Journey > Articles > Take a Long, Long Walk

My favorite piece of graffiti, scrawled above the counter in a local bar, reads; 'I love long walks - especially when taken by people who bore me.' Well, more truthfully, it’s my favorite piece of graffiti after, 'Happy hour; two for the price of one,' which I often find chalked up just below the 'long walks' words of wisdom.

It's a sobering thought, (the 'long walks taken by boring people making someone happy' axiom, rather than the 'get merry for half price' invite, which obviously isn't at all...sobering, that is). The idea that one may only be such a popular chappy because of spending a lot of time away on long walks, rather than acting the flying buttress against the bar, calling for 'another two of the usual' and starting interminable ramblings with "when I was in..."

There's definitely something in it. Not being around much makes people rather appreciate your popping up for a few days now and again. Especially if you've got fresh stories to bore them with. And particularly if you're going to disappear again for another few months, or years. Or, how about, forever, and soonish.

Getting out of people's hair for a while just so you can be welcomed back like a prodigal son isn't the only reason for travelling, of course. It may not, for example, have been the primary motivation behind Ibn Battuta, Marco Polo and the rest of the early scribblers setting off across continents on foot; no, they had 'what I did in my summer holiday' essays and GCSE geography papers on the primary exports of Central Asian fiefdoms to write. Nor was it for Cortez, Raleigh and Cook who were essentially house hunting on a global scale. Nor for the John Hillabys, Nick Cranes and Bill Brysons, of our time, who have demanding readers and publishers chivvying them into marching boots and rucksacks in the way that small boys in former times were sent up chimneys.

But for the rest of us, travel is a strange preoccupation. It's not a money making proposition, this journeying lark; airport taxes alone turn any foreign journey into an immediate fiscal loss, even before the nose wheel leaves the ground. Nor, anymore, is it for reasons of exogamy (look it up, if you have to...it's a wonderful word and an excuse for all kinds of questionable behavior), not nowadays when you can mingle your genes with those of exotic tribes and races at the nearest nightclub. Nor are we fulfilling the territorial prerogative and the need to conquer new lands; we've all got enough mortgages or rent to keep up with at home, without wanting to add more property burdens in Khartoum, Marrakech or Havana.

I guess we travel, mainly, out of curiosity, just as our Neolithic forebears did, intrigued by what, and whom, lie over the next hill. That and the joy of being welcomed back merely because we went away. Especially if we're carrying the equivalent of fire or a high-tech knapped flint adze in the way of pressies for the folks back home.

Perhaps we travel, most of all, to gain perspective on our lives. To discover that 'other' people are at one and the same time so like and so unlike ourselves. To become observant strangers in our own lands, and comfortably at home when away.

Ah! Being at home when away. There's the nub (whatever a nub is). Not the 'oi, I've just found a caff with Watney's Red Barrel and eggs and chips, and The Telegraphs only a day late at the shop down the road.' kind of at home. But, more the 'meeting new people and having adventures whilst not getting mugged, ill or lost' kind of savvy that makes not only for less boring stories on your return to 'home' home, but for a safe return home in the first place.

And what are the secrets that turn the world into your very own succulent mollusk best eaten in months with an 'r' in them? Search me. I'm still trying to work it out, but the results of harsh experience and the merry plagiarizing of the thoughts and adventures of folk met along the way, give a few pointers.

Don't leave home without... Travelling light is the ideal. On my first long walks through France and Spain I carried an ex-army rucksack, filled with useless kit, (a cast iron cooking pot...two volumes of Greek myths...) until it weighed as much as a well-fed 12 year old child, spent three months compressing the distance between my earlobes and ankles by a measurable 2 inches. Disastrous idiocy.

A few years later I met somebody who'd got it right. Californian Jack had only a single, silk made-to-measure suit, two shirts and three ties to his name. Apart from a sense of morality that made Casanova look like Mary Whitehouse. In city and country Jack travelled lighter, more comfortably, with less money and in better company than I'll ever achieve. But then, equally, I'll never be a gigolo given to taking languid long distance strolls through the French landscape, between conquests.

So, my essentials for sort-of-light travel are the string and pocketknife of the well-prepared Boy Scout anticipating a laundry hanging and sandwich-making test. Earplugs, which can turn the most cacophonous of Spanish pensions into a 5* sleeping experience. A couple of bin liners, which can fulfill the function of chic-ish rainwear, survival bag and, in extremis, hobo suitcase. A harmonica - otherwise known as a credit card for drinks and friendship, by those who can actually play the thing. A real credit card, preferably with unlimited credit, or at least an unlimited overdraft.

Don't forget an expired credit card, either - I think you're, legally, meant to snip them up, but there's nothing sweeter to give a mugger, however charming, than the passport to a duff account. Useful, too, are copies of all your important paperwork (it pays to open a Hotmail e-mail account, and put all your passport and insurance details, credit card numbers and essential addresses in a document mailed to yourself and which can be accessed from any cyber-cafe worldwide). Useless paperwork is good - letters of introduction, memberships of obscure clubs, certificates in first aid; some countries (especially ex-British colonies) run on bureaucracy and you might as well add to it when people ask to see your papers. Expendable, photo-emblazoned ID is a winner - I use an International Youth Hostel card, and it's stood in for my passport or driving licence when hiring cars from dodgy operators, or leaving surety in hotels on many occasions. Photographs of, (in my case non-existent), wife and happy children back up an often useful married-and-pillar-of-society image, a ploy that is even more useful to single women travelling in macho or misogynistic cultures. A good book, to read and then swap.

A hat; the single most useful item of clothing invented since trousers - quite apart from its rain shedding and sun deflecting properties my Akubra instantly identifies me, so that, for example, in a three month stint in Morocco I was easily findable by friends who, for a dihram tip to any small boy, could be led to the cafe currently being patronised by the aroumi in the chapeaux. And, best of all, when I took it off, I 'disappeared.'

You should have seen that foreigner... The only justifiable defense in the face of arguments that travel is a bad thing, inflicting the horrible 'us' on the pure living 'thems' around the world, is to counter with the truth that we 'us' amuse those 'thems.' Usually by being stupid, or having strange habits. Which is as it has been since prehistoric times; "Would you check out that guy", Ugh, "and his mammoth skin loin cloth, and...hey, hey, hey...look at him with his fancy flint and iron lode, he doesn't know a thing about rubbing two sticks together." It's still the same today, except now we’re the guys from the weird tribe.

It's our duty to be clowns in foreign parts, and most of us manage it effortlessly, with dead-pan faces, whilst desperately trying to fit in. Foreigners wearing local clothing, trying to speak the lingo and eating liquid mush with their fingers and spilling it down their shirt fronts are the three-ring circus of entertainment in small villages, though less successful in bigger cities where they see the full Barnum and Bailey of tourist stupidity everyday and the novelty has rather worn off.

By some trick of cultural exchange rates, a song sung, a trick with two handkerchiefs and a coin or even hand shadows thrown by an oil lamp, when done by an outsider, have a much higher value in an Indian hamlet than back home.

And never turn down the opportunity to dance; you can't lose...either you're crap at tango-ing, czardas-ing or hula-ing in which case you'll be the most hilarious thing since Charlie Chaplin first put on his big brother's boots, or your hours of soft-shoe practise in the Hammersmith Palais will turn in a performance of such skill and poise that village elders will kill chickens in your honour. Whichever, you'll end up with more arak, tequila or mint tea being pressed on you than human stomach, brain or liver can stand, and the results of that will amuse your hosts even further.

Of course, just choosing to walk in places where everybody else aspires to speeding around on a moped or in a Toyota Landcruiser, makes us much, much more hilarious, even, than reruns of ‘Fawlty Towers’ dubbed into Serbo-Croat.

Have adventures... 'Believe me, the secret of reaping the greatest fruitfulness and the greatest enjoyment from life is to live dangerously,' claimed Nietzsche? But then he would, wouldn't he. He was about on the money, though, if you apply the dictum to travel. Doing the unusual, stepping out from behind who you are, is the great freedom of travel. Abroad, there are no voices to say, "Come on, you're not a dauntless trans-Andean walker, but a systems operator from Haverfordwest," and, ergo, pedestrian Andes conqueror is what you are, at least for a couple of weeks.

Adventures are funny things, though. You can set them up to a certain extent but then you have to let fate take its course. And they're not always obvious. A New Zealand bungee jump, from whatever height you like, is not an adventure but merely an expensive way of getting an adrenalin rush whilst giving employment to a bunch of ex-surfers with headbands and ridiculous shorts. But hearing about a small track that goes to a village that may or not be two day's hike away, and striding off anyway, 'just to see,' is a genuine, 24-carat adventure material. Anywhere, seen from the right angle, has the potential for genuine adventure, excitement and challenge. Even the Netherlands, given a good freeze and a pair of second-hand ice skates.

I have been most inspired by the madcap travellers who have bought bicycles in village markets and pedalled off into the wide blue yonder. By the elderly couple I met, notching up all of England's long-distance paths, (they were doing the ‘notching up’ I hasten to add, not me). By the delicate Dutch blonde who was walking through the south of Morocco only because she 'got tired of lying on the beach at Agadir.'

Bringing it all back home... The difference between tourists and travellers? The million $ question. Well, the former buy souvenirs and the latter haggle to the last peso over bits of ethnic tat thrown together by hand in a tradition going back ...oh...at least months. The latter, naturally, feel morally superior.

The only thing I buy regularly when I'm abroad (if you don't count a growing collection of whips and spurs) is stationary. Hence my top tip; you can get business cards printed for a tenth of European prices in Mexico, India or anywhere they've got a hand press and Roman type. And rubber stamps made to your own design make greatly appreciated, cheap presents from the same countries.

Buying carpets, cigars, drums or whatever for profit, on the say so of some eager salesman bazaari claiming they're worth 'ten times the price you pay here when you get them back to Europe,' doesn't stand up to the harsh test of reality. I've tried all the above, and realised, if this was really the case, the bazaari's brother would be on his way to Paris with loaded suitcases at that very moment. As he always is. But with the good stuff.

What's with the camel markets... You hang out a sign saying 'camel market next Tuesday' and the tour buses arrive on Monday night. Filled with people who wouldn't know a dromedary if you stuffed it and sold it through Habitat as part of a three-piece suite. What's going on here? We come from countries where church attendance is dropping faster than the Euro in a free market. Yet get those same heathens abroad and they're off filing round Chartres cathedral, and mosques and stupas as if their souls depended on it.

You'd think that if you were interested in guitars or pottery at home, those and not camel markets and cathedrals are what you'd be seeking out on the trail. And of course the brighter travellers are, and getting so much more out of their jaunts abroad.

Eat what's on your plate... Foreign food used to be the great exotic, but nowadays when you can test drive the world's cuisines in a couple of nights of English high street browsing, it's rare to come across any taste you haven't already tried. And even more rare to be such an exulted guest that you get given the sheep's eyeballs (think on it...there's only two to a sheep whose other parts can make a couscous that will feed tens of hungry punters).

Reassure yourself, too, by remembering that anything any other person is eating is edible. Though, from my own experience of Columbian salted ants, there is edible and the 'oh, salted ants, usually love 'em, but, hang on, I've got a doctor's note here...strange complaint, but instant death if one so much as passes my lips' sort of edible.

Really exotic stuff - snake, crocodile, breast of blue-fronted Amazon - as we know, all tastes like chicken. But is three times as expensive and has bones in funny places. Of course, if you're mad to try amusing road-kill, you don't have to go abroad; the Birdcage restaurant in London does scorpions in chocolate and fried locusts amongst other delicacies. Both of which, presumably, taste like chicken but are six times as expensive.

Falling in love again... Voltaire reckoned that 'marriage is the only adventure open to the cowardly,' but throw travel into the equation and the cowards clear the field for the foolhardy and the truly adventurous. Riding the ferry from Tangier to Spain I spotted a Canadian girl with the most beautifully hennaed hands, and not a 10 dirhams in Djema el Fna quickie paint job either, but the full marriage guest filigree work. I asked her whose wedding she'd been at. "Mine," she replied in a voice numb with horror. After a whirlwind, and common language free, romance with the desk clerk at her Fez hotel they'd exchanged vows. As her dowry she'd organised a Canadian passport and a hefty loan from her parents for him. He was clutching both with a big grin when she'd last seen him. Now she was wondering if she hadn't been a bit hasty. 'Especially as,' and she gulped back tears, 'I don't know what I'm going to tell my fiancée in Calgary about all this.'

On the bright side, of course, a foreign affair can fast track you into a language (even if your newly learned vocabulary doesn't help much outside candlelit dinners and lovey-dovey situations), into the depths of another culture. The first time you have to ask a Belgrade chemist who looks like your bad tempered great aunt for condoms, you can count your years of innocence as well and truly over, and considered you’ve learnt something about your host country. As a bonus, though, if you pick your country, and your soul mate, carefully, you could learn some really neat dance steps along the way.

But in reality, of course, travel romances are all too often summed up by Tom Stoppard's final dialogue for 'Shakespeare in Love'; "How is this to end. As stories must when love is denied, with tears and a journey." Equally, the Canadian got a Moroccan passport out of her deal, which must be some comfort when facing a long, Calgary winter.

And what have I learnt from 25 years of footing it around the globe? Pathetically little really. To always offer to do the washing up when staying with people, how to say 'cheers' and 'where does this trail lead' in nine languages, and 'I'm really very fond of you but I don't think it would work being married' in a few less, to tie good knots and not talk politics, to buy walking boots one size bigger than my shoe size and always wear two pairs of socks. And that's about it, really. Oh, yes, and when to put down my glass, mutter ‘I’ll see you later, and then take a long, long walk.

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