The British pioneers of overseas travel

The British pioneers of overseas travel deserve a medal for braving the roads, the heat and, of course, the tea

Published: 14 January 2001

Are British holiday-makers heroes? That was the only conclusion I could draw from ITV's series Some Liked It Hot, shown over the past two weeks. How brave we have been, it seems, to go abroad at all, considering how parochial we were when it started, back in the days when we were all going on away-days from Sunderland and taking mouthfuls of sewage and catching polio.

I loved the couple, for example, who spoke of solemnly drawing up their will before going on a driving tour of France, "just in case". None of their neighbours, the woman said, believed that they were going to come back alive. Taking a motor car abroad did take courage, in the days when nobody knew if the British were genetically capable of driving on the right. They even had drive-on air services across the channel; cars were driven into the plane's hold through its nose.

And don't imagine that your generation was the first to suffer airport delays. If you are less than 50 years old, your parents certainly got there before you. The boss of the endearingly named Gaytours Ltd, an early mass-market package holiday company, admitted on the programme that what was described to passengers as a "12-hour delay" could easily mean a wait of up to two days.

And aircraft safety? Again our parents seem to have been the guinea pigs. One woman recalled sitting on the runway at Majorca in the early 1960s and being informed by the pilot that he had been unable to find a spanner to tighten up something in the engine and would the passengers please get into the crash position for a trial take-off?

"Going abroad made me feel that important," said one woman. "I thought: 'This is heaven. I'm a movie star.'" She then went and got blistered and had sun stroke and was horribly ill after just the first day on the beach.

I cannot quite imagine the humiliation of being the first British people after the Second World War to set foot on the beaches of St Tropez. "We were like milk-bottles," said a woman on the programme. "Everyone else was brown all over. We felt inferior, ridiculous."

The first British woman on holiday in Greece to fall disastrously in love with a man named Adonis; the first British people to attempt to make a mess of eating spaghetti in Italy; the first British man to complain that "you were lucky if you could get a good pot of tea" at breakfast in Spain: they did it for us.

So when we jet off to the Mediterranean this summer, let's raise a glass to the men and women of years gone by, who made it all possible.

Planning your travels by the colours of the seasons

This is the season of drab colours, a time of year when you want to pack up and escape to the 'bright red south'

By Jeremy Atiyah

Published: 07 January 2001

It's winter again, the eternal cycle of the seasons and all that. I always see this change as a violent switch from black to white, so that the new year invariably begins in a drab, unlovely colourlessness. This lasts through to February. Not until March will a vague whiff of colour touch this nothingness panorama - a watery green, perhaps.
It's winter again, the eternal cycle of the seasons and all that. I always see this change as a violent switch from black to white, so that the new year invariably begins in a drab, unlovely colourlessness. This lasts through to February. Not until March will a vague whiff of colour touch this nothingness panorama - a watery green, perhaps.
By May things are moving on. A strong yellow-blue patina will have formed, which progresses to something nearer red by mid-July. But from then on, colours fade ominously: first to a purple, in turn leeching colour rapidly to a pale brown, then to a grey then, by late November, to pretty much a solid, featureless black, all the way through winter.
So what does this colour-calender prove? Nothing much. But it does seem to tell a story about which parts of the world we ought to be visiting at which times of the year. Think about flying to the bright red southern hemisphere during the drab white month of January for example. Plenty do. But have they ever really told what an extraordinary sensation this is? Walking the streets of Cape Town, Canberra or Santiago de Chile while your home is in the grip of a northern winter will enable you to see hot skies and smell dry grasses as you never, ever imagined them before. I liken the experience to savouring a perfect cold drink which you knew existed, but had not drunk until now.
Following on from that, the insipidly pale-greenish month of March is the time, without a doubt, to get down to the southern Mediterranean, when everything will already be happening in bold colours: big storms, green hills, rich brown earth in the vineyards. And this is not the artificial, jet-flight-aided experience of someone else's climate. This is your own hemisphere. It is a preview performance of your own spring.
Coming up to the yellow-blue time of year is when I want to be in Scandinavia, travelling endlessly northwards. It's a mystical thing: some primeval search for the land of eternal sunlight. But the second the red time of year arrives in the UK is the second I want to get back home: July and August are without doubt the best months of the year to be in the UK (and how unfortunate it is that this is also the time of year when the majority of us have to take our holidays abroad).
The pale-brown month is time to get moving south again, preferably back to the Mediterranean where the bright-red season will still be in full swing, as though nothing has happened. But that phase doesn't last long. I see no fun in discos down on the beach, when the leaves up on the trees are wounded and dying.
My response upon entering the grey months is instantly to develop an appetite for extreme colourlessness, that is to say for Poland, or the Baltic, or Russia. It is as though, by anticipating my own winter, I can get it out of the way faster.
It is possible to truncate the whole autumn into a couple of weeks by a judicious north-eastward journey at the start of October, beginning with brown leaves in Berlin and ending in the snow-fields of Siberia.
That, then, leaves the black month of December, which can be dealt with by a tropical antidote: Bali, perhaps, or the Seychelles. Enjoy the last dying days of the year in some hallucinatory place, with fantasy downpours of steaming rain, and jabbering birds leaping about on rocks where the moss grows in front of your eyes.
There is no better way of busting up the illusion of the eternal cycle of the seasons than this.
It's winter again, the eternal cycle of the seasons and all that. I always see this change as a violent switch from black to white, so that the new year invariably begins in a drab, unlovely colourlessness. This lasts through to February. Not until March will a vague whiff of colour touch this nothingness panorama - a watery green, perhaps.


By May things are moving on. A strong yellow-blue patina will have formed, which progresses to something nearer red by mid-July. But from then on, colours fade ominously: first to a purple, in turn leeching colour rapidly to a pale brown, then to a grey then, by late November, to pretty much a solid, featureless black, all the way through winter.


So what does this colour-calender prove? Nothing much. But it does seem to tell a story about which parts of the world we ought to be visiting at which times of the year. Think about flying to the bright red southern hemisphere during the drab white month of January for example. Plenty do. But have they ever really told what an extraordinary sensation this is? Walking the streets of Cape Town, Canberra or Santiago de Chile while your home is in the grip of a northern winter will enable you to see hot skies and smell dry grasses as you never, ever imagined them before. I liken the experience to savouring a perfect cold drink which you knew existed, but had not drunk until now.


Following on from that, the insipidly pale-greenish month of March is the time, without a doubt, to get down to the southern Mediterranean, when everything will already be happening in bold colours: big storms, green hills, rich brown earth in the vineyards. And this is not the artificial, jet-flight-aided experience of someone else's climate. This is your own hemisphere. It is a preview performance of your own spring.


Coming up to the yellow-blue time of year is when I want to be in Scandinavia, travelling endlessly northwards. It's a mystical thing: some primeval search for the land of eternal sunlight. But the second the red time of year arrives in the UK is the second I want to get back home: July and August are without doubt the best months of the year to be in the UK (and how unfortunate it is that this is also the time of year when the majority of us have to take our holidays abroad).


The pale-brown month is time to get moving south again, preferably back to the Mediterranean where the bright-red season will still be in full swing, as though nothing has happened. But that phase doesn't last long. I see no fun in discos down on the beach, when the leaves up on the trees are wounded and dying.


My response upon entering the grey months is instantly to develop an appetite for extreme colourlessness, that is to say for Poland, or the Baltic, or Russia. It is as though, by anticipating my own winter, I can get it out of the way faster.


It is possible to truncate the whole autumn into a couple of weeks by a judicious north-eastward journey at the start of October, beginning with brown leaves in Berlin and ending in the snow-fields of Siberia.


That, then, leaves the black month of December, which can be dealt with by a tropical antidote: Bali, perhaps, or the Seychelles. Enjoy the last dying days of the year in some hallucinatory place, with fantasy downpours of steaming rain, and jabbering birds leaping about on rocks where the moss grows in front of your eyes.


There is no better way of busting up the illusion of the eternal cycle of the seasons than this.

So what if British trains are slow?

So what if British trains are slow? They are only catching up with the rest of the world

By Jeremy Atiyah

Published: 17 December 2000

I do hope that there are some foreign tourists enjoying Britain's slow trains at the moment. Retired Americans, say, or mellow Australian backpackers. People who stay relaxed while looking out of windows at stationary British landscapes.

This is not to wish harm to foreign tourists. It is just to say that these are the only people who might actually be enjoying the experience of, say, spending entire nights on trains travelling between London and Nottingham (as opposed to the locals, most of whom probably want to string themselves up from the nearest broken signals).

Swedes, I hope, are already cracking jokes with Spaniards about funny British trains (maybe they will re-run the one about the man asking if he has the right platform for today's train. The guard replies: "No sir. This is yesterday's train. Today's train comes tomorrow") Commuters will not laugh, but if you are a Swede or a Spaniard, there is at least a chance that you will board your British train smiling contentedly at the ancient truth that timetables are not the only thing in life.

We are always reading in guidebooks, after all, about the pleasure of catching trains "just for the experience of it". How about the famous "toy train" to Darjeeling in India, for example, which takes an entire day to trundle up a miniature-gauge railway, along a route that can be covered in no time at all by bus? Everyone agrees (except, presumably, for local commuters) that the train is the only way to do it - because of the funny clanking noises and the sheer nostalgia the ride evokes.

Then there was the excellent direct train that, until recently, still ran between Athens and Istanbul. The only reason for getting on this train was the time it took: between one and two days (not precise enough for you? Go by bus then). What I particularly liked was that it was slightly slower than the same scheduled train service had been at the time of the Ottoman empire.

It is the same with all the great train rides. Yes, some of them are very long journeys. But what makes them really "great" is their slowness. The Trans-Siberian may be the longest railway in the world, but by any standards a whole week to get from Moscow to Vladivostok is a hell of a long time. A French TGV covering the same route could do it in not much more than a day.

My own favourite place for extremely slow trains used to be Spain. It was as recent as the late-1980s that I enjoyed the pleasure of taking the longest domestic train journey then available anywhere in the European Union, between Barcelona and Granada. Timetabled at an astonishing 18 hours, it was none-too-convenient for a quick business meeting. But for a tourist, creeping down the coast to Valencia, moseying inland across the plains of La Mancha to Ciudad Real, then meandering south through places like Valdepenas and Baeza... well, what could be better? The Spanish state train company, Renfe, seemed to understand this, deliberately slowing the train down the nearer you got to your destination. The last stages, inching between the barren hills of Andalucia, gave tourists a spooky feeling that they were coming to the last place in the world.

But that has all changed. These days Spanish trains have become so speedy that there is no fun in them any more. Riding to Andalucia is getting to be a lot faster than riding to (say) Nottingham. I don't see why British train operators cannot capitalise on this, and start making a virtue out of their slowness. At least it will please the tourists.

The pleasure of Ramadan

No food, no drink, no sex, no work - observing Ramadan brings liberation in unexpected guises

By Jeremy Atiyah

Published: 10 December 2000

We're right in the middle of Ramadan, during which Muslims are supposed to refrain from eating, drinking, smoking and having sex during the hours between sunrise and sunset.
A shocking time to take a break in the Middle East, then, you must be thinking. Any chance of a glass of water during one's desert outing under the hot midday sun? Sorry.

Well, that's as maybe. But I once spent Ramadan in Riyadh, the none-too-festive capital of Saudi Arabia, and my memories of that time, I have to point out, are almost exclusively of merry-making and jollification.

For the entire month, all work went onto the back-burner. People did short hours, if any, on the grounds that it is not easy to concentrate when you have got a stomach full of nothing. A few bleary-eyed tellers continued counting money in the banks, and the odd grumpy traffic policeman could occasionally be seen waving cars through broken traffic lights in 100C, but the general rule was that life during Ramadan should be different.

The basic idea was to expend as little energy as possible during the daylight hours, then, at the moment the sun set, you broke your fast with a meal of dates before moving on to the harder stuff, if appropriate. Having spent the day sluggish and semi-comatose, it was quite normal to put in a few hours of work after your sunset meal, and then to spend the rest of the night feasting until dawn. And the best thing was that you knew everybody else was on short working hours as well, so there was no need to feel guilty.

A whole month every year, to put aside! It struck me even then, that this was at least as good as a month on the beach every August.

Inevitably there were a few people who took things to extremes: gloomy types, who went around in fear of accidentally swallowing their own spittle, for example, or who spent time checking that other people weren't sneaking a quick fag in the office toilet.

But most people were having the time of their lives, relishing the anomaly of sleeping late under the air-conditioners, enjoying not doing their jobs properly, savouring the possibility of catching up on old friends at four o'clock in the morning. Petty-spirited expatriates, I noticed, used to deride the evidence of people actually enjoying themselves as contrary to the spirit of Ramadan, but this usually meant two things: first, that they were bitter about their favourite cafes keeping unusual hours, and second, that their notion of Ramadan involved suffering and penance.

What would happen if we tried to inaugurate a Ramadan-style month of fasting and reflection in this country? Some, I suspect, would look at their diaries and think : "Oh no! What is the point of living if I am not working efficiently?". They would then lock themselves in their offices with piles of illicit sandwiches and coffee and pretend to sleep, while doing their utmost to exploit the temporary absence from work of the rest.

Worried that you might be one of these people? A short holiday in Saudi Arabia during Ramadan might be just the thing for you.

'Tis the season to get cheap flights

Flying anywhere in late November is a pleasure easily comparable to shuffling through piles of dead leaves

By Jeremy Atiyah

Published: 19 November 2000

When everything is dark and meaningless, and people are too depressed to think about going away, air fares become ridiculously cheap. That's why I like the end of November.
When everything is dark and meaningless, and people are too depressed to think about going away, air fares become ridiculously cheap. That's why I like the end of November.
The owners of airlines, by contrast, must hate this time of year. The sight of the last yellow leaves clinging feebly to the treetops means empty seats in planes. Because what customer in their right mind is going to plan a holiday four weeks before Christmas? The only consolation for Go, Ryan Air, Buzz et al is that this low-season also gives them the opportunity to trumpet some absurdly cheap fares.
In six months' time, when the leaves are green and bees are buzzing in the sunshine again, some of that favourable publicity will begin to pay off. People will get up in the morning and ask each other: "Where did I see that advertisement for flights to Barcelona for £49?" By then, of course, the price will have doubled or tripled, but that won't matter: the seed of the idea that flights to Barcelona are cheap will have germinated in the spring warmth.
Anyway, right now, I can't get enough of these feeble yellow leaves. There are some at the bottom of my garden which I have been staring at fixedly for a fortnight. I am willing them to drop. It's a kind of superstition I have: cherry-tree leaves a-dropping, flights a-going cheap.
During the past week I've seen tickets to Lisbon, Madrid, Barcelona, Sardinia and Calabria all advertised for under fifty quid, including taxes. I couldn't help picking one up, almost as an involuntary reaction, like wiping a drop from the end of my nose. I regard buying tickets at this time of year as a seasonal rite, even if one has no intention of travelling. What do you lose after all? Well, £50, I suppose. But the gains are enormous: namely, the possibility of flying south, when everyone else is too depressed to move.
By the way, buying tickets merely on the grounds that they are extremely cheap (regardless of whether or not you will be able to use them) is another of those special pleasures that I associate with dark afternoons and mulch underfoot. It makes you realise how much of the joy of travel is in the anticipation.
Try it yourself: buy a ticket to Lisbon for £50 and carry it around in your pocket for a week. If you are feeling well-off, buy two or three tickets simultaneously to different destinations. Ask yourself how much pleasure the experience has given you. Then throw away the tickets.
Of course if you actually decide to get on one of your flights, then so much the better. Flying anywhere in late November is a pleasure easily comparable to shuffling through piles of dead leaves.
What I especially like, as soon as I get off the plane, is the sight of Latins dressed up for November: vast padded coats designed for Siberia - just bought for the season - tend to come out whenever the temperature drops below 15C.
And it's those giant autumn coats that help people, sitting over their correspondingly tiny coffees, to look serious. Before the atmosphere goes downhill in January with the addition of silly hats, these coats add to the general gravitas; to the sense of creativity, depth and intelligence.
Basically, they give you all the reassurance you need, that you are not completely out of your right mind taking a holiday four weeks before Christmas.
When everything is dark and meaningless, and people are too depressed to think about going away, air fares become ridiculously cheap. That's why I like the end of November.


The owners of airlines, by contrast, must hate this time of year. The sight of the last yellow leaves clinging feebly to the treetops means empty seats in planes. Because what customer in their right mind is going to plan a holiday four weeks before Christmas? The only consolation for Go, Ryan Air, Buzz et al is that this low-season also gives them the opportunity to trumpet some absurdly cheap fares.


In six months' time, when the leaves are green and bees are buzzing in the sunshine again, some of that favourable publicity will begin to pay off. People will get up in the morning and ask each other: "Where did I see that advertisement for flights to Barcelona for £49?" By then, of course, the price will have doubled or tripled, but that won't matter: the seed of the idea that flights to Barcelona are cheap will have germinated in the spring warmth.


Anyway, right now, I can't get enough of these feeble yellow leaves. There are some at the bottom of my garden which I have been staring at fixedly for a fortnight. I am willing them to drop. It's a kind of superstition I have: cherry-tree leaves a-dropping, flights a-going cheap.


During the past week I've seen tickets to Lisbon, Madrid, Barcelona, Sardinia and Calabria all advertised for under fifty quid, including taxes. I couldn't help picking one up, almost as an involuntary reaction, like wiping a drop from the end of my nose. I regard buying tickets at this time of year as a seasonal rite, even if one has no intention of travelling. What do you lose after all? Well, £50, I suppose. But the gains are enormous: namely, the possibility of flying south, when everyone else is too depressed to move.


By the way, buying tickets merely on the grounds that they are extremely cheap (regardless of whether or not you will be able to use them) is another of those special pleasures that I associate with dark afternoons and mulch underfoot. It makes you realise how much of the joy of travel is in the anticipation.


Try it yourself: buy a ticket to Lisbon for £50 and carry it around in your pocket for a week. If you are feeling well-off, buy two or three tickets simultaneously to different destinations. Ask yourself how much pleasure the experience has given you. Then throw away the tickets.


Of course if you actually decide to get on one of your flights, then so much the better. Flying anywhere in late November is a pleasure easily comparable to shuffling through piles of dead leaves.
What I especially like, as soon as I get off the plane, is the sight of Latins dressed up for November: vast padded coats designed for Siberia - just bought for the season - tend to come out whenever the temperature drops below 15C.


And it's those giant autumn coats that help people, sitting over their correspondingly tiny coffees, to look serious. Before the atmosphere goes downhill in January with the addition of silly hats, these coats add to the general gravitas; to the sense of creativity, depth and intelligence.


Basically, they give you all the reassurance you need, that you are not completely out of your right mind taking a holiday four weeks before Christmas.

Why must these gentle exiles from the world's most powerful nation humbly apologise for everything?

By Jeremy Atiyah

Published: 12 November 2000

Don't talk to me about American politics. The only Americans I care about are the exiles: the sad ones, travelling the highways and byways of the world.

I am not, of course, talking about the sort of people who spend a week in New York and then go home to Texas believing they have seen Rome. Or the schoolkids in Wisconsin who don't even know that there are foreign countries.

No. It's the real American travellers - the world specialists - who fascinate me. The best travellers you can ever meet. There's no greater pleasure in life than bumping into solitary, bearded Americans in places like Kashmir or Beirut, looking depressed about the state of the world.

They don't necessarily say it out loud, but the feeling is written all over their pale blue eyes, watery after the latest sandstorm in, say, the Sinai Desert: "We come from a powerful country," they want to say, "but unfortunately we are powerless people."

They explain to me, modestly, that this country of theirs is located in the ocean half way between Japan and Britain. ("It divides the Atlantic from the Pacific," they say. "You find it between Canada and Mexico.") They then spend hours crushed into uncomfortable buses, telling me how sorry they are for everything.

It's taken me years to get the point. "Sorry for what?" I say, wondering if it is their squashy peaches I am sitting on. "Oh, you know," they murmur, in non-assertive voices, with Burmese peasants sleeping on their shoulders or sundry Vietnamese babies in their laps. "For... isolationism. For ignorance. For what we have done. For the mistakes we have made."

It is as if they think that the whole world is lined up in righteous accusation against them, behind Ayatollah Khomeini, and, moreover, that they themselves - even in sarongs - are morally responsible for global warming and Third World debt.

I actually feel very sorry for them. They are doing their bit. They know what all good travellers should know (that Yemenis, for example, use tufts of camel hair as coffee filters, and that there are pirates in the Sulu Sea).

I want to try to reassure them. "Oh don't worry about it," I say. "We're still grateful for the Marshall Plan." But they keep on giving me that sad and guilty look, even if they then turn out to have done a seven-year PhD in a dialect spoken only by the tribespeople of eastern Bangladesh, and have since devoted years of their lives to re-educating child-prostitutes and drug-users in northern Thailand.
A strange symptom of the heavy responsibility of world leadership? Probably. And perhaps these sad, gentle people in their big quilted coats up there in the High Karakoram (or in their sandals down there by the Ganges) were once sponsored by the State Department. Who can say?

But now they have become ultra-knowledgeable travellers. They are experts in unusual kinds of tea. They can summarise nations. They speak quietly, in the hope that nobody will recognise their accents. They get their facts right.

And regardless of whatever happens in Washington, I am looking forward to meeting many more American travellers like these in the very near future.

How to re-define fame

If you think the West has bizarre ideas about what defines celebrity, try visiting China

By Jeremy Atiyah

Published: 06 November 2000

I'm just back from China and am having to get used to the fact that people are no longer jostling to get better views of me as I step down from my bicycle rickshaw.

What a depressing transition. Last week, people were offering me congratulatory glasses of Chinese vodka every time I opened my mouth to speak. Since my return home - on the other hand - nobody has paid me the slightest bit of attention.

Nobody has asked me how much I earn, for example, or if I am married, or why I am balding, or how old I am, or whether it is true that the English masses drive their own cars. Now I know how bad Princess Diana would have felt had she ever found herself ignored by the paparazzi.
Celebrity status in China is great. It's also quite easy to acquire, if you have a big enough nose. Some of the most famous men in the world are obscure English teachers who have managed to get themselves on to Chinese television a few times.

What happens to you if you are a Chinese-speaking foreigner in China is that you instantly become a spokesperson acting on behalf of the entire Western world. You become the special envoy of the European and American intelligentsia (or proletariat, or peasantry, depending on how recently you have shaved).

For most Chinese, after all, it is a God-given truth that Chinese speak Chinese, and foreigners foreign - just as Chinese eat rice, drink tea and use chopsticks, while foreigners eat chips, drink coffee and use knives and forks. Any daring attempt on the part of a man with pale eyes and a giant nose to break these laws of heaven is enough to stop a billion people right there in their tracks. Your casual remarks during long bus journeys through Sichuan province will be capable of altering the future course of history. I have found that it helps to be polite.

Of course, fame in China has its low points, as it no doubt does in Hollywood as well. There are days when you would rather not have people staring at you too closely. The responsibility of representing the combined peoples of Europe and America is less attractive, for example, when you have just got off the Peking-Canton Express along with a population equivalent to that of several small African countries.

I'm also none too keen on being woken from my sleep just because somebody wants to ask me if I would mind posing for a photograph with his daughter who is due to be married later in the day. And be careful with that nose of yours which is going to generate such intense interest: whatever you do, don't pick it, and don't blow it loudly in public places.

But make no mistake. Stardom in China has its uses. With a nose as big as yours, you will be allowed to use first-class waiting rooms at stations even if you are travelling on a second-class ticket. You'll always get to the fronts of queues more easily.

Best of all, though, is this: that the nicest, cleverest people in China will be queueing up to pay you attention. Just sit back and wait for them. Subjects for discussion will range from your attitude to China, right through to your feelings about your children and the level of your income.

And don't worry. You will also be congratulated, as often as you like, on your ability to speak Chinese (and to use chopsticks).