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Category Archives: In transit

e l e c t i o n

[ 22:05 thursday 23 october - dulles airport, virginia ]

dulles airport again, on my way back to london. being in washington two weeks before the presidential election has been deeply bizarre. news media are saturated. nick-nack shops are stacked with election trinkets, typically including lifesize cardboard cutouts of the two pair of presidential and vice presidential candidates. verges are peppered with placards supporting one party or the other, not just in the city but in the remotest corners of countryside. driving around you can tell a lot about the demographics of an area from the balance between mccain and obama placards, the same way variations in shrubs tell you about the underlying soil.

at the weekend, out on the maryland coast, the mccain faction was decidedly in the ascendent. at breakfast on sunday morning i naughtily eavesdropped conversations on neighbouring tables. one woman was seriously arguing that obama was a sleeper agent for a hostile power: “you know there are literally thousands of these sleepers waiting for the call”.

22:56 / on the plane, ready to take off. only forty-five people in economy so i’ve got a row of four seats all to myself!

: c :

d u l l e s

[ 17:46 thursday 11 september - washington dulles international airport, virginia ]

i’m sitting with a cup of tea at the end of concourse b, a vast white featureless corridor stretching as far as the eye can see. it’s actually been extended since i was last here and it now takes about twenty minutes to walk from one end to the other. i fear washington dc is a city i will never learn to love. it’s unrelentingly conservative, populated by blandly uniformed people and apparently lacks any iota of experimental culture. people hear wear clothes to go out in the evening that folks elsewhere would choose for the office. that can’t be good, can it?

monday afternoon’s presentation at the network roundtable went rather well. i was launching trampoline’s new technology for analysing and visualising social networks so it was a well-informed crowd. from time to time i sense a buzz in the room when i’m talking and this was such an occasion. the subsequent days were spent meeting various customers. this included my first visits to a couple of intelligence agencies. i was expecting terrifying security procedures but in fact it wasn’t much different from a typical international airport. the most bizarre experience was at the one and only agency that permitted me to bring in my laptop (though not connect it to the internet). here a man was specifically employed to stick a sort of rivet into my laptop’s microphone socket when i arrived and remove it again on my departure.

after an afternoon meeting at fort meade i made an impulse decision to drive out to the maryland coast rather than face the rush-hour traffic battling to get into washington. i picked a random point on my gps and half an hour found myself at the edge of a tranquil creek with neatly- tended lawns descending to the water and chesapeake bay beyond. i sat on the bank and watched the sun set over a power station then drove back into town.

yesterday evening i was walking down seventeenth street when a fellow in a kilt and flat cap strode past in the opposite direction and bid me good evening. i returned the greeting and we both continued on our way. but everything about this encounter was so wildly improbably that after a short while i stopped, stood pondering a moment then turned and ran back the way i’d come. he was walking at a good lick so it took me a few minutes to catch up. when i reached him i told him he was the first person to greet me on the street in the last three days in washington. we walked and talked together for the next thirty or forty minutes. he was kelly, born of irish parents who’d moved to nevada to run a petrol station. he’d come to washington a year earlier when he was kicked out of home.

chance encounters like this do more than anything else to remind me how wonderful the world is.

: c :

m i a m i

[ 18:55 saturday 19 july - miami international airport, florida ]

i’m in my seat on the flight for london, taking advantage of a pre take-off delay to tap out a few words on my trusty laptop. following foo camp i took a couple of days’ holiday to stop off here in miami and visit shemoel at his family home. the main objective was for us to work out a modus operandi for producing songs together with me in london and him in san francisco.

this is the first time we’ve tried composing together instead of improvising. neither of us knew how it would work out but things fell into place smoothly. after two days our first song is already coming together. shemoel put down an idea which sparked me to add something, which in turn prompted him to change another section and so on. i recorded bass clarinet, vocals and a few electronic bits. shemoel recorded drums and the bulk of the electronics. we listen to a lot of similar electronic artists but we have very different musical personalities. i’m constantly delighted by shemoel’s perspective and how he responds musically in a completely different way to me. the process we followed over the last couple of days seems like it will lend itself well to long-distance collaboration. it will take more will power to keep it going but hopefully we can muster that.

we took breaks from the music to go swimming on the beach, hang out in sweat records (the epicentre of miami’s small experimental music scene) and join the full moon drum circle on the beach until the police broke it up. i managed to record half an hour of this on my new digital audio recorder.

it looks like the flight’s cleared for take-off so i need to shut my laptop. there are big tropical storms all the way up the florida coast. it should be an exciting ride.

: c :

d e n v e r

[ 17:37 tuesday 6 november - united 732, denver airport, colorado ]

one hundred and fifty-six business people squeezed into a tube that will carry them from denver to san jose. serried ranks of standard- issue wheely cases line the overhead lockers. denver airport is an hour’s drive from the city itself, though all that lies between them is a vast empty plain. driving across this expanse from denver the spiky airport building slowly rises on the horizon like a giant white armadillo.

denver felt strangely derelict with a chill bone-dry wind blowing through vacant streets. it feels as if the city has some rather serious social problems. on each of the nights i was in town there was a fatal shooting within two blocks of my hotel, which was right in the city centre. to balance this rather bleak picture, on sunday night i walked out to a place i’d heard of called the “mercury cafe” and it was a gem. i ate a superb meal in its organic cafe with a riotous series of performances going on in the theatre next-door and a swing dance class continuing upstairs. a frail-looking gentlemen in full wizard regalia came in and sat down blandly at a table.

i flew in from san francisco on sunday evening to talk at a conference about social networks. now i’m heading to san jose to give a lecture at another conference.

departure is announced. time to close my laptop.

: c :

t r a i n c h a o s

[ 14:13 sunday 7 october - first capital connect train, streatham to luton airport ]

my elaborate web of connections across italy, spain and morocco went off without a hitch. today’s journey from london to budapest has made up for all that. my flight departed from gatwick an hour ago and i was not on board. i arrived at london bridge station three hours ago with plenty of time in hand for my train. but the moment i set foot on the platform a twenty minute delay was announced. then ten minutes later the train was cancelled. this was irritating but the next train would still get me to the airport in time. however after twenty minutes this service too was cancelled. at this point i started to feel at little anxious. a rumour went round that someone had committed suicide at purley and services across south london were in chaos. there were no announcements about the situation but it wasn’t looking promising.

together with three other passengers i set off in a taxi for gatwick. but driving from london bridge to gatwick takes half an hour longer than the train and speaking to the driver as we sped south it became clear the likelihood of me getting there in time was slim. i called kaz and rebecca who generously interrupted their sundays to assist me. in minutes rebecca had booked a flight from luton to budapest which departs at five o’clock. yipee! i asked the driver to drop me off and bid farewell to the other passengers. the cab dropped me in front of streatham hill station but that had no useful services so i walked the half mile to streatham, studied the routings and decided my best bet was to take this train. it follows an improbable route from here heading south then westward through tooting and wimbledon, then north and eastward through bermondsey to london bridge before turning north-west through king’s cross thameslink and continuing to luton. the train is half an hour late but it’s running and i expect to reach luton airport with plenty of time to spare for my flight.

i’m going to budapest for three days for the etre conference, a gathering of influential venture capitalists and technology moguls. i’m due to give a talk tomorrow afternoon. as soon i’ve checked into my hotel and found some supper i ought to start working on my presentation. rebecca mailed the briefing notes to my house so they were there to pick up when i arrived last night.

looking back to the last forty-eight hours, the thirteen-hour bus journey from ouazazate to tangier was far less arduous than i feared, largely because it was half empty. andrew, cristina and i arrived in tangier at eleven, fantasising about coffee and pastries, only to discover that all the cafes were shut for ramadan. so we got straight into a taxi for the two-hour journey along the coast to the spanish colony of ceuta where we were finally able to satisfy our cravings. after that we went for a swim and spent the afternoon vegetating blissfully on the beach. to enter ceuta from morocco one passes through a proper old-fashioned frontier with border guards, check- points, barbed wire and a stretch of no-man’s-land in the middle. it projects a powerful sense of crossing from one world into another. in the evening we united with some of cristina’s journalist friends. after an orientational stroll around the town we dined on intriguing spanish-moroccan hybrid tapas then moved to an irish pub which seems to be the hub of the ceutan journalism community. i didn’t miss alcohol during the week in morocco but the first cold beer did taste good (as did the second, third..).

the spanish coast is clearly visible across the mediterranean sea from ceuta and the next day i said goodbye to andrew and cristina after our journey together and got on a ship for the hour-long trip to algeciras on the other side. from there i took a bus round the bay to la linea then walked over the frontier into gibralter. the contrast was much less dramatic than the morocco/ceuto border but it was surreal suddenly to enter a domain peppered with british symbols like gilbert scott’s red telephone boxes and double decker buses. gibralter felt simultaneously nostalgic and a tiny bit seedy, an echo of a world where such impositions were common-place. after checking in at the airport (the first i’ve encountered where a main road crosses the middle of the runway) i picked my way behind a row of sheds and found a dirtly little beach facing algericas and the afternoon sun. a couple of english families were set up, with the children playing in the shallows. i propped a broken chair against a concrete wall and sat there sunbathing for a last luxurious half- hour. then i walked back to the terminal and got on my way. the flight back from gibralter was uneventful. next stop budapest.

: c :

o u a r z a z a t e

[ 21:03 thursday 4 october - overnight bus ouzazate to tangier, morocco ]

andrew, cristina and i have just boarded this long-distance bus at ouzazate in the far south of morocco. i’ll be in this seat, hopefully with occasional remission, for the next fourteen hours. it’s not likely to be pleasant.

my preference would have been to take a taxi collectif to marrakech (three hours, crossing the high atlas mountains), then a train from there to casablanca (another three hours) and finally the sleeper train to tangier (i don’t how long this takes). that would offer much more chance of arriving in tangier fresh and relaxed rather than crumbling zombie-like out of this bus in fourteen hours’ time. i love sleeper trains anyway. however we wanted to spend a night in the fringes of the sahara desert and the only way we could fit this in was by taking the overnight bus back north. our moment in the desert was magical so i don’t begrudge the coming ordeal in the least.

the coach’s cabin lights were extinguished shortly after departure and the reading lights don’t work so i have to hold my diary right under my nose so i can see to write. meanwhile the coach is lurching around as we start the climb into the mountains. it’s not the easiest environment for writing but the effort is quite entertaining. andrew and cristina are in the row in front of me. niko and pau (new friends with whom we journeyed to the desert) are in the row to my right. a few minutes ago niko held the ink bottle so i could refill my pen, quite a perilous undertaking.

my smartphone continued its decline to the point where i can’t even use it as an address book now. the wretched thing lost two wanderer messages in successive system freezes, obliterating my accounts of madrid and marrakech. hence i’m writing this despatch by pen in my diary, a more trustworthy technology.

: c :

h e l i p a d

[ 22:25 thursday 27 september - mv laurana, stromboli to napoli ]

i’m huddled in the ship’s bar with irene and her friends, an hour out from stromboli. this journey has so many memories for me. today i’m sharing a cabin with maurizio, on his way back to melbourne to rejoin his girlfriend.

yesterday evening i had dinner with gustl and valerie then walked up the mule trail to punta la bronza. the moon was full and the sky was completely clear. the volcano was unusually quiet, expelling a glowing fan of lava every half hour or so.

i sat on the helipad for a couple of hours watching a cloud front slowly drift in from the north-western horizon. by the time the wispy outrunner clouds passed across the moon orange flickers of lightning were starting to flash in the distance and it was clear a storm was coming. i did a few sets of yoga sequences, bid farewell to the mountain and started my descent. a few minutes after i got back home an hour later the heavens opened.

: c :

r i n e l l a

[ 05:21 friday 21 september - ryanair 3916, stansted to palermo ]

here i am, fitting myself into a seat in a packed plane at this truly unholy house. karsten dropped by while i was packing this evening and suggested my expectations of getting a couple of hours´sleep were optimistic. he was right. i didn´t get any.

thus commences an alarmingly complicated journey. after this flight to palermo i´ll take the train to milazzo, a hydrofoil to stromboli (where i´ll stay a week), then the overnight ship to naples, from where i´ll fly to madrid for a night, then fly to marrakech, drive around morocco for a few days, up to the spanish colony of ceuta on the mediterranean coast, take a ship over the straits to gibralter and finally fly back to london. with any luck i´ll manage to meet a succession of friends along the way. i didn´t intend the trip to be so tortuous, it just gradually got that way. sorting out all the connections has been a nightmare.

13:00 / now seated on an even more crowded train waiting to depart from palermo. this is one of the ancient regional efforts with no air conditioning and seats designed to banish any possibility of sleep (of which i´m in sore need). nonetheless i´m feeling excited. it´s a while year since i was in sicily and it´s wonderful to be back in the midst of the familiar sounds, perfumes and chaos.

my first liaison has already gone awry. antonio was due to travel down from tuscany today but he had a run in with a dentist and won´t be coming til tomorrow. meanwhile he´s told me where i can find a key to one of his aunts´ houses on stromboli so i have somewhere to spend the night.

19:44 / perched on the wall overlooking the little port at rinella, on the south-western corner of the island of salina. from where i´m sitting the islands of lipari and vulcano spread out to my left, with filicudi and alicudi to my right. i shouldn´t be here at all but the hydrofoils switched to the winter timetable two weeks early so there was no way to get to stromboli today. rinella was the most remote place i could get to and i´ve never been here before so it was the obvious choice to spend the night. so far nothing is going to plan.

i arrived an hour and a half ago, sorted out a room in a deserted hotel by the harbour then swam off the rocks with the sun setting over alicudi. preparations are underway for an open-air theatre performance on the little square above the harbour but it´s hard to predict what my state of consciousness will be by the time the show commences. i´m already hallucinating from sleep deprivation.

: c :

b r a s s

[ 19:57 friday 25 may - paddington station, london ]

monday is a public holiday so this afternoon i decided on impulse to spend the weekend with mum and dad. my train should have departed quarter of an hour ago but it hasn’t even arrived at the station yet. no matter, i’m content to sit here cross-legged on the great western information desk, listening to the station brass band playing next to me on the concourse.

i remember hearing the band many years ago but i assumed it had been swept away in one of the recent spasms of privatisation and modernisation. nowadays the security services would probably see this thirty-five piece ensemble of mostly elderly folks as a sinister threat to the nation’s transport. but no, against all odds here they are still pom-pom-pomming away.

the most delightful thing is the way the train staff wait for each song to finish before announcing the latest batch of delays. only once has the announcer cut into the middle of a song. the conductor chose a suitable hiatus at which the band sustained a chord and waited for the announcement to end before continuing the song.

: c :

k i n g s t o w n

[ 18:42 sunday 7 april - port of kingstown, st vincent ]

easter sunday, a little after sunset. i’m sitting cross-legged at the taffrail of the day’s last ferry across to bequia. the ramp below me scrapes and squeals in the rolling swell. bob marley songs pump out from a pick-up parked on the quay below, which is surrounded by a knot of people dancing and talking. lights start to pepper the surrounding mountainsides as the post-sunset sky darkens. the air is sultry, tinged with an acrid edge of diesel.

it’s barely 36 hours since i left london but it feels like i’ve been traveling for weeks already. last night on tobago i stayed with a security guard everyone calls the doctor who lives on the sea behind the airport and keeps a few guest rooms with his sister ruth. he drove me up to scarborough, the island’s main port, where we got some supper and soaked up the atmosphere around the market.

a lot of people had come over from trinidad for the evening’s beach concert by buju banton. some of them had brought seriously tricked-up cars with custom paint jobs, flashing lights, lots of chrome and big sound systems; which were parked along a stretch of road for people to admire. when we got back to the doctor’s place i clambered down the dark rocks and sat by the beaking waves with the hot wind on my face until i was ready to sleep.

this afternoon i flew on to barbados in a fifty-seater twin prop aircraft that seems to be the staple inter-island transport here. after an hour in barbados’ earily gleaming airport and a couple of delightful conversations i boarded another flight to st vincent where i arrived an hour ago.

my first impression of the caribbean is of strong warm people who are confident in their cultures. it’s easy to speak to people. it’s particularly interesting to hear opinions of america and europe. there’s a much more balanced, critical view than i would expect.

as i write the ferry’s ramp is raised, the engine throb gets higher and we cast off. in an hour i’ll be on bequia.

: c :

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