, but Soweto's a tourist destination. You can get a tour, eat lunch, buy a wire motorcycle souvenir. There's arts and music – loads of music. There's theatre and there's the new apartheid museum which just rams a lump down your throat. As a rule, I don't like walking round museums that have been twisted into social engineering. There are lessons to be learnt from the past and the past can be accessed through things, but the reason for putting things in museums shouldn't be to make kids polite citizens because, in general, it makes for self-righteous exhibits and the kids smoke behind the bookshop and swear at passers-by. But this one is something else. There are very few artefacts, it's a journey through history commissioning an execution of apartheid, told with photographs and film and hundreds of televisions. If that sounds dull, then it's because I'm not explaining it properly. It's a cross between a moving scrapbook and an art installation. It's also the most thoughtful and emotional couple of hours I've spent in a museum for years. The divisive story is told inclusively and if you've never been to South Africa, you can have no idea how difficult, restrained and courageous that is. The museum is a lesson in how history doesn't have to have consequences or at least not the ones that were written on the packet. Fate is open to apologies. Classes of black schoolchildren milled round me as ever in Africa, neat and beautifully turned out, in exuberant uniforms. A year ago, I'd never have suggested to a tourist that they take time to visit Jo'burg but now you've simply got to. Not just the apartheid museum and the townships and the markets and cafés, the music and jacarandas, and the high, dry veldt, but you should go because this is the luckiest place in the unluckiest continent. This year, the UN pointed out that Africa tipped from being an agrarian continent to an urban one. More Africans live in cities than in the country. And almost all tourists who come to Africa with the best liberal intentions come to see animals and wilderness – very few come to see Africans. No pride of lions is as exciting as an African market, to walk through an African street is more entertaining and enthralling and a lot more inclusively hands-on than a drive in a game park. If you want to feel the rhythm of the dark heart, then go to an African city. I'd go to Jo'burg.