Travel

Easter is a good time to talk about airports — or perhaps a bad time, if you bought your Spectator in the shopping labyrinth that impedes your path to the departure gate after a maddening wait in the security queue, where only a quarter of the scanners are working. I’m with you, and not just in spirit: in fact, that’s me being led away by men with machine guns, after an altercation over the contents of my wash-bag. It’s a curious fact that no one has ever succeeded in imbuing airport terminals with the romance, dignity and passenger satisfaction quotient of 19th-century railway stations. At best they are soulless, at worst a stress-filled vision of hell.

The sun has only just risen in Rome and we are standing bleary-eyed in a short queue outside the Vatican. Our guide, Tonia, takes us through security, and within minutes we are in a nearly empty Sistine Chapel. In an hour it will be crammed with tourists — sweating, gawping, getting in each other’s way. Vatican officials will be shushing and clapping to quieten the chatter. Now, though, we are free to contemplate Michelangelo’s swirl of naked bodies in peace. Michelangelo claimed that he painted the ceiling entirely on his own. In fact, Tonia explains, he started off with 15 helpers, though he got rid of them all along the way. He ‘fought everyone’, she says. ‘On the one hand he was amazing but in human relationships, no.

This last week, in India, I visited six cities in seven days: Mumbai, Pune, Bangalore, Hyderabad, Calcutta and New Delhi. This is my 11th trip to India and from the very beginning the signs were good. For a start, the temperature on arrival in Mumbai was a cool 22 degrees and I was told it had rained for the past two days, though I’ve actually never seen rain in Mumbai before. Because of a new eight-lane highway, we got from the airport to the Taj Hotel in the city centre in just 40 minutes, despite a minor hold-up. As the car was idling in a traffic jam, a young boy who couldn’t have been more than six or seven tapped on my car window. He was holding a pile of books. I wound the window down, and he asked: ‘Would you like the latest Jeffrey Archer?

My first visit to Athens as a student gave me a set of impressions that the present crisis has only validated. The man designated to meet us at the airport did not turn up. I will never forget his name. It was Nic Katsoudis. So we got in a taxi anyway. It crashed twice on the way to our apartment in the Vouliagmeni resort south of the city. Once inside, the plumbing was Periclean in age if not in grandeur. That was when local colonels and not German bankers were the devil. Since then I have been back often, en route to my sister-in-law’s house on lovely, neglected Skopelos — an island not so much unspoilt as unimproved in the first place. Athens is where you change planes, get on a bus or find a boat.

Syracuse is a handsome place, steeped in a rich historical broth. At the tip sits Ortygia, an island offshoot, which has been the backdrop to many Mediterranean sagas: Hellenic, Christian, Medieval, Renaissance, Baroque — take your pick. By day, Via de Benedictis is filled with local men selling sea urchins, milky balls of ricotta and bunches of mint. At night, we went to the Piazza Duoma for aperitifs. The cathedral’s broken pediments and exuberant sculpture cast strange shadows on to the square and a zephyr blew. It was November and the place was empty, aside from a small boy on rollerskates and a dog. In summer it must swarm with people. An earthquake destroyed much of southern and eastern Sicily in 1693, and many of the towns were rebuilt in a Baroque style.

Fez is one of the seven medieval wonders of the world. An intact Islamic city defined by its circuit of battlemented walls, it is riven by alleyways. You pass doorways that look into a 10th-century mosque, then a workshop courtyard, before coming through a teeming covered market and twisting past the high walls of a reclusive garden palace. The aesthetic highlight of any visit will be the teaching colleges built in the 14th century by the Merenid Sultans, and nothing can quite prepare you for the colours and odours of the open-air tanneries or the drama of listening to the dusk call to prayer from the ruins of the Merenid tombs. To the north of the city rise the slopes of Jebel Zalagh, dotted with olive orchards.

I arrived in Venice believing it would reek of sewage. It didn’t. The walk into the centre went through cobbled alleys packed with loud Americans in sandals and Italian ladies tottering in kitten heels. But it was when crossing the Rialto bridge that I first felt as though I was truly in Venice, with tacky gold gondola models for sale at extortionate prices, and tourists jostling for prime photo spots. How else are you supposed to know you’re on holiday? The canals are wonderfully chaotic; smaller boats have to dart out of the way of the Vaporettos as perilously overcrowded gondolas bob in their wakes. Gondoliers nap in the afternoon shade, pretending not to see the half a dozen tourists who turn up hoping to squeeze in to one boat and make their guide earn his money.

As a boy camping with my father on safaris deep in the African bush, there were no tents involved; we just slept by the fire like cowboys in the open under the constellations. Supper was sweet tea and biltong and we used a tin bucket for a shower. When it rained we simply moved underneath our parked Land Rover. One morning we woke to find tracks circling us, where a big lion had come close enough to blow on our toes as we slept. That old Africa rubbed off on me and I still like safaris to be the real thing — under canvas, by the campfire, gin, tall tales, fresh air, and carpet-creeping between tents. Safari is an art and it’s for real people, not celebrities climbing Kilimanjaro.