The Oldie Travel Supplement Winter 2015 by The Oldie

ING SWIMMAYS HOLPIADG E 2 8 SEE

JANUARY 2015

travel with

STANLEY STEWART WITH DH LAWRENCE IN NEW MEXICO CHRISTOPHER HOWSE’S SPANISH GHOSTS TIM CAHILL’S TRAVEL MISHAPS BRIAN UNWIN ON ST HELENA

HOLIDAYS WITH GRANDCHILDREN WILD SWIMMING SLOW CYCLING

ISSUE 8 JANUARY 2015

AMONG THE CONTRIBUTORS STANLEY STEWART FRGS FRSL is the author of three travel books and several hundred articles based on journeys across five continents. He has been named Travel Writer of the Year six times and was awarded the Magazine Writer of the Year in 2008. His latest book, In the Empire of Genghis Khan, is about a thousand-mile horse ride across Mongolia. On page 19 he follows D H Lawrence to New Mexico.

SIR BRIAN UNWIN KBE is a former British civil servant and author. He was chairman of the board of HM Customs and Excise and president of the European Investment Bank. He has published two works of historical non-fiction, both dealing with the Napoleonic era: Terrible Exile: The Last Days of Napoleon on St Helena (2010), which was shortlisted for the Fondation Napoléon History Prize, and A Tale in Two Cities: Fanny Burney and Adèle, Comtesse de Boigne (2014). On page 24, he takes the Mail Ship to the remote island of St Helena. CHRISTOPHER HOWSE is an assistant editor of the Daily Telegraph and a regular contributor to the Spectator and the Tablet. He has been travelling around Spain for 25 years, and made a 3,000 mile circumnavigation of the country for his latest book, The Train in Spain: Ten Great Journeys Through the Interior. On page 14 he shares his experiences of Parador hotels. Cover illustration by Arthur Robins Go Away is published by The Oldie magazine, 65 Newman Street, London W1T 3EG Editor Anna Lethbridge Design John Bowling Advertising Lisa Martin, Monique Cherry, Maisie Bone For advertising enquiries, call Lisa Martin on 020 7079 9361 For editorial enquiries, call 020 7436 8801 or email editorial@theoldie.co.uk

4 TRAVEL TIPS

24 A MAGICAL ISOLATION

Hot travel tips for Oldie readers

Brian Unwin travels by ship to the remote island of St Helena

6 TAKING PLEASURE IN RUINS

26 WINES OF THE LOIRE

Barnaby Rogerson’s passion for ancient North Africa

Bill Knott enjoys Chenin Blanc and châteaux in the Loire Valley

11 FROM ENGLAND TO AUSTRALIA, SLOWLY

27 SANDCASTLES, SEAWEED & SHRIMPING NETS

Oli Broom cycled to Brisbane to watch the Ashes

Jane Fearnley-Whittingstall has some tips for holidaying with grandchildren

28 A SWIM ON THE WILD SIDE Emma Jay on the joys of swimming in the wild

14 GHOSTLY COMPANY IN SPAIN Christopher Howse on Spain’s historic Parador hotels

17 THE WORLD’S EDGE Michael Pye is won over by the North Sea coast

30 IN PURSUIT OF ART Catherine Milner selects the highlights of this year’s major art exhibitions

33 THE LIGHT STUFF Sophie Campbell on the art of travelling light

19 A FARAWAY UTOPIA

38 THE PERILS OF IGNORANCE

Stanley Stewart follows D H Lawrence to New Mexico

Tim Cahill recounts his travelling gaffes

22 GARDENS OF THE CôTE D’AZUR David Wheeler finds glorious gardens in southern France

January 2015 GO AWAY The Oldie 3

Travel Tips Tips, tales and recommendations from our eagle-eyed, travelling readers

Home-swapping holidays

The big day arrives: Post-It notes in place, coat-hangers made available, wine and welcome note on the kitchen table. Time to post a Jiffy bag with the keys to our flat to complete strangers in another country – but we are not alone, a couple like us are doing exactly the same thing. We are flat-swapping. Over the last ten years our travels have taken us to a converted Eiffel workshop in central Paris, a Manhattan apartment (with three pianos), a luxurious flat with huge terrace overlooking Fiesole and a sleek Bauhaus-designed home in Berlin. In all, we’ve taken more than 20 holidays in 14 countries, all courtesy of an annual subscription of £49. In return: the experience of living life as a local, with no corporate colour scheme, Do Not Disturb signs or trouser presses. How easy is it to arrange? Via the internet it’s extremely straightforward. You upload images of your home with a description, identify the places you’d like to visit and times of the year. You then either wait for others to seek you out and suggest an exchange or if you have a specific place in mind then search for suitable properties and send an email. Once you have found a match you set up an agreement to confirm details such as use of phones and cars, and book your flight or train. http://gb.intervac-homeexchange.com http://www.lovehomeswap.com

Readers’ contributions wanted Send your travel tips or stories by post to Travel Tips, The Oldie, 65 Newman Street, London, W1T 3EG, by fax to 020 7436 8804, or by email to editorial@theoldie. co.uk with ‘Travel Tip s’ in the subject line. Maximum 300 words £50 paid for all contributions printed

4 The Oldie GO AWAY January 2015

Soulful in Memphis

My hips are swaying, my arms are swinging, my heart is soaring. I’m mouthing and moving along to Otis Redding, almost alone on the dance floor. We’re not in a club but a museum, probably the only museum that invites you to dance in its galleries. It’s the Stax Museum of American Soul Music in Memphis, Tennessee. In this movie theatre turned recording studio turned museum, Isaac Hayes made the soundtrack to Shaft and Rufus Thomas started Walking the Dog. Soul is the heart of this city, and its greatest export, Memphis the Musical, starring Beverley Knight, is running on the London stage. But while the rows of West End seats are full, the home of this unique Southern sound is rattling like a tambourine. I was the only passenger on the trolley car taking me back to the iconic 1920s Peabody Hotel. It was easy to get a booth at the Arcade diner, where a photo on the wall, taken in 1948, showed the street thronging with hatted people and Ford cars. Elvis’s booth was at the back. I ordered a meal the crooner himself could have eaten 50 years earlier – sweet potato pancakes, eggs over-easy, hashbrowns and grits. Soul food is served slow. When I complained, my server drawled, ‘This is the South. They do it slow down here.’ Slow and soulful is the rhythm of Memphis. The waitresses move languidly across the chequered tiled diner floors. Trolley cars trundle empty along the lines, rattling to the city’s beat. The overhead stoplights seem to swing in time on their wires, turning red to the empty streets. The legendary B.B. King’s Blues Club in Beale Street gets busy as the day draws in, a few tourists wandering in to hear the three-piece band. But even here the tempo is slow and the crowd smaller than when this strip was not only the heart of Memphis, but also of black American music. The music fans were elsewhere. At Grace-

The legendary B.B. King’s Blues Club lands, in the sprawling suburbs, there are queues to give praise to Presley. At Tiny Sun Studios, where 18-year-old delivery boy Elvis paid three dollars to cut his own record, a spot of tape on the floor marks where he belted out That’s Alright. At that moment, it was. I was still in search of soul, of the Memphis of Redding and Presley. I left downtown for an area my cab driver didn’t want to go. I was looking for Wild Bill’s jook joint. From the outside, it was an unpromising shack. But when I opened the door, the Blues burst out as if imprisoned. The customers, all black, were also squeezed in, dancing as if in a trance. Singer Miss Nicky had such a mighty body that, as it shook, so did the whole shack. I began to move among the dancers in a slow, sad swing. It was the same slow rhythm the trolley car travelled at, the stoplights swung at, at which the waitress served the coffee. Now Memphis was in my soul. And it was definitely alright. Seven night holiday to Memphis from £988 with America As You Like It 020 8742 8299 www.americaasyoulikeit. com. www.memphisthemusical.com Dea Birkett

North Africa

TAKING PLEASURE

IN RUINS UINS

BARNABY ROGERSON is ‘randy for antique’, as Betjeman put it, and some of his favourite ancient sites are in North Africa

have spent two-thirds of my life questing after ruins, and particularly those of North Africa. We are told that passion ebbs with age, but as in other areas I’ve not always found this to be the case. Each archaeological site feeds into a better understanding of the others, to build ever more ambitious castles in the air. Timgad, founded by Trajan in 100 AD, deep in the Aurès Mountains of Algeria, is bathed in the golden glow of ancient sun-baked limestone. Life in the ancient city is described by an astonishing quantity of inscriptions, some plain altar carvings, others seemingly on the point of inventing Carolingian minuscule. The covering of three feet of windblown sand that had settled on the place for some 1,100 years has been blown away, revealing it as if newlyborn. The local Berber tribes had had to put up with armies of Vandals and then a century of ambitious Byzantine campaigns of reconquest, restoration and revival, and by the seventh century the Arab armies were on their way. They

site, towards a belt of pine trees growing over a Christian cemetery, you discover a vast rectangular Byzantine fortress, quarried from

The covering of three feet of windblown sand that had settled on the place for some 1,100 years has been blown away, revealing it as if newly born. decided that they would be better off scattered about the mountains in rural poverty than sitting together in urban magnificence, so they trashed the place. If you have the energy to totter to the southern edge of the 6 The Oldie GO AWAY January 2015

the town’s theatre and forum and thrown quickly together, as if by an infant with a bag of wooden bricks. Inside, preserved from the assaults of time, are the remains of a sacred sanctuary to the spring, built in

the time of the Emperor Septimius Severus. Elsewhere, scattered around the town, are the ruins of 14 separate bath complexes, one of which has a mosaic of a dark man with a twinkle in his eye and a vast dribbling cock. Clearly the pleasures of the bathhouse have always meant different things to different customers, then as now.

n Morocco, I first fell in love with the Roman ruins of Volubilis as a teenager. I remember seeing rusty rail tracks and old mine trolleys dating back to the time when German POWs were employed clearing the site of its medieval layers. But as a youth I was

North Africa

Far left: Pair of triumphal arches from the unexcavated city of Zana, north of Timgad. Top left: Hippo – the Basilica of St Augustine. Top right: The Lambeasis of the III Augusta Above: Roman Basilica, Volubulis, Morocco. Left: The ruins of Tipasa

more fascinated by the walls and the ring of forts on the visible horizon that had protected the Roman city. Excavations into the vast but bleak governor’s palace identified a series of altars confirming ‘a federated and lasting peace’ with the powerful Baquates tribe. Then the series of altars and the peace came to an end. The bursting of the frontiers in 280 AD had an unexpected fringe benefit for the modern traveller. A cache of exquisite bronzes was hidden, buried beneath the floor of a villa, which is why the beautiful portrait head of King Juba II, who was descended from the Kings of Numidia, Mark

Antony and the Ptolemaic Pharaohs of Egypt, has survived and is now housed in the Rabat museum. I once led a very keen group (a dedicated Andante Roman Morocco tour) to stomp around ploughed fields until we had discovered the fossa-ditch of one of the frontier forts. It was almost dusk by the time we had made a certain identification, but we were rewarded with mint tea by some hospitable villagers. I am used to being offered fake antiquities for sale, so was not too surprised when something was proffered in brown

paper. It turned out to be a beautiful chipped statuette of Hercules that had been ploughed up that day.

ipasa in Algeria is just one of the many Roman port-cities that studded the coast of North Africa. If you look at their stratigraphy they all started life as harbours of Phoenician traders about three thousand years ago. The prevailing winds took these enterprising merchants of Lebanon north on their westward journey, brushing past the islands of Sicily, Sardinia and Ibiza, but on their way back home they had to hug the North African shore. So January 2015 GO AWAY The Oldie 7

North Africa

It was the insistent combination of death and sensuality that drew Albert Camus back to Tipasa again and again every 20 miles or so they established a safe landing place, where there was fresh water, a harbour and friendly natives. And it is the local Berber word for ‘headland’ by which Tipasa is still known. This only makes sense if you are coming from the west and, having safely passed the last of the cliff faces of Jebel Chenoua, make this welcome anchorage. Tombs, Punic, pagan and Christian, cluster in their thousands outside the city walls, the poor buried beneath a spine of roof tiles, the rich in sarcophagi placed inside monumental mausolea. Like iron filings drawn to a spiritual magnet, the early Christian burials cluster around the tomb of martyrsaints such as Bishop Alexander and St Salsa. Although it is popular with picnickers and courting couples, thick shrubs keep the necropolis mysterious. It was this insistent combination of death and sensuality that drew Albert Camus back to Tipasa again and again (alongside the excellent fish restaurants, the sea swimming and a beach big enough to host several football games). His love for the place is commemorated by a stone which proclaims, ‘Here I first understood true glory – the right to love beyond measure’. A local Berber carpenter, Djellaul Khalil, has added his own tribute to the site by carving a cornucopia of heads and symbols onto some old tree trunks.

Above: Triumphal Arch of Caracalla, Timgad Right: Berber woodcarver Djellaul Khalil (centre) with Barnaby Rogerson, Tipasa

Recently I was lucky enough to meet this talented artist and tell him that his work had only one parallel in my mind, the mysterious wreath of heads and animals carved into the rock around an ancient spring in the Cyrenaican hills of eastern Libya. He looked thrilled, and I, for my part, felt that after 40 years of finding pleasure

from ruins I was at last putting some of this experience to good work. Barnaby Rogerson runs Eland, an independent publishing house which is dedicated to reprinting classic travel books (www.travelbooks.co.uk). He also writes about North Africa and Early Islam.

Travelling to ancient North Africa

Travel companies Andante Travels, www.andantetravels.co.uk, 01722 713800, runs several tours to the region, including Bare Bones Fez which includes Volubilis in its itinerary. Other tours include Carthage to the Sahara, and Tunisia – the Punic Wars. Martin Randall Travel, www.martinrandall.com, 020 8742 3355, organise a tour of Roman Algeria that includes Tipasa and Timgad. They also have several trips to Morocco. Steppes Travel, www.steppestravel.co.uk, 01285 880 980, runs tours to Algeria, Tunisia and Morocco.

Recommended reading: The best introductions to the ancient history of North Africa are: l Susan Raven, Rome in Africa, Routledge, 1993, £30. l Michael Brett & Elizabeth Fentress, The Berbers, Wiley-Blackwell, 1997, £34.99. l Barnaby Rogerson, North Africa: A History from the Mediterranean Shore to the Sahara, Duckworth, 2012, £12.99. 8 The Oldie GO AWAY January 2015

Slow Cycling

FROM

ENGLAND

AUSTRALIA, SLOWLY

OLI BROOM cycled to Brisbane to watch the Ashes and was inspired to start a ‘Slow Cycling’ revolution

n October 7th 2009, I picked up a bright blue, steel-framed bicycle from a man on the south coast of England, and two days later some friends and I went for a ride. We started at Lord’s Cricket Ground in North London and finished, some eight hours later, in a wood in Kent. That’s where we spent the night. When the sun rose the following morning we were off again, bound for Dover’s ferry terminal, where my friends and I parted company. Most of them jumped on a train back home to wives, girlfriends and office jobs. I caught the ferry to Dunkerque and continued to pedal more-or-less south-easterly for the next 14 months. With a cricket bat strapped to my panniers, I was off to Brisbane, to watch England play Australia at cricket. Before I left for Brisbane I hadn’t sat on a bicycle for ten months. The furthest I had ever ridden was from London to Paris, on a mountain bike I had bought on eBay for £20. I expect you know people who have cycled a similar route. It probably took them two days, three at most. Well, it took

me seven. That bicycle, the purchase of which had been forced upon me by an unhealthy bank balance, ensured I got to know parts of northern France pretty well, and some of the people who live there. My ride to Paris inspired me to get on a bike again, and this time to travel much further, across four continents. We’re continually fed notions of exotic bliss by glossy magazines, told where the ‘Top 10 Beaches in the World’ are, and that we should visit them all ‘before we die’. The result is that we choose the fastest and most cost-effective way of reaching a destination. I do it all the time. I buy a seat on a plane that flies me thousands of miles over our rich and wonderful planet and I see nothing of it. The destination is everything. The journey is defunct. On a bicycle, the journey is the point. On my rather roundabout route

It was because I was on a bicycle that a Hungarian film producer decided to film my journey

In high spirits near Toowoomba, a day out from Brisbane

to Australia I wanted to make friends in obscure European cities and Turkish villages, to understand what life is like in the Sudanese desert or in an Indian mega-city. In the humble bicycle, I found a machine that offered me such opportunities.

t was because I was on a bicycle that Laszlo, a Hungarian film producer, approached me on a Budapest street and asked where I was heading. When I told him my plan, he decided to cycle to the Serbian border with me. Then he decided to make a film about my whole journey and we remain friends today. January 2015 GO AWAY The Oldie 11

Slow Cycling

Main picture: On Outback roads the sand was often too deep to ride Top left: I’ve never felt further from home than in Sudan’s Nubian Desert Top right: I was in West Bengal for the state elections

Some weeks later, in the depths of winter, I found myself a thousand metres above sea-level on Turkey’s central Anatolian plateau. During daily electrical storms I was ushered inside crude stone houses by farmers just as eager as me to avoid the weather. Inside, women threw on burkhas when they saw me and got busy preparing feasts for the foreigner: bread, soup and a whole chicken if I was lucky. There was never any expectation of anything in return and I was often persuaded to hang around and chat using signs, in the absence of a common language, for hours after the storms had abated.

uch encounters were common everywhere I pedalled. With a bicycle as my trusty companion, there was a sense of continuity and slow adjustment to my travel. Borders acted as little more than reminders of the often arbitrary segmentation of our planet and never seemed to bring much more than a colourful stamp in my passport, at least until I rode deeper into a new culture. I never felt out of place and that allowed me 12 The Oldie GO AWAY January 2015

to make friends. It was a symptom of the slow nature of my travel; the gradual movement from one country to its neighbour. I may have looked like, and occasionally acted like, an intruder in a strange part of the world, but I didn’t feel like one. It is now four years since I returned home. There are still times when I long to be rolling along a dusty track in Syria or India or Australia, hands leaning on a couple of dirty socks which padded the handlebars, legs turning gently and wheels taking me onwards, towards another night in a tent, in a strange place. These days my bicycle spends her days chained to the stairwell beneath my Battersea flat. Occasionally I take her out for a spin but most of the time she waits there silently, a redundant relic with no mountains to climb, deserts to inch her way across or trucks to hurriedly avoid. She’s pretty filthy, needs a good clean. But she won’t ever get one. There’s yellow Saharan sand in her joints, red Outback dirt too. Her role as a crosser

With a bicycle as my trusty companion, there was a sense of continuity and slow adjustment

of continents may be defunct but every day, as I leave for work, she reminds me of the extraordinary kindness I came across and the inherent goodness in the people I encountered during 412 days on the open road.

still don’t call myself a cyclist. I’m not particularly interested in cycling for sport or athletic endeavour, which is how it tends to be classified these days. Inspired into the saddle by the super-human efforts of super-spindly Olympians like Bradley Wiggins and Chris Froome, legions of Brits are taking to two wheels. Across the country, every weekend of the year, thousands of riders pay to take part in organised ‘Sportives’ while charities vie for business from fundraisers eager to take on the challenge of cycling to Paris in 24 hours, or from London to Istanbul as fast as possible. No, it’s not for me, competitive cycling. In a world that is obsessed by speed, a bicycle offers a wonderful opportunity to slow down, and that’s something we all need to do every now and again.

Oli Broom’s Cycling to the Ashes: A Cricketing Odyssey from London to Brisbane is published by Yellow Jersey Press, at£7.99. You can follow his Slow Cycling Revolution at www.slowcyclist.cc or on Twitter: @slow_cyclist

Paradores of Spain

Main picture and top: The Parador at Zafra, where the Count of Feria and Hernán Cortés are said to have met before Cortés set sail for the New World

Ghostly Company CHRISTOPHER HOWSE shared a Spanish Parador with ghosts from its past

ne June night at three in the morning, I walked out on to the roof jutting from the castle walls at Zafra in Extremadura. Perhaps I had been disturbed in my bedroom by the ghosts of the Count of Feria and Hernán Cortés, said to have taken council there before the conquistador set sail for the New World. How stifling their high-collared doublets must have been in the tapestry-hung salón dorado. Tourists like me can now sleep in that very room, its high, coffered ceiling painted with heraldic devices, for since 1965 the palace has been a Parador de Turismo, a state-sponsored hotel. Perhaps, hundreds of years ago, the Duchess of Feria had taken the night air here too. For she was not bred to

14 The Oldie GO AWAY January 2015

in SPAIN

the heat but lived in London as Jane Dormer, before becoming the bride of the favourite courtier who had accompanied King Philip II to Winchester when he married Mary Tudor in 1554. For the new Duchess it meant alien exile in Spain and a 40-year widowhood. Today, above the sleeping rooftops of the little town, from the old parish church rang the quarters, incongruously to the chimes of Big Ben. The only ghosts visible were dim white shapes of storks, standing motionless on their nest on the nearby convent church of Santa Marina. To there the body of the Duchess was brought at half past five on the afternoon of February 2nd, 1612, nine days after the heavy coffin enclosing an envelope of lead left by coach from Madrid. That night it was to be the subject of an attempted bodysnatching.

Above: An atmospheric stairway in the Parador at Zafra

he was meant to be buried in the family sepulchre in the church of the Poor Clares, nuns who lived enclosed in their convent in the middle of the town. Next morning, the Poor Clares’ abbess, a duke’s niece herself, halted the funeral, insisting the coffin be opened, not satisfied by the undisturbed covering of black velvet fastened with gilt nails.

Paradores of Spain

FACT BOX Paradores de Turismo are luxury hotels converted from ancient castles, palaces, convents, monasteries, fortresses and other historic buildings. They are found throughout Spain, and as they are state-owned, they are usually located where they are not in competition with the private sector and many are in smaller medieval towns and villages. The first opened in Gredos, Avila, in 1928, and the Hostal de los Reyes Catolicos in Santiago de Compostela is considered to be the oldest continuously operating hotel in the world and one of the finest Spanish Paradores.

How to book a room Rooms can be booked directly via the Paradores website, www. paradoresofspain.com, or through Keytel, the official representative of the Paradores at www.keytel.co.uk or on 020 7953 3020.

Tour companies Tour companies that include Paradores in their itineraries include Wexas Travel (www.wexas. com, 020 7590 0618) and Totally Spain (www.totallyspain.com, 0871 666 0214).

Above: The Parador de Leon Below: Oropesa de Toledo – Somerset Maugham admired the bathrooms Bottom: A bedroom in the Santiago de Compostela Parador

An account left by the Duchess’s steward, Henry Clifford, tells of a plot by the pious nuns of Santa Marina to steal the body of the Duchess, their foundress, that night and stuff the coffin with ballast. It sounds an unlikely plot, but perhaps it was hatched in the unreasonableness of family entitlement. Wouldn’t the Duchess want to be buried in the convent she had founded? Only a lock on the coffin, it transpired, had thwarted the scheme. When it was now opened before all present, ‘the face seen, which was

The only ghosts visible were dim white shapes of storks, standing motionless on their nest on the nearby convent church of Santa Marina

12 days after her death, still remained so seemly and sweet and with so lively colours as if she had been living; her hands tender, flexible and white, as they were while she lived.’

eside Zafra, there are 93 other Paradores, mostly in historic castles or convents, with an average of 65 bedrooms each. The chain was founded in 1928. They are well staffed and a slightly bureaucratic air is easily outweighed by the spaciousness and beauty of the buildings, and the view (if you’re lucky). Nothing compares with dawn in the misty spring air over the chasm between the Parador of Cuenca and the little medieval city on its rock spur. Two thirds of the guests are Spanish. You can, if you want, tackle a late, heavy formal dinner in a baronial hall. At Avila once I took the lift, not the stairs, to my room after ambitiously ordering, at the end of a blazing summer’s day, rabo de toro (oxtail) to follow a heavy peasant dish of fat white beans. I’d say: don’t drive from Parador to Parador, or you’ll talk to your spouse all the way and then speak English to the staff. Train travel lets you mix with the people of the country. On my way back to Madrid I like to stay at Oropesa de Toledo, one of the first historic buildings turned into a Parador, in 1930. Somerset Maugham was impressed by the bathrooms. Below it, the town of 3,000 is a microcosm of Castile: historic, shabby, pious, modernised, smelling of woodsmoke and dust. The local slaughterhouse is, without self-consciousness, dedicated to the Blessed Virgin Mary, whose image appears on hand-painted tiles on the facade. That is very Spanish. Christopher Howse’s The Train in Spain: Ten Great Journeys Through the Interior is published by Continuum at £16.99 January 2015 GO AWAY The Oldie 15

The North Sea Coast

Not just shingle and sharp wind

The World’s Edge MICHAEL PYE discovered oysters, art and a whiff of decadence while journeying along the Continental North Sea coast The shifting sands of the Belgian North Sea coast

orth Sea means shingle to me, sharp winds and seaweed, old ladies munching tiny brown shrimps, floral clocks, games on the pier and dodging away to get forbidden candy floss: childhood pictures. I never went back, not when there was the warm Caribbean, or bouillabaisse on the Med, or red-spiced whitebait eaten in the breeze from the Bay of Bengal. I abandoned the North Sea. I even despised it. It took the writing of a book about its history to bring me back. This is my confession: I was wrong about the whole thing. Maybe I started on the wrong shore: the Frinton, Scarborough, Mussleburgh shore, where the villas are mostly stolid, disapproving nineteenth-century. Cross

the water to Belgium, to Ostend, and there’s a faint whiff of decadence: gambling, vast hotels, memories of vampire movies, things more wicked than walking on municipal grass. There’s also a connection to a much deeper past than anything at my seaside. Close to Ostend, the site at Walraversijde has been dug up and examined more closely than anywhere else on the shoreline: it was a fisherman’s village once, but drifting sand, violent tides and a Spanish army finished it off. Now there are meticulously rebuilt cottages stuffed with everything a fifteenth-century fisherman needed: the majolica plates, the needles, nets and hooks, the glasses and the chests. It is a museum, but the houses seem to be waiting for the men to come back from the sea. January 2015 GO AWAY The Oldie 17

The North Sea Coast

ll along this coast, the past is alive. The city of Antwerp was bombed during the war – its vast docks are new – but you have a sense of what it once was; one of the great ports of Europe, another Venice. Painters worked there, the Medici bought paintings there. The Mayer van den Burgh, one man’s museum, is odd but wonderful and the Brueghels are a glory. Rubens’s house has been muddled up, but it still stands. As for the city, you have to hope its liveliness isn’t all fuelled by chemicals; there’s said to be more cocaine in the drains here than in any other city in Europe. To the north lies Zeeland. The small town of Yerseke used to be inland until floods changed everything; and then in Sun, sand and a good book: an ideal holiday depicted in a beach mural, the 1880s there was an oyster rush like the The Hague, Netherlands gold rush in America and fortunes were North at Skagen, where the Baltic meets the North Sea made. All along the waterfront there are still tanks full of and their different densities mark out a clear frontier of oysters washing themselves for the table; these oysters are colour in the water, there is a fine white gabled church that the platte zeeuwse, the flat ones from the sea, the best. You lies buried in the sands which once threatened to drift over can eat local mussels, with cream sauces or with bread, and half of Denmark. The coast was always vulnerable. see why they deserve their own festival each August with fairgrounds and brass bands. Great art, good food and a sense of history: the things o when you land in Bergen in Norway, you underyou find in Italy can all be found alongside the North stand why this was where an eleventh-century king Sea. There are small, old cities, but not on hills: places chose to found a town and to build the fine stone hall as charming as Middelburg, with its fine old centre and which still stands. Take the funicular, the Fløibanen, up the wandering lanes around Gothic buildings. Drive to the sea mountain and you can see the green net of islands which at Domburg, with its magnificently ridiculous Badhotel – protects the mouth of the fjord, the barrier against all the six houses from the movie Psycho mashed into one – and change that the sea brings. Go down among the wooden you can see the beach where high winds and low tides once warehouses on the dockside, which looked much the same revealed a whole lost history, the remains of which are now 600 years ago, give or take the odd souvenir shop, and in in the museum. the alleyways you can hear old business being done. The coast, you see, is mobile; that is its fascination. It You can also start the journey here up to the Arctic Circle is alive enough to shift, century by century, and change on the post boat, or explore the quiet beauty of the sharp everything. You sense that on the ferry crossing over to the fjord valleys; and in town you can eat the white flakes of island of Texel, the point where the great Dutch fleets set salt cod called klippfisk, a preservation technique which the sail for Asia and America in the seventeenth century and Norwegians learned from the Spanish, or stand in the ribs the whalers north to Spitzbergen; the channels have cleared of trading ships in the Bryggen Museum and celebrate the and silted a dozen times. You go there now for the air, risky life of the sea. It is much too interesting to be ignored. the beach, the smoked fish and the extravagant museum display of how Texel’s great seaway used to be (there is a Michael Pye’s The Edge of the World: How the North Sea Made captured English ship, of course). Us Who We Are is published by Viking at £25.

The city of Antwerp was the Venice of Northern Europe

18 The Oldie GO AWAY January 2015

New Mexico

A FARAWAY

UTOPIA

D H Lawrence dreamed of founding an ideal community in New Mexico, and Georgia O’Keeffe spent 50 years painting its grand beauty. STANLEY STEWART travelled there to find out what made this austere region such a mecca for writers and artists

ust before Christmas, 1923, D H Lawrence hosted a dinner party for friends in a private room at the Café Royal in London. He dubbed it the Last Supper. The other diners, all old friends, were familiar with his mood that evening. He was excited, buoyant, persuasive. He had a new enthusiasm. Lawrence had made a trip to New Mexico the previous year. ‘The moment I saw the brilliant proud morning shine high up over the desert of Santa Fe,’ he wrote, ‘something stood still in my soul.’ For some years Lawrence had been dreaming of founding a new community, a Utopian society. Over toasts in the Café Royal, he persuaded his fellow diners to join him in New Mexico, the ideal setting, he claimed, for his dream community. The wine flowed, the dreams of a new world were

shared enthusiastically and departure was set for the following spring. The evening ended messily. Lawrence had to be poured into a cab. Some confusion over the bill left the poorest member of the party having to pay. I came to New Mexico on the old Santa Fe highway, climbing up from the western staging post of Cimmaron. On a back road near Taos, not far from the Lawrence Ranch where the writer’s ashes are now enshrined, I stopped the car and got out. The wind carried the scent of sage and pine. The sense of space was thrilling. Westward across the plateau, beyond the deep canyon of the Rio Grande, lay the austere mineral-streaked faces of the San Juan Mountains. North, above sun-bleached foothills, were the forested flanks of the Sangre de Cristo Mountains. ‘There are all kinds of beauty,’ Lawrence wrote. ‘But for

For some years Lawrence had been dreaming of founding a new community, a Utopian society greatness of beauty I have never experienced anything like New Mexico.’

awrence was not the first traveller to be overwhelmed by Northern New Mexico. Centred round the old Spanish colonial towns of Santa Fe and Taos, the area has form. Georgia O’Keeffe, arriving in 1929, described the landscapes as ‘beautiful, untouched [and] lonely... a fine part of what I call the ‘Faraway’’. She spent the next 57 years painting the faraway and her museum, just off the main square in Santa Fe, January 2015 GO AWAY The Oldie 19

New Mexico

Main picture: Adobe houses in Santa Fe Right: The rugged landscape of New Mexico Below: Colourful produce in a local market

underlines her importance as one of America’s greatest figurative painters. Late portraits of O’Keeffe show a face that resembled her beloved landscape – weathered, austere and beautiful. Ansel Adams, the great American landscape photographer, couldn’t get enough of New Mexico’s grandeur and stark clarities. When she arrived in the 1940s, Millicent Rogers, model, socialite and heiress to the Standard Oil fortune, wondered, ‘Why has no one ever told me about this place?’ She spent much of the rest of her life in Taos and her ravishing adobe home, now a museum, showcases one of America’s most valuable collections of native American art. Dennis Hopper, one of a number of west coast film stars who moved to Taos, made it the centre of his creative life, building a solid reputation here as a painter and photographer. He liked the fact that no one in Taos cared who he was.

he truth is that there are people all over America who dream of new lives in New Mexico, amongst the cottonwoods and aspens, in one of those charming adobe houses with distressed leather sofas and native Navajo rugs. Santa 20 The Oldie GO AWAY January 2015

Fe regularly tops lists as one of the most fashionable cities in America and Taos remains a mecca for artists, writers, photographers and musicians. The arrivals have brought new lifestyles. In Taos there is a massage therapist for every 30 inhabitants, and you can sign up for acupuncture, gestalt therapy or Indian drumming at the supermarket check-out. But New Mexico also has a strong Native American tradition, with a patchwork of reservations spread across the state. In Santa Fe, I browsed through America’s oldest market – the indigenous jewellers, potters and woodcarvers have been spreading their wares in the arcades of the seventeenth-century Palace of the Governors for over a century. Up on windswept Museum Hill, overlooking the town and those austere mountains, the Museum of Indian Arts and Culture offers a canter through the different south-western Indian cultures – Navajo, Comanche, Apache, Pai, Ute and Pueblo. Some 50 miles away is the Bandelier National Monument, an ancient Indian settlement, first occupied in

the 1100s. In water-scoured Frijoles Canyon, I followed trails along the riverbank, between the ancient dwellings, excavated in the cliff faces and accessed by ladders. It was autumn, and the orange aspens were bright feathers among the dark green pinyon. The only sounds were water and wind. It felt like an innocent Eden. When a native inhabitant looked up one day, just over 400 years ago, and saw the glint of sunlight reflected off the helmet of a Spanish conquistador on the ridge above, it signalled the end of this world; but it didn’t signal the end of these people. Just outside Taos is Taos Pueblo, a traditional indigenous village that has been continuously occupied for almost 2,000 years and remains an iconic habitation for Pueblo Indians.

New Mexico

FACT BOX

How to Get There British Airways (0844 493 0787, www.ba.com) flies from London Heathrow to Albuquerque via Dallas from £560 return. Budget (0844 544 3439, www.budget.co.uk) has a week’s car hire from the Albuquerque airport from £117.80.

Where to Stay The Four Seasons Resort Rancho Encantado Santa Fe (00800 6488 6488, www.fourseasons.com/ santafe) has doubles from £280. The Historic Taos Inn (+1 505 758 2233, www.taosinn.com) in Taos has doubles from £63. The Dreamcatcher B&B (+1 575 758 0613, www.dreambb.com) in Taos has doubles from £105.

Tour Operators A seven-night tailor-made fly-drive trip to New Mexico with Vacations to America (01582 469777, www.vacationstoamerica.com) is from £1,559 per person including seven nights’ room-only accommodation, return flights from London and car hire.

Further Information Discover America is a one stop shop for American travel information, including flights, car hire, accommodation and sightseeing. www.discoveramerica.com.

Cactus flowers in bloom in the New Mexico desert

hen Mabel Dodge arrived in Taos, soon after the First World War, she was fascinated by the Pueblo Indians, who were still in native dress and still intimately connected to a preEuropean world. Heiress, cultural magpie and world traveller, Mabel was another nomad who immediately decided this remote and spectacular place was home. She left her second husband and married Tony Luhan, one of the Pueblo Indians, whose courtship seemed to have consisted of setting up a tepee in her garden and drumming every night. She eventually came to him in his tepee, though possibly only to get him to pipe down. Like many marriages with inauspicious beginnings, it worked. They were together for 40 years. It was Mabel who first persuaded Lawrence to visit New Mexico. When he returned to Taos a few months after the Café Royal dinner, only his wife Frieda and Lady Dorothy Brett, a Lawrence stalwart, accompanied him. It seems that for the other Café Royal diners Utopia was just the wine talking. The three acquired a ranch from Mabel, in exchange for the manuscript of Sons and Lovers.

People all over America dream of new lives in New Mexico, in adobe houses amongst the cottonwoods It wasn’t a great deal. The ranch was worth $1,000. Mabel would eventually sell the manuscript for $50,000 to pay her psychiatrist. The three lived happily enough in a couple of log cabins. Utopia turned out to be a pretty low-key affair. Lawrence wrote and went for long rides, drinking in the landscape. Illness would eventually force his return to Europe, and in 1930 he died in the south of France. But a few years later, Frieda arranged to have his ashes brought to Taos to a small chapel on the ranch. It may not be Utopia but he would be happy to lie under those tall New Mexican skies where ‘the stars snap like distant coyotes beyond the moon.’ Stanley Stewart travelled to New Mexico as the guest of Vacations to America, BrandUSA and the Four Seasons January 2015 GO AWAY The Oldie 21

Cote d’Azur Gardens

Gardens Côte d’Azur

of the

DAVID WHEELER on the English horticulturalists of the Côte d’Azur, whose gardens are now open to visitors

egardless of your approach – by train, boat, plane or road – the Côte d’Azur holds its arms wide in a welcome that quickens the heart and pleases all the senses. For me, its epicentre is Menton, a small ochre-washed seaside town in the far south-east of France, a place favoured by Queen Victoria and her subjects for its benign climate and today spilling joyfully over the open border into Italy. The Côte d’Azur has attracted a ragbag of bods: the aristocratic and proletarian, the goodly and the downright felonous. Was it not playwright and novelist Somerset Maugham who dubbed it ‘a sunny place for shady characters’? In 1927 Maugham settled in St-Jean-Cap-Ferat and at his villa, La Mauresque, entertained everyone: the Windsors, Churchill, the Aga Khan, Lord Beaverbrook, Virginia Woolf, T. S. Eliot, Noel Coward, Kipling and 22 The Oldie GO AWAY January 2015

Ian Fleming. Today it’s the Russians who are moving in, causing estate agents to advertise opulent villas for sale in Cyrillic script. Menton, however, is safe: its bay is too shallow for the oligarch’s vodka palaces, some approaching the size of small cruise liners.

n the second half of the nineteenth century there began a small invasion of horticulturists, men and women driven south from chilly England in search of (then) cheap land and sunnier skies on and under which to make new gardens. They were monied, able to afford large acreages (in one case a whole promontory jutting into the Mediterranean) and to pay for manual labour. Their names live on: Thomas Hanbury and Ellen Willmott (on the Italian side of the border); the Rothschilds, the Waterfields, Lawrence Johnston and May Campbell, who could be recognised by their green fingers

William Waterfield depicted (R) in a garden mural at Clos du Peyronet

lusting after exotic plants. And it didn’t stop in the Victorian and Edwardian eras. Newbies with much-needed deeper pockets still pitch up and ‘join the club’, establishing botanicallyrich gardens in a short time through newly-made local gardening friends, specialist nurseries and the internet. I have been trawling these gardens for several years and am thrilled to be spending a week there in June, sharing my many experiences and glorious gardens with a bunch of Oldie readers.

Cote d’Azur Gardens

In the second half of the nineteenth century there began a small invasion of British horticulturalists climatically well-endowed that its traditional New Year’s Day flower count regularly scores more than 300 plants in full bloom. Lawrence Johnston bought a chunk of the Gorbio Valley on Menton’s western approach in 1924. Not for him a coastal site, but one protected by forests and high hills. It was his winter escape from the cold Cotswold escarpment where he had already served an apprenticeship by creating at Hidcote Bartram one of today’s most famous gardens. Recently, thanks to an enterprising bunch of influential garden lovers in several countries, his terraced Serre de la Madone – now administered by the town of Menton – was gently and sympathetically restored. There’s an intimacy about the place that suggests that at any moment Johnston himself (he died in 1958) and his pack of dachshunds might step out into the sunlight to greet you.

B Main picture: The garden at Clos du Peyronet Top left: Joanna Millar’s garden Top right: Serre de la Madone

he Hanbury Botanic Garden at La Mortola is within hailing distance of the border. Now managed by the University of Genoa, it nevertheless continues to shelter a Hanbury-by-marriage, Carolyn Hanbury, invitations to whose chatty tea parties have become a minor legend and a great privilege. We will be on her wisteria-clad balcony listening to fascinating stories that begin with Thomas Hanbury’s prosperous property-speculating in Shanghai that bank-rolled this remarkable garden, a garden so

ut no such act of resurrection is required at Clos du Peyronet on the other side of Menton, where William Waterfield, in his senior years, continues to embellish a garden begun by his grandparents in 1912. You can read the barely-disguised story of this family’s love affair with Menton in The Long Afternoon, a novel by William’s brother Giles, published in 2000. Our June trip to the Côte will also take in the floral abundance of the Villa Ephrussi de Rothschild (the very name recalling The Hare with Amber Eyes) and yet another tea party, hosted this time by sprightly 80-something Joanna Millar, an English rose whose name has been given to a hitherto unknown real rose which she found and rescued at the Hanbury Botanic Garden. While in Monaco Oldie readers will, I hope, know how to behave at the gambling tables. My advice: stick to the gardens.

David Wheeler, Editor of Hortus, is leading an Oldie reader tour, The Gardens of the Cote D’Azur, 6th–13th June, £1,950 excl. flights. For details, call 01225 427311 or visit the readers' offers page at www.theoldie.co.uk. January 2015 GO AWAY The Oldie 23

St Helena

A Magical

Isolation

A stylised wirebird is shown on the island’s coat of arms

BRIAN UNWIN took the Mail Ship to the island of St Helena, an outpost of old England and still one of the most remote places on earth

solated in the South Atlantic, 1,200 miles from Angola and more than 2,000 from Brazil, St Helena remains a remote monument to Britain’s imperial past. Discovered by the Portuguese in 1502, it was seized by the East India Company in the midseventeenth century and has remained a British possession ever since. It is now one of our few remaining Overseas Territories, with a Governor and full panoply of colonial rule to serve around 4,000 ‘Saints’. Its tiny capital, Jamestown, nestling between towering cliffs, is a wonderfully preserved Georgian village, protected from the sea by the Castle – the Governor’s headquarters – and from the devil by St James’ Church, the oldest Anglican church south of the equator. You cannot get a cheap flight there. In fact, you cannot get a flight at all –

that is, until the proposed airport is completed in 2016. You must go by sea, and the only regular route is by the Royal Mail Ship (RMS) St Helena, which leaves Cape Town every three weeks or so. The journey takes five days and you have a week on the island before you must board the ship to return or spend another three weeks waiting for it to come back. The RMS St Helena is the last such ship in service, carrying up to 150 passengers and essential cargo – the islanders’ lifeline. It is a wonderful journey; nothing to see but the endless Atlantic and the occasional wandering seabird. But the ship is remarkably comfortable and full of warmth and friendship, with returning Saints, visiting officials, and tourists on a mission – to trace ances-

tors, view the island’s rare endemic flora, or simply search for Napoleon. For what makes the island so famous, of course, is that, after Waterloo, the Emperor Napoleon – or General Bonaparte, as the British insisted on calling him – was held captive here from October 1815 until his death (from stomach cancer, not poisoning) in May 1821.

here is much to see and do on the island. There are no sandy beaches (the misnamed Sandy Bay is gritty and littered with the barrels of rusted cannons) and the distressed wife of one of Napoleon’s fellow exiles called it ‘an island that the devil shat, when flying from one world to another’. But its daunting volcanic

The daunting volcanic cliffs conceal a lush interior, with green valleys and wooded hills

There are wonderful hikes into the mountainous interior of the island

24 The Oldie GO AWAY January 2015

St Helena

cliffs conceal a lush interior, with green valleys and wooded hills, and there are wonderful treks up to the heights of Flagstaff or Diana’s Peak, St Helena’s highest point. Although tough blades of New Zealand flax, introduced in the nineteenth century, cover many hillsides and mountain slopes, the island is rich in biodiversity and home to more than 400 natural species that occur nowhere else in the world. Twitchers will be able to tick off the rare wirebird, unique to the island, as well as a variety of exotic seabirds such as boobies, noddies, Persil-white fairy terns and drone-like tropic birds. It is easy to get around the island, though hiring a car is recommended. There are many well-marked walks and footpaths and although sometimes hair-raisingly steep and narrow, road surfaces are good and road manners generally even better.

f it is Napoleon you are after, there is plenty to see. Longwood House, situated on a high, damp and windy plateau, was his home (in reality, prison) for most of his five-anda-half years on the island. It was sold to the French Government in 1854 and the French tricolor flies boldly above it – a curious sight on an island otherwise dominated by the Union flag and images of the royal family. It is now a museum, curated by the French honorary consul, a noted Napoleonic scholar. The French also own the Briars pavilion, a sort of up-market summer house where Napoleon spent a couple of months while Longwood was being made ready for him. Here he played billiards and blindman’s buff with the ebullient 15-year-old daughter of the house, Betsy Balcombe, who was not at all fazed by the reputation of the erstwhile ogre of Europe. You

Longwood House was Napoleon’s home – or prison – on St Helena from 1815 until his death in 1821

The French tricolor still flies boldly above Longwood House, Napoleon’s residence during his exile can also visit Napoleon’s original tomb, down beneath the willow trees in the quiet flower-scented stillness of Geranium Valley. It is still guarded by an attendant, although Napoleon left long ago, disinterred and shipped to France in 1840, to be reburied with pomp and ceremony in a much grander tomb in Les Invalides. With the airport the island will change radically. There will be new visitor amenities and Saints will no longer be so cut off from the outside world. But the magic of isolation will have gone. No longer will you be able to experience the thrill, after a week at sea, of seeing that tiny dark speck on the horizon gradually turn into a formidable volcanic fortress – just as Napoleon first saw it from HMS Northumberland nearly 200 years ago. So book your place on the RMS St Helena before it is too late! A speck of rock in the middle of a vast ocean: St Helena from space

FACT BOX The St Helena Tourist Board is a source of up-to-date information, http://sthelenatourism.com/

When to go The hottest months on St Helena are between January and March, and the coldest between June and September, but for much of the year temperatures are between 70-80°F (20-27°C). Rain usually falls from late March to early May, with April being the height of the rainy season, and again in July to September, with August being the height of this period.

Getting there Until the new airport opens in 2016, the only way to get to St Helena is by ship on the RMS St Helena from Cape Town, http://rms-st-helena. com, 020 7575 6480.

The following companies offer tours to St Helena: Halcyon Travel Collections, www.halcyon-collections.com, 020 7193 2363 Island Holidays, www.islandholidays.co.uk, 01764 670107 Voyages Jules Verne, www.vjv.com, 020 7616 1000 Sir Brian Unwin’s Terrible Exile: The Last Days of Napoleon on St Helena is published by I. B. Tauris at £15.80 January 2015 GO AWAY The Oldie 25

Wine tasting

Wines of the Loire The Loire Valley offers the wine tourist some of the finest vineyards – and châteaux – in France, according to BILL KNOTT

here can be few more tranquil experiences in the whole of France than gliding gently in a barge along the Cher River, a tributary of the mighty Loire, through the arches of the stunningly beautiful Château de Chenonceau. It’s even better, however, with a glass of something local in your hand at the time. A glass of Sauvignon Blanc from Touraine, perhaps, or a crisp, apple-scented Chenin Blanc from Saumur: both regions are nearby. Or, for those whose preference runs to something a little darker, a taste of one of the great names from the Loire Valley vineyards on the other side of Tours: Chinon, Saumur Champigny, Bourgueil and St Nicolas de Bourgueil, where Cabernet Franc is king, producing reds of great finesse, structure and elegance.

The tranquility of the mighty River Loire

distance. As well as wine, Chinon boasts a grand medieval fortress – the only one in the Loire Valley – and the great estates of Villandry, Chambord, Amboise, Azay-le-Rideau, and many others, are an easy drive away. For a wine tourist, the Loire is friendly, but it is not slick. There are few of the visitor centres you might find in Bordeaux or Champagne: winemakers here tend to be farmers first and salesmen second. Which is not to say that the Loire isn’t fertile ground for the visiting oenophile, just that you should plan a little in advance.

The Loire is friendly but not slick. Winemakers here are farmers first and salesmen second Visiting the great wine region of the Loire Valley is not quite as simple as, say, a trip to Burgundy, Bordeaux or the southern Rhône. The river – the longest in France – stretches for 629 miles from the Massif Central to the Bay of Biscay, and for much of its length there are vineyards on either side: indeed, without the benign effect of the river raising the air temperature a degree or two, there would be no wine.

o, rather than try to bridge the gap between Muscadet and Sancerre, it makes sense to focus on the middle of the river, around Tours. Not only are some of the finest vineyards located here, but most of the great châteaux are within striking

26 The Oldie GO AWAY January 2015

n the major winemaking towns and communes, like Chinon and Saumur, you could easily follow signs to various caves offering dégustations and spend a very happy morning or afternoon sampling the various local cuvées, but it still makes sense to call ahead: winemakers are often at the mercy of their vines, and may be busy in the vineyard, or they may simply be at lunch which, being France, can be a lengthy affair. There are tourist offices in all the major towns – Cheverny, Montlouissur-Loire, Chinon, Bourgueil, Tours and several others – who will be happy to give you a list of local caves and point you in the right direction: many of the region’s cellars, by the way, are housed in old limestone caves, from

which the stone for the great châteaux was once quarried. There is, you might reflect as you swirl another of the region’s wines meditatively around your glass, a pleasing symmetry to that. Bill Knott is leading the Oldie reader Taste of Bordeaux tour, 16th–21st March, £1,295, excl. flights. For details call 01225 427311 or go to www.theoldie.co.uk.

FACT BOX You will need a car to make the most of the area. Hire one in Tours, or – better still – drive from the UK, which gives you plenty of boot space for all those fine vintages: the Loire Valley is, with the exception of Champagne, the most accessible wine region from the UK. If you don’t want to drive, Ryanair flies from Stansted to Tours-Val de Loire; or take the Eurostar and cross Paris: trains take about an hour from Gare Montparnasse to Tours.

Where to stay, etc. There are plenty of good-value gîtes for rental in the area: for a comprehensive list, visit www.en.gites-de-france.com. Boat tours on the Cher at www.labelandre.com; www.cavemonplaisir.fr, in Chinon, is a friendly cellar with a particularly good range of local wines.

Holidays with Grandchildren

Sandcastles, Seaweed and Shrimping Nets JANE FEARNLEY-WHITTINGSTALL finds that when it comes to sharing a holiday with her grandchildren, nothing beats the British seaside

iking in Austria, snorkelling in Sri Lanka, scuba-diving in the Seychelles: we’ve shared some great multigeneration holidays. But nothing beats the British seaside. Tide-washed yellow sand; barnacled, seaweedy rock pools; buckets, spades, shrimping nets. For us it’s a wallow in nostalgia, reliving our childhood as we teach our grandchildren to make a sandcastle with a proper moat, show them where crabs might lurk and help them catch the wave on a surfboard. My first seaside holidays were more than 70 years ago and our next will be in July this year to celebrate my husband’s 80th birthday. Not much has changed. We shared our postwar holidays with our cousins and bonded with them for life. Bonding involves friction and we were a family of keen competitors and bad losers, so naturally there were squabbles. It’s the same with our six grandchildren, but Grandpa, as praefectus ludis, sees fair play. All ages join in beach cricket of both the English and the French variety (strangely, the latter is unknown to our French daughter-in-law). When the tide is out, Grandpa organises races. He’s a shrewd handicapper, so most races end as a dead heat between the oldest and the youngest. But handicapping doesn’t

HOLIDAY TIPS TOP TIP Persuade your family to choose a hotel or house within walking distance of the beach. Squashing everyone into a car to sit in a traffic jam is asking for trouble.

●

TOP TIP FOR PARENTS Each year the grandparents get older and slower. Don’t let the children run them ragged.

●

TOP TIP FOR GRANDPARENTS Don’t shout at your grandchildren – unless they’re drowning.

●

work for crab-racing, another popular sport. First catch your crab. Tie a lump of bacon to the end of a bit of string. A child hangs the bacon from the jetty until a crab grabs it. The crabs are dropped into a bucket. Granny’s job is to stop them getting out again. When there are enough crabs to go round, line them up a couple of yards from the water’s edge and let them go. The first one to reach the sea wins. My memories of Cornish and Welsh beaches in the 1940s are not all idyllic. We would emerge from short, sharp sorties into a very cold sea, lips blue and teeth chattering, to be enveloped in abrasively sandy towels for a rub-adub-dub to get the circulation going. Wetsuits have changed all that and our

JANE’S TOP UK PLACES TO HOLIDAY WITH CHILDREN ●

Trevone Bay, near Padstow, north Cornwall. Jane stayed in Lagos, a fourbedroom house by the sea in Trevone. Details on the owner’s website www.trevoneholiday.co.uk or call 01453 873052.

●

Epphaven Cove, near Port Isaac, north Cornwall. Tresawl isa six-bedroom house overlooking the coast. Details can be found on www.ownersdirect.co.uk (search for Tresawl) or call 01342 325680.

●

Newport, Pembrokeshire, Wales. Jane recommends the six-bedroom Dolawel Cottage which overlooks Newport Bay. www.dolawel-cottage.co.uk or 020 8948 2800.

●

The Gower Peninsula, Wales. There is a huge choice of cottages to stay in, many with spectacular views: www.the-gower.com/self-catering.

●

Lyme Regis, Dorset. www.lymebayholidays.co.uk/cottages-with-seaviews.

grandchildren can now frolic in the sea for hours. We’re flattered and touched when our children ask us to join them on holiday. But we’re not fooled. The unspoken deal is that we make ourselves useful: change the odd nappy, wipe the odd nose, peel the odd spud (just enough to feed 12 hungry people). We’ll baby-sit to give the parents a night out. The children will use our bed as a trampoline at seven o’clock so their parents can have a lie-in. None of which we begrudge for a moment. But savvy grandparents negotiate a pay-off: for granny it may be a post-prandial siesta or a day off to go shopping or walk the coastal path or just stand gazing out to sea like the French lieutenant’s woman. My treat is coffee and cake in a garden chosen from the National Gardens Scheme’s Yellow Book. My husband likes going off on his own to buy the groceries. What he enjoys most of all, though, is gathering mussels off the rocks at low tide. Moules marinières for supper. Grandparents may wish to contribute by hiring help for the holiday, but should check with the family first. Our best-ever beach holiday was the one when Yari the Scandi ‘manny’ from Finland spent a summer with our son’s family. He took the children fishing, retrieved beach balls bobbing towards the horizon beyond the waves, headed the lunch-time queue at the pasty shop and, best of all, played Monopoly with six children every evening for a week. No tears before bedtime for them. Jane Fearnley-Whittingstall’s Good Granny books are published by Short Books January 2015 GO AWAY The Oldie 27

Wild Swimming

A Swim on the

WILD SIDE EMMA JAY’S lifelong passion for wild swimming has taken her around the world in search of the perfect water hole

ike many Oldie readers, I’ve always done ‘wild swimming’. In my childhood I had to pick my way through cow-pats and forget-me-nots to swim in the murky yet refreshing Thames near Lechlade, drifting past willow trees and moorhens’ nests. Holidays in Denmark were spent floating in the warm shallow sea there. In my twenties, travelling in the Alps or Appalachians, I loved wading up the nearest torrent, waist deep and fully clothed, armed with a stout stick. Almost every summer since my teens I have spent in south-west Ireland, where we throw ourselves into the Atlantic breakers shouting, ‘It’s boiling’. Only last October, while cycling round sunny Berlin with an old schoolfriend, we got so hot that we swam at an empty nudist beach we found on a lake near Potsdam. All my life I have dreamt of finding the perfect swimming hole, preferably with a large rock to jump off, a tree

with a rope and Huck Finn for company. In old age I have decided to focus on this search for water and, alone or with a friend, have recently discovered an exquisite string of waterfalls and pools at the foot of Mount Snowdon, a beautiful ‘deep’ surrounded by autumnal trees in upstate New York, and a cool, clear river (the Vis) with warm, mossy boulders near the Cevennes. Next year I am planning to explore some rivers in Italy and Croatia. This thirst for nice places to jump into has been made much easier with the current craze for wild swimming. There are luscious, photo-filled books (is wild swimming the new porn, after houses and gardens?) and websites galore nowadays, all giving map references and handy tips about accessibility. My holiday in France last June was based on places recommended in Daniel Start’s Wild Swimming France, 2012 (watch out for its not-to-scale maps), plus happy trawling through Air B&B and Trip Advisor.

If you’d like to take the plunge, these organisations can help ●

The River and Lakes Swimming Association (www.wild-swimming.com) publishes books and a newsletter about wild swimming.

●

Outdoor Swimming Society (www.outdoorswimmingsociety.com) calls itself ‘the world’s biggest collective of wild swimmers’ and organises group swims around the country.

●

Wild Swimming (www.wildswimming.com) publishes a newsletter and gives advice on where to swim in the UK and abroad.

●

SwimQuest (www.swimquest.uk.com) and SwimTrek (www.swimtrek.com) arrange swimming holidays worldwide.

●

The Big Blue (www.thebigblueswim.com) runs week-long holidays based in Lefkada, Greece, catering for all levels, swimming round 12 islands in the Ionian Sea.

●

Strel Swimming Adventures (www.strel-swimming.com) run trips in Croatia, Slovenia and Montenegro, and one in Lake Powell, Arizona.

28 The Oldie GO AWAY January 2015

A medieval bridge over the River Vis in France

It all seems to have started with Roger Deakin’s wonderful book Waterlog (Chatto & Windus, 1999). If you haven’t read it, do so – you are in for a treat. He set off from his moated farmhouse in Suffolk and swam round Britain’s lakes and rivers, railing against Health and Safety restrictions. (Thanks to him and campaigns by the organisations listed below, ROSPA and the Environment Agency have got slightly less unreasonable about safety, but there is still a long way to go.)

is friend Rob Fryer started the River and Lakes Swimming Association and wrote a useful black-and-white book on good places to swim and the iniquities of restrictions. Then came the Outdoor Swimming Society, founded by Kate Rew in 2006, which produced a beautiful colour

Wild Swimming

All my life I have dreamt of finding the perfect swimming hole, preferably with a large rock to jump off, a tree with a rope and Huck Finn for company (including Sicily). All these books and websites give map references and describe ease of access – sometimes one can park nearby, other times one has to scramble over rocks for half an hour. Local hostelries are also suggested.

EMMA’S TOP FIVE PLACES FOR WILD SWIMMING IN THE UK ●

Hampstead Ponds, Hampstead Heath, London

●

Claverton Weir, near Bath, Avon

●

Lulworth Cove, Dorset

●

Waterfall Woods, between Neath and Merthyr, Mid-Wales

●

Emerald Pools and Trough House Bridge, near Dalegarth, the Lake District

Wading down the River Vis near the Cevennes, France

book and whose website lists places all over the UK and Europe. More recently, Daniel Start and others at Wild Swimming have published some mouth-watering books on coastal and inland swimming places in Britain, France (including Corsica) and Italy

January 2015 GO AWAY The Oldie 29

used to think that being in a pretty place and being able to have a dip was all I wanted, and couldn’t understand those who wanted to swim vast distances or ‘challenge’ themselves. However, I have recently met many people (largely late middleaged women) who love long-distance swimming and whose lives have been transformed by lots of exercise, fresh air, camaraderie and a spot of competitiveness. Emboldened by their example, I took part this summer in a half-mile ‘community swim’ in grey, choppy seas across an Irish bay, and could not believe the high I was on when it ended. It was like being on drugs and I could see why people get addicted. SwimQuest and SwimTrek organise holidays all over the world with swimming as the focus. You can learn to get confident in the sea, improve your stroke and swim for just a few kilometres a day, or go for miles, knowing there is a backup boat and a delicious meal following. You can have a day’s swimming in Lulworth Cove, three days in the Lake District or a week on a boat in the Norfolk Broads. Abroad, you can have a long weekend in Mallorca; a week trying a bit of everything in Corfu or pushing yourself hard in Turkey; or a trip exploring remote places in Slovenia, Mexico, the Algarve, Sardinia or Thailand. You can even swim in the Arctic Circle. These holidays are fairly expensive, and one has to pay for flights on top, but friends say they are luxurious, exciting and great fun.

Art Exhibitions Ushio Shinohara’s Doll Festival 1966, exhibited in The World Goes Pop. Photo courtesy of Tokyo Gallery+BTAP

Pursuit

Art of

For those who plan their travels around major art exhibitions, CATHERINE MILNER selects this year’s artistic highlights, from Amsterdam to Arabia

his year will see the opening of the first in a series of major museums to emerge from the salt marshes of Abu Dhabi. The architecture of the boldly-titled Louvre Abu Dhabi will dazzle visitors almost as much as its contents, which include works by Leonardo da Vinci, Monet and Manet. The architect Jean Nouvel has envisaged the museum as an oasis in a land of blinding sunshine, a vast complex of pavilions, plazas, alleyways and canals, all sheltered under a vast dome, perforated with holes to create a dappled shadow effect of palm trees and rain (opens December 2015). Two of Spain’s greatest artists will be honoured in major exhibitions in Europe in 2015. Velasquez, the most celebrated painter of Spain’s Golden

30 The Oldie GO AWAY January 2015

Age, is the subject of a blockbuster show at the Grand Palais in Paris. This huge exhibition will feature Velasquez’s early landscapes as well as the history paintings and dramatic portraits for which he is most famous, including that of Infanta Maria Teresa from the New York Met with her toppling crown of hair (March 25th – July 13th). The Spanish romantic painter Goya is the focus of two exhibitions this year. The Museo del Prado has an exhibition of his tapestry cartoons, which will be displayed alongside loans from other collections to reveal the artist’s links with earlier tradition, the influence of the classical world, and the range of his contemporary sources (until May 3rd 2015). Closer to home, London’s National Gallery has the first ever exhibition to focus solely on Goya’s portraits. Fifty examples

have been selected, drawn from collections around the world, including drawings and miniatures, and the exhibition will trace Goya’s career from his early beginnings at the court of Charles III to his final years in France (October 7th – January 10th 2016).

nother celebrated portrait painter, John Singer Sargent, is the subject of a major exhibition at The National Portrait Gallery in early 2015. On display for the first time will be a collection of the artist’s intimate and informal portraits of his friends, who included Robert Louis Stevenson, Monet and Rodin (February 12th – May 25th). For those drawn to more tormented souls, the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam will bring together the works of Munch and Van Gogh in an

Art Exhibitions

A major retrospective will pay tribute to arguably Britain’s greatest living painter, Frank Auerbach

The interior of the Louvre Abu Dhabi, and, from its collections, Equestrian Portrait of Maharao Sheodan Singh of Alwar, India, c. 1863. © Louvre Abu Dhabi / Agence photo F

at the heart of the Biennale will be All The World’s Futures – an examination of world politics and its current upheavals (May 9th – November 6th). Meanwhile, in London, Carsten Holler, master of the spectacular and designer of the 100-foot metal slides at the Tate a few years ago, will be creating new wonders for a show at the South Bank’s Hayward Gallery in the summer. ‘A lot of Holler’s work is about the psychology of making decisions – what happens when you don’t know something, how you move forward, how you make connections in the dark,’ according to Ralph Rugoff, Director of the Hayward (June 10th – September 6th). One of the most eagerly-anticipated art events of the spring is the reopening of Manchester’s Whitworth Art Gallery – doubling the space and creating new display areas that reach into the landscape – with a major solo exhibition by Cornelia Parker, one of Britain’s most acclaimed contemporary artists (reopens February 14th).

A Frank Auerbach’s Head of William Feaver, to be exhibited at Tate Modern. Courtesy of Marlborough Fine Art

exhibition that examines the underlying similarities between these two tortured artists (September 25th – January 17th 2016). The Surrealist painter Leonora Carrington, Britain’s answer to Salvador Dali, is the subject of a major exhibition at Tate Liverpool in the spring. Carrington, who ran away from her starchy English family to be the lover of Max Ernst, died in 2011 at the age of 94, having spent most of her adult life in Mexico. This exhibition will bring together not only her dreamlike and fantastical paintings but also some of her films (March 6th – June 7th).

op Art is not only about Andy Warhol and Peter Blake, according to The World Goes Pop, Tate Britain’s autumn blockbuster. Around 200 works from the 1960s and 1970s from Latin America to Asia, Europe to the Middle East, will reveal that Pop Art was not just a celebration of Western consumer culture but was also a subversive international language for criticism and public protest (September 17th – January 24th). On the contemporary front, 2015 sees the return of the world’s biggest and most prestigious art extravaganza. The Venice Biennale allows the visitor to catch up with all the best in contemporary art. The title of the main exhibition

major retrospective at Tate Modern in the autumn devoted to Frank Auerbach will pay tribute to arguably Britain’s greatest living painter, encompassing more than 70 works. Portraits of his most loyal subjects include the former Director of the Whitechapel Art Gallery, Catherine Lampert, who has sat for the artist every week since 1978 and is helping him hang the show (October 9th – February 14th 2016). After the success of his installation at Blenheim Palace last year, the Chinese artist Ai Wei Wei, who is still under house arrest in his native country, is being honoured by a major exhibition at the Royal Academy (September 19th – December 13th). And finally, for those with particularly polymathic taste, Björk, the punky songstress and artist from Iceland, is lauded in a major exhibition at New York’s Museum of Modern Art. It will feature her work with video directors, photographers and fashion designers, including her collaboration with Sir David Attenborough (March 7th – June 7th). January 2015 GO AWAY The Oldie 31

Luggage

The Light

stuff

SOPHIE CAMPBELL on the art of travelling light

here is no hatred quite so pure as that felt by the heavily-laden traveller for someone skipping smugly through security with one small piece of carry-on luggage, slip-on shoes and no laptop. The obvious solution is to travel light yourself, but as any guru will tell you, the road to enlightenment is strewn with irritating obstacles. Take those teeny weeny gadgets that occupy zero space but also don’t work: step forward my elasticated washing line, which simply sags into a graceful parabola, dunking all my knickers in the dirt. Arise, you stretchy bits of material designed to fold into numerous permutations of feminine fashion – tube skirt/ halterneck top/maxi dress/snood, etc – that should be known collectively as a Strangle. And who ever got dressing like an onion right, apart from an onion? You spend your entire holiday adding and removing layers and it is always that moment of transition, with a garment jammed halfway over your head, when minke whales choose to breach, or the Perseids shower the eastern skies, or you bump into the Dalai Lama. There are silver linings – lightweight foil ones of course. Kindles, tablets, consumer courier services, more relaxed dress codes (in

the West, at least), shrinking coinage, space-age fabrics, Muji. The list below includes goods and services that I and my travelling colleagues, many of us dyspeptic and/or suffering from a cocktail of conditions such as plantar fasciitis, shin splints and carpal tunnel syndrome, do actually use. Some I would like to use but can’t afford. And if anyone out there can work those battery boosters that make your phone or tablet last longer, tell me how and a second-hand elasticated washing line will be winging its way to you in no time.

GADGETS & SERVICES Wipe-out The best no-waterneeded cleanser and makeup remover is Bioderma Crealine H20: a 100ml travel size lasts around three weeks and there are packs of disposable wipes. From Amazon (www.amazon.co.uk), £5.99 or £5.31 for 25.

●

Bioderma Clealine H20 (above) and the GSI Espresso Maker (left)

Donkey work Thirtyyear-old Jordan Makin set up Luggage Mule (www.luggagemule. co.uk) because of the hassle of carrying too much stuff. Send your luggage one-way or return, in the British Isles or abroad, to arrive at your door. Prices start from £14.99 to send a 20kg case one way within the UK. It costs £100 to send a pair of skis or set of golf clubs to the USA, for example.

●

Light roasted The GSI Espresso Maker, one to four cups, from £49.95 at Amazon (www.amazon.co.uk) not only looks dinky, it works: mine is battered but unbowed after years of hardy service.

●

If you find yourself with too much stuff, Luggage Mule will carry it for you

Aerolite has ‘the world’s lightest carry-on bags’ (see next page)

A little light swinging Every so often you find two perfect trees to go with a perfect sunset and the latest Scandi detective novel. You need an army hammock. They take some getting used to, being taut and flat, but weigh the same as a very large bag of peanuts. I still use mine. DD Hammocks (www.ddhammocks. com), £52.

●

January 2015 GO AWAY The Oldie 33

Luggage

CLOTHES & SHOES Light as a feather The Microlight compressible jacket from RAB (www.gooutdoors.co.uk/ rab-microlight-jacket-p275820) weighs 125g, even in large, and is made of down from a very small goose plus Pertex. A black one, though ubiquitous on city streets from Rome to Leeds, takes you from hilltop to bar in the shake of a martini.

●

At a stroke Cashmere shawls and pashminas start at £24 from The Wool Company (www.thewoolcompany.co.uk), but the lightest and warmest are the most expensive. Spend £72 for a bingowing cover, blanket, plane pillow and modesty curtain rolled into one.

go to a formal dinner in them. The nearest equivalent available in the UK is the Ribbon Mush Wedge Paparazzi Leather, £20. Chuck ‘em on The pithily-named Men’s Earthkeepers® Stormbuck Chukka Duck Boots cost £115 per pair from Timberland (www.timberlandonline.co.uk): in dark grey, they segue effortlessly from floodwaters to restaurants. ●

From top: Earthkeepers boots; M&S cashmere jumper; RAB compressible jacket

●

Tumi San Remo Soft Duffel in Black, £695

CARRY ON

Oompah, oompah… Meanwhile cashmere jumpers fold up small: I like M&S (www.marksandspencer.co.uk) £69 fitted ones, but Uniqlo (www.uniqlo. com/uk) do v- and crew necks in rainbow colours for £59, and very cool cashmere beanies for £29.95.

●

Simply the vest Double the cosy effect with Merino underwear by Icebreaker, such as the Siren Tank £45, http://uk.icebreaker. com, or wool and wool/silk undershirts by Janus (www.janus.no) from the Norwegian Store in Keswick (www.norwegianstore.com).

●

All stars for feet A friend calls Teva Women’s Mush Mandalyn Ola 2 Flip Flops (www.teva.co.uk) the best all-purpose sandals on the planet: she swears you can walk ten miles, shower and

●

Strong arm I always buy Samsonite (www. samsonite.co.uk) and the space-age looking Lite-Biz range includes the Lite-Biz Upright 55cm cabin case, £345, weighing just 2.4kg. ●

Lighter than air Aerolite claims to have the world’s lightest piece of carry-on baggage just 2.4kg for a bag measuring 66x41x25cm, with 68litre capacity. Available

●

A cashmere scarf: blanket, pillow and curtain in one

34 The Oldie GO AWAY January 2015

in lots of jolly colours (in apple green on previous page), also from Amazon (www. amazon.co.uk), £39 at the time of writing. Bags and stuff Sea to Summit (www. seatosummit.com. au) is an Australian company making superlight bags, including duffels and rucksacks. Great for that moment when you find you’ve bought one stuffed donkey

●

too many. UK stockists from Burton McCall (0116 2344600; www. burton-mccall.co.uk). Small but stylish Luggage from Tumi (http://uk.tumi.com) always looks great and its neat carry bags inspire you to pack fewer things of better quality. You hope. The San Remo Soft Duffel in the Astor Range costs £695–£795 and looks gorgeous in Earl Grey.

●

Travel Mishaps

THE PERILS of Ignorance TIM CAHILL has committed many a faux pas on his travels, usually due to simple ignorance

or reasons that remain opaque, the United States State Department recently chose me to give a series of lectures in the country of Georgia. I understood that I was representing America and tried hard to be a good ambassador. ‘How do you like our country?’ the television reporters wanted to know. It was the most asked question of my trip. ‘The food is superb,’ I said, ‘the wine is excellent, the people hospitable and the mountains and rivers and ancient monasteries and battlements are soul-stirring.’ I had several variations of this sentiment memorised and I was able to say each of them with a great deal of enthusiasm because it was all true. Most of the people I spoke with seemed pleased with my impressions. Smiles all around. I accepted invitations to supras, elaborate dinners washed down with the excellent, earthy wines. As is the custom, a toastmaster (tamada) proposed toasts to all present, then, in separate toasts that continued throughout dinner, to those who couldn’t come, to those who have passed before, and to new friends (me). Seldom have I felt so honoured. But frankly, I have not always been a credit to my country while travelling and have committed any number of idiocies abroad, most of them due to simple ignorance. For example, at one time I did not know the Burundi national anthem. This is of some importance if you happen to be in Burundi, loading a bush plane, and one of the songs playing on the scratchy loudspeakers at the airport happens to be the national anthem. If you know the song, you stand to attention. And if you don’t, a soldier will escort you to the broom closet where you will sit for a couple of hours learning respect. 38 The Oldie GO AWAY January 2015

y travels over the past 40 years have featured an astounding number of bone-headed faux pas. On my way to visit Iran’s Valley of the Assassins, I found myself sitting in a bus, trying to communicate with a number of Iranian men who’d ascertained that I was from America and had taken a keen interest in me. I wanted to tell them that, while our respective governments were sometimes at odds, friendship between the people of America and the people of Iran was a really good idea. However, I was entirely innocent of Farsi and tried to express this concept as if in a game of charades. One of the gestures I used was a big smile with both thumbs up. All the Iranians around me returned the smile and gave me the thumbs up. There was even a bit of laughter. I was a funny guy. The Iranians liked me. I’d made my point. Unfortunately, I later discovered that, in Iran, the thumbs-up gesture means the opposite of what it means in the US. So what I said to my new Iranian friends was, ‘Up yours.’ And they all replied, ‘And up yours too, buddy.’

gnorance has served me well only once. Turkish police detained me and my friends at a number of successive roadblocks in the southeast

‘Instead of the cooking pot, we’ve decided to try a tossed, chunky salad.’

of the country. They did not believe that I was searching for the supposedly extinct Caspian tiger. To them, I was likely one of those journalists who was going to write a story about how badly Turks treated the Kurds who lived there. Roadblock conduct required that all necessary documents be produced promptly. Soon enough, if the papers were in order, it would be time to joke with the police. We’d have a good chance of passing through into the tiger’s territory if we could get them laughing. And we had a sure-fire knee-slapper right there on my passport. My first name, Tim, could be Timur, a common Turkish name referring to the fifteenthcentury Turko-Mongol conqueror, Tamerlane or Timur the Lame. It was my last name that got them laughing. Cahill looks much like the word cahil, which in Turkish means ‘ignorant’. Timur the Ignorant. It was like being called Attila the Jerk. The officers laughed and laughed. But they let us through. So, in this case, ignorance worked in my favour. I can’t say I will never again be detained or questioned or that I won’t embarrass myself in some cultural gaffe. Travel is a process of learning what you don’t know. And sometimes you have to learn the hard way. The Georgians, I suspect, have a toast for that. ‘To the ignorance that propels us into knowledge. Cheers.’ No wait. Kill the ‘cheers.’ It is considered slightly inappropriate to say while toasting in Georgia. I learned that the hard way. Tim Cahill is founding editor of Outside magazine. This piece appears in The Irresponsible Traveller: Tales of Scrapes and Narrow Escapes, published by Bradt at £10.99. Oldie readers are offered a 40 percent discount; visit www.bradtguides.com and enter the code OLDIE at the checkout. Offer valid until end of February 2015.