When I’m travelling as a writer to strange and distant lands my conscience tells me that I should be living like the indigenous people. I should be experiencing whatever privations and discomforts they are suffering on a daily basis in order to fully absorb the colour and patina of their lives. If that involves a lack of running water, cooking a sparse dinner over an open fire and encountering insects that make your nights a waking nightmare, then so be it. I’ve read enough from authors like Wilfred Thesiger, Jan Morris and Paul Theroux to know how a real travel writer should throw themselves into the moment.
Sometimes, of course, that is exactly what happens and it is often a highly rewarding experience – at least it is once you are safely home and looking back through your memories. (Graham Greene, after all, was almost finished off by illness while travelling in search of his own version of Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness in Liberia in 1935, but lived on to become one of the greatest writers of his generation.)
I have to confess, however, that the more strange and distant the lands I am visiting, the more I relish having a base in an anonymous, international, five star hotel. The hot shower so powerful it massages out the muscles that have become knotted with the bumpy roads of the day at the same time as shooting away the dust; the air-conditioning that lowers the body temperature; the ability to make yourself understood in your own language and the bland international breakfast and strong coffee that set the stomach up for a day of local delicacies. It is the very blandness and anonymity of these hotel chains that soothes the nerves and provides comfort for the body and the mind after a long day of often violent stimulation.
I do, however, feel guilty whenever I find myself scampering back to the five star safety of an international hotel chain, but then I tell myself that even Greene ended his days in Antibes, possibly one of the most comfortable and civilised places in the world, far from the ‘Heart of Darkness’ he once sought out so eagerly.