Mari Nicholson
The following articles are copyright to Mri Nicholson, and may not be reproduced in any form without her consent in writing.
- Magnificent Manchester
- The Kwai and Beyond
- Cocaine, No! Emeralds, Si!
- Haight-Ashbury – Coolest city on the Bay
- Jordan - History and Heritage
- Looking for Lorca in Al Andalus
- Tijuana Truths
- Looking the part at Cowes
First published in Dubai International
The north-versus-south debate, for decades a part of the English cultural landscape, has lost some of its edge in recent years – thanks in no small part to the way Manchester has transformed itself into one of Europe’s top leisure destinations. Its rise in status has been particularly welcome from a neutral’s viewpoint as second city Birmingham – while itself in the midst of major transformation – has never been a serious match for swinging London.
Now England’s third city, with its eclectic mix of nightclubs, Michelin-star restaurants, growing international airport, two premier soccer teams and the largest University in Europe – 90,000 students attend from all corners of the globe – has an enviable hotspot status.
The most accessed website in China is Manchester, not because the city has the third largest Chinatown in the world - beaten only by San Francisco and Vancouver - but because it has something the other two don’t have – genuine football idols. Speaking to a group of Chinese students, I asked what had attracted them to Manchester University. “David Beckham” they said in unison, and ran off giggling. The iconic Beckham may have fled to Spain, but Manchester United’s global appeal is unlikely to diminish in the long-term. With arch-rivals City consolidating their position in the premiership side, Manchester’s football scene is in fine fettle.
Sport runs deeply through Mancunians’ veins, as anyone who witnessed the 17th Commonwealth Games in 2002 would testify. The third biggest sporting event in the world gave rise to The City of Manchester Stadium – the largest integrated sports and leisure development in the country – as well as Sports Science laboratories and medical facilities. Along with the new 48,000-seater Stadium – the new home of Manchester City Football team from August – you’ll find a Velodrome cycling centre, National Squash centre with movable show court, six-court indoor tennis centre, table-tennis venue and indoor Athletics track – all open to the public. Later this year, ice and rock climbing walls together with a real snow ski slope will open on the opposite side of the city.
If you’re planning your trip before September, you might catch a match at Old Trafford, home to Lancashire County Cricket Club and scene of many a fiercely fought Test match.
In its rush towards sporting venues, Manchester has not forgotten the arts. It boasts the largest museum sector outside London and the largest concentration of creative industry employment in the UK with design agencies making up 25 per cent of its cultural enterprises.
The Manchester Art Gallery has doubled its exhibition space and added a spectacular glass walkway bridging the two buildings that make up the Gallery where works by David Hockney, Lucian Freud, Bridget Riley, Henry Moore, and a remarkable collection of pre-Raphaelite painting are on display. The new, multimedia arts centre, The Lowry, stunningly located on the Quays, is home to the city’s internationally renowned collection of work by L.S. Lowry, the artist who more than anyone else, represents Manchester. The innovative Urbis, is the world’s first museum dedicated to the experiences of urban living, a shimmering glass building inside which visitors can pass through the hubbub of Singapore and over the gridlocked streets of Sao Paolo to experience life in these cities
The Imperial War Museum North, on the banks of the Manchester Ship Canal, is a sensational and disturbing piece of steel and aluminium architecture by Daniel Libeskind, a vision of a world shattered by conflict, less a celebration of war than a social history of what happens to people between wars.
It’s not surprising to find that in Manchester, always a city of non-conformity (think trade unions and suffragettes) the ‘pink pound’ runs riot in along Canal Street, the centre of Britain’s cosmopolitan scene.
One oft-quoted reason why Manchester is becoming the first UK venue of choice - and second most popular Conference centre outside London - is the friendliness of the residents and their strong civic pride.
After the devastation left by the IRA terrorist bomb that destroyed the city centre six years ago, Mancunians set out to refashion their city in a new image. They threw off the mantle of their industrial past but kept intact the historic heart of the city, the Victorian buildings and the canals which were the city’s lifeline in its heyday two centuries ago.
The industrial sweatshops and the red-brick warehouses of the 19th century that formed the heartland of the woollen industry and caused Fredereich Engels to write to Karl Marx and compare them unfavourably with the slums of Paris, have been transformed beyond all recognition.
Derelict docklands have been reclaimed for housing and public spaces, abandoned warehouses are now hotels, and disused railway arches have been transformed into bars and restaurants. Where gracious old buildings have been retained, their sooty, dark bricks have been polished back to a russet glow. The regeneration of the derelict Salford Quays, once one of Britain’s busiest ports, is a masterpiece of urban planning and it is now quite seriously being called the Venice of the North: not so surprising, when you consider that Greater Manchester has nearly 100km of canals.
Situated in the middle of England’s most beautiful and unspoiled countryside, with 32 national nature reserves, three national parks and a heritage coast nearby, Manchester offers cosmopolitan pleasures and countryside pursuits. The Lake District is just 80 minutes up the road along with the rest of the beautiful Cumbrian countryside, and the lush green pastures and sandstone outcrops of Cheshire are within equally easy reach. A short trip across the Mersey takes you to Liverpool – recently awarded European Capital of Culture 2008 – and home to The Beatles, The Hollies, The BeeGees and Freddy and the Dreamers - and the chance to see two other great football teams – Everton and Liverpool.
First Published in The Sunday Herald
There was a ripple on the water and through the early morning mist I watched a herd of black buffalo swim past, their heads just visible above the milk-chocolatey River Kwai. The wash from their progress gently rocked the bamboo raft on which I sat wrapped in a blanket against the cold morning air at Kinsaiyok, Thailand, a cold which would soon turn to intense heat. It was still too early for the birds and save for the gentle plop of a fish in the river, the silence was all enveloping.
It was hard to believe that in the jungle just behind me an estimated 150,000 allied and Asiatic prisoners of war had died building a railway link between Thailand and Burma during the Second World War. Estimated to be a five year job they were forced to lay 415 miles in sixteen months. For every sleeper laid ten men died.
There had been a POW camp not far from where I sat and behind me lay the infamous Hellfire Pass which we’d stopped at on the way up. Up ahead was Three Pagoda Pass, and Burma lay just 11 Km. away.
The popularity of the film The Bridge Over the River Kwai means that it’s virtually obligatory now to visit the Bridge and the War Graves in Chungkai and Kanchanaburi town when in Thailand, but few people bother to venture further up river. Yet just two and a half hours away by car and boat from Kanchanaburi lies Kinsaiyok, an ideal place for visiting the area where the prisoners spent their captivity: 51 POW camps were based along the river.
Instead of a one day trip to the Kwai Bridge from my base at Hua Hin, I opted to spend a few days at the Jungle Rafts Floatel which offered the chance to trek on foot or with elephant into the jungle, accompanied by one of the excellent guides in the area.
From Kanchanaburi Station (near the Bridge) a car had taken us the hour’s journey to Pakseng, the jumping off point for the river journey by fast longtail-boat. As we headed up into the dark and billowing jungle that lay beyond the river the scenery stunned us into silence. Waterfalls crashed into the river, kingfishers skimmed the surface, and a baby elephant scampered up the bank to hide behind its mother as we passed. A lone buffalo eyed us curiously from his kneeling position on the banks of the river and a splash of orange indicated a monk who sat serenely in a tree-house that leaned precariously over the water.
And then, round one more bend in the river the 24 rafts of the Jungle Floatel came into view, each with a hut perched on top fronted by a bamboo raft patio, joined together by wooden walkways divided by tubs of brilliantly hued flowers.
Twenty-five years ago a Frenchman, Jacques Bes, had an exceptional vision of an away-from- it-all experience for visitors to Thailand and those interested in the War Graves and Jungle Rafts was born. To service the rafts, Jacques settled and employed a tribe of Mon, (who hold fast to their racial purity, denying both Thai and Burmese influence). The Frenchman no longer has an interest in the place but the families of the Mon tribe that he settled here still run the place while continuing their traditional harvesting. Members of staff each do two or three jobs, doubling as elephant guides and cooks, barmen and receptionists - just as Jacques wanted.
Although visitors to the Jungle Rafts live a life of luxury compared to the way the POWs lived, it is still a Spartan existence. No hot water, no electricity, and no heating despite the low temperature during the night. A hook for my clothes sufficed as wardrobe in a room furnished with only a bed, a bamboo shelf and a tiny mirror. A compartment off the bedroom contained an (icy) cold-water shower, the water from which ran away through the floor into the River Kwai: the WC was flushed by pouring in pans of water from the bucket provided.
The restaurant and bar occupy the two centre rafts and the meals, a choice of Thai or Western, are surprisingly good (although they won’t gain any awards for high-class cuisine or polished service). The bar serves an adequate selection of drinks but as they can run out sometimes they are quite happy for guests to bring their own bottles to the bar.
A attractive small theatre sits on the two end rafts and every evening the locals perform the traditional Mon songs and dances, keeping their culture alive. Jacques Bes’ dream for this area and these people has indeed succeeded.
After a few days on the rafts the contrast on my return to Kanchanaburi town was harsh. But if the town is brash and noisy with cafes and souveneir shops jostling for space at the foot of the much photographed bridge (not the original one, incidentally), the two Cemeteries are not.
The main War Cemetery where nearly 7000 Australian, New Zealand, Dutch and British prisoners of war lie, is opposite the railway station at Kanchanaburi. The graves are marked with horizontal bronze plaques, looking for all the world like little brown lozenges set into the grass. A sense of peace permeates the place: flowering trees and shrubs dot the grounds and a riot of scarlet, purple and white bougainvillea tumbles over the walls.
From Kanchanaburi a long-tail boat takes you the twenty minute trip down-river to the smaller cemetery at Chungkai. In this smaller cemetery of less than 2000 graves you will find quiet young Thai workers tending the grounds and the headstones. Butterflies flit among the perfumed blossoms of the frangipani trees as though they are keeping company with those who lie underground. If a period of quiet contemplation is needed, this is the place for it.
Endless repeat showings of The Bridge on the River Kwai makes it hard to dispel the cinematic myth of a crack team of Commandos blowing up the bridge to the cheers of assorted P.O.W'S. The truth is less dramatic. Not only was the original teak bridge only partially destroyed by Allied bombing in November 1943, but the Col. Nicholson of the film was a purely fictitious character.
But myth is more powerful than reality, and as you stand on the banks of the muddy River Kwai and look down-river towards the dark green of the jungle and the craggy mountains of Burma, if you open yourself to the experience, you may hear the ghostly whistling of the Colonel Bogey march and from the earth, feel the faint vibration of tramping feet.
First Published in The Scotsman
“Cartagena? Isn't that where they shoot people first and ask questions afterwards, the home of drug cartels and gang warfare?” Well yes, it is, but Cartagena, a city steeped in Spanish colonial history is one of the most interesting towns in South America and is more than 400km from the drug capital of Medellin and a long way from the gangster warfare of Bógota. And much to the surprise of many it’s a safe - or safe-ish - place to visit.
There is something specially attractive about a city with a beachfront that borders the Caribbean sea. When that beachfront is overlooked by the fortress walls of Cartagena, built in the 16th century to defend the city from pirates and hostile European Monarchs, the attraction deepens.
This UNESCO-listed World Heritage City was, at one time, the main port of transit for the silver and gold that flowed to Spain. Today, it is still an extraordinary example of unadulterated Hispanic colonial architecture. Narrow 16th-century streets of terracotta-roofed two and three-storied houses with carved wooden balconies spilling over with purple bougainvillea, their facades a rainbow of hot pinks, ochres, yellows, dark reds and simple white-wash, lead to small squares where wrought iron gates open on to shady patios filled with greenery.
The streets are a cacophony of noise, from lottery-ticket sellers to old men selling sweetmeats and strange local dishes wrapped in greasy paper. Runners for the emerald houses push leaflets into the hands of anyone who looks a likely shopper, assuring them of bargains not to be missed. Women carrying baskets of mangoes on their heads sway by, the perfume from the fruit mingling with the aroma of freshly roasted coffee emanating from cafés in sunlit dappled squares and courtyards. Columbian coffee - smooth, aromatic.
In the middle of the city is Plaza Bolivar with its nearby candy-pink Cathedral, the Palace of the Inquisition, and a magnificent Gold Museum housing some rare pre-Columbian artefacts. The plaza is where the good-humoured and exuberant Cartagenans congregate. It is noisy and it’s crowded. But it wasn’t fruit or coffee - or even cocaine - that the locals tried to sell me when I was there, it was emeralds and tee-shirts. Vendors crowded around plucking at my sleeve and flourishing their wares. An old Cartagenan hand had advised me to buy just one tee-shirt (the quality is excellent) and flourish it as I walked, and this seemed to work. The emerald sellers were more persistent, but a polite 'Nada, gracias' saw them off. But watch your pockets - the country’s best pickpockets work this square.
If you don’t want emeralds or tee-shirts, then take a look at Columbia’s cottage industry crafts which can be found under the arcades of Las Bóvedas not far from here, or visit the crafts village of San Jacinto, where all manner of wall hangings, handbags, carpetbags, ponchos, hammocks and weavings of all sorts are all for sale and inexpensively priced. The village is also the birthplace of Las Gaiteros de San Jacinto, the most popular folkloric group in the region and is the best place to buy tapes of the group (they are less likely to be counterfeit).
At night, the old town area of Cartagena is alive to the sound of music when the “cumbia” bands play in the cafés where the locals go to drink rum and coffee. Horse-drawn carriages trip by, their lanterns softening the neon that spills from open doorways. As the sun goes down, hundreds head for the beach where in an atmosphere akin to carnival, the place is turned into a gigantic dance floor where vallenato groups compete.
A few steps from the old town is the touristic centre of Cartagena with first-class hotels located along the magnificent beach that stretches right around this peninsula. Shopping malls offer a selection of designer goods and hand-crafted leather goods second to none - and prices are good.
Speed boats will rush you to the never-ending deserted beaches just fifteen minutes away on the Baru peninsula, or to the coral shores of the Rosaire Islands where the atolls offer white sand, palms, and a transparent turquoise sea just perfect for snorkelling. Several agencies offer professional instruction to beginners and equipment can be hired daily. Or take a trip to the Islas del Rosario, an archipelago of coral formations and transparent water. The 28 mile trip through the waters of Cartagena Bay is delightful and if you are tempted to stay overnight there are facilities on one or two of the islands.
And if you grow tired of the beaches, the historic old city of Cartagena, and shopping in Boca Grande, then there is plenty of Columbian culture to savour. Cartagena is a magnet for writers and painters and, of course, is synonymous with Gabriel Garcia Marquez who still maintains a house here in the city where he began his career. There are readings at most of the cultural centres throughout the year - organized by the very active British Council.
Many areas of Columbia seem to have been totally ceded to guerrillas and there is no doubt that it has a reputation for violence, drug dealing and kidnapping. I wish I had some interesting drug-related stories to tell but the truth is no-one offered me any antisocial substances. In other parts of the Caribbean I’m accosted on a regular basis with offers of ganja and the white powdery stuff, but in Cartagena, nothing more powerful than Cuban cigars at $10 a box were offered.
Safe? Yes, I found it so. Safe and interesting, Latin more than Caribbean. With the Mondrian-esque primary colours of its houses, the brilliance of the flowers clustered on every balcony, and the music that flowed from every café, Cartagena, capital city of Columbia, was well worth a visit.
And where else can you swim by day from the beach you will dance on that night.
Haight-Ashbury – Coolest city on the Bay
First Published in See You (Germany)
Its still the coolest place on the Bay. Haight-Ashbury, the hub of hippiedom in the 60s and the epicentre of life for the crazy, spaced-out days and nights of thousands of the world’s flower children, is alive and well. Jefferson Airplane, the Grateful Dead and other legendary bands that rose from the area may have gone, but their spirit lives on in the neighbourhood.
The famous intersection of San Franscisco's Haight & Ashbury streets remains a counter-culture enclave where the sweet smell of hash drifts from the dark, psychedelic shops manned by throwbacks to the sixties. ‘That’s cool man’, they say, when you decline their offer of incense or home-made candles. Occasionally you’re solicited for ‘a few dollars for a drink’ by a panhandler who’ll tell you he’s a Vietnam veteran. ‘Did three terms in ‘Nam, and now I’m hustlin' for a beer. Shouldn’t treat the vets. like that man’. The current version of earlier flower children just smile vaguely at you and hope you’ll press a buck or two in their hands.
Haight-Ashbury launched the youth revolution that swept the world and culminated in the 1968 riots in Europe. Before the advent of flower-power the area had been home to the beat poets from nearby North Beach, where Ferlingetti, Ginsburg and Kerouac hung out. Lawrence Ferlingetti’s City Lights bookstore still stands on Columbus Avenue, a monument to an era and the beat generation that spawned a revolution in poetry and student politics.
Still standing also is 710 Ashbury Street, home for a period to Jerry Garcia and the Grateful Dead and now a landmark for those who visit the area for more than a Cherry Garcia from the Ben & Jerrys that stands on the corner. But there’s little else to remind anyone of that glorious time in history when, for a few precious years, it seemed that the dawning of Aquarius was a real possibility.
I remember in sixties San Franscisco passionately deciding that I would live there forever. My uniform of moccasins and beads, long hair and plaited flowers was my entry into a community of hedonistic, selfless, feckless young people who felt, no, who knew beyond doubt, that they had the answer to the world’s problems. Maybe they did but the world wasn’t ready to listen.
But something went wrong. The pushers came looking for the tourists who came to look on this human zoo, and when Janis Joplin died in 1970 it heralded the end of dreamtime.
I went back there a few months ago to a sense of instant deja vu. There’s a new lot of hippie followers selling jewellery, incense, candles and leather belts with the odd piece of Indian silver thrown in as a sop to modern sensitivities for Native Americans. The smell of pot still hangs in the air but the sense of sweet charm and quaint toleration has gone to be replaced with a feeling of menace.
The drop-outs who genuinely want to live a nomadic life are being swamped by aggressive Vietnam vets, the homeless, rootless kids you’ll find in all cities and the messed-up druggies that loll about in various states of despair and apathy. ‘Crazies’ - their term not mine - look at you wildly and shout obscenities as you pass and drunks pass out on the grassy bits of land near bus-stops. But attempts are being made to change the culture, and shops selling the sort of things they sold in the sixties now alternate with vegetarian restaurants and cast-off clothing stores, and there is a great number of really good coffee shops.
The tourists are coming back - slowly. Some, like me, searching for a past, some who want to add Haight-Ashbury to the list of counter-culture places they’ve visited, Covent Garden, Greenwich Village, Patpong, etc. Radical chic is alive and well.
It was nostalgia that took me back there, but as I stopped at Ben & Jerry's and bought a Cherry Garcia I thought again of the great bands of those days, of Janis and The Holding Company, of Jimi Hendirx, Jefferson Airplane et al. The family of drop-outs we created didn’t survive the seventies, but somehow the continuance of the hippie dream - even in a debased and ugly state - makes me think it wasn’t all in vain.
If today’s San Franscisco is a reflection of its past, then it is easy to see why the student revolution of 1968 had its beginnings here. It is a tolerant city, a city where an alternative lifestyle is a possibility and where diverse cultures and deviations from the norm are permitted. San Franscisco is just like a European city.
Haight-Ashbury stands as a monument to a dream that failed - but it failed honourably.
First Published in Sunjet (January 2004)
The smell of fresh figs, dates and pomegranates is an assault on the senses as I move among the shoppers in the market place of Amman. I bite into the nugget of juicy mango offered by the smiling stall-holder and accept a handful of saffron-flavoured pistachios. “Welcome to Jordan”, he said. “but please, tell your friends to come back too.”
The tourist industry is in crises in this peaceful corner of the Middle East where visitor numbers have fallen dramatically, not because of any internal dangers, but because Jordan is surrounded by countries where internal dangers are perceived to exist. Yet despite this downturn in tourism, I found only warmth and traditional Bedu hospitality wherever I travelled in Jordan, for extremism is foreign to the national psyche of this young country which only came into being in 1946.
The lack of visitors is a disaster for the whole country, not just those engaged in tourism, but from a selfish point of view it means that you and I have Jordan’s historic sites pretty much to ourselves, Petra being but one example where visitor numbers have fallen from a daily average of 3000 in 1999 to a daily average of 110 today.
“We are a quiet household surrounded by fractious, noisy neighbours” is how my guide, Kamel Jayusi, described Jordan in its relation to the rest of the Middle East. “People see only the fighting between neighbours and they stay away”.
That is a great pity, because Jordan offers the tourist so much, from ancient sites to modern shopping, cultural highlights to great beaches, all accessed without hassle or stress. There are no touts spoiling your walk as you follow in the footsteps of Old Testament prophets, or wander the sandy streets of 3,000 year old cities, and no beggars imploring you with outstretched hands for a few cents, for there are no beggars here.
When courtesy rules the day, shopping in the souks is a joy as, with a smile, you are told to take your time in deciding between the turquoise or the lapis lazuli earrings, the rope of gold or the necklace of heavy ornamental silver, all at bargain prices.
The city dress-code is relaxed too. Men and women may walk through tourist areas in shorts, although it is advisable, and polite, to wear trousers and a long-sleeved shirt if outside these areas. Black hooded robes are provided for women to wear over their own clothes when visiting a holy place, like the beautiful Blue Mosque in Amman.
The capital’s Roman remains and architecture is often overlooked because of the glory that is Petra, but this city that sprawls across seven hills has a rich history of its own. Downtown there is a well preserved Roman theatre, a colonnaded street and a Nymphaeum, seen to best effect from Citadel Hill, one of the seven hills on which Amman sits and site of a vast complex built by the Ammonites who settled here in 1200 BC. However, the remains of the Umayyad Palace and the Temple of Hercules, currently being restored, date from Roman times. In the small Archeological Museum on the site, among the fascinating artefacts on show, is one of the world’s great treasures – rectangles of kidskin sewn together that form the 3rd-century Dead Sea Scrolls, discovered in 1947 inside a cave at the Dead Sea by wandering shepherds.
A few hours drive from Amman, along the King’s Highway that cuts through the desert, and you are in the stunningly beautiful Wadi Rum, Jordan’s most spectacular natural feature, seen to great effect in the David Lean film, Lawrence of Arabia. Massive pillars of red sandstone, weathered into fantastic shapes, surge out of the flat and featureless desert like a scene from an Arabian fantasy. This is “the vast, echoing and godlike Rum” that captivated T.E. Lawrence and to spend a night under the inky, star-studded sky, to witness the fantastic dawn and sunset spectacle of the changing colours on the rocks and sand of the desert is an unforgettable and moving experience.
Not far from Wadi Rum lies the Red Sea port of Aqaba in a spectacular setting of purple coloured mountains and sandy beaches backed by groves of palm trees. This friendly and relaxed small town is believed to have been the Ezion-Geber from which King Solomon’s ships sailed.
It houses a small Fort built during the 16th century, but if you’ve had enough cultural history, you could head for the gently shelving, clear waters of the Red Sea where the coral teems with brilliantly coloured fish, and where snorkelling is both easy and fascinating. For divers, the seas off the 27km coastline between Aqaba and the Saudi border offer all year round wreck diving, in sea temperatures that never go below 20o, accessible from one of the five PADI centres that cover the area. (To dive you will need to produce your certificate and log book or take a PADI Review course).
If you don’t want to get wet, there is the excellent Marine Science Aquarium and there are plenty of glass-bottomed boats available from the two public beaches or the private beaches of the luxury hotels that stretch along the northern section of the Corniche. A payment of between £3 and £6 gains admission to these private beaches which are great places to chill out. And there’s always shopping – especially for jewellery, hand-woven rugs and carpets, finely decorated daggers and swords and Dead Sea health products – in the numerous little shops that crowd together up the hilly streets.
From Aqaba to the rose-red city of Petra takes you from the 21st century back to the 6th century BC when the original inhabitants, the Nabateans, having moved from Wadi Rum, set up this, their city state. For centuries they defended their home with ease until 106 AD when it fell to the Romans who were succeeded in their turn, first by the Byzantines, then the Crusaders. By the 16th century Petra was all but lost to the west. In 1812 the hidden city was penetrated by the Swiss explorer, Louis Burckhardt, who returned to tell the world about Petra, the wonder that had once been the centre of a trading empire that stretched from Saudi Arabia to Damascus.
The cliff walls on either side of the Siq, the winding 1200 metres track through the canyon that is the only approach to the hidden city, soar for upwards of 80 metres into an impossibly blue sky, until suddenly, the narrow defile opens on to a square dominated by the grandeur of the Treasury façade, carved out of the pink sandstone rockface. Most people are stunned into silence when first confronted by the Treasury, especially if the sun is shining on the façade, intensifying its pink colour.
This is only the first of Petra’s secrets. Walk further along and see caves, theatres, and temples, all carved with the same fine attention to detail. A UNESCO World Heritage Site, 85% of Petra still remains to be excavated.
From the Treasury you can hire a horse-drawn carriage, a donkey or a horse for the half hour trip through the heart of the rocks to where a steep climb of 800 steps to the Monastery, the Sacrificial Place, and magnificent views over the surrounding countryside await you. But if you walk the few miles you will be rewarded by more carvings, exquisite colouring in the soaring water-eroded rocks, and ancient inscriptions and figures of animals carved deep into the sandstone that ranges from pink to deepest purple.
These magnificent sites won’t be quiet for long. Soon people will be flocking back to Jordan to stand mesmerised before some of the loveliest buildings in the world. The astute tourist will go now while visitors are few.
Jordan will still offer the hand of friendship, the slice of melon and the cup of sweet tea as you barter (not haggle) quietly over some Beduoin craft or gemstone, for the hand of friendship will always be extended from he inhabitants of Jordan, this peace-loving nation.
Looking for Lorca in Al Andalus
First Published in The Times Education (Travel) Supplement
“Lorca is Granada and Granada is Lorca”, the young poet I’d met said simply. “And the Alhambra?” I asked. “That too. The Alhambra is our soul, but Lorca is our heart.”
Granada did indeed have a deep influence on the adolescent Spanish playwright and poet, Federico García Lorca, and it was the Granadinos who first recognised his genius and his gift for a lyrical poetry that reflected the passion and the pain of Andalucia. I wanted to find the landscape and the people that form the backdrop to his rural tragedies and his earlier poems and these, I was told, lay in the villages of the Vega - the vast plains that surround Granada - and in places like Fuente Vaqueros where he was born and where he spent the first eleven years of his life.
Just eighteen kilometres from Granada, I found the signpost I’d been looking for and a mile or two on a side road brought me to Fuente Vaqueros, a village of postcard-like simplicity, where the only sound at midday was the slap of dominoes coming from an inky bar hidden behind a beaded curtain. Old men sat in the shade of the poplar trees on one side of the plaza, while the aged women of the town, las viejas, dressed in black as if they’d strayed from the playwright’s House of Bernarda Alba, were busy with their looms on the opposite side. From the workers in the olive-groves that surrounded the village came faint snatches of the wailing, minor-keyed, cante honda, the song full of pain that Lorca captured in Gypsy Ballads and Poems of Cante Honda
This is España la verdad - the true Spain - where Lorca found the passionate, gitano soul of Andalucía and put it into the poetic form that revolutionised Spanish theatre in the thirties.
La Fuente, as it is known locally. is a gracious little town with a maze of narrow cobblestoned streets and alleyways in which to wander. At one time this area formed part of the Kingdom of Al-Andalus (Andalucia) and eight centuries of Moorish influence is still obvious in the whiteness of the houses, the barred windows and the flower-filled courtyards glimpsed through open doors. There is no tourist office yet, but there is no great touristic operation either, and you are not channelled in any particular direction. Wandering through the town, or sitting in its square at a café, or at the Bar Lorca with a copita, is an ideal way to spend an afternoon. And the wine of the region can be highly recommended.
The street in which Federico was born has been renamed Calle Poeta García Lorca and the house in which he spent his childhood has been transformed into a Museum. It is small, with few objects to demand your attention, but in the converted upstairs granary there is a fascinating collection of photographs, manuscripts, publications and curiosities covering the poet’s life, in particular his time in New York. This alone is worth the entrance fee. If you feel you’ve seen too many castles and cathedrals in Spain, this unpretentious and sparsely furnished house with its idiosyncratic collection of papers is a sheer delight.
Across the street from the Museum and facing the Plaza is the monument erected to the poet by Cayetano Aníbal, and if you sit on the stone seat in front of the monument, with just a little suspension of disbelief, it is possible to see the square as Lorca saw it - a meadow full of wild flowers, grasses and lizards. Here he watched the women wash the clothes in the fountain: here it was he absorbed the speech and the rhythms that were to energise his plays in later years and here it was he learned to identify with the victims of a stifling tradition.
Lorca was assassinated by Franco’s Nationalist troops shortly after the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War in 1936, executed at a spot between Viznar and Alfacar. The spot where he and fellow-victims were shot is in the Parque Federico Garcia Lorca, especially created to preserve their memory. This can be visited on the way back to Granada from Fuente Vaqueros, but if you are in Spain in August you may care to join the pilgrimage of Lorca aficionados who meet here at this time each year on the anniversary of his death.
His work and his memory were stifled under the claustrophobic rule of the late dictator but in his own land he is once again hailed as a genius. His plays today are as relevant as they were in the thirties, their passion and pain as accessible now as they were then.
The Alhambra may be the soul of Granada but the heartland of the ancient Kingdom of Granada, the Cante Hondo of the poems, remains the land of Lorca.
First Published in Traveller Magazine
You'll see them every evening, peering through the holes in the fence at the patrolling agents on the U.S. side, or astride the wall, silently waiting for sundown and their chance to make that final spurt for freedom. These are the pollos (chickens) illegal immigrants who nightly swarm across the high steel fence that snakes inland from Tijuana to San Diego. Like the old Berlin wall, this one too has arc lights and guards equipped with night-vision cameras.
San Diego County borders Mexico for approximately 70 miles, but the wall itself runs for only 14 of them. Further north the immigrants risk a gruelling three or four day journey across tough, arid terrain, but from Tijuana to the suburbs of San Diego it is only a short run. Joselito spoke for them all. "If we don't make it tonight, there is a chance of finding some sort of a job while we wait for another day. So we stay."
Tijuana is a tough place to live, it is noisy and dirty, the crime rate is high and the easy availability of drugs is a growing problem. But for the scores of people who arrive daily from all over Mexico, this frontier town is the gateway to new beginnings and new hopes and many who come here to try their luck at crossing the border end up finding means of supporting themselves and their families in Tijuana itself.
You will see them on the side-streets of the city; the brick-makers who squat by the streams, the farriers who tool and fashion the graceful Mexican saddles and boots, the touts for repairworks who stand by the sidewalk, a damaged car-door in one hand and a panel beater in the other. Their customers are Americans who drive their cars across the border for high calibre work at only one-tenth of what it would cost in California.
That's not the only thing that attracts Americans to Tijuana. Drugs and dental treatments that are expensive in the United States are cheap and readily available in this border city. It is almost certain that the American matrons you see clutching pharmacy bags have just picked up a six month supply of the sunshine drug Prozac at giveaway prices, a supply of chemo-therapy treatment, or a mixed bag of sleeping pills and wake-up pills.
Rich and poor live in close proximity. There are modest houses of concrete and metal alongside magnificent colonial style mansions, interspersed with crazily leaning shacks. Plastic containers splashed recklessly with scarlet and yellow paint and filled with scented pink geraniums define the 'garden' space in front of these dwellings. Here and there on end walls are brilliant murals of darkly exotic flowers, and oceans and skies of an impossible blue, a naif art that owes more to the capacity for gaiety and colour in the Mexican temperament than to any artistic talents. Even here strolling groups of traditionally dressed Mariachi bands want to serenade you and if you've suffered six versions of Quantanamera in thirty minutes it may be prudent to know the title of one or two other Mexican songs.
Twenty years ago Tijuana was little more than a clutch of ragged adobe houses and a few stores, a border town of such searing poverty and dirt that I was glad to leave it. Today it is a city in its own right, a city that has a future - of sorts. Above all, it has a young and vibrant population, one of the reasons why Samsung, Sanyo, General Electric, Ford and other international bodies have invested billions of dollars in the city and why they currently employ more than 100,000 workers. The fact that there is work for thousands where before there was nothing will not halt the border crossings, but it makes the plight of the 'chickens' less hopeless and enables some of them to remain in their own country.
Meanwhile, the steel border, illuminated at night, adds a frisson of excitement, a charge, to life in Tijuana and those gaunt figures that sit astride it today will be followed, inevitably, by others.
First Published in The Sunday Herald
It’s that time of year again when the inhabitants of Cowes in the Isle of Wight, rent out their houses, kennel the dog and cat, and disappear. The ‘yachties’ are about to descend on the Island for Cowes Week.
Although the town will never again play host to the reigning monarchs of four countries as they did in 1909 (Edward VII, Kaiser Wilhelm of Germany, the Tsar of Russia and the King of Spain), there is consolation in the whiff of serious money that comes with today’s royally rich. Oil barons and City whizz kids crowd the pavements of the narrow streets and Hooray Henrys swig vintage champagne from bottles as they stagger from one party to another. Old salts and wannabe ‘yachties’ dressed with impeccable regatta cred. stroll the narrow streets with polished brass telescopes under their arms, and the bemused local population looks on with wonderment.
Dressing to look the part is important during Cowes Week, so the stalls lining the pedestrianised streets for the week, display an impressive collection of overpriced nautical gear, navy sweaters sporting embroidered red anchors, peaked caps with enough braid to satisfy a Ruritanian General, and tee-shirts from famous yachting clubs. The crew and owners of the competing yachts do their shopping in the somewhat old-fashioned local shops that make no effort to look stylish or enticing, favouring instead a turn of the century faux ‘ships chandlers on the quayside’ look as befits Queen Victoria’s island.
For the novice or hanger-on who hopes to get kitted out in Cowes however, there are untold hurdles of taste to surmount. To be seen wearing anything other than the absolutely correct fashion is an enormous social blunder: what may have been essential last year could, this year, spell social death to the uninitiated.
It helps to have a dark chocolaty tan of course (a sure sign of a summer spent sailing round the coast of France or Greece) and you can’t go wrong wearing navy blue and white but beware of the striped matelot look much favoured by minor celebs. For both men and women fluorescent zinc suncream is a must. And never, ever, wear a blazer with a crest on the pocket unless it’s that of the Royal Yacht Squadron. Even then you may get funny looks.
The real members of the sailing fraternity can be seen around town wearing last year’s team shirts, proving they really belong at the yachtfest, so if you’re thinking of coming back for the celebrations in the Year 2000, get hold of one of this year’s shirts. The most prized is that of the U.K. Sailing Academy. If you haven’t got one from 1998 then beg or borrow a shirt from another Regatta to show you’ve been around anyway - exotic ones like those from Sydney and Singapore are the most prized.
And those shoes. They must be proper deck-shoes with the correct designer label on the side. Don’t even think of a copy pair from M. & S.
Shorts are acceptable - with the team shirt - if you are ‘pubbing’ but to carry these off properly you need to hang around outside the bar, preferably with a can of Mexican beer in your hand (the in-beer this year).
And if you manage it right this week, if you manage to look the part, to walk the walk and talk the talk, you might get invited to one of the minor yacht clubs to watch the fireworks on the last night. But if not, find a sailor, get a team shirt, and try again next year.