Rising Dawn
Vikram Seth wrote that sometimes, it seemed the only reason he travelled was to collect material for future nostalgia. Sometimes I think the only reason I travel is to discover the most perfect locations to write in my journal - a sumptuous leather-bound volume, purchased after a long search through the bazaars of Rajahstan, the craft fairs of Cape Town and the WH Smith in Watford. Fiona, my girlfriend and travel companion, regarded the practice of lugging it around the Mediterranean for two months (with attendant fountain pen and perpetually leaking bottle of black ink) as a rare kind of madness, but this really was my only luxury - no sleeping matt, no pillow, no walkman.
On arrival in Istanbul, I was quite content to pen impressionistic vignettes from the balcony of our budget hotel. With limited knowledge of Byzantine or Turkish history, I surrendered to sights, textures and tastes: the view over a quiet downtown of narrow, tangled streets and buckled, tiled roofs to the Sea of Marmaris, with its fishing boats and cargo ships just outlined in the heat glare. The Blue Mosque with its six towers that are always resolving into new configurations as you walk around the old city, and inside the intricate patterning on the pillars and domes giving a glowing aura of dark, absolute blueness between the Nikon flashes.
But by the time we reached Venezia, La Serenissima, "The Most Serene Republic," after a month of strange shoestring overland travel, the problems of writing and how to describe were clearly focused for me. This place had ruled the Mediterranean for a millennium, had been described in the prose of Goethe, Mann, Hemingway and other greats, and distributed throughout the world in a set of images and expectations. But now, with increasing flood risks from high tides and insanely high property prices, the city hardly exists as a residential area anymore. The "locals" all live in an uninspiring industrial town called Mestre on the mainland, and walking around the squares and fondamenti, we had the strange sensation that Venice, with all its overtones of romance, death and deception, now exists only as something generated for and by tourists. If you arrive by ferry and private boat to your hotel on the Grand Canal, looking in all the right directions and with enough dollars for perpetual gondolas, you could probably maintain the illusion for yourself. But for us, outside the padding of the money womb, the grotesque and decaying was never far away. For every altarpiece by Giotto that I peered at, there was a deeply questionable pastry for lunch or the littered grass verge of a motorway to be walked along while inhaling carbon monoxide belched out by Fiats and Alfa Romeos exploding past into the distance. We commuted to Venice on local buses from an enormous campsite 10km where all the shade from meagre olive trees had long been taken by huge canopied tents - dug in for a long stay and sending out porches, washing lines and fold-up tables like spreading fungal growths.
Still, we were determined to have Piazza San Marco to ourselves, and awoke one day at a phenomenal 5am to catch the first bus in. This journey, stopping at the airport where arrivals and departures never cease, revealed to me how an entire industry, a self-contained economy, revolves around this medium sized island town and its beauty. With us on the bus were the staff of hotels and restaurants, water-taxi drivers and vaporetto staff, all on their way to a day's work, having seen the palace fronts, dawn reflections in the canals and the smiles of wonderment on our faces a thousand times before. Boats were unloading fruit and bearing away sewage from septic tanks, and across the water smoke was rising from stacks for all the water heaters and bedside lamps in five star hotels as we waited for public gondola no. 1 to take us away from the grimy station steps to the Basilica, the Palazzo Ducale and the Canaletto views. On the boat ride around the lazy S-bend of the canal, all travel-weariness and reservations about sharing beauty faded: the buildings and side-canals we were passing, even those with no claim to fame, were all so perfect, and the whole place was waiting to be walked through, signalling itself with spires and domes that we could just begin to make out in the dawn light. When we arrived, with the bumps against the yellow pontoon and the metal rattle of the gate slid back, locals were walking purposefully across the spaces with fruit carts or briefcases, but we had to run around in drunken figures-of-eight and scatter the grotty pigeons. The camera film bought at the bus station was devoured in five minutes as we tried to capture it all in photos which will probably make no sense back in an English October, but you can't just do nothing when the sun is rising between the palace and the law courts, over Isola Giorgio Maggiore and the water, behind the pillars topped with golden lions and the bell-tower sliced into yellow-orange and orange-brown.
At a travel grant interview in Lower Thames Street, I was asked, "How will you step out of the postcard?" This whole journey became so much more than just the places we visited: a formation of strange new wholes made not only of meals and views, but people and earlier experience - things I had forgotten about, India and Oxford - suddenly brought to light through the changing shapes around me. Our half-way point, Venice, could be cited as the apogee of Western forms, but for me the gold mosaics of the Basilica San Marco and its crazy carved facade spoke of domed mosques and even Hindi temples. Before departure I worked in a car warehouse, packing engine treatments with an ageing hippie. Just before he was fired for smoking too many drugs on the job, he looked me in the eye and intoned: "Remember, a tourist sees what he comes to see, a traveller sees what he sees." They might have come from a weed beleaguered brain, but those words made more and more sense to me as we journeyed, as my olive green combats slowly faded in the Med sun and Fiona's skin went honey brown, the world and its differences expanding even as I saw more of it.
Photographs by Fiona Bucknill
8th Jun 2001