VIII

THE GRUMPY GUIDE TO
TRAVELLING

Although it is tempting to dismiss travelling out of hand as something young people do, people of all ages get up to this nonsense, so curmudgeons must pay attention at least long enough to condemn it. For there is little point to travelling and no reason to do it, apart from the need to stop other members of the family from complaining that they are never taken anywhere. Most places are the same as the one in which you live, except that they are less convenient. But if you must travel, below are a few notes that you will never find in any tourist guide. Ignore these notes at your peril.

Going places: Travelling in any airline’s cattle class is a most uncomfortable way to go anywhere. If Captain Cook had been faced with up to 24 hours in a plane to discover the South East Coast of Australia, as opposed to six months being tossed about in a ship, he might have told the Admiralty that it was not worth the trouble.

“Probably nothing down there, anyway,” he would have told them.

There are supercilious people in the Northern Hemisphere who would still agree with that statement.

A full day in a train is wearing and dull, particularly as it doesn’t have the airplane’s in-flight entertainment system, and is noisier so it’s more difficult to sleep. Travelling by car is boring and dangerous, if you get sleepy. Walking takes too long; going by horse is not much faster, tiring and there is always the danger of falling off. Bicycling requires real energy. Ships may be fine for some, but once you are on them there is not much else to do but put up with the in-ship entertainment, talk to your ghastly fellow passengers, or retreat to the bar and hope you don’t get sea sick.

As for any place you might want to see, everyone else wants to see it too, particularly if the weather is warm. This means crowds and queues and further inconvenience. Famous tourist sites, the second stage of the Eiffel Tower, the Colosseum in Rome and the top of the Empire State Building – why on earth do people want to go up the top of the Empire state building? – can be so crowded as to be uncomfortable, especially in the warmer months. In all it is better, and certainly cheaper, to stay at home and play computer games. With information technology advancing in leaps and bounds you will soon be able to virtually visit famous places, both present and past, while remaining at home. This avoids queues, spending money on airplane tickets and dodgy hotels, tiresome custom and security checks, general exhaustion and crowding.

Arriving: You are tipped off the plane, jet-lagged and monstrously sick of travel only to have to negotiate an obstacle course to get your luggage. In Paris, in particular, you have to be seriously attached to your luggage to still want it after the long hike required to get to the carousels.

Places: Once you finish the uncomfortable travelling and get past the queues, you will find that famous places are smaller and much less interesting than you thought they would be. The Sphinx in Egypt is a prime example. Admittedly you don’t have to queue to see it but the famous face is no bigger than a kitchen table. And you came all that way. Other places are famous for being mentioned in a song or in history, such as Piccadilly Circus in London and Union Square in San Francisco but are otherwise not worth visiting.

Information placards: These are the placards put up at spots that are thought to be of interest, which tourists are supposed to stand around and read. In some old buildings visitors could spend the entire day reading these wretched things. Why can’t they simply say something to the effect that some famous person (whoever) was killed here on this date, so that the message can be comprehended at a glance; or “famous massacre occurred here centuries ago, much suffering”. You can then take in the ambience – the stone work and darkness. Scary place, something bad happened here a while back, got it! Then you can move on. Some details can be added for those who don’t mind standing around, feet aching while they read it. If you have any interest in the blind hatreds of a few centuries back, you can always read about it later on your tablet. They have everything on the Internet these days. Pictures are better too.

Museums: So here is a musket under glass. Musket, got it. Looks just like the pictures you’ve no doubt seen. Further on in the same museum you may see equipment the old explorers carted around with them; or some old Roman coins found in a set of ruins. The coins won’t work on any of the modern vending machines, and the camping and wilderness shops back home have much better equipment. We should summon up the spirit of those old explorers and send them off to those shops and then ask our summoned spirits what they think of GPS units. Now that would be interesting.

Art galleries: If you see a lot of pictures one after another and they blur together. Was that set of canvasses from the French impressionists or the Dutch masters, and are we supposed to care that there is a difference? Contemporary art is best ignored until it gets older, and then disposed of in an environmentally unsustainable way. As for statues, they provide some decoration for large, outdoor spaces and a convenient roosting place for pigeons, but serve little purpose beyond that. Why would anyone want to see a collection of them? As for antique vases, bits of ancient jewellery and delicate latticework, flea markets sell that stuff on most weekends. Admittedly the flea market stuff is not a couple of hundred years old, but it’s often better made. No need to get aching feet standing around in art galleries.

Old castles: There was a big siege a few centuries back but thankfully you have missed it. Now the place is in ruins, leaving you to picture the pile of stones as it must have been in its glory days, such as they were. But it’s still a pile of stones and it’s time for lunch. A placard says that something really important happened there a long time ago, and a lot of people got killed. Right. Many more people got killed through disease, overwork or neglect than got themselves killed by men of high social rank who turned out to be homicidal lunatics, but then who pays attention to the little people dying of mundane causes. Whoever said that history is one damned thing after another was right. Henry Ford also once said that “history is more or less bunk” and he was right too. We are supposed to learn from history, but mostly we cannot even learn from what happened yesterday.

Rome in general: One of the few cities that has a set of ruins at its heart which it calls a tourist attraction. Why are two pillars on a slab of stone – all the remains of most of the buildings in the Roman Forum – worth preserving? Best to knock it down and put up an intact replica, complete with gift shops. Tacky? Possibly, but more interesting for tourists. If you must see anything in Rome check out the Pantheon. It’s just as old as the Colosseum, give or take a century, and is intact. Otherwise the Trevi Fountain and the Spanish Steps are overrated, and the museums are too crowded.

The Sistine Chapel: If you want pictures in a church, why put them on a ceiling, especially when that ceiling is as high as that of the Sistine Chapel? Pope Julius II, who commissioned Michelangelo to paint the ceiling in the early 16^th century, should have insisted on a nice flat white for the ceiling itself and asked for the paintings to be put at ground level, so that people can see them. There were already paintings there? Then put Mick’s paintings somewhere else where it won’t get as crowded and there would be more seats for the future billions of tourists.

Vienna: No-one seems to have told the Viennese that Mozart is several centuries dead, and that the Imperial dynasty was deposed almost a century ago, but then there are also a lot of old buildings they haven’t gotten around to knocking down. Sad really.

Paris: The Eiffel Tower is one of those monuments that’s famous for being famous. Originally built as the entrance way to the 1889 World’s Fair, the fair has long gone but the entrance has remained. Now it doesn’t do anything apart from draw tourists. If a gigantic lattice of brown iron work is your thing, then by all means go there. The snack food in the cafes nearby is tolerable. As for the rest of Paris, if gigantic stone buildings filled with paintings of 18^th century scenes make you warm inside, then you may need professional help; otherwise head for Paris. An interest in statues would also help. There are plenty of buildings with statues inside, outside, up on the walls and around the door. The original builders of the cathedral, or whatever, could have built the place for a quarter of the cost if they had ditched the unnecessary frills. A few centuries later and there are a billion tourists, give or take a hundred million or so, crowding around to see these frills. Strange, but there you are.

Pisa: They should straighten that tower. Why it was not torn down soon after the mistake in the design (shallow foundations in unstable subsoil) became apparent in the late 12^th century is difficult to understand. The mistake is a celebrated one, but if people like looking at mistakes there are plenty of those closer to home. Whole governments come to mind. Why travel to Italy?

San Francisco: This city’s famous tram network is, is fact, quite rudimentary compared to the extensive networks in cities like Vienna and Melbourne. The one bright spot is the ruins of old Federal prison of Alcatraz. As a famous place of misery it should attract grumpy people. In its heyday in the 1950s, the prison housed the hardest, most recalcitrant of the prisoners in the US Federal system. That meant it achieved a perverse attraction for the sort of people who end up in prison. It was a badge of criminal honour to serve a few years there. Shut down by the Kennedys in the 1960s, its main use now is as a tourist site and an occasional film location. Compared to European or even Australian cities the rest of SF is of little account. The best way to get out of this city is quickly.

New York: Something can be said for the street life of this city, in that there are a lot of street vendors, but how do any of those vendors afford to live within commuting distances of where they sell tee shirts or knock-off sunglasses? All the places that you may have heard about over the years, such as Soho or Greenwich Village, have become gentrified and that means the real estate is expensive. Even in Harlem, which used to have a dreadful reputation worldwide, apartments sell for $US1 million plus. Otherwise the Statue of Liberty is an overgrown piece of terra cotta, Times Square is not much more than an intersection that may have been a town planning mistake, the Brooklyn Bridge is just a bridge and the Empire State Building is a tall building you can go to the top of, which may be a thrill for some.

Washington: Tolerable, if you like monuments, but these always look far better in films than they do in real life. They are certainly less crowded. The Lincoln Memorial, for example, looks much better in the 1950s science fiction film The Day The Earth Stood Still, than it does if you look at it yourself. In films, incidentally, famous places are never crowded with tourists and the main characters in them can park their late model cars very close to the monument in question. This easy access to key points in any city, including famous tourist sites, is often more difficult to believe than the ridiculous plots.

Las Vegas: This city is so tacky that it really should be a virtual model. That is, its representation should be stored on a computer. Then you can visit it without the trouble, expense and crowds. You can gamble online, why not put the whole city online? It certainly makes more sense than building replicas of the pyramids and the Eiffel tower and whatever else takes the fancy of the casino owners.

London: So you’ve seen Big Ben and the Tower Bridge and ridden around in the underground which, surprise, is just like undergrounds anywhere else. One difference is that there are more English people on the trains than in most other places, but that is a hazard of being in England. If you ignore them, incidentally, they don’t go away. The tower holds some interest as a famous place of past misery, but the crown jewels are barely worth a glance. Westminster Abbey is tolerable if visiting tombs is your thing, which is creepy. Compared to Versailles, Buckingham Palace looks dumpy. Admitted there is a live Royal Family to live in Buck Palace but that just means that, unlike Versailles, visitor access is restricted.

Venice: If you like crumbling buildings slowly sliding under the water then by all means go to Venice. As the place lost importance in the 17^th century none of the buildings have been redeveloped into something more convenient which is a shame, but there it is. Museums, old palaces, a few monuments of varying interest – yada, yada. The famous gondoliers are too expensive to be worth the trouble and if you want a trip along a canal filled with over-priced houses, a lot of new world coastal waterside developments have canals, some of which have not silted up. You can hire a rowboat for a few dollars an hour.

Amsterdam: More canals, more museums to this and that. The Dutch version of history emphasises the time when the Dutch were the masters of the sea which is hardly surprising but almost amusing if you are familiar with the British version of maritime history. There is of course the Red Light district and the looser Dutch attitude towards recreational drugs, but curmudgeons don’t do those sorts of thing so it isn’t relevant.

Mardi Gras of all types: These can hold some interest, I suppose, if you are not being jostled by a million other people so desperate for a thrill in their lives that they have also come to look at the spectacle, such as it is. If you can put up with displays of drunken behaviour, queues for the bathrooms and the extra chance of being assaulted and robbed for the sake of gazing at a few bizarre floats then by all means go. A better strategy is to record the telecast of the event, glance at a picture in the paper the next day, and delete the unwatched telecast two months later to make room for something more important.

Firework displays: See Mardi Gras, but the telecast does not take as long to watch so you may glance at it before deleting.

All Asian cities: Not worth visiting, unless you have business. Sure there are ancient temples and plenty of scenery in Asia, but these are mostly not in the cities which can be seriously polluted and gridlocked. Anything that is authentically Asian is modernised to be just like the West. Unless it’s brand spanking new in Asia it’s no good. Not fair to Asian cities? Perhaps Hong Kong is not gridlocked, but it is difficult to see why anyone would want to live there, unless they were earning a living. Perhaps the harbour is worth a look, otherwise it’s the place to go when you are on your way to somewhere else.

Egypt: No Pharaoh in Egypt, in its glory days of 3,000 years or so ago, could rest in his pyramid unless he or she (there was one she) had put up another few square kilometres of statues and temples for this reason and that. If you like gigantic stone works that make no sense, unless you follow a detailed archaeological reconstruction, and endless lines of symbols that you can’t be bothered learning how to read, then Egypt is the place for you. The Pyramids are just big stone buildings in the desert just outside Cairo which you can take in at a glance. There is nothing inside except for a few empty chambers which you can’t visit anyway (at least you couldn’t when I went there), and the local authorities don’t care for you climbing on them, so all you can do is walk around them while being pestered to buy souvenirs. As for the famous Sphinx, see the entry for famous places. Cairo itself has an interesting, if seriously underfunded museum, if you can stand museums, otherwise the place should be avoided.

Beaches: If you are in an area where swim wear may be required, only to find your bathers has been left at home, you face the problem of buying some. Swim wear buying, particularly in resort towns, is not set up for the advanced middle-aged. The shops are staffed by young people with rings in their noses and stocked with bathers in primary colors with writing on them. All you can really do is choose the least eye-catching set where the words are not offensive, in the sure knowledge that you will not otherwise attract attention. Nor is there any need to go to the beach in them. If your hotel has a pool stick with that, even if the beach is a few steps away. The sand can get very hot and, when you do head into the surf, over-zealous surf life savers are always screaming at you to stay between the flags. You can find shade at the pool, without the bother of setting up a beach umbrella, order drinks and lie on a sun lounge while reading your book. If curmudgeons were given to philosophical declarations they would declare that life is a pool. Forget about beaches.

Fellow travellers: These people are in the same category as the people you meet socially, in that they may be boring, dangerous, diseased, opinionated, stupid, uninformed, unwilling to give proper credence to your own opinions (which are correct), loud, annoyingly cheerful, or all of those things at the same time. And you’re stuck on a plane or a train or whatever for hours with this person. When will the agony end? Your fellow travellers may, of course, be witty, charming and pleasant but this is highly unlikely. Your companion will be 40-year-old cross dresser who is obsessed over a return to the gold standard for international trading (long story, you don’t want to know).

Tour groups: Tour groups are a band of fellow travellers, as per the previous item, but unlike those in the seat next to you on a trip, you are stuck with your tour group companions for weeks. The horror! After a time the group itself splits into groups and, if there are a certain number of school teachers and social workers with the groups, it starts to feel like school. There are “cool” groups who actively sneer at the others and even, if the guide is weak or uninterested in the groups, to taunt others in the group. This is not merely idiotic but intolerable. One possibly good point to offset the main bad points is that you do see and do more in a tour group, as it is organised by professionals. If you have a high tolerance for your fellow humans then a tour group may be worthwhile. Curmudgeons should definitely stay away.

Hiking and camping: One part of the bush is much like any other part of the bush, and at the end of the day you breath in carcinogenic camp fire smoke and need a torch to see what’s in your coffee. Some people like this sort of thing, I am told, but then there are individuals who like to be whipped.