Category: travel

Must be hard times in the hotel industry. I seem to have had email in the past few days from every hotel I’ve ever stayed in, reminding me of how much they miss me. What they also seem to be missing is that I don’t usually visit a place because of the hotel: I stay in the hotel so that I can visit the place. Or, until I retired, because that was where the conference was.

This is especially true of airport hotels: I just used them in days gone by for a necessary stopover en route to or from somewhere*. For instance, there are many good reasons to visit Vienna, but adding to my loyalty points by spending a few days at the airport hotel is not a priority. (I only ever stayed there if I got there late or needed an early flight to the next destination.) What’s more, I have many thousands of loyalty points that I may never find a use for before they expire, because most of the places I still want to visit don’t have a hotel within 50 miles that will accept them.

*There was one instance where the conference hotel was actually on the perimeter of the airport at Geneva, which was more than usually convenient, but unusual – airport hotels rarely have enough in the way of conference facilities to support more than a moderately-sized seminar.

When I lived and worked in London, I occasionally got to take part in a security seminar in one of the hotels on the perimeter of Heathrow, but that was long ago and far away. I like to remember, though, that on one occasion I even won one of those little electronic organizer devices, which proved invaluable for playing solitaire during long journeys and attacks of constipation. I don’t remember what happened to it, though. Maybe I gave it away when I got an iGadget.

This is Edmund Hellmer’s statue of Johann Strauss II in the Vienna Stadtpark. The monument was erected in 1921. I don’t know the lady, but it proved impossible to get the statue without tourists. For some reason, I don’t have a picture of the airport, let alone the NH airport hotel.

In the back of the jeep I dreamed an African dream, wwhere the tarmac and dirt roads Didn’t yet exist. There were no fences, no notices saying “no lines”, because there were no lines. No trophy hunters taking selfies with the carcasses of uselessly murdered animals. Not even photo safaris.

Man moved like the animals, freely across the landscape and accountable only to the seasons and the laws of nature

But my dream was just that. A vision, perhaps some sort of racial memory.

Instead of that Africa, on waking, I saw a leopard that only climbs trees to pick up the meat planted by the game drive guide, having forgotten how to drag its own prey into the branches.

I saw a cheetah that never runs, waiting instead for the tour-bus, for the carrion and photo opportunities, catching, like a performing dog or circus seal, the meat thrown by the guide.

In the towns, the signs say “Do not turn our people, our children into beggars.”

But who speaks for the predators of the bushveld?

 [From a long-dormant series of travel sketches.]

En route to South Africa, our flight with BA was suddenly outsourced to Cathay Pacific. It wasn’t the worst flight I’ve ever experienced (hi, Ryanair!), but it had its peculiarities.

Drinking a Dom Pedro in Knysna

At the time I was waiting for the results of a coeliac test to come back and avoiding gluten, while my wife was sticking to a vegetarian diet. (I think it was a turf ‘n’ surf in Australia that finally threw us both off the vegetarian wagon, though we’ve ridden it from time to time sinceI.) It appears that gluten-free and vegetarian mean something different in Hong Kong. My gluten-free meal included a bread roll clearly identical to my wife’s, as well as a packet of gluten-rich crackers. However, I had flat water (boring!) instead of orange juice, fish and vegetables, and a fruit pie thing that was certainly not gluten-free. My wife had miscellaneous vegetables and no meat substitute, a roll, but no pie. There was clearly something they weren’t telling us about that fruit.

Breakfast was also interesting. At first, we were served the same as everyone else: eggs, cheese, ham, salad, a roll and yoghurt. After a while, though, someone must have found our orders. They turned up with my gluten-free provender and insisted on taking away the meal I’d already half eaten. Now I had rice and vegetables, and they replaced my already gluten-free yoghurt with orange juice, perhaps the one I wasn’t allowed for the previous meal. The roll, unfortunately, really was gluten-free: unfortunate, because if there was one thing that irked me about my period of eating totally gluten-free food*, it was the bread, which always had the flavour of cardboard – or what I imagine cardboard to taste like – and the moistness of a sirocco. However, my wife decided she didn’t want anything else, so I did get her (definitely gluten-free) yoghurt.

Food apart, the flight was mostly OK: the cabin crew seemed to have an average age of 14 but were very friendly, very giggly. One was chatted up in the middle of the night by a Scot in the opposite aisle seat, who then returned to conversation with his neighbour in the window seat, as he worked his way through glasses of wine (two at a time) and then his bottle of wine from the duty-free. In the end, we politely asked him to reduce the volume: he grumbled at me a bit, but subsided into sleep soon after.

The stopover at Windhoek was astounding. The descent was over many miles of scrub, and when we down, there was still nothing but scrub either side of us until we pulled before the terminal building. We were next to a 777 and a Cessna, the smallest number of aircraft I’ve ever seen at an international airport, and some of the insects were as large as the Cessna. I hope none of them took off at the same time.

No doubt we had a drink and maybe a snack, but what I remember most is treating myself to a leather safari-type hat: a ridiculous affectation, especially for someone who still sometimes pretended to be vegetarian**, but I was probably influenced by a friend who lives somewhere in the East but is Texan by nature, and always seems to look as if he’s about to lasso a longhorn.

*Apparently, I didn’t have coeliac disease, and I don’t display the more spectacular symptoms of gluten intolerance, so if I happen to visit you, feel free to offer me sandwiches and biscuits.

**A tip of the hat here to a former relative-in-law who despised me and my previous wife for being vegetarian, though she did buy us a sort of beginner’s guide to vegetarianism one Christmas that took the interesting position of including recipes for chicken and fish. I don’t know if it was meant as a way of leading us back towards carnivorism, or it was a subtle way of insulting us by assuming we didn’t know anything about vegetarian food, or that she thought that fish and chicken were vegetables, or that it simply meant that she hadn’t actually looked inside the book. (Actually, I do remember a Christmas – not necessarily the same one – where we were tempted less by nut loaf than by a rather interesting recipe for prawns in a vodka sauce, and declared prawns to be an honorary vegetable.)

My former relative’s finest hour, however, was probably when she ranted about how stupid vegetarians were if they wore leather shoes. Though at least she never pointed out that Hitler was a vegetarian, a common theme among people who somehow find vegetarians offensive.

David Harley