Chapter 3 of Time Dark Sea. Previously: Llagostera as launch pad, and Barcelona rebuilt through politics, the Olympics and mass tourism. This week: the city's deeper wounds — Civil War, Anarchism, a petty crime near the Columbus monument — and the bus north out of Barcelona, at last, to Llagostera.

Barcelona’s tensions with the central powers are a historic reality, pegged through time, with the current phase anchored in the Civil War.

In the years between 1936 and 1939, Barcelona was in the thick of the broadly leftist fight back against Franco. In fact, the whole Mediterranean coast was a burr in Franco’s side. The city suffered greatly in those years and afterwards (although it certainly wasn’t alone in that) and it’s no surprise that not all those wounds have healed.

Those arranged against Franco’s forces across Spain during the Civil War were a disparate bunch from a range of ideological backgrounds. Tens of thousands actually came from outside Spain, part of the large international volunteer forces that rushed to help the Republican cause.

I was travelling with one of them, a young Australian by the name of Lloyd Edwards. He was a literary companion whose presence was in the form of a collection of letters he wrote while he was one those fighters, joining the 15th International Brigade in 1937.

Those brave souls saw the dark clouds gathering that would storm-burst almost immediately after Spain was lost. Hitler’s Nazis blitzkrieged Poland just five months after Franco’s Nationalists marched into Madrid to claim the government.

Lloyd Edwards, wrote to his family back in Perth in July 1936 from an Aberdeen and Commonwealth Line ship in Colombo on his way to Spain that “It is a remarkably miscellaneous collection of human beings, many are particularly stupid while others are particularly smart.”

“The halfway between,” he goes on, “the ordinary sensible people are the ones who stay at home.”

Prominent among that cohort of fighters, both Spanish and international, were a group that was relatively prominent at the turn of the nineteenth century and the early twentieth century and rather forgotten now: the Anarchists.

In many ways, it’s fair to say that Anarchism was the biggest loser of the Civil War. Stalin-backed Communists, better resourced and less frightening for many international onlookers, undermined the Anarchist movement with more weapons and nastier agendas. The battle between leftist ideals and the alphabet soup of organisations that represented them takes up a lot of George Orwell’s first hand report as a foreign fighter in the war, in Homage to Catalonia.

Orwell was struck by the social experiment of Civil War Barcelona. In 1936, when he arrived as part of the informal international fighting contingent that had gathered worldwide to fight the fascists, the city was something of a workers’ revolution in progress. Formal pronouns were no longer used, as they denoted class, people wore generic worker’s dungarees and boots, and all wages were set at equal levels meaning tipping in cafes became something of an insult.

He writes in Homage that “it was the first time I had ever been in a town where the working class was in the saddle.”

Hemingway saw a different city in these years.

“Now it is the paradise of the fake soldier,” he wrote of Barcelona in his Spanish Civil War novel For Whom the Bell Tolls, perhaps his most psychological work.

“The soldiers who like to wear uniforms, who like to strut and swagger... Who like everything about war except to fight.”

This was Karkov, a dark, somewhat mysterious character Hemingway used to embody the Stalinist elements in Spain and its brutal Realpolitik manipulation of the Spanish war for its own ends.

The Soviets won their shady political chess game and successfully marginalised and eventually destroyed the Anarchists. But, in the end, the Republicans won not much at all and their in-fighting and disorganisation frustrated Orwell, Hemingway and many others, Spanish and foreign alike.

The Communists won against the Anarchists. Then they themselves went on to lose the war. It’s almost Pyrrhic. Very Mediterranean.

If the big losers were the Anarchists, the ultimate winner was not just Generalissimo Franco, the Church or the old elites, but the central state ideal, which became further entrenched as a result of Franco’s victory.

The battle was of course, for power, not the ideals of Anarchists or anyone else, and that was the hill on which Franco’s Nationalists and their Communists enemies staked their claims.

The noted Spanish academic Miguel de Unamuno knew within months of Franco’s coup kicking off that the dark arts of politics would prevail. Just months into the Nationalist coup he told an audience that included prominent Nationalists, including Franco’s wife, “You will win but you will not convince” while members of the Nationalist Falange Party made one-armed salutes in the audience in defiance of his words.

Unamuno was right. It didn’t matter. They did win. They did not convince. They lasted almost 40 years - some might say they are still there - and the dictator died in peace.

Today, Anarchist groups are still active. Barcelona’s pro-Palestine demonstrations since October 7 are often organised by Anarchists and they are mobilised in relation to squatter movements around the city that have sprung up to deal with the city’s housing shortage.

It is apparent the city today is not, as the city burghers, distant politicians and tourism marketing agencies would have it, a slick globalised city, full of romance and cool, and fitting seamlessly into a coherent Spanish nation state. That narrative might be what sells the vision. It is not, I would suggest, how most of the locals see it. Hence the troubled relationship with Madrid and with mass tourism, both of which are embodiments of the thrusting, single-minded, Francoist economic policy that has become the norm. The hordes of blimpy, sunburnt Poms, Germans and French helped pay for Franco’s four decades of dictatorship. And, it seems, Barcelonans have long memories.

During the Civil War, Las Ramblas was in the thick of the action, with running battles along the main promenade and in the tight streets that run off into adjacent suburbs like Raval. These days, the pavemented mall is something of a seedy tourist trap, with tout-fronted restaurants, a sex museum advertised by a scantily-clad and bored-looking Marilyn Monroe lookalike, cheap souvenir stalls and, later at night, hoody-clad and dark voiced drug dealers offering drugs and trouble.

Right now, it is also something of a construction site. Deep trenches run along each side, forcing walkers to weave around witches hats and cyclone wire. The tacky tourist stalls are thankfully being moved out as are the old bird sellers that preceded the tourism boom. Today’s tourists are suffering discomforts so tomorrow’s can have a purer Barcelona experience.

It looked like the pictures I had seen from the war days.

One afternoon, I sat in a cafe in Las Ramblas and watched as a group of African men moved in and removed some large pipes, heavily encrusted with age and dirt, from the ditches that ran along the mall. The pipes looked to be metal, cast iron perhaps, or lead.

They had to dig them out further to grab them with their hands, and they were obviously very heavy, with four burly men needed to carry one section of perhaps a metre and a half, grunting and straining with the effort. They hoisted the sections with much drama onto a nearby flatbed truck which winced and bounced with the weight.

The way they were dressed suggested some sort of audacious, dare I say anarchic, raid by entrepreneurial migrants.

I later learned that they likely were migrants who were freelance junk merchants. It’s a practice which I was told is not exactly legal, but is accepted.

Unlike many major European centres in recent years, neither Barcelonans, nor Catalans generally, appear to have spent much energy blaming migrants for the lack of housing and other real or imagined ills. While the leader of the Catalonian secessionist movement, Carles Puigdemont and his Junts party (meaning “together”, apparently ironically) are openly anti-immigration, locals appear to have identified that it is tourists who rent the apartments and push up the tapas prices, not African asylum seekers. In general, and historically, Barcelonés and Barcelonesa are more likely to heap their opprobrium on Madrid, or on the local government, before it starts pointing fingers at migrants going about their day. The housing crisis, for instance, is seen as the result of elite property investment and an over-the-top reliance by central authorities on pandering to tourists’ growing need for ‘authentic’ or home-style, accommodation.

This lean towards egalitarianism and humane politics - not always expressed in reality, yet aspired to nonetheless - is a part of the soul of Catalonia, which, as many here would see it, puts it in fundamental contradiction to Madrid and, for that matter, for the EU.

Madrid is patrician, elegant, straight-laced. Valencia is in the shadow of both Madrid and Barcelona, and carries an inferiority complex. Seville is aloof in its Moorish distinctiveness. And Barcelona is a chaotic dance; always chaotic, always dancing.

I knew it was time for me to leave Barcelona when I had my backpack stolen near the Columbus monument. It shook me up, even if it wasn’t serious. My phone, cards, money and passport were safe with me. I had lost notes for this book, other work notes, my prescription reading glasses and my battered old Kindle on which I had been re-reading Dervla Murphy’s lovely book on Gaza, A Month by the Sea. I was shaken up. It was a very real personal violation even if the actual material loss was relatively small. I also felt foolish and rookie, and berated myself for my lack of vigilance. Ultimately, I calmed myself with gratitude that nothing truly important was lost.

It ended up being a stressful few hours as getting back to my hotel I realised the key for the padlock on my main bag was in the stolen backpack. I therefore had to enlist emergency assistance from the hotel’s resident handyman. He nodded blankly at my story and disappeared, returning minutes later with a two-foot long bolt cutter. We stood awkwardly silent in the tiny elevator, like we were about to conduct a crime. He couldn’t cut through the lock, so he had to cut the zipper tags through which the padlock looped, leaving them looking malevolent and violated.

Just before the theft, I found a large bookstore in the Raval district, and bought an English language copy of Borges’ Labyrinths for my daughter who has become enamoured of the Argentinian writer’s compelling overlap of the planes of existence, as I had been in my youth.

I was writing in it that she was a labyrinth in her own right, and wondered if I should have punned it, as in “write,” when the bag was whisked away silently and without my notice.

In a single act, it seemed apt. Barcelona had felt skewed and on edge. I thought perhaps it was me, being new here, the strange and surprising place I was in, physically and mentally, or perhaps just the heat was addling my mind. There was an aloofness in the people that I put down to Catalonia’s gruff persona, a distance that hung in the air like smog.

Maybe. It still felt like something was brewing as it seems it always was here.

I sat now on my hotel bed on my last afternoon before leaving, flipping through the pages of Borges, and came across a line: “I thought of a labyrinth of labyrinths, of one sinuous spreading labyrinth that would encompass the past and the future and in some ways involve the stars.” And I felt the old city’s warm breath on my neck.

I was glad to be at the homely, rundown old Estació del Nord to head north. To Llagostera.

The proportion of Africans at the Estació del Nord seemed higher here than elsewhere in the city. I wondered where they could all be going and where they might be coming from. Bus stations, representing transience, may well be the kind of place some cultures find familiarity and peace, or perhaps where they dream of going home.

I sat on the floor, propped against my bags to wait for the bus, sweating in the heat despite the shade of the building.

A shape loomed over me, felt more than seen as my eyes were closed in an attempt to just for a moment shut-down and escape the city. I looked up and saw her, standing, looking down at me, her face passive, unmoving yet oddly comforting and solid.

She looked away.

She wore overalls, known here as monos, and a t-shirt underneath, of which I could just see part of the red and black insignia of the FAI, the still existing anarchist federation (aligned with the Confederación Nacional del Trabajo - CNT - or National Confederation of Labour) which fought Franco’s forces during the Civil War.

She must have been in her 80s, maybe 90s, a stoic dinosaur, a five-foot-tall warrior with a set jaw and steel grey hair. Surely she was a Civil War kid, wearing the memories of that hideous time in her choice of clothes, in her eyes, in the mind that seemed to be deep set and whirring as she looked ahead and assessed her next steps.

I stood up. I wanted to talk to her, to ask about the war, was she there, what does she remember?

This country, a historic collection of established nations, still wobbles at times as a centralized nation state. As evidenced by Catalonia, and other distinct regions, like Galicia, Andalucía , and the Basque country (Euskadi), Spain’s connecting tissue can be weak.

I imagine those areas attached to the Spanish state like the pieces of a jigsaw floating on the nation’s shorelines; sometimes locked in, sometimes not, and their edges furred by the waters of culture, politics and history.

For Catalonia and Spain, the wounds of the war, and of the subsequent violent and repressive “peace” of Franco’s reign have barely healed. The border between Catalonia and the rest of modern Spain may not be visible, yet it still exists as cicatrices across the mental landscape.

There is an eerie silence about the war and its aftermath. The kidnapping of children by the Nationalist government between the 1930s and 1990s remains for some a sotto voce topic, so shocked are many by the detestable practice even now. Children born to nominally anti-Franco families were removed from their mothers, who were told the children were dead, and brought up by ‘safe’ pro-regime families. Trusted community leaders, from Catholic priests to nurses and doctors, participated in the crime, driven by a belief that those who opposed Franco were afflicted with an anti-social Marxist gene that had to be cauterised from Spain’s puritanical body politic.

The practice was only widely acknowledged around 2010 after an investigation by a well-known human rights judge called Baltasar Garzón became known. No-one has ever been convicted of having a part in the state-sponsored theft of tens of thousands of Spanish children between the 1930s and 1990s.

It’s difficult to see how a society recovers from such a blatant, and cruel, breach of trust.

Perhaps this woman was one of its victims.

The reluctance to revisit such traumas is understandable on personal levels. On a different level, however, it’s hard to escape how institutionally convenient it is, bolstered by the infamous Amnesty Law (Ley de Amnistía) of 1977 which blocks local courts from prosecuting anyone for Civil War or Franco-era crimes. As a result, no-one has been.

Perhaps these internal diversions have ensured the war and the almost 40 years of dictatorship that followed have been underplayed as a critical historical moment. This is odd as the Spanish Civil War and Franco’s reign had an undeniably central role in European and world history at the time, and significant factors in today’s global landscape can be traced back to pointers present in Spain over the last century.

The daily weight of it remains and everywhere I went in Spain, I was aware of the ever moving battlefront that this war dragged across the nation in the late 1930s; in the farm fields and in the villages, in the cities and in the forests, on the beaches and in the mountains, the war’s terrible rumble rolled across lives and livelihoods like an errant steamroller.

I could feel the tremors of the Civil War and the horrors of Franco moving silently through the bloodstream of Catalonia and across Spain.

The most harrowing section in Hemingway’s For Whom the Bell Tolls is one in which Pilar, a member of a guerrilla band, tells the story of events she witnessed in a small Spanish village where the local republican militia has corralled the “enemies of the people” for execution.

Hemingway allows Pilar a crushing line; “If you have not seen the day of revolution in a small town where all know all in the town and always have known all, you have seen nothing.”

The fine line between political passion and mass psychosis, a border crossed by both sides in this conflict, fades before your eyes. Hemingway is writing fiction, but with the “non” prefix lurking behind the words.

Such feelings manifested in me throughout as a recurrent background anxiety, like an occasional mental flinch, which felt very real and very present, despite the years that have passed. Every pockmark in a wall seemed to me a bullet hole, every dark alley a place for a rough execution, every ditch a bed of rape, every furtive look a memory.

That unease was, and is, concentrated by the fact that similar forces and trendlines are in play today, and similar ignorance, laziness and prejudice in the halls of power arrogantly purport to contain the march to authoritarianism with the wherewithal of a paper bag holding water.

In the 1930s, Britain and France, nominally freedom-defending democrats in Europe, refused to put any obstacles in front of Franco’s savage insurrection, infamously choosing not to provide any military aid to the floundering democratic government. Some leaders actually hoped for a quick fascist victory so things could get back to normal without too much bother.

Hitler and Mussolini were less reticent and engaged their firepower with gusto behind Franco to crucial effect.

Historian Paul Preston argues that British non-intervention policy in Spain put protecting social hierarchy and the status quo above freedom, arguing that their appeasement policies were “founded in the class prejudices of Conservative decision-makers.”

The damning conclusion that the deadly, explosive buds of Hitler and Mussolini and their aggression could have been nipped well before they wiped out a generation may be disputed. To me, it seems a fair claim.

The woman at the bus station seemed to have forgotten me already and shuffled off, carrying jagged shards and odd-shaped bits of Spanish history like an unseen train behind her, as so many do here. I moved to talk to her, but held back and left her alone. The demons of that war at this personal level perhaps need not be disturbed amid the day-to-day challenges of language, age and bus stations.

I instantly regretted my timorousness, the diminution of my journalistic instinct. I had deferred to a stronger impulse, a respect for privacy. The moment was lost.

By the time the bus pulled out of the Estació and we hit the highway I was, not for the first time on this journey, wanting to turn around and go back. As unfamiliar and gruff and ultimately nasty as Barcelona felt, I was missing the place already. The city’s ugly outskirts gave me little to attach to and so my mind was able to wander.

My panic increased as the structures thinned out and a more rural landscape, harsh-lit and brown, deep into the washed-out summer afternoon took over. It looked to me empty, unfriendly and alien. The bus windows framed stubbly, harvested fields punctuated by lines of huge wheat-coloured rolls of something organic, like giant fat cigars. Little villages came and went, with the bus stopping at some, and passengers happily getting on and off. I was jealous of their familiarity with the surroundings.

Creeping visions of being dropped off at the end of some dusty town as night fell, with not a soul about, were getting more intense as the day departed. The feeling was making me ill.

I was finishing Lloyd Edwards’ letters and had reached where he was escaping the country over the French border at war’s end. He writes of his “fear that when I got to the border, I wouldn’t get over, would go to a concentration camp.”

Very different situation, yet I recognised the sense of vulnerability in movement, felt close to Lloyd and his anxieties in this land.

I was supposed to be met by E, a French chap, who of course I had never met, who had been minding the house for a few weeks before I arrived. What if he wasn’t there?

What if he was an axe murderer?

Chapter 2 of Time Dark Sea. Previously: The view from a café table in Barcelona, and the Mediterranean's long habit of being the world's centre. This week: A small town in Catalonia, and back to Barcelona, a city defined by its ideas.

It starts in Llagostera, an unlikely launch pad.

To the extent a journey starts anywhere at all, it started on the beach, as a boy, back on Australia’s Pacific coast, and in the straight line horizon that seemed to be looking back at me, and in the feeling of that water lifting and holding me.

All journeys begin like this; with a space, a feeling, a moment that is often buried well behind the physical steps to move and to travel.

Spain. A country I had never been to, yet which had a resonance for me, for reasons I don’t really know. The Civil War, Orwell and Lorca, Cervantes and Gasset, Segovia and Flamenco, Catalonia, Al Andalus, Galicia, Basque Country, Guernica, Manuel the waiter, and Barca v Real Madrid, all mental highways leading me here, imagined, closed and darkened until now.

To Spain.

This unknown destination.

Llagostera.

The place felt like a gift. But, if it was, paraphrasing Churchill on Russia, it was wrapped in mystery, inside an enigma.

On one of the last nights I was in the Middle East, stopping over on my way from Asia, I went with a friend for a few drinks at the apartment of an English friend of hers. We ate, drank whiskey and talked politics and told stories with her and her husband. They were excellent company. Hearing I was at a loose end, travelling, though not sure where, the friend told me her brother and his partner were looking for a house sitter - more truthfully, a cat sitter - while they worked through the summer in England.

“They live in a place called Llagostera,” she said, eyebrows arched in expectation. The next day I googled the place. I didn’t learn much, other than it was around an hour’s drive north of Barcelona. The owners were to be gone for six weeks and it seemed one of those moments of serendipity - a message from Kismet - that vagrants like me are wont to rely on.

I agreed to do it.

And I felt the lift begin, that familiar exhilaration of weightlessness I hadn’t felt for so long.

When I landed at El Prat airport I came to the luggage carousel to see the army-style duffel my friend had given me — since my bag had split — emerge from the luggage hold, dripping clothes, like it had been mugged in the bowels of the airport. The zipper had busted and a nine-inch tear, like a yawning mouth, had spilled some books, undies and T-shirts on the conveyor belt. I walked out to grab a taxi holding it to me like a baby lest more fall out, cowering and embarrassed.

I had wanted to be suave for my first visit to cool Barcelona and it took me longer to recover from that tiny crisis than it should have.

The 1992 Olympics was my first introduction to the city. Watching on TV in Australia, it seemed like the most intriguing, exciting and beautiful place in the world. This was back when the Games were still worth getting up for. And it was a buzz. That awesome opening ceremony, with the arrow firing from an athlete’s bow to ‘land’ in the cauldron to strike the Olympic flame (It was likely a clever illusion: apparently the arrow shot straight over the cauldron and out of the stadium. It was just timed to ignite as the arrow passed over it) and the spectacular high diving venue up on Montjuïc, where divers leapt off platforms with the city laid out behind them, like they were diving into it, were unforgettable.

That and the chic reputation the city has garnered over the last few decades, unhelpfully as it turns out for locals and tourists alike, built up the place before I had got there.

Since then, it has cultivated itself as an irresistible vortex for tourists, being a pioneer in modern, urban mass tourism, and now among the world’s most visited cities. Since the 1990s, the city has ridden on the Olympics, which itself crested on the Costa Brava boom. It is commonly argued that the city and, more directly, the coastal strips to the east and running south of it, are among the founding locations of mass tourism as we now know it.

I set off on Day One of this adventure. The shade, thrown by the grungy old buildings angled sharply upwards in the narrow streets, was welcome relief from the punishing late summer burn in the plazas and wide streets. I came armed with a list of sites I intended to visit, and, as usual, I refused to give in to the weakness of a map, digital or otherwise, allowing the city itself to lead me.

Sure enough, I came across most of the targets on my list, their majesty or interest aided by the pleasant surprise of their discovery.

On one of the days I spent thus flâneuring, I found myself at the beach. My lack of maps meant I wasn’t sure if it was Nova Icaria or Barceloneta beach or somewhere else. It was well populated with prone bodies, and the aroma of sun lotion competed with the faint salty whiff lifting off the tiny waves.

Perhaps I’m too used to the confidence of the Australian gaze out to the ocean, which is seen as a place of fun, meditation, adventure, possibility and escape. For Mediterraneans, it seems the sea itself is something of a threat, which is reasonable given that so many invasions emerged through the waves and onto, and over, the beaches. People here, and all around the Mediterranean, seem to cling to, or huddle on, the beach rather than find joy in it.

From Spain these days, a troubled gaze falls across the Mediterranean, enlisting informal migrants coming mostly from the Middle East and Africa as the enemy. These nominal invaders are a paradoxical, ironic army of bedraggled women and children and thin young men with phones in their back pockets and fear and desperation in their eyes. These dangers to European security carry no weapons other than their hopes, no agenda other than to get a bottom-rung job in the promised land of Europe.

The continent’s defences, bolstered by the invention and evolution of the European Union over the last half-century, are arranged as if they were under constant assault from the slickest, most brutal fighting forces ever assembled. The vast watery border that is the Mediterranean hosts, on any given day, a bobbing armada of liveried EU anti-immigration vessels, bristling with the intention to hold off anyone who has the temerity to do what human beings have always done when conditions are no longer liveable: move.

I stood for a long time looking out from the small beach with its flashy cafes, restaurants and casino, and across these deep, unwelcome waters.

As if to confirm the feeling of anxiety and constriction, I had to pay to take a leak at a beachfront toilet block, which seemed a minor human insult with the same mindset, if not the scale, of the EU’s approach to informal migrants - another denial of a basic human need.

A squat, grumpy matriarch interrupted my hurried passage into the open cubicle, with a flurry of terse language and an outstretched hand and a language that didn’t sound to me like Spanish or Catalan. I saw no sign noting payment.

I was eventually permitted entry after hastily parting with a euro and was confronted with a smelly, slimy and malevolent interior. The toilet itself held a nasty reminder of the previous visitor. That euro clearly didn’t pay for cleaning.

When I emerged, the woman was gone. Was she just a local looking for a meal or was she too one of those hapless souls from across the sea grifting for a tenuous European future?

The coffee I had afterwards while sitting in one of those fancy air-conditioned cafes overlooking the beach was expensive and bitter.

Barcelona’s foundation is so ancient that its details are lost in the traffic smog of time. I like the theory of it being an offshoot of the Carthaginian empire (which was based in what is now Tunis), in the 3rd century BC, if only for the synergy of its possible source: a Carthaginian general named Hamilcar Barca, Hannibal’s father. The other most credible candidates as founders are the Phoenicians (who were the founders of Carthage anyway), from way across on the other side of the sea, in what is now Lebanon.

Either way, the settlement started as a sea-facing trading post that quickly grew in size and importance. The city’s subsequent place in the Mediterranean story is clearly significant. Yet, it shapes around the sea a little warily. Its port and beach are busy, but there is a sense of always looking back to shore, rather than outwards. Even the well-known nineteenth-century monument to Christopher Columbus, nestled at the bottom of La Rambla (which is also called, confusingly, Las Ramblas), has the eponymous explorer looking outwards to sea, but not to the Americas that would bring him eternal fame.

His pointing finger is actually aiming more or less southwards across the Mediterranean, towards Algeria, rather than across the Atlantic. At least from where I was viewing the monument, Columbus’ stance is a little awkward, feet shaped like he is not committed and unsure about which way to go. One foot is dangling on the edge of the plinth like he could topple off. Rather than booming, “We go here!” he seems to be asking, “Er, is it that way?”

I wonder if someone, somewhere is having a joke on Columbus and on his sponsors, King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella. The monarchs unified the disparate Iberian peninsula and essentially constructed modern Spain in the second half of the 15th century. Columbus’ establishment of a Spanish presence in the Americas was a significant economic boost to that aim. I couldn’t help wondering if centuries-old Catalan anti-monarchical sentiment and the sense of humour of those who designed and constructed the monument in 1888, sculptor Rafael Atché, and architect Gaietà Buïgas i Monravà (both native-born Barcelonins) are somehow conspiring to take the piss.

I walked and walked, playing a game in my mind to find a way of summing up this great city. I stumbled upon the Sagrada Familia. Antoni Gaudí’s monumental, ridiculous church. I realised this might just be the icon I was looking for.

The basilica was established in what was then a largely rural area, outside the city walls, among sheep fields, in early 1882. It was intended as a statement of Catholic piety, part of a political push against Republican, anti-Church sentiment - an iteration of a broad conflict that was to be present across the centuries in Spain.

Art critic Robert Hughes, in his book Barcelona, is abruptly clear in his summation of the Sagrada Familia’s intended purpose. It was, he wrote, “commissioned and designed as an ecstatically repressive building that would atone for the sins of modernism and the ‘excesses’ of democracy.”

That it remains incomplete some 150 years later seems a stronger statement than was perhaps intended in the initial brief. The sweating tourists who stood in line in the morning sun to pay 26 euros, waiting to wander about inside with 100s of other over-cooked bodies, certainly didn’t seem mired in its complicated history.

Despite its elite agendas, the Sagrada, in its unfinished impossibility, and its over-the-top sense of itself with its fake Christmas trees in the high-up walls, its icing sugar spires and madhouse angles, has ended up becoming a compelling statement on the place and its vision of itself. Antoni Gaudí, its Catalan designer, produced a masterpiece not unlike the expressions of another Catalan, the great Salvador Dalí. It is a work of genius. The way those spires seem to hang upwards, the distribution of the columns, the narratives it references, the windows, the light.

Yet, the structure seems like a statement in search of a point (notwithstanding its nominally religious intent) or like a poem composed purely for the sake of hearing one’s voice speak it.

Like an excited child discovering speech, the Sagrada tries to say so much that it becomes incomprehensible. That isn’t to say it is not endearing, fascinating and worth viewing, but that’s partly because it’s such a pure glimpse into the heart of the city.

Mirroring the Sagrada, Barcelona’s true locals seem to somehow revel in being misinterpreted, carrying the otherness like a banner. Thus, they are always distinct and set apart. The city stands alone, and that would appear to be where it wants to be.

As a result, like Gaudí’s magnum opus, the city’s deeper incompleteness leaves it reaching for something it doesn’t have, or can’t touch. Or perhaps for something it has lost or been removed from. Barcelona, seen through its earthy, hardy people, appears to be constantly thwarted by the constraints of a reality that has never really suited it, never really matched its version of itself.

The Sagrada, Barcelona and perhaps all of Catalonia are, in some ways, too expansive for the Spain that wants to hold them, and perhaps too much also for an increasingly restricted, overly structured world. Theirs is the kind of grand yet imperfect version of human folly, expression and freedom that the rest of the world, whether it knows it or not, has been at war with for centuries.

I’m sure those at the ground levels of Barcelona society, the people, know exactly what their city is. Not every city can make that claim. Part of that sense of self falls easily into step with Gaudí’s insane creations and reflects the vernacular anarchist and syndicalist ideals of small communities voluntarily working together to various agreed common ends, even as it subverts the Sagrada’s political agendas. That the place doesn’t always make sense or work in practice is, in a way, divine. As Gaudí himself said, “there are no straight lines or sharp corners in nature.”

I soon bored of Gaudí and with the slavish, unthinking fawning over his oeuvre, even as his singular creation stays with me.

I was staying near La Rambla, the university, and the Sagrada. This is in the heart of the Eixample. By the mid-nineteenth century, a little before Church leaders were pondering what became the Sagrada Familia, officials in Madrid were concluding that Barcelona had grown so much, and had become so successful as an industrial hub, it was literally bursting at the seams. It was considered the “Manchester of the South” so dense were its workers’ quarters, jostling with textile factories, belching and crunching day and night, driving the cogs of the industrial age.

Those authorities, with some commendable foresight it must be said, although with less sense of the local character, decided to knock down the old city walls. These date back to the Roman battlements constructed in the first century BCE, which ran around what is now the Gothic Quarter.

To the fetid, seething space this part of town had become, they envisaged something of a new model in modern urban living. It was agreed that aiming for better use of natural light, space and something like a tentative egalitarianism were the aims. Catalan engineer Ildefons Cerdà ticked all the boxes with his design and he won the right to usher in a new era for the Catalan capital. It was to influence city planning to this day.

His plan centered on super blocks, supposed to be 113.3 metres square, which were to facilitate a process he called “urbanización”, thus helping to set the term as an international concept. The distinctive chamfered corners of the blocks were meant to ensure horse and carriage drivers had vision well back from the corner.

Wide avenues meanwhile offered room for motorised vehicles, which hadn’t yet arrived, but which Cerdà foresaw.

The design, successful for a time, soon succumbed to real estate speculators, and the wealthy tended to buy up the best spots. Those in less salubrious neighbourhoods, with shallower pockets, tended to fill the block courtyards - intended for gardens - with more dwellings, thus creating mini-slums.

Cerdà was roundly criticised for these missteps until his death in 1876, unfairly I think. The problems in his design were more due to the greed of the city’s elites and less about in-built dysfunctions. He strikes me as a Catalan with more democratic and egalitarian sensibilities than the tedious Antoni Gaudí, an anti-social religious zealot whose output tourism marketing boards have branded as must-see tourist attractions.

Cerdà strikes me as the kind of Catalan that, while also faithful to his culture, perhaps is more grounded and perhaps more universally applicable. His reputational resurrection is overdue.

Barcelona’s Gothic Quarter is the outcome of a similar redevelopment scheme to the Eixample although this time the goal was, quite directly, to increase tourist numbers.

The Barri Gòtic area was occupied by numerous lower-middle-class, working-class and artisan communities, crammed into crowded tenements and traversing dim, tight and airless lane ways.

In the late nineteenth century, a local government made up of dogged Catalan nationalists devised a means by which the working people in the area could benefit from better living conditions, whilst also underpinning Catalan national pride by reinvigorating the indigenous medieval, Gothic and neo-Gothic architecture that had fallen into disrepair. With the International Expo coming to Barcelona in 1929, the opportunity was ripe to promote Catalan culture and identity.

During the 1920s quite a lot was done as part of the on-going revamp of the city. This is fairly conventional, you might think, even if there were the inevitable controversies over moved communities and design choices and so on.

Things got really interesting in the Franco years. Then architecture became weaponised. The dictator shifted the emphasis away from Catalan sensibilities and implemented a range of design agendas intended to bolster his vision of Barcelona and of a nationalist, pro-monarchist Spain.

Franco looked upon the less than 1 km² space of the Barri Gòtic with a combination of disdain and lust - the former for the unruly and politically troublesome neighbourhoods, the latter for the potential it offered as a kind of living medieval showpiece. A kind of Disneyland full of simulacra devised in the mind of a dictator. A Francoland, no less.

Franco’s renovators - architects, engineers, developers and investors - moved in, the locals were turfed out and the quarter was reconstructed, like an application of some mad, post-modern manifesto, to look more like itself. All sense of Catalan identity was quashed. Local features that had been in place for centuries were uprooted and moved to look more authentic and new structures were built to return the area to its roots. One of the quarter’s most photographed landmarks, the Pont del Bisbe or Bishop’s Bridge - a Romeo and Juliet-style pedestrian overpass that looks deliciously medieval - was actually built in 1928 and connects government offices.

These days, few actually live in the Barri Gòtic, and it has become a visually beautiful, super photogenic and touristically attractive space that has long since had its soul bypassed in a surgical process that those whose families once lived there surely still lament.

Franco’s creation sits top, or near top, of the itinerary for the majority of those 25 million-plus visitors the city hosts every year.

Barcelona’s tourism boom and the associated problems its residents are constantly highlighting were largely therefore its own making, or, to be more honest, Franco’s making. It is said dictators leave a long shadow, but massive and enduring economic success for some, coupled with a deculturised society, may be among the more perplexing shapes.

And this city, not for the first time, was about to start fighting back.

At a cafe near Catalan Square in Barcelona, the shifts and conflicts of today’s and yesterday’s Mediterranean are, at one level, easily felt. The drilling summer sun makes it all the more uncomfortable, like the world is weighing in on the city and testing its resolve. Not for the first time.

This is my first visit to this city and it is only my second day. I’m disoriented and alone, worried about money, home and deep down, my own sanity.

As I sit with a bottle of Estrella in front of me, both sweating bolts, it’s tempting to reach for answers, or resolutions, or just peace, even if I don’t know where or what they are.

As I search, I know solutions are only stories in themselves and do not end the story, they only make new ones.

Resolutions borne in the haste that fear and/or false bravado breeds may well be Pyrrhic victories. Memes run through my mind to help me clutch at a story, a legend, an archetype with which to frame my predicament. And the Mediterranean themes of Gordian knots and of the pitfalls between Scylla and Charybdis, are what my mind reaches for.

I keep returning to ancient Greece and Rome, the stories of Herodotus, Ovid, Aesop and Homer, the meditations of Marcus Aurelius, Seneca and Zeno, the characters leaping from the pages of Euripides, Sophocles and Virgil, the Gods and their conflicts, the legends that tell of them.

These and other idioms and myths are the foundations that give shape and form to the human experience underpinning the way many of us think and act.

Not only are the swings and twists, the interstitial paths and roundabouts of migration, travel and tourism and their libraries of ideas, ideals and ideologies, in and of the region — but also the way we think about them, and act on them, is derived from these very shores

Gerardus Mercator’s celebrated world map of 1569 was already justified in putting the Mediterranean Sea at the very centre of his flat depiction of the terrestrial globe, where it still remains in standard world maps today.

To be fair, in Mercator’s initial map, it’s actually quite hard to make out the sea at all; it’s crowded out by the seemingly teeming populations bustling about its shores. Spaces in these early days of cartography were subservient to the land masses that held the people.

For Mercator, even oceans were a canvas on which to plot island stopping points, each like the hub of a wagon-wheel, with radiating points pin-cushioning them, presumably showing shipping routes. It’s as if the vast waterways of the planet were simply empty distances through which the human populations that huddled on coastlines came and went, animated only by the bobbing presence of weird, fabled sea creatures that every medieval map had to have.

The “Mediterranean”, as we now know it, hadn’t yet been invented in the mid-16th world of Mercator and his sea monsters. The sea was known as “Mare Internum” - “Internal Sea” or “Interior Sea” by the Romans since around the 3rd Century and “Mediterranean” as a geographical descriptor was not in common usage until around the 6th century. Its identification as a culture, a region or a people would not come until much later, and even then, the common ground was almost always contested as when Mussolini claimed it for his Italy as “Mare Nostrum”; Our Sea.

Before the advent of either geography or cartography as we know it, the water that separated the land masses, in Mercator’s time, was more a hindrance than a highlight.

The reason this large but relatively minor geographical feature (it’s just the 10th largest body of water in area on earth and, depending on the measurement used, a mere 4000 km across at its longest point), has become so important is due to the convergence of the desires, imaginations and actions of its population that keep reflecting off its mirrored surface.

The place just keeps being relevant.

Kings and queens have traversed it in search of spoils, honour or escape. Great leaders and warriors have fought, and gathered their forces to defend their possessions, or to take those of others on or around its shimmering waters.

The sea has fed ancient Greece and Rome, The Phoenicians, the Moors, the Crusaders, the Carthaginians, the Minoans, the Byzantines, the Mycenaeans, the Ottomans, the Philistines, the various Goths, and so many more extraordinary and influential civilizations, that it is impossible to argue against the claim that its narratives still drive us today, and will into the future.

These civilisations spawned numerous religions. Their coastlines sit at the spiritual confluence of three of humanity’s largest institutionalised spiritual practices - Christianity, Judaism and Islam. All were born, if not on the water, then certainly with views to it. Leading figures, in crucial periods of each religion, in political, military, or religious terms, such as Amr ibn al-As, Paul of Tarsus, and Nachmanides, were born or made their most impact around the sea’s shorelines.

The sea also laps onto three mighty and historically weighty continents - Africa, Europe and Asia, drawing them together like fingers pinching a terrestrial fabric. The myriad cultures of each, among the world’s oldest and most enduring human outcrops, are scattered across the waterway and its shorelines, shifting, merging and evolving, carried on the waters across those regions and the world.

Atlantis, that lost island civilization so sophisticated that nascent human societies were meant to have evolved in leaps and bounds using its technology and resources, thus advancing our species from dribbling grunts to astronauts, has any number of candidates in these waters as its actual location, from Sicily to Malta, from Crete to Cyprus.

The discovery in 1900 of a 2000 year old computer-like device off the Greek island of Antikythera gives impetus, say some, to those claims that a super-race existed there.

Of the top five most popular travel destinations around the world, four have Mediterranean coastlines - (1. France, 2. Spain, 4. Turkiye, and 5. Italy) and of the top ten, five are Mediterranean (with Greece in 10th). What’s the reason for that?

It’s not value for money. Countries around the coast have some of the most expensive real estate in the world, particularly plots with a decidedly sea-facing profile, think the French Riviera and the ultimate up-scale icon, Monaco. A mouthful of coffee for $8, and a sleepless night in a grimy hostel bed for $100+ ensure even relative well offs from rich countries may have to slum it a little in these parts.

Neither is it pure escapism - the vast, ridiculously over-the-top indulgence of the afore-mentioned rich strips nudge Italy’s Lampedusa and Sicily and the island nation of Cyprus where the never-ending wave of asylum seeker arrivals is apparently so large that navies are sent, absurdly, to push them back. Europe looks across the water to North Africa, where informal migrants, looking back across the water, gather and plan and wait to make their pitch for the EU and hoped for freedom. Much of Mediterranean Europe, to the consternation of Fortress EU types has become an extension of North Africa for those heading there outside the, usually non-existent, formal channels.

Some of the world’s most desperate and ground down souls walk the same streets as some of its most entitled and privileged, glaring at each other across the chasms of fortune. Neither escape nor escapism can withstand the realities of today’s Mediterranean.

Those coming from across the spectrum of human social and economic standing are drawn by the region’s lifestyle, the opportunities of wealth, the legendary benefits of its diet, its political power, its cultural weight, its style, its image, its climate, its movie-backdrop-around-every-corner-ness.

In significant part, this space’s centrality as a narrative source emerged from the Enlightenment and the subsequent Grand Tour obsessions of the children from wealthy Western Europe and Britain, devoted to the Classical heritage of ancient Greece and of Rome in particular. This early wave peaked in the late 17th century to the mid-nineteenth century. These proto-mass tourists, men, and some women, would go on to conceive and design the machinery of global politics, economics, science and art for centuries to come, based on what they saw and understood of Mediterranean cultures, effectively inventing the world in the sea’s image. This form of travel, as a corollary, also gave birth to modern mass tourism as package tours to Europe - popularised by Thomas Cook from the 1840s - became a cheap and easy way to partake of the cultural and recreational benefits of a Mediterranean and/or continental experience.

Further progress in working hours and designated holiday time in Europe and elsewhere built on this and the mass tourism market as we know it today was more or less invented here. Today, anywhere between one-quarter and one-third of the entire global tourism market is spent on the Mediterranean.

With its powerful historic narrative thread and its current popularity as a travel icon, the region’s lure is hard to resist. In this way, it is like a family home; a place many of us simply have to go. It acts like the base for an admittedly far flung and disparate population, united not by blood or water, but by narrative, a no less permanent glue.

Albert Camus campaigned for greater unity across the seaboard nations through claims to the kind of bonds that are usually based in bloodlines not tides. He said in a 1937 lecture that “What we claim as Mediterranean is not a taste for nationalism, but a certain way of living, a common sense of life.” In doing so, he was, in part, countering Mussolini’s Mare Nostrum (“Our Sea”) which imagined it as an Italy-centric sea empire. And Camus was careful to ground his sense of collectivism in nothing so prosaic as a nation state.

He saw a common spirit between the ten or so nations that spread around the shoreline, adding that the traveller through those lands could not help but feel at home and among family, contrasting it with “buttoned up” Mitteleuropa.

“When you travel in Europe, and go down toward Italy or Provence, you breathe a sigh of relief as you rediscover these casually dressed men, this violent, colourful life we all know.”

There is, he said, “a certain smell or scent that we do not need to express: we all feel it through our skin.”

It’s a familial relationship generated, admittedly, by the concept of keeping your friends close and your enemies closer and by geographical realities. But there is genuine camaraderie within this fractured clan scattered around fringes of the sea, even given the direst rivalries, which, really, are always evidence of great respect for the other even as they degrade and dehumanise. Just like a family.

The fourteenth century Tunisian jurist, sociologist and historian, Ibn Khaldun, saw the presence of these connections too. As a historian, he found in the Amazigh or Berber culture, and in the conquering Arab culture that tire across North Africa a force he called asabiyyah. This is a collective will and an agreed cohesion to action. In his lifetime he personally witnessed the breakdown of asabiyyah too as the Arab Andalusian era began what was ultimately its fatal contraction.

Six centuries apart, both Ibn Khaldun and Camus saw, or perhaps felt, the sea’s deeper tides, those that swell and wane beneath our collective histories.

These dynamics are still there.

Today, as always, even those who’ve never been to the Mediterranean before, it can feel like it’s a kind of heartland, the source of much that we carry through our lives, perhaps even a home.

This sea exerts a familiarity that transcends actual physical presence. Many of us have a memory of it before we have even been there. It’s familiar, comfortable, a place to return, a place both of refuge and pleasure.

And, as also in families, the region and its people are constantly seeking to balance freedom with restriction, cohesion with autonomy, realism with idealism. These negotiations are as constant here as elsewhere, yet, because of this place’s fissiparous history and cultural landscape, the dynamics are often understood in a multitude of different ways and the clashes are more intense and intractable as a result.

But, if it is home, if it is family, it remains a mythical and manufactured one. It is a broken home. Various attempts to create some kind of Mediterranean union or common region have faltered. Generally, this is because such deep and time-thickened roots can too easily become barriers to closer growth and too readily overwhelm the basic need for people to get on with their lives.

Fernand Braudel, the undisputed maven of Mediterranean history, saw this when he wrote that the sea region “speaks with many voices” and is a “sum of individual histories.” But, even in that fractured state, he still believed in the presence of a common Mediterranean experience based on the physical environment.

Camus, Khaldun, Mussolini and Braudel all came at the concept of a Mare Nostrum from very different angles. But the fact they arrived there at all gives testimony to the weight of the concept. The sense of a family, feuding yet irrevocably tied, holds for all.

The latest attempts, including Mediterranean-inclusive institutions like NATO or the EU, are facing the same, timeless challenges. Attempts to define a unified approach to, say, informal and irregular migration - wrongly called ‘illegal migration’ - or climate change, environmental sustainability, food supply, or political groupings, continue to implode. Their unending failings are so familiar, and familial, as to be mundane.

Challenges are delayed and diverted but not overcome. The banal necessities of political expediency trump sustainable, human-scale solutions as a ritual occurrence.

This range of contrasts and clashes, pushes and pulls, each lapping at the shores and drawing away like a sucking tide, is constantly raising the spectres of lifestyle and death with each sea-borne shift. Rich and poor, privileged and denied, accessible and inaccessible buttressing each other, like bollards against a pier.

This sea has seen it all before, knows these tropes instinctively as it knows the connective tissue under the skin is strong, but still it can’t resolve them.

The Mediterranean keeps arguing with itself, knowing there is never a real winner. Like Pyrrhus counting his dead while claiming victory, even in triumph, few if anyone can truly escape the cage of the Mediterranean’s sinkholes and traps, its glories and promises, or its uncountable stories.

Whatever is to come, this region is very likely to be at the forefront of it all, setting the frames for change and utilising the vast machinery of its memory and its myriad layers to work the cogs of human evolution once again.

If there’s one thing that is permanent here it is the knowledge that once you’ve arrived here, you may leave physically, you will never really depart.

Because whether we want to be or not, we are all Mediterranean.

Autumn,
Tel Aviv and Rotterdam

The days were beginning to shorten when I flew out of Israel on October 2, 2023. The country always tested me and there had been a sour ending too, to a past relationship with M, briefly rekindled. Israel had become untenable and the platform M and I had once shared had rotted with time and could not support the weight of our lives now.

She drove me to the airport and in her Israeli bravado, I sensed no emotion. The light was failing fast and the air was cooling as we followed the highway running parallel to the border wall, marking the edges of the Occupied Territories. The giant Palestinian flag in the West Bank town of Tulkarm loomed like a spectre from a distance in the dusk light and then it appeared around a sweep of the freeway, its defiant colours held out in the soft breeze.

At the airport, I was out of the car and on my way quickly, but, when I looked back to wave, she turned away, crying. She would no doubt say it was just dust in the air.

Looking out the plane window on the way out of Ben Gurion airport at the clouds below the wings, I thought about how there are few more dramatic ways to end something than at 30,000 feet.

My memories of M are very warm, but cool to the touch.

I was heading to a friend’s place in Rotterdam to look after his dog while he and his wife went, ironically, also to Israel, where their daughter was studying.

It was good to be back in Rotterdam, although my relationship with D, with 30 years of history in it, was refusing to be what I had imagined it might be after all these years. As with M, the scaffolding had collapsed, and neither of us knew how to put it back together.

“Have you heard what happened?” D asked me as I came downstairs for breakfast on October 7.

Overnight, their trip to Israel to see and spend some chill time helping their daughter settle in had become a rescue mission. As the news squawked frightening headlines, my friend and his wife studied their flight schedules and cancellations, ticket conditions and routes, consulted the military movements and gauged the implications in Israel, the Occupied Territories and under possible flight paths in places like Tehran, and Beirut.

D was torn between his respect for Palestinian people, and for their rights, and his love for Israel and anger at what had happened.

Their daughter, with the temerity of youth, batted off their concerns. But they were beside themselves despite her best efforts and they left me with their dog while they departed, waving in front of their grim faces and tense body language, into the cold autumnal morning.

They returned with their daughter a week later and as the horror unfolded in Gaza in those early days, their anger, shock and fear filled the little Dutch house like an odor. I had been to Gaza, and I had come to love the place and its people. D had been there too, although as an IDF reservist, a choice we rather skirted around by virtue of our differing views on its context.

I was deeply upset by what happened on October 7, and I feared what was about to come to those people in Gaza who had overwhelmed me with their kindness and dignity. Even as it unfolded in those early weeks, I feared worse was to come - as I expect my hosts did too.

A day after they returned, I heard, from my room one afternoon, music. I came out to find D and his wife standing statue still at the top of the stairs. Downstairs, Al Jazeera was narrating another day of darkness and, over it, their daughter played Einaudi on their lounge room piano.

We stopped and were quiet as the music coiled up like incense from downstairs and I stood in their lives and wept with them, for them, and for those who had lost and, we both knew, for those who were about to. And in the quiet heart of it all, I held my friend’s hand as he gripped the bannister and felt our blood pulse together in that still and silent place.

I didn’t go back to Israel as planned. My bag full of clothes, books, notes for my book and documents, was left sitting forlorn in the dark attic of a kibbutz apartment, where, I believe, it remains.

Winter,
Istanbul

In Istanbul for New Years Eve, I met O, who looked to be about mid-30s, in a restaurant in the city’s Beyoglu district. Nearby Taksim Square and Istiklal Street hummed with consumerism and conspicuous movement and O’s corner restaurant was generally full of men hunched over coffees wisping aromatic steam into the chilled air.

“You are Australia?” he beamed.

“I want to go to Melbourne.”

He told me he was from Syria and was hoping to apply for a visa.

I offered to help. But I knew enough about Australia’s heavy duty asylum seeker and broader migration system and, deep down, I knew his chances were slim.

O told me that he was, like most Syrians in Turkiye, formally considered a “guest”, a legal grey area. I didn’t know at the time, but that meant it was virtually impossible for him to migrate to Australia, or anywhere, as he was effectively persona non grata in terms of international migration law.

I wanted to know his story. But he was reluctant to offer the details of what was clearly a traumatic reminder of a journey and a current plight that, although its presence is there every day, he tries everything he can to avoid thinking about. I also assumed that he didn’t know me enough to trust me. He told me he still had family in Syria.

He did eventually reveal a story about getting arrested in his home in Damascus, where he lived with his parents and sister, and being trafficked around prisons and aircraft hangars, often blindfolded, to be dumped with other political prisoners. Sometimes they were there for weeks, sometimes just a few days. There didn’t appear to have been any judicial process and no charges were ever laid.

“I don’t even know why I was arrested; they never told me,” he said.

He was released, again, without warning, after 6 weeks in detention. He knew he had to get out of the country. He relayed the ordeal of applying twice for a passport to leave, and it being rejected after waiting hours each time.

“When I was waiting in the government passport office, I was so scared. I am thinking the police will just come and take me again and I will go back to prison.”

I thought of my own passport, worn and battered, sitting atop a pile of small change back in my hotel room, and how it allowed me to come and go here as I pleased. It had arrived by registered post and it cost me some paperwork and a few hundred dollars. I visited no government office.

O finally got his passport. He couldn’t understand how, and immediately began planning his escape. “There were tourist operators in Damascus,” he told me, “and I went to see them to find out which way I go.”

“I had not enough money to take a plane,” he said, “and there were not many flying anyway, sometimes none at all.”

So it was buses and cars. Walking. He made it to Turkiye at the end of 2011. He was 21 when he got here.

“I have missed a lot of my life.”

I went back to O’s restaurant the day before I left. But he wasn’t there. I never got to say goodbye. Syria was liberated, more or less, on December 8, that year. Many Syrian refugees have since gone home, some were forced to. I have often wondered if O made it back, knowing he may not have had much choice, and what was waiting for him there.

On that last day, sitting in the restaurant waiting for O and surrounded by the constant flow of traffic and people, the movement of bodies and lives and ideas. I meditated on the fingers of coffee clouds reaching into the air, and tried to avoid the TV news that was flicking mutely on the wall.

But, I caught pictures of Gaza and I felt, as I usually do, I had to honour their narrative by paying attention and witnessing.

Then, there was a piece about little Aylan Kurdi. It was just after the ninth year his death had been commemorated in small, low key gatherings of silent dignity, confusion and sadness here and around the world.

If Aylan hadn’t lost his life, he would have been about to enter his teenage years around now. If he and his little red Mystery Space Invaders t-shirt and blue pants, shoes still velcro’d up by his Mum, didn’t end up limp as a doll, cold-skinned and stone dead on Bodrum beach, just south of here, on September 2, 2015 he might be playing football today, or thinking about being an astronaut, or being a kid.

When that silent TV image of his body appeared, even amid the hubbub of the cafe many looked up. Conversations paused. Eyes fixed on the screen in the way memories hold us and it seemed amid the shock reminder of the image, that there was a nostalgia for a time of innocence, not just little Aylans and all those lost at sea, but for us all, when we could still lose sleep over the death on a distant shore of a lone child we didn’t know.

Netanyahu came on the screen, his silent moving lips translated into Turkish on the Chyron sliding past below him. With his appearance, I felt motivated, obliged actually, to turn away. The cafe too returned to itself.

I got up and left, catching more images from today’s Gaza reflected on the glass door as I left and felt the mood as heads looked up, saw, and dropped down again, or found ways to talk quietly about something else.

I had to go, so I also put my head down.

*

Know someone who'd want this in their week too?…

Photo by zero take on Unsplash

As I began to write this book in the relative peace of a Spanish summer, in a small house in Catalonia, two conflicts were occurring at either edge of the Mediterranean Sea. A third was taking place right at its heart, in its capitals and major centres.

Another still is entirely my own.

In many ways, they provide a dramatic, often lurid, backdrop for the period in which this book was produced. And while this book concentrates on the western half of the sea, each of these conflicts bruise the horizon across the region.

Firstly, there is a more or less conventional battle taking place. This consists of the actions of one state and its reaction to a fatal raid on that country by one considered to be a non-state, or a proto-state or a denied-state (depending on your perspective). This ongoing violence has one of the highest civilian-to-combatant ratios of any conflict in modern history, perhaps as high as 5:1.

A second conflict is a more nuanced struggle between modern consumerism and ancient ways. It is one which may change the freedom of movement some of us are privileged enough to take for granted and may begin to undermine contemporary travel as we know it.

Third, there is the shifting political landscape across Europe that is posing an existential challenge to the other, lower end of the ladder of human movement, one of which I suspect many reading this have limited knowledge.

Finally, threading through them all is my story and the personal battle slowly, more gently perhaps, coursing through me like a tributary of this very sea.

The first is, of course, the overwhelming retaliatory attacks currently being conducted by Israel’s government and its allies in Gaza. As I write, this has emerged as a generational conflict in which the institutions of international law and diplomacy have failed. And, so, the people of Gaza are desperately suffering not only their immediate plight but the recognition that the world, for all its hallowed declarations and its human rights standards, doesn’t care enough about them to end their suffering.

The second is the anti-tourism protests centred, among other locations, in Barcelona - just a 45 minute drive from where I am now - and spreading elsewhere to Spanish and other regional tourism hotspots from Lisbon to Lesbos. Timed to impact on the summer high season, opening with the heat like tropical flowers, Barcelonins are making it known that they are fed up with the millions of gawping, ambling, selfie-taking tourists that crowd their charismatic and picturesque, if somewhat overrated and expensive, city, blaming their presence and unending arrivals for pushing up prices and for generating a hotel and Airbnb-heavy housing market.

The weapons of choice are often water pistols, deployed by marauding bands of protesters on hapless tourists as they sip their morning espresso or dive into their pre-siesta paellas. Given its mid-30s Celsius, many on both sides consider it a bit of a jape. But the point is made and headlines have been set for the moment. A gentle victory if ever there was one.

Elsewhere, in Rome for instance, activists have removed the ubiquitous key safes utilised for Airbnb check-ins, leaving a note, in case anyone hadn’t heard, that the locals are pissed off and are taking action.

Thirdly, I refer to recent polls and election results all over Europe which express, seemingly, a widespread fear and hatred of Africans and Middle Eastern asylum seekers, refugees and migrants of any kind seeking safety, security or a better life in Europe.

All across Europe, politics is shifting ground to a new extreme. Once, not so long ago, emigration out of Europe was the problem. Immigration into Europe was a necessary step to plug gaps left by departing workers. Laws were introduced to stop the rush to leave Europe to seek better opportunities elsewhere. Now, few are leaving Europe and fewer still can get in.

Today, they come from Africa and the Middle East, and into Europe, often traversing these Mediterranean waters, where many end up sinking namelessly to its bottom, undocumented, unheralded and forever homeless.

And, in the midst of all this is a lone individual, mapping the uncertainty of his life. That’s the Me that moves the fingers that writes these words and those to come.

Setting out from Australia in late 2022, I was weighed down by a period of penury and post-separation depression. Travel was felt to be a psychologically necessary, if financially dubious, option. I saw no choice because sitting still and taking the hits of life and trying not to flinch had become too hard and frankly counter-productive. Playing the game wasn’t working out so it was time to tear the rule book and to toss it into the wind, into the landscape.

The bottom line reasoning was that movement is its own reward and money, well, I hoped money would follow the momentum of action.

This is not a book about political trends. But, in the Mediterranean they are, compellingly, impossible to avoid. This book puts a narrative to those changes noted above, and what has come since. This is significant because the region is a crucible for human change and if things are evolving here, then the implications are likely to be not only visible, but openly and viscerally understood elsewhere.

The Mediterranean coastline covered on my travels, roughly starting in Barcelona, and along the French south coast, to Gibraltar, then south to the north coast of Morocco, across to Tunisia and ending in the south-west coast of Italy, is a universe of light. And here, I find light and shade to be a powerful symbol for what this space represents for us all at this time.

The light and the shadow divide the land in shifting patterns, each day a little different, each pattern a little altered, following the diurnal passage of human and non-human time. The lines between, like borders, like thresholds that are never the same, are never still. Light, like the tides, like humanity, is a reality of movement, defining us and our histories.

Within these divisions resides all our fears, our exhilaration, the anxiety and hope of crossing over one boundary and the delicate euphoria of being, before confronting the next inevitable barrier.

Travel emphasises this; the constant movement and crossing over, the return to our nomad roots, supplemented by jet aircraft and fancy hotels and Google Maps. It is, in essence, what we’ve been doing for millennia.

And, given the ability to travel, there are of course numerous places from which to take in these developments as they unfold.

Why the Mediterranean?

Plato, in his Laws, said that the best location for a city- state is nine miles from the shore, which for him meant, of course, the Mediterranean shore. He argued that “access to the sea makes men’s souls knavish and tricky and their city faithless and loveless,” largely because the world of commerce and trade the sea represented in his time was, he believed, a corrupting force.

I take this to be a judgment on the culture of commerce rather than coastal living which, in my experience, often has the opposite effect.

As my life too mirrored the world’s pangs of evolution, this felt like where I needed to be.

I could think of no better place, at this time, to go in search of the stories we might need.

*

A note for readers.

A traveller has many privileges. One is to look from the outside in, to have the luxury of arrival and departure.

The nomad, the migrant, the refugee is each allowed to observe the process of his/her personal evolution, for it is traced across a shifting landscape, thus offering perspective less possible in a sedentary life.

The reasons for moving may be different, but the outcomes are similar.

Personally, this meant a re-immersion into the realities of who I once was, in a purer form; the self I spent a lot of my life trying to escape.

As a traveller, I have been confronted with the old assumptions and reflexes I have cultivated, often out of fear or in various modes of survival, which have emerged under my feet like pieces of furniture I thought I discarded, tripping me up in mid-stride.

The world I have made does not now have a traditional home. My home is always here, wherever that may be on a map. Maybe that’s in my native Australia. Or maybe it’s somewhere else.

I have been gifted the opportunity for this journey and I have allowed it for myself. And I have become it. This book covers a period in which many journeys were made. It’s perhaps unfair to place it in the singular, not only because my own experience was multitudinous, but because I cannot claim ownership of it.

All experiences, and all the words that describe them, cease to be owned once they are released. This is just my vision of it. You must make of it what you will.

This is not a journey as such, in that I have not undertaken these travels in a single dedicated period, or in a linear process.

I have essentially broken the western Mediterranean region into stages, and have necessarily dropped in and out over a period of four years to cover a stage or two and withdraw.

Some places I have remained for months, living in that space, taking in the energies and engaging daily with the people and the life there. Others I have blown through rather quickly, as the requirements of itinerary necessitate. Each day, my schedule and choices orbited available time and budget, visa restrictions and other human and non-human proclivities, external commitments, costs, relationships and so on, aspects familiar to all travellers. You can travel as much as you want, but you can’t escape yourself; no matter where you go, there you are, as the saying goes.

The extended time period has allowed reflection and the construction of a portrait, albeit a moving one slapped as I go onto the canvas of personal reflections and of the benefits of context.

This is not a comprehensive narrative, in that I have not sought to cover every inch of the Mediterranean terrain to explore its every corner. In fact, I have chosen to synthesise and generalise, seeking to anchor my visions and explications on grounded, real-time observation and interaction, and removed, objective interpretation. Where I have dug deeper, it is as an archaeologist, spotting the potsherd of an idea and applying the techniques of excavation to learn of it. Many shards have been left in the ground. There are too many books here to be written.

If there is a pattern, or a journey at all to be traced, it is one of the mind rather than cartography. I have attempted as best I can to follow the inhalations and exhalations of narrative, both my own and those of my subject, and to be stilled or mobilised as the circumstances require by the tidal wash of the ideas and voices that come into my world as I move through it.

My physical approach has been to set a path of major centres or cities in Spain, Morocco, France, Gibraltar, Tunisia and Italy, which act as hubs and connectors to explore a range of areas, issues, topics and narratives as they gather and emerge.

Ultimately this is a personal narrative of my own making.

Llagostera, Spain.
2025

I bodysurf. There is much that I love about this. But the most magical aspect for me is so brief as to be almost non-existent.

It is that moment, at a given point inside a wave, when you are held.

Looking to the horizon, you see the wave, the swell engorging before you. And you turn, being careful to get the timing absolutely right. You swim, explosively, digging into the wave, pulling into it before it escapes. It’s a frantic exercise, muscles straining, tendons tensed, breathing hard.

Then, if you get it, you are weightless and you feel the ocean engulf you, shape around you and gently lift you. You are momentarily still in this perpetual chaos of nature. That moment of suspension is as pure as the sky above you. Nothing else exists. Nothing matters.

You look down the sucking, sloping face of the wave, quickly turn to see the foam breaking above you against the sky, the light delicately glittering on the edges, take in the line of sand, the vegetation, the gem sprinkled shore break, and you plummet down, planing on an outstretched arm, the other arm under the water like a rudder, torso and legs stiff and board-like, and you ride the universe like a fucking space cowboy.

This, to me, remains the essence of my life on earth. It’s a moment I keep searching for and, as I get older, I fear the time when, perhaps, I can no longer access it.

So reverential is this quest that, always, before I take to the water, I will walk along the shore, perhaps for an hour or more. I do this slowly, absently yet deliberately, and it is best done alone. Depending on how wild is the day, I may walk up to as deep as my knees, shorts getting wet, looking out. I did this as a habit for years, not really thinking about it too much, and it took me a while to realise I was actually feeling the ocean, communing with it through its movements, tapping into what the shifting sands beneath my bare feet were telling me about the conditions, the swell, the breathing tide, the mood, the wind, the sun.

This walking has become now a sacred act, a mark of respect and a kind of supplication, seeking consent to enter the great ocean fully and to move with it.

Sometimes, I don’t feel permission is given, or that I am not welcomed, or perhaps I am somehow warned against diving in. On such days, I don’t enter the water, even if the surf looks pure and serene and the water, inviting.

Then, I will just sit and watch the water, being with it.

It had been a few years since my marriage, and the family life I had cultivated for 20 years, ended with a shock. My life had quickly and uncontrollably unravelled, the future I was settling into dissolved like beach sand under my feet.

I came to the shore often. As much as I could.

Edges like coastlines are liminal spaces, thresholds where the energies of old and new, here and there, yes and no, cross and re-cross, moving borders as easily and as fluently as the gulls flying overhead, the breeze and the water lapping at the sand. It’s an ageless shifting, mocking the human concepts of time and place.

When I go there I am not looking for anything. I am not trying to channel the healing energy of nature or the spirituality of such places, redolent though coastlines are with these qualities. I just want to be there.

After my separation, I had left my family home. I had been living at a mate’s place while he was away. Then I was in a shared house with another friend, then in a room in someone’s basement, then in a garage in a backyard.

I went to the beach because I was broken and had nowhere else to go, nowhere else to call home. The sky was my roof. The ocean was my companion. And I was listening to what she said.

I was working for a while packing fruit and vegetables at a farmers’ market stall - start time 4am - and trying to sell some writing, generally unsuccessfully and enervatingly.

Once or twice I saw people from my past life and family at the markets. The work was honest and market folk are good people. But my energy was clearly drained. I wasn’t me. I tried to make it look like this was all just a life adventure and that everything was fine. But I knew everyone saw through it.

I could see my reflection in their faces, and I was scared at what was looking back at me.

There is a line in a song Missing You made famous by the Irish singer Christy Moore, about Irish immigrants in London doing it rough, working construction, sleeping under bridges:

I’ll never go home now because of the shame

Of a misfit’s reflection in a shop window pane…

Now it was me. I was homeless. Broke. Alone.

I kept returning to that liminal place, the beach. Rain, hail or shine, at all times of the year. That was my home.

It felt like time didn’t apply to where I was. I was heavy with depression and anxiety, fear and grief, I missed my teenage daughter, missed my home, missed what once was.

I made no friends. I spoke with few people. I never went out other than for a coffee, and even then I would sit alone and pretend I was working or reading so no-one would talk to me.

Sure, I dabbled with the question of finality, and looked at ways to end it all. But I was never serious as I knew I just didn’t have the courage to actually do that when it came to it. And I knew I couldn’t leave my daughter with that dark legacy.

That said, most every day I wanted to not be here, to be gone, to be no more.

That’s a lot of baggage to carry with you everywhere you go.

But, whenever I lugged it all to the beach, even on the worst and heaviest days, the weight would lift. Nothing materially changed. I was still utterly busted, but the universe seemed kinder, and possibilities were thinkable, reachable there. The horizon welcomed me.

I don’t recall a turning point moment, the sort of cinematic dawn that stories like this often hinge on. I wasn’t in a movie. But I look back now and I realise all that time spent in that nowhere space, both physically on the shore and mentally in the yawning gaps of my life, had led to a silent and unnoticed evolution.

The process of change was already shaping me, whispering its words.

Leave, it was saying. Move. Go. Get out of here.

Travel, it said.

Cross this threshold.

And, so, I awoke one day and I realised it was a time for leaving…

After August 1, Inside the Outside becomes something more.

From then, Time Dark Sea, a book twenty chapters long, will be published here every week through mid-December, with a print edition to follow in the first quarter of 2027.

This is something I have been working on for 4 years. It is a work of narrative, literary-style travel writing of the that has featured here for the last few months. The journey follows a route around the western half of the Mediterranean — from Barcelona and a little town just north of there called Llagostera along the Med’s northern (European) and southern (African) coasts, and occasionally beyond.

But, I’m trying to make this more than a book about places. It is a book about the lines the sea keeps drawing and redrawing: between coasts, between generations, across history, and between who gets to cross and who does not. The title borrows from Homer, of course; where he had a wine-dark sea, this one is time-dark, overshadowed by its own place in the human story.

Some of it is personal. Some of it is reportorial, utilising the same instincts that took me through three decades of journalism, features and editorial writing, and running international media ops for well-known human rights and social justice figures. And some of it, I hope, sits somewhere near the writers I’ve measured it against while working, and have mentioned on this page — Kapuściński, Theroux, Murphy, as well as a few I haven’t spoken about here, like Kassabova and Abdul-Ahad. That’s not a statement of ambition so much as an alignment with a method I share with those writers: using narrative as a point-maker and the the conviction that enough observed detail, honestly placed, properly ordered, makes its own deeper justification.

Why serialise it here, and why now?

Publishing a manuscript chapter by chapter, in public, before it is bound, is not the safe way to do this. It means the seams show. That’s a risk I am happy to take. A book about lines across a map and who observes them, perhaps above all, should not be finished in private and delivered as a fait accompli — it should be built somewhere a reader can see the work happening, and can be part of the shaping while its own borderlines are still in development.

That’s my invitation.

The first four chapters/episodes are free to everyone. After that, the remainder of the serialisation — along with a whole lot of added material — is for paid and founding subscribers only.

Founding membership is open through October 31.

If you genuinely want to be involved and can’t afford it, I’m always happy to try and accommodate.

Down the alley from my apartment is a beautiful door. If you know what to look for, you know it’s a Fes door, a Fassi door. It is imposing, dignified and noble with a discernable character in its own right. It would not be odd if it spoke.

The Fes medina (Fes el-Bali) is a city of doorways and those thresholds - domestic, civic, and religious - are adorned and revered, praised in their design and in the place they honour between inner and outer, between time, between states of being.

This household door. I walk past it, anticipating it as I approach. It has something.

I fantasise about what is behind it, a sunlit courtyard with trickling fountains, a gallery of geometric zellij tiling and local arts, a welcoming local family, offering great food and company.

Or perhaps an entry point to cross the Heliopause into another galaxy.

On the western edge of this 1,200-year-old labyrinth, it is quiet in the way breathing is; if you stop you can hear its silence. It feels like I’m moving around in a heart-like organ, sliced lengthwise, all those alleys like cross-sectioned aortas and arteries laid open, and we little two-legged and four-legged cells making our way through them.

The peace is mainly organic. A breeze through the olive trees, talking voices, clip-clopping donkeys carting water or gas canisters, birds, and the muezzin’s call at set times each day.

And from up on the roof, I can look down on it all; the alleys, the people, and the doors, including the one I pass every day.

Doors in Fes are a narrative unto themselves. Their design and manufacture have levels of meaning which can be understood in certain, intellectual ways, even as their underlying power will always, I suspect, remain a mystery.

Invariably made from local cedar, and scenting the adjacent air with their perfumed oil, Fes’ private dwellings are entered by doors for which the ultimate intention is to display reverence for the act of crossing.

They are often doors within doors, with the actual opening layered into larger jambs. These require entrants, especially men, to humbly stoop before going inside, a kind of obliged respect for the householders and for the act of entering another’s domain.

Perhaps the most ingenious component is the double-knocker ID system. There are usually two heavy iron ring knockers, one set far higher on the door than the other. The higher one is for men, the lower for women and children.

This is to do with modesty rather than hierarchy.

Due to the different acoustics generated by the positioning, the householder is able to hear the identity of the visitor. This system is for the purposes of Islamic piety; a woman may not open the door if a man is knocking, or may add to her attire to accept him.

Fassi doors also have iron studding, used to hold the wood together over centuries, and those huge old-style keyholes, like miniature Islamic gates. I’m told householders used to walk about the medina with the key to their house, perhaps 40 cm long, over their shoulder, on a rope.

With each passing day, this door nearby is beginning to feel enchanted. Its double knockers, its giant key, the iron studs like soldiers from above in ranks across the sturdy, thick cedar felled in the mountains I gaze on most every sunset.

The strange echoes of the medina throw sound about, flicking aural tricks in the air.

Once, walking back from dinner, I heard chanting coming from up ahead, I thought from behind that door. I turned the tight corner expectantly and saw another open door close by, from which this exquisite choral melody was escaping.

Two men came out, carrying chairs, and I gestured if I may go inside to experience the singing. The older man spoke in French, telling me it was a family occasion; someone had died. I apologised and asked no more. He nodded respectfully, hand on heart.

Hamdullah, we both said quietly together.

The man stood with me for a while and started singing along with the voices inside and moving his arms like they were blown by a soft desert breeze.

A few nights after this, I was up on the roof, and I heard similar music. Male voices, polyphonic melodies, jaw-droppingly beautiful and lilting. It sounded like it was coming from behind The Door. I couldn’t see it from where I was. But it seemed to be coming from exactly that direction, just up the hill and around the corner.

I considered going to find out, but the cooling breeze held me there.

I imagine there are whole souks, whole medinas, behind those storied doors, a psychological hall of mirrors, a maze in a maze in a maze ad infinitum.

Surely that door has worlds behind it.

It was one of my last mornings in Fes, a Friday, when I turned the corner to see the door was open. I stopped outside it and looked in to see a man in the foyer, perhaps in his 30s, wearing a white singlet and shorts, smoking and noodling about on his phone. Blue and white zellij tiles seemed to swarm like clouds of insects in the tight space and contrasting light. He looked up at me and looked back down at his phone.

He was, on first impression, a disappointing guardian for this vaunted door.

Behind him was a small child, presumably his daughter, playing with something a few steps above him, leading into the darkened hearth of the dwelling.

I foolishly spoiled a moment that should have just been left alone and asked to take a picture . He, of course, graciously, politely agreed, and he thankfully ignored me while I took a few hurried, rather self-conscious, shots. I said too many Shukrans, and left him and his daughter and his life alone.

I wasn’t disappointed that it was just an ordinary scene. For one it seemed pure Fes, pure Morocco, the normality at the end of the (self-made) mystery.

As I got back to my little apartment nearby, I was thinking that with the unseen interior, its tiles swirling like a universe, hidden in the emptiness at the top of the stairs, it was still possible some other reality, a place unmapped and unknowable, was there, just there, beyond what I could see.

I still do.

I do have some nice pics to go with this piece, but I am having quite a few tech problems where I am right now, si unable to upload them. Will get onto a fix when I am able.

Like many, I first read Theroux on a train. But, he was on the train, not me. His “rail series” like The Old Patagonian Express, Riding the Iron Rooster, Ghost Train to the Eastern Star are generally the books for which Theroux is best known, but his body of narrative travel literature beyond the train tracks is extensive.

Train travel was in fact a great way for Theroux to announce himself as it put him in motion but often in a confined space, or in the narrow world of railways and track lines.

He helped personalise the travel experience in the modern context.

This front-facing, in-the-picture style was to be a feature of his travel work thereafter. This I’m-here-and-this-is-what-I-think approach is supplemented by an unflinching honesty which de-glosses travel, firmly seperates it from tourism, and breaks it down to the sensory, emotional and intellectual impact of motion through time and space, rather than a series of postcards with the author in them.

Others had done this before him, for sure, and he has a number of high profile contemporaries who wrote similarly, Newby or Thubron, Raban, Kapuscinski and, most explicitly, Chatwin. But Theroux brought another, quite unique dimension: grumpiness.

Or so it is said.

I think the whole image of Theroux as a curmudgeonly figure slumping about the world is a bit overdone and unfair. Other writers, including some of those above, could be similarly terse and could, I think, be accused of slipping into first-personism at least as much as Theroux, if not more so.

I think his style is just straight observation. He doesn’t try to sell an argument even as he maintains it. In fact, he often holds back and allows the reader to make their judgements. Sure he does pepper his thoughts throughout when some, including me at times, just want to check out the scenery or smell the marketplace. But, he earns the right for it.

I recall a theme in his African journey Dark Star Safari of white UN vehicles coursing about the continent, invariably throwing dust on surfaces and passers by, and regularly driving past people on the roadside, perhaps needing real immediate help.

It’s something I subsequently noted myself there and elsewhere.

He simply described this without over-commenting and the point was powerfully made.

He may dip into opinion, but here he did it lightly. And that for me was Theroux at his best.

If that’s grumpy, well, I will wear that t-shirt too.

Theroux’s Pillars of Hercules (1995) is a core inspiration for Time Dark Sea, my upcoming Mediterranean book (launching here, a chapter a week, on August 1).

I am careful with that legacy however, and I have been disciplined in not returning to that book - other than to flip through in search of a quote or two - since I started writing my own Med book. I don’t want to either compare with, or to be subconsciously influenced by, Theroux’s previous foray, lest my own clarity be shaded by the immense light he casts.

But I am happy to carry the inspiration and motivation that Pillars of Hercules in particular delivered me all those years ago when I first read it, and to allow that into what I am doing now. And to be grateful for it.

That’s most obviously because of the topic. But it’s also that he’s a kindred spirit. His no holds barred reportage is often highlighting things that I too find annoying or unfair or just wrong. People things. Bureaucracy things. Those unnecessary acts or non acts that just make people’s already difficult lives more constrained.

In Time Dark Sea, I, like Theroux, reference figures from literature. But Theroux knows them and hangs out with them.

He caught up with the Egyptian novelist Naguib Mahfouz in Cairo for instance, which annoyed the hell out of me when I read it in the 1990s. I too, on a freelance gig for an Australian newspaper, sought Mahfouz out at Fishawi’s, his favourite cafe in Cairo’s Khan al-Khalili and, not knowing him personally, failed.

On the Mediterranean, he said in Pillars of Hercules that “The history of the Mediterranean is a history of mongrelization; these days the most common sound was the native mongrel yapping about his pedigree and driving off foreign mutts.”

It was a beautiful metaphorical means of highlighting the early signs of a trend that has now become a pandemic of “yapping about pedigrees” across the Med and Europe.

It is a theme I have woven through Time Dark Sea and it’s kind of where the title draws from.

I think Theroux’s search for truth would accept that his perspective from thirty years ago is now, perhaps, a relic of a different time.

I actually had the pleasure of briefly speaking to Theroux last year. It was during an author interview he gave to @thetravelbookclub here on Substack. I put in a question and was shocked I got to ask it live, and we chatted briefly about my own book.

Quite an honour.

Of course, I hope he reads Time Dark Sea. If he does, it would be a major full circle experience for me, reading Pillars of Hercules through a Melbourne winter 25 years or more ago, wondering if I could do that.

Reading List:

The Great Railway Bazaar — 1975

The Old Patagonian Express — 1979

The Kingdom by the Sea (Britain) — 1983

Sailing Through China — 1984

The Imperial Way (Peshawar to Chittagong) — 1985

Sunrise with Seamonsters (essays) — 1985

Riding the Iron Rooster (China) — 1988

To the Ends of the Earth (selected travels) — 1990

The Happy Isles of Oceania (Pacific) — 1992

The Pillars of Hercules (Mediterranean) — 1995

Fresh Air Fiend (essays) — 2000

Dark Star Safari (Cairo to Cape Town) — 2002

Ghost Train to the Eastern Star (Europe, Asia) — 2008

The Tao of Travel (anthology/reflections) — 2011

The Last Train to Zona Verde (Africa) — 2013

Deep South (American back roads) — 2015

Figures in a Landscape (essays) — 2018

On the Plain of Snakes (Mexico) — 2019

For much of its history, the Mediterranean has been considered a hindrance and a barrier. It’s still seen that way at times. But it’s still possible today to see the sea as a kind of connective tissue, a vast body of water that is itself a bridge.

The fourteenth century Moroccan scholar and writer known as Ibn Battuta was one of those who laid the foundations for that more communal view.

Born in Tangier, he lived out his old age in Fes. Both cities, while not so far separated geographically, marked bookends in the life of one of the more extraordinary travellers the world has seen. At a time when travel was labour, when every step meant just that — lifting a sandalled foot one after the other — and dangers and uncertainty literally lurked around every bend in the road, Ibn Battuta traversed much of what constituted the known world for those in his time and place.

Between 1325 and 1354, in a series of monumental journeys, Ibn Battuta covered some 73,000 miles or 117,000 km — roughly equivalent to three times around the earth at the equator.

A great deal of this was on and around the Mediterranean sea and coastline, from all along the North African coast to Palestine and Syria and into al-Andalus in southern Spain.

His influence is as much as a literary figure as a journeyman. Usually, travellers of this era wrote in a fairly dry, factual, day-by-day, location-by-location approach, almost like a bureaucratic report. Ibn Battuta was different in that he inserted himself into the narrative.

While there are plenty of dry passages in his seminal work the Rihla (Journeys, or Travels), he is also shocked by certain dress codes in the Maldives, and complains freely about poor hospitality elsewhere along his route.

A journey, of course, isn’t just what you see — it’s what you experience. Travel is internal as much as external, and Ibn Battuta can be credited as one of the first to reconcile this gap.

It can be said, then, that Ibn Battuta embodied connection, which in turn informed his narratives and laid new ground on which generations of travel writers have been walking ever since.

His voice is echoed in the oft-quoted line of the Mediterranean’s uber-historian, Fernand Braudel: “The Mediterranean has no unity but that created by the movements of men, the relations they imply, and the routes they follow.”

In my upcoming book, The Time Dark Sea, I am trying to explore the Mediterranean sea in these terms — paradoxically, perhaps, as a connective tissue.

How can such a large body of water itself be a bridge?

It’s a question I keep returning to throughout, as I explore the dynamics of tourism and migration woven through with my own narrative.

Braudel’s quote is my north star throughout, and I feel Ibn Battuta’s blood in my veins as I write and as I travel.

Ibn Battuta faced enormous hardships in his travels and, more than once, stared death in the face. But he maintained his humanity and his basic openness to other peoples and cultures, albeit with occasional raised eyebrows.

For him, I think, placing restrictions on human movement in the Mediterranean, or anywhere, would have been ridiculous.

We must distance the man from his writing, though. For one, while Ibn Battuta sought to reinvent the genre somewhat, the Rihla draws on a tradition of travel writing as a form of intelligence-gathering as much as literature.

Most importantly, it wasn’t written by him. The prose itself is largely the work of a young Andalusian scribe, Ibn Juzayy al-Kalbi, commissioned by the Sultan of Fes to record Battuta’s account on his return.

However, paraphrasing JFK’s speechwriter Ted Sorensen (a writing hero of mine) on his relationship with the President: Ibn Juzayy may have written the words, but Ibn Battuta authored them.

So I feel we can sense the beating heart of Ibn Battuta in the following lines*, from when he was first setting out as a 21 year-old on his epic thirty years of travel. With almost 700 years of wisdom woven through them, they echo my own emotions hitting the road four years ago, and I expect nomads and travellers everywhere will relate:

“I set out alone, having neither fellow-traveler in whose companionship I might find cheer, nor caravan whose party I might join, but swayed by an overmastering impulse within me and a desire long-cherished in my bosom to visit these illustrious sanctuaries…I braced my resolution to quit all my dear ones, female and male, and forsook my home as birds forsake their nests.”

• From H.A.R. Gibb's translation of the Rihla for the Hakluyt Society

It is 5.30am and it’s already 28 degrees. The air is thick with humidity as grey clouds assemble like battleships around the horizon, bruising the hills in the distance.

It’s hard to sleep in this torpid air and so I tend to bury a whiskey or two at dinner time, purely for the medicinal aim of getting a decent sleep. It usually fails, but I have to keep trying…

The lack of sleep means I am lying spread eagled across my bed at 5am most mornings, willing sleep. It’s doomed of course and so I get up, have a shower and head out to push through the curtains of early day’s heat.

Near my hotel is a Wat, or temple. In its grounds is a plaque on a stand that says King Mengrai built a dwelling here for himself and his court in 1295 CE which became Chiang Mai, the capital of his Lanna Kingdom. The little sign is planted at the bottom of a chedi, a form of South-East Asian stupa, surrounded by 16 concrete elephants, the twittering of birds and susurrating trees like the sound of rain.

The chedi ascends to a needle point, all golden and catching the light on its surfaces, holding the morning for its brief visit each day.

I try and walk here every morning as early as I can, but it sometimes doesn’t open until 8am. The main building, which is a large prayer hall, houses a large gold Buddha and various paraphernalia, gold and jade, things that tinkle and scatter light, and occasionally the atonal hum of electric fans that oscillate, massaging the musty interior

Wats in Thailand are as ubiquitous as 7/11s. Every neighbourhood has one, which often means a wat on every block in some large built up areas like Bangkok. They mostly follow a similar architectural pattern of a central ceremonial or assembly hall and a chedi, as well as an array of other buildings around the compound perimeter, like monks’ living quarters or display pavilions or other prayer halls.

Many of the central hall structures are designed for walking around in a rough circuit, a practice known as cankama or walking meditation, with the idea being to slow down, align breath with the steps you are taking, so as to contemplate the place, the moment.

A more formal practice of walking is also done over a set number of laps at certain times of the year as a deeper meditation.

In this climate, mornings are golden, when the air is freshest and coolest, the birds and squirrels are active, and the mind is open and expansive, readying for the day ahead and calibrating what narratives it will carry into it.

And so I walk. There are two paths around the central building, an inner and an outer ring, and I usually take one, then the other, walking clockwise, which , I have since discovered, is the recommended direction.

I walk slowly, trying to feel my sandalled feet planting on the ground, evenly, soles flattening and lifting. The details of the structures and nature I walk past announce themselves as they will, with shimmering light from the window displays, a wink of gold flaring from a wall feature, a flutter of a leaf as a bird alights, the large Buddha on the western side, shadowed under the eaves, but with a form and presence that is felt before it’s seen.

The giant frangipani tree, flowerless now but with an aura of sweet scent, throws a deep, cooling shade as I round the front side of the main prayer hall for a new lap. I allow my hands to drag along its bark, as a kind of good morning gesture, an exchange of DNA.

Occasionally, if I am very early, and the Wat grounds are still closed, I will walk the streets where I might see barefoot monks procuring their bowls to residents who have waited in the street to feed them. It’s a quiet, humble moment, which I am dismayed tends to attract snap-happy tourists, who rather encroach on its intimacy, although I appreciate the desire to record and hold such a thing of delicate beauty.

In her 2001 book, Wanderlust: A History of Walking, Rebecca Solnit lifts the seemingly banal act of walking to something which has a deep core meaning which has been practiced for millenia. In line with Theravada Buddhist thinking, she links the metronomic beat of walking with the breathing tempo of meditation, noting that the act unlocks our minds and easily, without effort, connects the inside thoughts with the outside world.

There is an intrinsic value in it, she argues, which develops a balance between the two worlds that allow us to course our way through them both. In a society which is always needing to do something, walking can seem like a nothing act. But, says Solnit, it is perhaps one of the more conscious and connected things we can do.

I walk everywhere. It offers an opportunity to go at nomad’s pace, to drop back into our ancient rhythms, to inhale and exhale into movement and to observe in a way that allows thoughts space so they can, themselves, move and observe, to not stay trapped in the prison of stasis.

But, this temple walk is special and rare. It is to feel at one with something existing beyond my reach, outside the day and my small life, and to be defined by what is absent not by what is received.

On leaving the wat compound, I often say good morning to the tuk-tuk and taxi drivers parked around the gates. One morning, one asked me if I lived here, as he had seen me here often. I said no, I did not, but I added I will always return even when I’m not here. He bowed his head a little and put his palms together, fingers to the heavens, before his smiling face, and I did the same.

*All pics © JJ Rose

You have to respect a travel writer who, on one count I came across, witnessed 27 revolutions and coups, was jailed 40 times and was condemned to death 4 times. I think respect perhaps shifts to wtf territory when one reads that he contracted cerebral malaria in Uganda and TB in Tanzania and took the frightening diagnosis with sanguinity….and kept filing.

Disease, he might have said, is just a thought, a germ of the mind. Indeed, he wrote in Travels with Herodotus (2007 in English), “there exists something like a contagion of travel, and the disease is essentially incurable.”

To live is to be inflicted with an incurable disease.

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Ryszard Kapuściński was a Polish journalist who worked for his country’s national press agency. That was just his day job. In being dispatched to far flung corners of the world - back in the day when foreign correspondents were given an actual budget - he wrote colourful journalism - again, back when journos were allowed to write actual essays - which, because of his rich sense of place and moment, became some of the best travel writing of his generation.

These writings became books, across five decades from the early 1960s, which somewhat remade what travel writing could be. His work opened the potential for travel writing to truly inform and educate, by combining journalism, essays and travel into new forms of literature.

While the term reportage had been around well before Kapuściński, he can be credited largely with modernising it and in bringing it into the realms of high art and literature for contemporary readers.

He wrote most notably on Africa, where he lived for 6 years, but revisited numerous times over 4 decades. Here is arguably his most powerful and compelling work, exploring the rise and fall of Ethiopian Emperor Haile Selassie (The Emperor, 1983 in English) and combining vignettes of African political life in Shadow of the Sun (2001 in English). His Africa work is also his most controversial.

He was accused of fabricating some of his stories, and his meetings with figures both high and low. He was heavily criticized for falling into the usual “white guy in Africa” tropes of the “dark continent”, simple-minded and/or savage customs and caricatured portraits.

All of which threatens to make him irrelevant today. That’s understandable. But, it ignores his contribution to the craft of reportage style travel writing and his seminal role in pushing travel writing into new spaces.

I have grown past seeing the heroes of my youth as fallen icons. While it may be disappointing to realise that someone you had on a high plinth is just another flawed human, it is also part of maturing to a point where one can accept the failings of others whilst also seeing their value. It’s possible carry both views in your mind at the same time.

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Further, he was often writing what is sometimes known as “Aesopian language” in that he was actually using the privilege of distance in other parts of the world, to provide commentary on Communist era Poland, then under harsh Soviet rule.

“There is a fundamental difference between the Polish experience of the state and the Russian experience” he said in an interview.

“In the Polish experience, the state was always a foreign power. So, to hate the state, to be disobedient to the state, was a patriotic act.”

Haile Selassie and the Shah, for instance, can be seen somewhat differently in this light and it’s probably fair, in assessing Kapuściński now, to acknowledge that his country too was a victim of colonisation, prejudice and oppression.

So, I can cut him some slack on breaking the journo’s code on keeping to the facts and can even soften my judgements on his caricaturing of The Other if he was doing it to highlight something relevant to these more paradigm-breaking aims.

Kapuściński, for all his faults, remains a model in my mind, less perhaps for his on-the-ground decisions and his subsequent editorial choices. I value him for his stylistic chops, his courage as a writer and as a dissident, and his ability to sculpt a compelling story from a moment in time that both gets to the simple human elements of historic moments, as well as the drama and stands the test of time.

Selected Works (Publication dates are for English editions):

The Emperor (1983)

Shah of Shahs (1985)

Another Day of Life (1987)

Imperium (1994)

Shadow of the Sun (2001)

Travels with Herodotus (2007)

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A place like El Wak exists in another dimension. The little single wing dropped and dropped, bringing into focus a moonscape of red earth and clumps of vegetation, flat and endless. As the plane lurched slightly, I had the sensation that it was the ground itself that moved, like a living thing, shifting beneath us.

But no, it was dead. Drought had decimated this place and the unmarked borderlands between Kenya and Somalia were tracked by the footprints of people and cattle seeking food, water, shade, relief.

Sparsely spread bushes, stunted and compact, were flapping with discarded plastic bags, snagged on the sharp edges of their bark. The only other signs of life were a few indomitable marabous, standing at a man’s height, their dignified posture belying their scavenger habits.

They etched against the sky like gentlemen, hands behind their back, awaiting a carriage.

When I saw him first, I thought he was one of the birds, removed from the group but standing stock still and staring, as they did.

As part of our “tour”, working with a UN agency, we were invited to a health clinic. Thin and brittle mums and dads sat listlessly in the dark, baking, insect buzzing interior, hands on emaciated children wasting away with malaria, hunger or pure fatigue. Their sunken eyes stared at the ceiling.

I saw him again, outside the open window, looking at me, or somewhere else, I couldn’t tell.

I looked back at the kids and their families, their thin arms, the parched skin, and realised they looked like the spindly, half dead vegetation outside.

I was not there to help directly, only to observe, which is no help at all, and I was uneasy about what my presence here meant and how I could do something for these people.

Be a witness, is what my boss told me. But, I knew that was a lie and that I was here and they were there because I had won the lottery of birth that they were still buying tickets for, and that was all.

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Later in the afternoon, we were driving in the UN van through the sleepy little town. Gerry built shops and broken down dwellings along a dusty road made the old WWII huts nearby look almost contemporary.

The van needed something and we stopped in the middle of the road. I will be a while, our driver said, may as well get out and take a walk. I was with an American colleague and we took his advice even though there seemed little to see in this ghost town in a famine out here.

He approached us. I saw his face now. Clear eyes, deep and expressive. He wore trousers, a shirt, a jacket and a cap for an engine company. He seemed kindly, carried an intelligent energy that intrigued me. His mouth tilted slightly in a kind of smile that, having not asked permission to appear, looked hesitant.

I’ve seen you, said my friend.

I nodded, me too.

He looked at us but didn’t speak. His smile fell away and he reached into his jacket’s inner pocket.

Between his calloused fingers was a photo, passport sized, of a young girl. She was maybe 7 or 8.

He pointed to my friend’s fancy SLR camera. We were waiting for him to tell us who the child was. Was he her father?

Take my picture, he said.

My friend was happy to, and did so.

The man stood firmly. It was clear he took this moment seriously.

There was no one else around and our team was still busy. I could taste the dust in my mouth and could hear the silence settling on the buildings, on the red earth, on our lives like a gloved hand.

I can’t give the photo to you now. Maybe I can send it to you somehow, said my friend.

It’s ok, he said.

It’s so I won’t be forgotten.

He put the girl’s picture back in his pocket and walked away, the dust he raised disappearing him as the sky closed around us.

*Pic credit: Terry Torok

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There was much that had died at Stung Meanchey. But the awful smell was alive and on the move, wrapping around your clothing, settling on your skin, penetrating up your nostrils and into your brain.

Also living here were thousands of people (officially a few thousand, but I was told up to 20,000) that once called it home.

And, the image of one, would stay with me forever.

Stung Meanchey was a rubbish tip. Literally. This was where those grungy trucks that thump, and roar, and stink around the teeming streets of Phnom Penh emptied out. It was a suburb of junk and shit and the detritus of a city that can’t contain the refuse it creates.

Back when I was there in the early 2000s, it was a picture of human life at the turn of the century. And in that picture, horribly, there were seen - children, mums and dads, grandparents - going about their day to day, more or less normally, stepping over and on an unbroken plane of steaming rubbish, on their way to work or school or to visit friends.

Some would disappear down unseen sinkholes in the rubbish, never to be seen again.

Whole lives were played out in this smoking apocalypse.

I was able to walk away from it, back to my nice hotel and rarely have I felt so grateful for the fortune of my birth. Would I be in their position, would I have the courage to live, to work each day, to maintain relationships, to bring up my children, with such grace, tenacity and character? I think perhaps not.

It’s not there now. It was closed in 2009 and authorities have sought to rehouse those who lived there. The dump itself has since been relocated. I’m not sure if this has solved the problems and there are still rubbish pickers all over the Cambodian capital.

But, kudos to the city, the country and to the numerous NGOs who helped find a solution. And credit most to the former residents themselves of course, who, despite all odds, found a way out of Hell.

But, that’s not my story.

This is about what I saw there and a scene that I can’t forget.

There were maybe 100 school kids, waiting for something to happen. They were all in blue and white uniforms. And we were the happening. I was working with a very wealthy philanthropist from the Gulf who was helping to raise funds, through his government, for the World Food Program. We travelled about doling out food and related aid to various communities around the world, before flying off, often, ridiculously, in a private jet.

The school was for kids from the rubbish tip at Stung Meanchey, a hugely worthy and valuable program.

The kids were immaculate, their uniforms spotless. How did they, and their parents, do this, living on a dump site, I will never know.

There were some cameras, local media, and our own camera guy who was recording it for news feeds.

She didn’t stand out. Maybe 11 years old. She and her fellow students were there for backdrop, to make the ceremony look good for the cameras and be bit players in the story, which was of international largesse and local negotiation skills.

She was just in the throng, doing what her teachers had told her to, and following the instructions of the all powerful local bigwigs.

She didn’t seem special.

But, after the ever tedious speeches, one of the cameras pointed at her. A woman journo with a microphone followed the cue and thrust the mic in her face, talking something at her in Khmer as she did.

Everyone froze. The school yard hubbub died down to silence.

Seconds passed like hours.

She started to speak, to reply. But her face shattered like glass and she started sobbing. She looked around for support or perhaps to apologise for her breaking of the code, or for upsetting her role in the bigger picture that surrounded her. But everyone was stunned and quiet and no-one approached her.

The camera. The mic. The soft breeze lifting dust in the distance.

Name: Unknown. Age: Unknown. Address: Unknown. Favourite Snack: Unknown. Favourite Game: Unknown.

But she became, for a few seconds, the focus of a very powerful group of people; the centre of the universe here in Stung Meanchey, in Cambodia, and, if there is any justice, for all of us, everywhere.

For a small child, living on a tip, eating rats, swatting flies in her sleep, walking on rotting food and broken glass and used nappies and dead animals just to get home from school, the attention was clearly too much. She had never been chosen for anything good. And now she was chosen to represent her whole world and everything in it.

We flew back to Bangkok that night. Hours after Stung Meanchey, I was sitting alone in my room at the ultra-luxurious Mandarin Oriental, one of Bangkok’s finest, paid for by my boss. The floor had its own butler.

I don’t remember anything about the hotel. All I remember is talking to my then wife by phone back home about my day. I first told about what we did, and then, I told her about the school and the girl and about the moment I can never forget.

And I sat surrounded by wealth and money, and before I knew it, luxury and extreme poverty collided like two manic armies.

The distance between lives, mine, ours, hers, theirs, all lives, collapsed to a point that weighed more than I could bear. And I sobbed like that little girl over the phone.

And, as I remember her now, I still do.

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Chatwin strikes me as the kind of author that wouldn’t get published these days. Publishers and agents just don’t take this kind of risk now.

To his credit, Chatwin at least took the opportunity to compose a body of genre busting work that put its shoulder to the frame of travel writing and heaved it into new shapes.

The genre, with his input, was never really the same again.

This is where I find his influence most weighted.

His work might be considered indulgent in less talented hands. It expects a lot of the reader and assumes we are as interested in him and his thoughts, as we are in any given location or journey.

He isn’t the first travel writer to put himself in the postcard of course: genre setters like Marco Polo and Ibn Battuta did this too. But he connected his own psychological meanderings to the physical journey, implying that each is inseparable.

The title of the book that broke his name - In Patagonia (1977) - is telling in this sense. As the reader soon learns, this isn’t so much a book about the region in South America, but about being in it; his presence in the landscape, more than the landscape itself, was the point. The book orbits his singular perspective in-situ, confronting it, interpreting it.

The timing of his oeuvre is also important. He was writing somewhat in the face of a booming new industry known as mass tourism. With all its package tour, checklist driven, guide obsessed time wasting, the moment was ripe for someone to disdain it and to articulate the vast chasm between modern tourism and actual travel.

These genre challenges were, and are, mostly welcomed. Chatwin’s trademark sparse, enigmatic and often fractal writing style suited his angles well. Reading his travel literature (he also wrote 3 novels, although some consider his travel should be called fiction) gets us close to the mental journeys we all take multiple times daily.

His is often an inner voice, and it leads to philosophising about just who is running that inner dialogue; is that the real me or is it someone else?

In terms of writing travel narrative, the tension between the inner and outer becomes an exploration of the journey itself, the inputs and voices, the versions we intend and how they differ from those that unfold.

All of which is acceptable and occasionally exciting.

What is less well supported is Chatwin’s tendency to shift between truth and fiction without giving the reader a heads-up on when the border is crossed. It’s a tendency many see as a betrayal of the reader’s trust.

At a basic level, Chatwin was never content to sit on established fact and he did not feel it was his job to bolster anyone’s reality. His grey areas are simply extensions of that inner/outer dialogue, embodying the tension we all must address as we narrate our own way through life.

But, in a book like Songlines, the blurred lines took on a decidedly political form. Ostensibly about the deeply spiritual and place-based cultural underpinnings of indigenous Australians, the book turned the examination into a fairy tale, albeit an entertaining one.

Facts were either misunderstood or ignored, characters were merged if they existed at all, and important cultural knowledge was mis-shaped. What started out as a worthy journey into a kind of still existing pre-modern nomadism - a topic that was central to Chatwin’s heart - became a thesis on the author’s own battles, a textual display of Chatwin struggling with himself, with the narratives of his subject and with the jagged edges of what is real and what is imagined.

Songlines, even given its layers and nuances, can read today as a book loosely about indigenous Australians and their rich and powerful universe, filtered through the eyes of a somewhat misinformed Englishman reaching for the exotic.

Today, Chatwin remains a beacon for many an aspiring travel writer and for the vast audience of travel narrative books. His Boy’s Own windswept vibe, his dreamy, and always personal style has become a model for many, seeking to capture the spirit of place through more than descriptions of location and people.

Ultimately, Chatwin’s work reminds us that storytelling is just nomadism internalised.

Select Reading List:

The Nomadic Alternative (1972) (Considered Chatwin’s major non fiction work, it was rejected by his publisher and never published. After the MS was thrown on the fire by its author it was rescued by his mother. Digital copies, often in extract form, are available online, eg here: https://centrefornomadicstudies.com/collection/bruce-chatwins-travel-journals/the-nomadic-alternative/)

In Patagonia (1977)

Songlines (1987)

What am I Doing Here? (1989)

Travellers all know that some places get under your skin and stay there. Kayole, a slum on the eastern edge of Nairobi, is one of those places for me — and I find myself returning to it, long after I should, probably, have made my peace with it. I’m still constructing its narrative in my mind, 25 years later. This piece is drawn from my book GAME (2022), a work of fiction built from the bones of real experience, real people, and moments in my life that are still floating around in my head, like that dried blood-tone Kayole dust that haunts the air…

[…] We drive through the shabby streets for maybe an hour, the scenery getting ever drearier and sadder as we go.

We approach a sort of roadblock, rocks and rubble and a rickety wire fence across the road. The driver reaches into a pocket in his door and pulls out a slightly curved, nine-inch knife and rests it on his lap. Winds his window down as a man saunters up to the van.

They’re volunteers trying to stop criminals getting in, she tells us from the front seat.

We’re inside the Kayole ‘compound’, about half an hour after entering via the guarded perimeter of the slum and the worrying presence of a nine-inch blade glinting on our driver’s lap.

Her name is Patricia, a Kayole local I knew from a previous time here.

You don’t know if the road blocks are to stop criminals, or are set up by criminals, she tells us.

And a knife is better than a gun because, if it’s criminals, they will hear a gun and come running.

A knife gets you a few more minutes.

Your driver knows Kayole.

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He sat in his car still, waiting for us, glaring with his one eye, and refusing to move.

Patricia is the manager of a child-care centre for kids who have lost, or are losing their parents, to the many hazards of dire poverty. In 2010, HIV/AIDS is darkly prevalent, as is a host of other ailments. Drug and alcohol addiction is rife. Domestic violence is normal. Mothers who work the streets often just don’t come home. Dads in search of work or better opportunities in rich countries leave before dawn and may never be seen or heard from again.

Parents absent without notice seems to be the most common reason kids here are orphaned.

The kids all smiled and high-fived us as we arrived.

This place, a small building in an always moving area of cars in tight spaces, and rangy, desperate people wandering the streets.

Kids would be on the streets if not for this place. Some kids have simply been locked out of home when they came home from school or back from playing. Some come back to a silent, empty home - or one with a dead body in it - and couldn’t get in. Some hadn’t been home for months.

Some kids do sleep in the streets, some here. Some live here but they can’t stay all day and, so, they amble the laneways hustling and growing up too quick.

Patricia took us for a walk, along a red earth road, past rust coloured buildings and cars. And people. Everything with the hue of dried blood.

And there it is. The focal point of Kayole. A rust-coloured dirt expanse, just about football pitch sized. Two goals at either end, wobbly poles lolling about in loose holes in the fine dirt.

Sad, limp nets, sagging and bedraggled, half on the ground, wrapped around these jerry-rigged goals.

We call this Wembley, she announced as the wind picked up a little and raised a few wisps of dust, like fingers curling upwards, hands beckoning us.

Something about an empty football pitch; no matter how basic it is, it somehow radiates an energy, the sum total of the exertions and sweat, the dreams and failures, wins and losses that its white-line borders contain.

And the sense of a crowd always looking on, even if there’s no-one there. Ethereal revenants of games past and the promised souls of those yet to come. The air always seems charged and full, like it is held by those white lines, gently clutching at the goal nets, energies not wanting to depart from this hallowed space, even if it is a sad and lonely looking patch like this one.

Wembley. As the dry wind whispers like a forgotten crowd, lifting the very ground on which we stood, in a pink cloud of dust, changing us and our world as we watched.

The children will be here soon? asks Windsor.

Patricia nods.

They are always here.

And, on cue, a grey, more or less spherical thing thuds onto the ground not 2 metres from where we stood. Raises a small dust-puff as it bounces oddly. Rolls a little, leaving a grooved track across the fine grained earth.

Dust in the nostrils. From just behind us, the patter of bare feet on raw earth, a soft drum roll of padding feet, rustling clothes, movement and breathing. Like a beast. No talking.

We turn to see maybe 20 kids, anywhere between 5 and 15. Mostly boys but a few hardy and serious looking girls too.

And it began. The enduring dance of The Game. The ball, a knobbly fist of plastic bags and rubber bands, keeping to its own counter-intuitive shapes across the ground and through the air.

The language of the earth, written across the air in dusty phrases, like the articulation of breath, made real and given a fleeting context. Then gone. Replaced by others.

And the kids. Bodies attuned and speaking to each other, voices and grunts, the points to space, the half said words, guiding and creating the game. Like a world. Souls moving and shifting, meeting and departing. Energies passing and attracting. The beyond-language universe of The Game.

The slums, Nairobi, the very planet dissolves. There is nothing else. This is where they live. Their inchoate fears, the Biblical dramas banished to the edges of this place. Sent to nothingness beyond the wobbly, broken white lines on the ground, to the other side of the nets at either end.

This, a whole world.

And see them live it. See them held by it and nurtured as they cannot be out there. This their parent. This their family. This their community. This their heaven.

Palpable and clear as a light in the darkness.

Patricia stood watching the game, standing between Windsor and I. And, on instinct I looked behind her to Windsor who, at that same moment, looked to me. And he winked. And I nodded. This was It. Could only be felt.

Inexplicably, a flurry of note papers came fluttering across the field, flapping like dying birds in the breeze. From a distance it was like snow, circling in this place where snow has never been. A few sheets of paper landed on the red ground and the game went on around and over them, kids stepping on them, oblivious. One fluttered up to our feet and on it was a perfect footprint, etched in red dust across the centre of the page.

It looked like it was from prehistory. Like an archeological relic, a sliver of ancient wall-art fallen down through the eons to this time, this place. Given modernity only by the thin blue lines running evenly across it.

I picked it up. And, careful not to fold it, I reached into my case, removed a clear plastic sleeve and slid it in…

….Windsor, Patricia and I sat in the tiny room of her centre for kids. TV images twitched mutely in the corner. One or two kids wandered in or out, occasionally asking Patricia for, or about, something.

One young boy asked who we were - to which Patricia replied, these men are helping make a football team for us.

The kid looked at us, and wandered off, saying nothing, went outside.

Within minutes, we could hear some commotion from outside. Lots of kids talking. Voices. Excited or angry?

We stopped talking. Waited. Minute maybe. And it went quieter. Patricia went outside and came back in.

No-one there, she shrugged her shoulders.

We went back to our discussions. Funding. Aims. Colours. Teams.

That afternoon we made the plan. Kayole would be the pilot. From then, well, everywhere. The world.

The afternoon sun angled in through the single grimy window. This eternal continent closing down yet another day.

Tired of talking, the three of us went outside and stopped.

On the ground, spilling over onto the road and on to the other side, maybe 200 kids, sitting cross-legged.

Not speaking.

Looking at us.

Waiting.

Children are like water, said Windsor.

And water always wins, I replied. […]

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You can find out more and purchase Game here

By a P.J. Bumble Esq., a Gentleman of Letters, Lately of Bloomsbury, Now Hopelessly Lost in the Year 2026

The crossing, over a vast ocean, was tumultuous, as may be expected for one having traversed some two and a half centuries to arrive in the Antipodes, in the year of our Lord 2026.

I arrived, upon which vehicle I cannot give due scientific adumbrations here as the mechanics of the experience defy my imaginations and, I would adduce, overturn the very principles of natural science. Suffice to say I found myself hearty, despite the journey, and in a thriving port town; a bewildering district known as the CBD, which I am told is a contraction or bevigraph of some sort — though the veracity of this description is questionable, having been furnished by a selection of random Antipodeans, known to themselves as 'Ozys,' (as best as I can transcribe it) whom I rather skittishly interrogated on the matter.

I can say however, despite my muddled state, that I was able to survey the landscape sufficiently to reach an auspicious conclusion as to its ambience.

There are no horses or such carriages with which my readers will be familiar, but rather a multitude of horseless carriages, propelled by what force I could see not.

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The streets were agreeably spruce, which does not appear to have been the result of titivation prior to my disembarkation - largely evidenced by the fact that none were manifestly observant of my presence nor did any remark upon my somewhat singular attire.

The geography of the space is agreeably formal, with linear avenues this way and that. I alighted onto a spanned bridge which over-arched a turgid, umber-toned river upon which screeching and surging conveyances and other more traditional sea craft conveyed people and goods without the benefit of sail or oar.

Overall, the vehicular movement on both land and sea is alarming in both its swiftness and mercuriality, enough so that one’s horse would be baulking at every cough and start of these metallic vessels.

I had rambled scant furlongs when I was visited by a creeping hysteria and such vapours as wholly overwhelmed me that I hazard to suggest may keep my physician in cashmere for years to come on my desperate patronage alone should I ever find my way back to London.

I can but admire the stoicism and fatalism of the locals who wander about the heaving metropolis with abandon, or perhaps honour should be given to the medical specialists who administer the population’s humours so expertly.

Coffee houses, of which there is a multitude, exist every half furlong or so, prompting my conclusion that such establishments may indeed be the basis of Melbourne’s economy.

These emporiums do not host the kind of vigorous learned debates, over, say Locke or liberty, as we are used to in such abodes. Instead, discussions of “footy” and the very coffee and comestibles being consumed, dominate the discourses, which are good natured although of little rigour. I indicated a “chai latay” after hearing such request prior to my ordering, and was observed with what I can only assess as a cool acceptance by the maitre de, as if I had passed some unknown exam.

If these be the economic hubs of the place, I can see little evidence of industry there however, as most there seem idle and with no small devotion to that state, a perplexing observation to be sure.

The people themselves revealed themselves to be an extraordinary looking society. The males wear shortened pantaloons, often with open foot wear and blouses of short sleeves. The women shocked me in their freedoms from male authority and in the scantiness and looseness of their apparel, more suited perhaps to the boudoir than openly displayed in the city’s many boulevardes. My sensibilities initially adjudged this to be scandalous. However, on closer observation and given some time to meditate upon the topic, I was able to assess the situation more evenly; I am, you may well be wise to know, a liberal fellow.

Indeed, I was to behold a pleasing diversity of races in this small area, with faces of all shades and manner, although many dressed with a similar open-minded design. I yielded to the view that this is a largely peaceable and temperate circumstance, fashioned towards an informal economy of relationships that would well suit those on the continent who are quick to reach for the escutcheon and assemble ordnance upon the slightest disagreement.

I erred upon a market space which, according to the signage, was known as Queen Victoria Markets. Of such a monarch I have no acquaintance so I assume it is some local noble who is active in property and commerce. Within this cathedral of trade, I was privileged to stand before an array of victuals the likes of which I had not in my humble years ever seen. Colours crowded mine eyes as to bring to mind a spring floral display. I was moved to calculate the costs of such offerings, and near fainted with the summation. Such folks as are here must be extraordinarily wealthy to pay a small fortune for a piece of fruit.

I beheld cheeses from the four corners of good King George’s domain and beyond, and an universal selection of produce such as yellow fingers known as “bananas” or leafy green edibles called “bok choy” (although this may have been the name of the Oriental vendor procuring them).

People gorged themselves on “loaded fries”, “burritos” “Chinese dumplings” and “sushi” and nobody considered this exotic fare at all remarkable. As to the source of these delicacies, I was none the wiser, despite being entreated to partake of them, and obligingly imbibed a multi-course sampling of unknown fare.

I ended the day at a tavern maintained by Messrs’ Young and Jackson, where I was roused by a group of rowdy gentlemen, and a few bawdy wenches, truth be told, to speechify upon my journey. Might I say my extemporising was heartily received and ruddy faces grinned and guffawed back at me with pleasing regularity and enthusiasm. These enjoinings were accompanied by endless pitchers of ale that were thrust into my hand and, due to my absence of thought for counting in the midst of my narrative, soon tipped me into inebriation. I was to pay a price for this jocularity later that night and the darkened river was obliged to receive the contents of my previous consumption, none of which was flavoured near as well as when it was ingested.

I rested for some hours in the gardens adjacent to the waterway and, as I compose these notes in morning light, I reflect that while I cannot find my way home, I am queerly content with this actuality.

Where will I find myself next?

— Written at a café in St Kilda, where “the oat milk dirty chai”, if I am to comprehend what I overheard from a patron, was “sooooo good.”

____

P.J. Bumble's journals were discovered in a disused London nightclub in 1981. I have recently acquired them at auction and present them here for the first time. No record of Bumble exists in any public archive, though from the journals themselves it is clear he was actively writing in the mid to late 1770s.

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____

• Yes, a departure from my usual — something lighter, pushing at the boundaries of travel writing a little. I hope you had as much fun reading it as I did writing it. There’s more Bumble if you'd like it. Just let me know. Where should he find himself next? If Bumble returns, I won’t announce the fiction — you’ll simply find another journal entry waiting. Consider yourselves in on the ruse.— JJ

From the swirling circles of La Sardana danced by strangers in a lamplit town square, to the coded protest songs that winked at Franco’s enemies, Catalan music has always been about more than sound. It’s a statement of survival. This playlist takes you from the cobblestone squares of the Costa Brava to the back bars of Barcelona — no translation required.

On a balmy late summer evening in the Catalan town of Llagostera, an 11-person band - a “cobra” - played a fast paced set on an open air stage. People filled the town square, spilling out from the cafe-restaurant run by the local municipal authorities.

A few wines into the evening, after having eaten at the cafe, locals joined hands and formed small circles and began dancing La Sardana, skipping and jumping in time with the sprightly music.

Old and young, male and female, the little bubbles of action sweated, laughed and spoke to each other with exaggerated expressions.

Humanity is immeasurably served by such small moments; a spontaneous connection with random fellow travellers and here, in Catalonia, the instinct for community is strong and enduring.

Here, the music is as inevitable as taxes and death. It has evolved over centuries and been re-shaped by numerous shifts in taste, political climate and fashion.

In the Franco era (1939 - late 1970s) Catalan culture was suppressed and ignored. Using the language was illegal. Local artists developed methods of hiding political statements within innocuous musical statements, winking at those in on the ruse as they sung and danced in defiance of the dictator.

Lluis Llach’s “L’Estaca” (“the stake” or “the post”) sings evocatively of collective solutions, of tolerance and engagement with each other. Listen to this version here and if you don’t tear up, even if you don’t know the language (as I don’t)., maybe you should check your pulse.

As such, Catalan music functions not just as ephemeral songs, or background music. These are statements of identity and presence, of resistance and of community.

This collection contains not just sardana music but a range of traditional and newer expressions with the broad Catalan musical range, all songs worthy of a headphone session anywhere from buzzing Barcelona to the sleepiest Catalan village.

Spotify Playlist here

On the Jordan side of the Red Sea there is a 24/7 stiff middle finger to Israel, just across the water. I first saw it from a beach cafe in Eilat on the Israeli side of the sea, its unignorable presence demanding attention among the urban jumble and desert rock faces shimmering across the hazy distance.

This is the Aqaba Flagpole, an imposing, 130 metre statement thrust to the heavens that is visible in four countries. Atop it is a black, red, green and white flag - the colours of the Arab Revolt during World War I.

From Eilat, the monument’s white pole and colours stand stark and proud against the rust coloured hills and the cool blue of the water, commanding the Gulf of Aqaba (or Gulf of Eilat, depending whose map),

Now, standing beneath it, it snaps and cracks loudly in the brisk coastal breeze emphasising the insult as it flips the bird across the water over and over again.

I came to Aqaba via the Yitzhak Rabin land crossing just outside Eilat. Not unexpectedly, the complex was largely empty and prison-like, officials casting conspiratorial eyes through passport windows and stern figures in uniforms standing about with low key hostility.

After some friendly bargaining with a taxi driver on the Jordan side, both of us knowing I was uneducated as to the normal price, I quickly felt more relaxed than I had on the Israeli side. The ratty and dishevelled outer neighbourhoods here seemed authentic and solid for all their grimy, beige dullness. Eilat felt jerry-built and held together with less loving hands, more dogged than liveable.

The taxi dropped me off at the wrong location and I spent the next 2 hours lugging bags about foreign streets and craving a beer in the weighted heat, stumbling over my low level Arabic and trying not to lapse into Hebrew, which I know much better and reflexively reached for in a crisis of other language panic.

When I eventually found my hotel I realised I had walked past it three times already.

When the famed Lawrence of Arabia - aka T.E, Lawrence - arrived here in May 1917, he was exhausted from a monumental camel trek across some of the planet’s harshest locations. The Mars-like Nefud Desert and Wadi Rum tested the Englishman to his core and even pushed his local Bedu fighting colleagues and their hardy ships of the desert to their limits.

After two months of almost daily near-death experiences, due more to the elements than the enemy - a journey beautifully recorded in his “Seven Pillars of Wisdom” (1926) - Lawrence and his Arab irregulars attacked the core port of Aqaba and defeated the Ottoman Turks in what became a significant moment in World War I.

In Aqaba, he summed up a great deal not only of the mixed emotions of arrival, but of the folly of war, even in victory; “For months, Aqaba had been on the horizon of our minds, the goal…Now in achievement, we were a little despising the entities which had spent their extremest effort on an object whose attainment changed nothing radical either in mind of body.”

It’s possibly as good a critique of the hollowness and insignificance of anticipation in the context of universal chaos as could be written.

The afternoon I arrived, almost exactly one hundred years after the book was published, I stood in an Aqaba book shop and thumbed an embossed hard back copy in English. At roughly 70 Australian dollars, I baulked a little at the price, and figured I would consider it, and return to buy it at the end of the trip if my budget permitted.

Outside, Aqaba shuffled by, vehicles, bodies, history, all composed in a moving mosaic past the window. I re-shelved the book, reluctantly, unable to refuse the lure of the passing street.

I wandered absently down the hill towards the coast, following instinct, navigating human traffic, disappearing pavements and spilling shops. Ten minutes later, I realised with that special panic known to all travellers, that I did not have my phone and money cards. Tingling with the adrenaline of fear, I retraced my steps and went back to the book shop.

As soon as I entered the proprietor nodded, half smiling, and reached beneath his counter. He handed me back my connections to the world, restoring me a future, gesturing I had left them on the book shelf.

I was learning to love Aqaba only hours after being here.

Aqaba is not a pretty place, at least on a surface viewing. The Red Sea beaches are utterly spectacular when you look outwards. Looking down they are rocky and rubbish-strewn. But they are underplayed by the locals.

The city nestles beneath the ferrous cliffs behind it, blocky dwellings and buildings like tea-stained sugar cubes. While the beach area seems an obvious focal point, the city lives in the nooks and crannies, its alleys, its little stores, its cafes, in the streets.

Aqaba feels like it doesn’t have to justify itself; its existence is secure and has been for generations. Settled some 6000 years ago, it was the first Islamic city established outside of Arabia.

Even as the tourists throng here, it has an air of self containment. It feels resilient. Whatever challenges confront it today dissolve in the fires of time.

Foreigners hang about Town (AlHafayer) Beach and scoot off to the diving beaches like South Beach, but they don’t seem to overwhelm the space; tourists from the Muslim world still generate ancient scenes of brown bodies - suitably covered due to (albiet fairly loose) Islamic sensibilities - that would have been seen here thousands of years ago.

I felt embedded here after only a few days, Jordanian hospitality provides a secure and homely embrace.

Near where the flag sits is the Mameluke Fort, which dates back to the 16th century (its foundations are centuries older). The WWI battle for Aqaba involving Lawrence was heavy around here in and inside the grounds. Bullets holes and divots can still be spotted in the soft sandstone walls.

Standing in the blunt heat and with the sounds of the giant flag cracking the air, you can feel Aqaba, Jordan and Arab history assembled around you, signposting in the desert air the story of the Arab peoples and the wider world.

The victory of the Arab army over the Ottomans rested on the promise of Arab independence in the post-war period. That was ignored by Britain and France, both of whom were already heavily engaged in the region.

A detestable agreement known as Sykes-Picot had already secretly carved up the Middle East into bite sized imperial chunks, leaving Arab people heartbroken and disgruntled and eternally distrusting Western powers after the war.

Much of the tension in the region since, including Gaza, Israel, Lebanon, Iran today, can trace a firm arc back to 1917, and the victory at the Aqaba fort.

As such, standing here, with the deep blue Red Sea and the sun’s diamonds shifting on its surface as if on a vast blanket, with Israel is a mirage wobbling in the heat across the gulf, and with Egypt and Saudi Arabia looking on under their rocky brows in the distance, the flag, symbolises the Arab defiance across the water in the face of betrayal.

It says they are here, they have always been here, and they will remain here.

It’s hard not to feel some camaraderie with that. Lawrence, himself a broken man afte the post-war duplicity of colonial powers, would surely agree.

I never got back for that book. A fellow Aussie was going back to Israel the same day as me and was nervous about the border crossing on her own. I offered to keep her company and so we left earlier than I had planned, before the book shop opened. I guess it’s still there, the dust gathering around my fingerprints.

All pics © JJ Rose

Slow travel had to be re-invented, first as a marketing line, then as a really great way to move around the world in the modern age.

Among the pioneers of this vision is Dervla Murphy.

In Full Tilt (1965), the book that put her on the map, the Irish writer recorded her 6 month solo bicycle trip from Ireland to India. This ground-breaking effort rather inverted the trend for rapid “package tour” and resort-based tourism popular at the time, and paved the way for the arrival of actual, modern-day nomads.

Her work helped lay the platform for a more authentic travel experience.

She became one of the most distinctive voices in the increasingly read travel narrative genre through her unending curiosity, her sense of ethics and her lean into the human wherever she was.

She usually travelled alone but her interactions with others on the road are among her most enduring features.

While she brought her politics to every situation, she aimed for the street and for the lower levels of society, not just out of political choice but because she knew that’s where the best stories can usually be found and where the most compelling contrasts, questions and relationships reside.

But politics were always in her backpack and she was never shy about framing her contexts and scenes with a prevailing sense of justice, fairness and dignity.

As such, she was more than an observer. She leant into philosophy, sociology, journalism and historic and political analysis, blending her travels with a healthy dose of backstory, context and her always singular perspectives.

In her later years she wrote A Month by the Sea (2013) and Between River and Sea (2015), about her travels in Gaza and the West Bank respectively. These are the books I came to know her by, as I have travelled in similar areas. She said that “not taking sides is immoral” and she doggedly walked through trouble spots and danger zones in those places carrying a belief in the sanctity of freedom, peace and equality like a flag, waving it in the face of violence and oppression.

She was then 80, missing teeth and, on her own account, rather dishevelled looking, and I love the image of this determined little old lady wandering about where everyone is at each other and stopping the BS just by being there.

The fact she then wrote about it only made it zing more.

She continued to walk towards danger right into her later life and remained undaunted to the end. I have a strong feeling that more than one potential antagonist was shocked into submission merely by the unlikeliness of her presence and her unwillingness to take a step backwards.

Enduring peace may well be best packaged in a tiny, feisty Irish lady in her later years after all.

Murphy’s travels may not always come across as fun or enjoyable, and she rarely picks an easy assignment. But, she generally finds connection, space and peace and often humour, nonetheless, often with herself as the butt of her own jokes, in between the hard bits.

She would often recognise the improbability of being who she was and where she was, and her self deprecating takes on it all are some of my favourite passages.

Reading Murphy is a little like being goaded by your grandmother into a trip to some odd and uncomfortable destination, told what you need to know, and being mocked for not keeping up. She does things I probably would have baulked at in my twenties, let alone now.

Being inside Dervla Murphy’s head may not be the most calming place to be, but take a look through her eyes and see what she sees; you will almost certainly gain insights you might not have otherwise.

Select Book List:

• Full Tilt: Ireland to India with a Bicycle (1965)

• The Waiting Land (1967)

• A Place Apart (1978)

• Eight Feet in the Andes (1983)

• Through the Embers of Chaos: Balkan Journeys (2002)

• A Month by the Sea (2013)

• Between River and Sea: Encounters in Israel and Palestine (2015)