ALTHOUGH my new book features a lot of unfortunate incidents abroad, surprisingly little has happened to me on my own travels, con-sidering the number of places I’ve been to.
The only time I’ve seen anything really nasty was on a creaky bus in northwest China. We were climbing out of Turpan, which is one of the lowest cities on earth, in the bottom of a depression. Our destination was Urumqi, the most landlocked city in the world — if you want a beach, the choice is between Siberia and Bangladesh.
As we were creaking up the hill, the wind got up and the bus began to shake and rattle even more. The westerners on board exchanged nervous glances, but the locals seemed unperturbed. The bus passed by this huge boulder and the wind dropped, so that it was comparatively still. But when we emerged, this gust smacked into us and the windscreen shattered, sending glass everywhere. The driver’s mate got a sliver in his eye — pande- monium. For some reason, it was the foreigners who flagged down a lift to get him to hospital while the bus was repaired.
I did get very ill once, when I was walking in the Annapurna range. I don’t know what it’s like now, but then the rule was that you slept and ate in the same place — you weren’t charged for the bed, just the meal. However, most meals consisted of rice with lentil sauce and across the road was a place doing stir-fries. So I broke the cardinal rule and tucked in there. Well, someone paid me back, because I came down with such serious food poisoning that, on the way back from the loo, my vision failed. For some reason, I could only see the colour red. It was really scary. Luckily, some specialists in mountain medicine were passing by, and one of them, an American, was brought to see me. He convinced me I was going to live, and not to worry. It was very calming, and I got better. I met him a week later and he shook his head and said: “I had no idea what was wrong with you. You looked like shit. I thought you might die too. So I thought I’d better try some psychology.” Still, it worked, I suppose.
When I was a child, we took holidays either in places like Southwold, in Suffolk, or in Italy. The latter meant a bit of culture. Not too much — my parents didn’t push it — but we might go and look at a church before lunch. I’m sure it was this relaxed attitude that made me think the whole travelling thing was fun.
As soon as I could, I was off. I remember when I was 15, a group of us would go walking in Derbyshire, or the West Country — Wells to Exmoor, staying at youth hostels. It was marvellous, with a real feeling of independence, of being grown up. Parents don’t let kids do that any longer, which is a great shame.
I followed that with train travels across Europe — not Inter-Railing, just catching slow local trains. It was that experience that made me realise you could go anywhere you wanted in the world. So I did: I went to Japan and taught English, and tried to learn Japanese, which I didn’t do very well. But I got enough sense of the characters to stand me in good stead when I travelled in China.
I carried on travelling right up until we had kids, a few years ago. I went down through Chile with the intention of getting to Antarctica. The Chilean navy used to sell berths to tourists on their ships, which supplied the bases down there. When I arrived, I was told the voyage was cancelled, but that the navy had booked me, at no extra cost, on a rather plush Ukrainian-German ship taking regular cruise tourists down. You could tell the cash-strapped backpackers who had been bumped from the navy ship because we spent all our time at the buffet, eating, with big grins on our faces.
Antarctica was quite remark-able, in that there’s no colour there. A bit of blue from the sea or the glaciers, but if it’s overcast, everything becomes shades of grey. It’s like living in a beautiful, austere black-and-white photograph.
Children, especially young ones, slow you down. The amount of stuff you have to cart about is astonishing. So now we tend to do driving holidays in Italy. I love Orvieto, never tire of the place — it’s serene and relaxing after Rome. The thing about travelling with children in Italy is that, first, Italians are very accommodating, and second, they’re so noisy themselves, the kids just can’t compete. If they were making a racket, they wouldn’t be heard over the locals — and if the locals did notice, they wouldn’t care. It’s a wonderful combination.
Matthew Kneale talked to Rob Ryan
