Spectator Life

What does Monte Carlo conjure up? A glamorous casino where fortunes can be won and lost, but mostly lost? Men in evening dress at baccarat tables with beautiful women standing by? A tax haven for the glitzy rich on the Cote d’Azur? Fabulous Belle Epoque buildings? A refuge for Edwardian English invalids to escape the cold? Grace Kelly? The Grand Prix?  It was here that Max de Winter met the girl who became the second Mrs de Winter at the beginning of Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca. "What do you think of Monte Carlo, or don't  you think of it at all?" he asked her. "I said something  obvious and idiotic about the place being  artificial," she recalled.  Well, she was pretty much correct.

There are few things that look sadder than an abandoned sports field. I spent longer than I meant to sitting on a decaying bench looking out over the forest that was once the intended playing surface for the Stroitel Pripyat soccer club. The sky above was cerulean, cloudless and entirely still. The only life came from my hand-held Geiger counter which spluttered and crackled, telling me that I was in a territory that wasn’t fit for a stroll, let alone 90 minutes of lung-bursting athleticism.

As a general rule, once a city erects turnstiles to tourist attractions which were once free to visit, it is time to go elsewhere. Never more so than in the case of Rome. Last week the Italian capital introduced a €2 charge to visit the Trevi Fountain. Tight-fisted tourists like me will still be able to see the Trevi from a distance – it happens to stand in a public street. The charge will be only for sad Instagrammers who want to get close enough to chuck their coins in the water. The city’s tourism department has suggested the fee is needed to manage the throngs of holidaygoers. Even then, God forbid, they won’t be able to take off their sandals and take a dip – that will earn them a €500 fine. Which raises the question: why bother visiting the fountain at all?

“People don’t actually do that, right?” my publisher asked nervously. “No one actually goes on a human safari, do they?” Eight years ago, I didn’t know for sure. There had certainly been rumors for years that wealthy foreigners were traveling to conflict zones to kill civilians at random. Gradually I had concluded that some people were indeed heading off to complete their bucket list of horrors. In my novel To The Lions, I placed the “human safari” in a fictional refugee camp in southern Libya. Concrete proof, however, was almost impossible to find. Several times during my years as an investigative journalist, I heard stories about nightmarish things going on in places where law and order had collapsed.

If you say the name Franco Zeffirelli to anyone under about 40, you’re likely to be met with bemusement. Find any opera or film lover over that age, however, and you will be greeted with a warm exclamation – “Ah!” – followed by a recitation of the Italian director’s greatest achievements. From his emergence in international culture in the 1960s with his seminal film of Romeo and Juliet to his legendary work on stage with such operatic titans as Maria Callas and Plácido Domingo, Zeffirelli became synonymous with tasteful, intelligent productions of the classics, all of which made him, for a time, the best-known cultural figure in Italy. It is fair to say that Zeffirelli, who died in 2019, didn’t always get it right, personally or politically.

I am in Tashkent, the capital of Uzbekistan. I am standing in a historic complex of madrasas and mosques, courtyards and dusty roses and I am staring at the “oldest Quran in the world.” It is a strange and enormous thing: written in bold Kufic script on deerskin parchment; it was supposedly compiled by Uthman ibn Affan, the third Caliph of Islam, who was murdered while reading it. And so it is, as I linger here and reverently regard the Book, while scrolling my phone for more fascinating info, that I discover the world’s oldest Quran is actually in Birmingham. Yes, that’s right, Birmingham, England. It’s probably in some obscure library, lodged between a thesis on post-colonial emojis and a flyer for Falafel Night.

My personal version of hell? Shibuya station, Tokyo. Shibuya Scramble is one thing: the busiest pedestrian intersection on the planet, it sees two million people elbow each other, every day. But the train station that thousands of them are trying to get to? That’s where my hopes go to die. A place where you’ll find me near tears, wondering if I’ll ever see my loved ones again. It’s almost impossible to navigate, spread across a dizzying number of floors and stuffed with throngs of human beings speaking a dozen languages. New platforms spring up all the time, often at the top of an unassuming escalator, or via a tiny hidden exit of the Hikarie shopping mall. There are (one or two) signposts, sure, but my Japanese leaves much to be desired.

It was stiflingly hot in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. I was exploring the eastern Galápagos Islands, living cheek-by-jowl on a former casino ship with a cast of characters plucked straight from a murder mystery novel: a former British supermodel, an Ecuadorian presidential candidate, the ex-drummer of a band who once supported the Who and an influencer couple who looked like they had stumbled off the set of Triangle of Sadness. The stars of the show – and boy did they know it –were the sea lions While the trip had all the ingredients to cook up an irresistible whodunit, I was not just there to inspect the wildlife on board but to observe the wildlife off it.

On a suffocatingly humid Friday morning in August, I sat in a rental car parked outside the home of Thom Robb, the leader of the Ku Klux Klan, wondering if I should knock on his door. A shirtless, muscle-bound, heavily tattooed carpenter who lived down the road – and swore he wasn’t racist or a Klansman – said Robb was “a really nice guy” who wouldn’t mind my turning up at his house without an appointment. Klansmen, I reckon, aren’t “nice” guys by definition, and as Robb’s mean-sounding dog barked at me from the other side of his fence, I feared the neighbor was setting me up to get my head blown off.

Southwest Virginia, October. Gravel groaned under my creek-numbed feet. I looked up at a mountain laid out like a fist and I climbed toward the most violent knuckle. But before I got there, the world turned on its side. I don’t know for sure why I collapsed. Maybe it was food poisoning, maybe a heart attack. I felt my face resting on cold stone and gripped the dark walnut of my rifle stock as I passed out. Eleven hours later, a new day started. A distant pickup truck with glass-pack mufflers fired up, then idled in a deep rumble. I stood – before the sun came up – and did squats for warmth, surprised I felt as good as I did, but I had a decision to make: walk off the mountain or hunt my way out. May as well hunt.

By complete fluke, my delayed shuttle bus rose through the Coast Mountains at dusk. I pressed against the window, outing myself as a tourist amid seasonaires snoozing through another spectacular sunset. Hot pinks and deep purples streaked between towering pines, transforming the outline of snow-capped peaks. I’d crash with local friends for a month, with support from Vail Resorts to explore stories beyond the slopes. Tales of Whistler Kids ski school were already family lore – I’d once visited as a 10-year-old, buzzing to see snow. Stuck at Vancouver International, I’d pulled up a chair at Salmon n’ Bannock on the Fly – Canada’s only Indigenous restaurant in an airport. As travelers, how often do we pause to ask whose land we’re actually on?

Wading through breakup grief, I’d hit the haziest stage of recovery, somewhere between lying horizontal in dark rooms, and shaving my head. Short of purchasing clippers, I’d resolved to write about wellness travel. Clad in regulation white cotton pajamas in the Western Ghats of India, my lifestyle habits had been judged (hard) and my thoughts about aging, recalibrated. A vigorous wellbeing regimen had revealed my 34-year-old body to be pushing 40, metabolically. Confronting? Yes. Salvageable? Also yes. (More mindfulness, fewer cigarettes, and – my addition – no men). Next stop: I’d pull on my hiking boots for a flight out of sweltering Mumbai, to icy Tokyo.  Post-Covid, Japan dominates algorithms and bucket lists.

I’m blinking through floor-to-ceiling windows that perfectly frame a pristine view of Edinburgh Castle, standing magnificent against an improbably cloudless Scottish sky. The elegant writing desk in the Archibald Signature Suite at 100 Princes Street hotel has all the makings of an elevated “work-from-home” set up, but the scenery – and the collection of aged single malt I know to be upstairs – make concentration an uphill battle. This luxury townhouse right on, you guessed it, iconic Princes Street was made for luxuriating, not hunching over laptops. Ducking into the entrance on Princes Street feels exclusive, like knowing a secret.

If you tell friends you are going to Kyrgyzstan, they look blank, or think you are talking about Kurdistan, although the two are 2,000 miles apart. If you get the choice, choose Kyrgyzstan. Like so many, I first learned of the place because of Alexandra Tolstoy: writer, adventurer, horsewoman and cousin of the author of War and Peace. She discovered the romance and beauty of the place for herself when she rode 5,000 miles of the Silk Road by horse and camel in 1999. Since then, she has ridden in Kyrgyzstan most years, taking parties of 12 or so into the lower slopes of the vast Tian Shan mountains, the highest range west of the Himalayas. Blonde, fearless and always elegantly turned out, she leads. We follow.

“Welcome to Wayanad. From here, all plastic is banned.” Prasanth was on a mission, belly pressed to the carpet of his car, legs sticking out on the roadside. He emerged triumphant, brandishing a forgotten Coca-Cola bottle and carrier bag before starting the ignition. Crossing into the high-altitude, hilly state of Kerala, he pulled up at a designated recycling spot.  Ephemera rained out of my upturned tote bag upon strict instruction to hand over any plastics. At Wayanad’s border, two impassive security guards eyed my friend and me as we instinctively sank back in our seats. A regular driver for tourists, Prasanth shrugged off the routine check, pointing to a sign as we were waved on.  “1,000 rupees fine! See?

I’ve always heard Americans describe the food in Rome as “authentic,” though maybe that’s only relative to our three square meals of Little Debbies, reconstituted meat and freeze-dried astronaut food. The things we eat are not authentic food. But abroad, authenticity means anything sourced locally and served by a very small old woman with limited English. If a nonna told me she’d fished anchovies out of the Trevi Fountain and plucked chicory from cracks in the sidewalk, I’d swoon and think: they really know how to do it right in Europe. Authenticity, to me, also means a little discomfort. Bones in your rabbit stew. Lugging a suitcase up a dirt road. Getting pickpocketed.

I was born in Saskatchewan and have no intention of returning. It’s the Siberia of Canada, an area bigger than France – where I now live – with the population of Buffalo, New York. It’s sucked dry by Ottawa. Elon Musk was here, and left. And it has winter temperatures of -40 degrees. Alberta has slightly more going for it: skiing, bears. But Albertans aren’t gruntled, either. The last time I was in Calgary I had lunch at the elite Ranchmen’s Club and the chatter was seditious. The talk was of Wexit – the separation of western Canada from the bloodsucking east. Then there’s Plan B. While it’s possible that western Canada could go it alone – seceding from the dominion and declaring independence – it’s hardly the only option.