The shantytown at the end of the universe

I was so close to finishing it! My chapter on Turkey and Bahrain – it was almost there!
It was hard going, to be sure – it’s been an extraordinary couple of weeks and there's a lot to say. And then I arrived in the human cacophony of Mumbai and there's so much to describe it should be gotten down while fresh. So the earlier chapter will follow this one in a couple of days – but for now I beg your patience, and for those who’ve never had the experience, let me do my best to paint a picture of what it's like arriving in India.

It really is far too easy to sit in one’s cushy armchair back in the developed world, knowledgeably discussing approaches to third world poverty, to cite articles and thinkers and NGO models and the like, and to read up on the enormous countries of the developing world which strain under the weight of overpopulation and inequality. It’s too easy to say “yes, well, I’m a do-gooder and believe in progressive taxation and care about the plight of the needy. I understand what they’re going through”. And I’ve travelled much more than most. I’m lucky. In my life I’ve been to places where deprivation is all around and met countless people in countless places. But it’s nothing like here.

Mumbai proudly calls itself the economic capital of India. And it does have more than its share of billionaires and foreign investment and the stock exchange. But it’s not the whole story. It’s barely a footnote or a dust jacket on the whole story. I got in last night and took a taxi ride for two hours through the biggest, heaving mass of humanity you could ever imagine. For two whole hours we passed through shantytowns and suburbs. For two whole hours I saw naked, abandoned toddlers scavenging through detritus, amputees begging, homeless children, literally a couple of hundred thousand people passed by my open taxi. Some came to the side to beg for money or food. Some stared. Some continued selling produce at the roadside as thousands of cars and bikes and rickshaws and buses beeped unceasingly through the blanket of people. The noise is constant. It’s deafening. It’s a sarcophagus of sound. It makes London – in itself an impressively large, busy, noisy and vibrant metropolis – appear a sleepy country hamlet. I really thought that Istanbul – with its 15 million inhabitants and throbbing crowds and unique blend of East and West – was an assault on the senses. And I’ve prepared my mind for arrival in India for months now. But – and I hate resorting to clichés but sometimes there’s nothing else – nothing, nothing, nothing at all can prepare you for the noise, the crowds, the chaos, the squalor, the colours of one of the Indian megalopolises.

The physical stature of the people hits you too. The Indians are not the Dutch or the tribespeople of the Kalahari – that much hardly needs pointing out to anyone who’s ever gone out for a curry. But it’s the effect of malnutrition in the lower castes here that’s so clearly evident. So many men of the darkest skin stand barely 4”10 and weigh less than 50kg. This isn’t just a racial or genetic thing. Most working and middle class Indian men aren’t much shorter than their Western counterparts – although slimmer, to be sure. This is a nutritional problem and a caste problem. And they go hand in hand.

India is, to this day, an extraordinarily tiered society, with the Dalits – the “Untouchables” - occupying the bottom rung of many on the social ladder and living in the direst, most unfair conditions arguably of any social group on the planet. A country which rightly has aspirations of being one of the big geopolitical players of this new century and which will soon overtake China and have the largest population on earth cannot, it cannot, it must not tolerate the prejudice and hardship foisted upon the tens of millions (130m according to one reliable estimate) of people consigned to living in sewers, collecting faeces with their bare hands for pennies, sleeping on piles of rubbish and clearing away dead animals. What their scarce opportunities for work have in common is ritual impurity. Which is exactly how the Dalits are seen by Indians at large. It’s their perceived impurity that keeps them where they are. India should be ashamed of itself.

The situation has improved, it’s important to note, and the Indian Constitution makes special provision for the betterment of their living conditions. But with your own eyes, passing through a reasonable cross-section of Mumbai and watching people in their hundreds of thousands – you can see the multi-layered caste structure as plain as night and day. The lower castes have skin almost black as night and are diminutive through a lifetime of abject want. The Indian working and middle classes have a much paler complexion and stand a foot taller. The upper class is practically white.

But don’t be put off, dear readers! Don’t be scared by the stench of open sewers (which is admittedly vile). Don’t baulk at the suicidal/homicidal traffic behaviour. Don’t be nervous about the yellow air so polluted your throat aches after ten minutes and which has covered my laptop with a film of taupe gunk which I’m fairly certain Apple didn’t build it to withstand. Don’t worry that you’ll cry for the dead and dying animals that litter the roadside (although you might very well). And don’t prevaricate about not being able to shake your head at the most wretched beggar children surrounding you with big eyes and distended bellies (although they will, and you probably won’t).

Don’t be put off by any of it, I implore you. I wrote before leaving London that I feel the need to come face-to-face with real life for most of the world’s people. That I need the perspective that comes only with experiencing (ok, observing) truly grinding poverty and the miserable hopelessness of so many people’s lives. And that only through doing so will I get some appreciation not only of the smallness of my own struggles, but begin to understand people in a way which I have been yet to do. On these travels thus far, during the first eight and a half weeks, it hasn’t really come. Western Europe is fascinating of course, and largely very beautiful. For a student of twentieth century history in particular, it’s heaven. And the former eastern bloc and Balkans is manna for the economist – to see in plain sight the all-pervasive mediocrity of communism and the desperate inequity and disappointment of a transition to liberal capitalism. And Turkey rewards the hedonist and the ancient historian who yearns to walk the land which has been the site of empires waxing and waning for millennia.

But India is the prize, and I’ve been waiting for it for my whole life. Because India – although I am barely off the boat – will reward and tear at your soul. It will, you just know it, it’ll crush and lift the spirit. It’ll bring forth smiles and tears in equal measure, it’ll make you love and hate people both. It’ll be a struggle just to travel across it and give you strength you always craved. It’ll feed the individual's Humanitarian, it’ll spur his compassion and clarity and charity. You can't see the things I’ve seen already – and will come to see in the coming five weeks – without feeling it viscerally. The world is an enormous place with too much to see in a lifetime, but the planet is too small for so many people. India has the population now that the world did when the Wright Brothers first took to the skies. This country might be the economic miracle of the subcontinent and boast a real future as the IT call centre of the West. Which will create more middle class jobs, yes. And by all accounts the relative number of people in poverty is decreasing. That is, I suppose, some good news.

But the problem is the way we throw that word, ‘poverty’, around. We use it to describe welfare mothers in Brixton who can’t afford to eat out. We use it for people who live on sink estates in perpetual debt and complain about the NHS. We use it for apartment buildings without any green space for the kids to play in. Whatever 'poverty' is, though, it has to mean something beyond an abstract term of art encapsulating having less than the majority. It has to refer to miles upon miles upon miles of dilapidated shanties, each with ten people crammed into 5m2 of filth with corrugated iron walls, undrinkable water, and a dollar a day. This is poverty on a spectacular, galactic, unimaginable scale.

But through all this, you still see people finding pleasure in life's little delights. I took a long walk last night through the shantytown. Attracting quite a crowd of giggling followers as I made my way through like a disoriented and pale-faced pied piper, I watched a father playing with his son. A mother laughing at her daughter’s poor attempt at sewing. Children hitting a shuttlecock. I played street cricket with a group of barefoot boys using a piece of pipe and a tennis ball. "Ponting! Steve Waugh!" they shouted at me. "You like Tendulkar?" They were as delighted as me. They don’t really see white faces. In a cumulative four hours in a taxi since yesterday afternoon, I must’ve passed – and I promise I’m not exaggerating here – half a million people. And – again, this is the truth – I have not seen even ONE white face other than my own. Despite the Incredible India! posters that plaster travel agents the world over, most visitors don’t leave the centre of the cities or they stick to slurping cocktails in Goa and photographing the Taj Mahal. They are, I can tell you, really missing out.

So at the risk of sounding unbearably limp, I return to my earlier call: come to India and see for yourself what deprivation really is. Come and meet the people and chat to them and wave to them (they’ll all delightedly wave back) and then – and only then – complain about the water pressure in your shower or the price of a cappuccino or the bugs in Vista and why can’t Microsoft get its act together. None of us have any right to do so – and that is what I came to India to really understand.

Thanks for your indulgence. Stories from Turkey will follow very shortly. Including a crazy sucubus Serbian, an enlightened Kiwi, angry protests, my latest border screw-up, and a hairy Turkish man touching my testicles.

Bulletholes, Bosnians and Backpackers

The complexity of the Balkans is hypnotising. The cruel whimsy of history, the pliable borders, the peoples so different and so similar – it’s really hard to take it all in. Especially when you have a nine-foot Bosnian or Serb man barking the minutiae of some 14^th Century internecine battle and who expects you to be fully conversant in the ethnic chessboard of the time.

And being here and meeting the people really brings home the fundamental evil of communism. It’s so easy to be seduced by ivory tower academic apologists who argue that it’s not the system but its implementation which was evil – and who fail to question whether the two things are actually one and the same. Like many deluded undergraduates before me and surely many after, I remember spouting sympathetic nonsense over café lattes. But spending time in the former Soviet states and Yugoslavia, you see, smell, feel, you taste the awful decay of the system, the all-pervading mediocrity of everything associated with communist rule. I’m in Sofia now, and the first person I met here described it as the second worst place in the world after Romania. Leaving aside the fact that he has barely travelled more than a few hundred kilometres in any direction, it was an astonishing welcome from someone who’s taking a degree in (wait for it) hospitality and PR and who manages a hostel.

But as always, I’m getting ahead of myself. So I’ll recap a little before musing on the second worst country in the world, the grey, crumbling ugliness the Soviets left behind, and the desperation the Bulgarians feel to be anywhere – and perhaps anyone – else.

Wikitravel - the free and fabulously helpful sister site to Wikipedia and surely a genuine threat to Lonely Planet’s dominance of the travel advice market – describes travelling from Belgrade to Sofia by train:

“Allow up to three hours delay while the Serbian and Bulgarian customs officers ransack the trains due to cigarette smuggling. However, the cigarette smuggling is worth experiencing once.”

I must’ve read this sentence weeks ago, smiled, and promptly forgot it. Because yesterday morning I was clinging miserably to the least comfortable sleep of my life in a 60s-era urine-smelling train compartment full of Bulgarian farm workers who travel to Serbia to earn their fortune (which should really give some pause for thought in itself), when I was woken by six Bulgarian border police. One of whom was rapping my leg with some instrument which wouldn’t look out of place in a blacksmith’s foundry.

Through the lavatorial and back-aching 5am fog, I follow my co-travellers out of the compartment and stand lined up in the corridor. One of the guards – a frightening-looking and pallorless behemoth of a man with machete scars on his face – produces a battery-operated electric drill from a pocket the size of a three man tent and begins unscrewing the whitewashed chipboard panels which line our compartment. His colleagues climb on the seats, crumpling my half-read copy of Pussy Westerner Weekly, and start banging on the walls with cocked ears.

The ceiling panel falls open with a thud. Suddenly, ten thousand cigarettes in cellophane cartons pour out. My Bulgarian farm workers shrug and with the sort of lethargic insouciance I've been working on unsuccessfully for years, promptly light their own cigarettes. All of which were of the same indecipherable brand as those plummeting from the heavens.

One of the uniformed wall-bangers stops. He pulls off the panel directly behind my backpack to reveal yet another smuggled bounty and the guards – with their own expressions of bored resignation – form a chain as hundreds of cartons are passed to their colleagues waiting on the tracks outside. My chest (and something else) tightens as I imagine myself being fingered for this failed enterprise by my treacherous peasant companions (to whom I had earlier given chocolate and wine, the bastards). I picture a freezing, faecal-smeared cell the size of a cupboard, me naked, sobbing and hugging my knees. I imagine my captors’ interrogation: “You will NEVER use Facebook ever again, do you understand? You will rot in this jail and never again feel the cathartic feel of thumb on iPod trackwheel unless you confess!”

Anyway, before I can even stutter “habeus corpus” or subtly nudge-nudge cough-cough in the direction of the peasants, the guards are satisfied and – astonishingly – smile at the workers, hand them one of the cartons back, and promptly disembark to collect their wares below. My criminal companions calmly return to their seats, the train shudders back into life, and they all fall happily asleep. Except me. I sit in the darkness contemplating murder.

The days before were spent mostly in Sarajevo, a place I had approached – like all visitors, I suppose – with wonder and some unease. The Bosnian countryside is among the most beautiful I’ve ever seen – mountains and valleys and lakes and cliffs and fields, undulating with a breathtaking greenness and smattered with tiny hamlets of poor farmers still using equipment from a pre-industrial age.

Sarajevo itself is a remarkable place – everyone who goes is struck by its uniqueness. Quite apart from the fact that the name itself has become synonymous with Serbian aggression, ethnic cleansing, the 1992-95 siege and the inability or unwillingness of the West to wake itself from its self-congratulatory post-cold war triumphalism and actually DO something – it's the European Jerusalem. It’s a wondrously cosmopolitan alpine town of Bosniaks, Croats, Serbs, Jews, Turks and countless other peoples.

The first thing you notice is the mortar and bullet holes. I don’t exaggerate at all when I say that 99 per cent of all buildings are pepperedwith holes of varying sizes like an Ottoman/Italian/Austrian/Yugoslav diorama made from Swiss cheese. Every wall and alley and apartment block and government building looks like it’s only the holes which are keeping it together, and the lack of meaningful post-war capital has meant only the bare minimum has been repaired. You see communist-era apartment buildings where, after a galaxy of tiny rifle holes, suddenly there is a blackened crater the size of an umbrella, half covering someone’s window; the only window in the entire block which is new. One morning not too long ago a middle-aged housewife was probably cooking on the stove when a Serbian shell blew her and her kitchen into smithereens. Somehow, through the grief and hatred, someone got around to calling someone else to come and install a gleaming new window, the only one among the other three hundred rotting Communist frames in that building. Keeping up with the Joneses is a bit different here.

It’s sobering. As are the various “Sarajevo roses” on the pavements - flat crimson monuments to where more than 11 people died in one explosion. There are quite a lot of them to see.

There's so much to describe and to experience in Sarajevo that I can never do justice here. The Arabness of the bazaar, the Europeanness of the rattling trams, the Asianness of the food smells in the Turkish quarter, the mosques (with this sign at the entrance), the synagogues and orthodox churches, the juxtaposition of the eclectic skyline with the mountains behind. These are the same mountains that hosted the 1984 Winter Olympics. In the reception of the hostel where I was staying, a yellowing and faded poster for those games included a map for the athletes and spectators to get from one event to another. Like architects’ drawings of commercial buildings before they’re built, it depicted smiling and energetic people walking as in a solarised, landscaped dream. You wonder if they would be quite so smiley and energetic if they knew what was in the pipeline.

It was in that very reception that I passed a very revealing few hours. One of the local men who work there is called Sunny, and my subsequent research supports his rather self-effacing claim to be the most popular tour guide in Europe. He runs the only War Tour of Sarajevo, and demand exceeds supply by quite some way. As a fluent English speaking native Muslim who has travelled overseas but lived his entire life in Sarajevo (including, obviously, the duration of the war) and who’s met literally tens (if not hundreds) of thousands of travellers through his work with the hostel and the tour, his research value for me was beyond value.

I can’t possibly summarise everything he told me here, but most salient was how happy he thinks Sarajevans are. The bare need for survival during the war has engendered a greater appreciation for life in its aftermath – the joy of one’s family being alive and well, the pleasure of walking outside without fear of snipers, the desire not just to survive but to live. My travels will take me to northern India, Cambodia, Vietnam, Argentina, Chile, West Africa and Lebanon – former conflict zones the lot. I want to know if this response – to emerging from the dark into the light – is universal or not.

Travelling the way I’m doing it (hostel-hopping) lends itself extraordinarily to fleeting but deep friendships. An email world means that after you spend a few days with a new person or people, you can easily keep in touch. Moreover, backpackers are a self-selected group, especially when you go to the more exotic locations. To be sure, if you drop in on the Costa Brava or similar during summer you’ll find yourself surrounded by troglodytes – including the eponymous bare-chested, Umbro-wearing, tattoo-porting and shaven-headed Englishman who laughs at everyone and makes a general embarrassment out of himself and his compatriots – but backpackers are a bit different. They’re adventurers at heart. Their thrill comes from exploration and learning per se, the irresistible yearning to see and smell and watch and hear the world and to not be able to sit still for too long. They’re my kind of people.

So it’s a good point to fill you in on a few of the characters I’ve met along the way. Right now I’m in the communal area of my hostel in central Sofia – surrounded by quite the motley crew of itinerant misanthropes. There’s the middle aged Israeli Jew with the ginger beard like a rhododendron bush (to borrow from Blackadder). He talks to himself in Hebrew most of the time and has a peculiar facial tick that gives the impression you’re causing him pain. I’ve tried to be open-minded and friendly. So much so that I gave up my space in the Internet queue last night, as he assured me he needed only 15 minutes (and I wanted much longer). An hour later and after a barrage of harrumphs and tuts in ascending volume from me, he told me he wasn’t yet finished. I told him the Bulgarian government puts all visiting Jews under continual surveillance and my job was to report back on his Internet use.

He gave me the computer.

The man is evidently troubled. What my investigations reveal so far is that he’s 47, backpacking by himself, lived with his mother (I know, what a cliché) and accepted financial handouts until she died and he hasn’t worked since. I put CNN on earlier and he made a noise like a beached whale gasping its last – he doesn’t like watching the news. We discussed the Middle East. I told him that the different birth rates between Jews and Arabs means that Jews would become a minority in Israel within a generation or so – so the clock is ticking on a two state solution. He did not know this, and has looked somwhat lost in thought since.

A Swedish couple are sitting – as always – silently in the corner. He looks about twenty, has dreadlocks like schooner rope and eyes in a permanent squint. She looks about thirty with hair so blindingly white it probably accounts for his squint. Last night a group of us went out to a nightclub (which, after careful examination, actually turned out to be filled with an 80:20 mix of hookers and pimps - and practically no one else) and the apparently lobotomised Swedes resisted every opportunity to make even the barest polite conversation.

And although this particular room is filled with people I have nightmares of being stuck in a lift with, the past weeks have involved some fascinating characters. There was Rikjaard, the shaggy Dutchman who has been cycling for the past sixteen months with no real itinerary and no end in sight. A computer programmer by profession, he decided that he could stomach the routine and pettiness of urban professional life no more. So he sold his possessions, packed a bag (including a Ukulele which he cannot play but carries around with him anyway), hopped on his bike and set off. Although occasionally staying in a hostel to have the odd shower, he is for all intents a nomad, sleeping under trees and in fields. I’m not romanticising this life. There are very few people for whom such an existence could be genuinely rewarding. But after a night drinking beer together and sharing stories, he struck me as a man at total peace with the world. And although, to be sure, he feels the loneliness at times, he is completely content doing what he does – and plans to continue indefinitely. I was honoured and grateful to have crossed paths with him.

As well as the Flying Dutchman, the past few days have seen me return to Belgrade with Johan, a South African Scottish Englishman twice my height and with Samsonesque locks. Soon to be a media lawyer, he’s doing much the same as me – a yearlong voyage around the world with the prime intent of meeting new and varied people and learning more about human nature before he has to settle down behind a desk and a cloak of melancholy. With my assurance that the Serbian girls are even more lovely that the Hungarians, the Croats or the Bosnians, I lured him to Belgrade - and the hostel where Passepartout and I stayed a couple of weeks ago.

As for the other friends of this trip so far, there has been Dylan and William and Rosenne and Eve and Violaine and Guillaume and Ivan and Sara and Monique and Andy and Fede and Suzanne. Little pockets of realness and symbiosis and profundity in a world otherwise replete with artifice.

And so Passepartout’s and my friends are now Johan’s friends and innumerable phone numbers and email addresses have changed hands – and for about the 800000^th time I marvel at the complete splendidness of making new travelling friends – with whom, almost by definition, you know you already have a great deal in common – and sitting up all night over a bottle of whisky sharing experiences of the world and of its people.

But it’s right that I’m moving on to Turkey and India and possibly Kyrgyzstan soon – the Balkans is, as I wrote above, overwhelmingly complex. The depths of the misunderstandings, the nuance of the suspicions and the history – it makes it genuinely impossible for the outsider to cease to feel like one. You can ask every question you can think of about the war, and NATO and religious differences, and the various land grabs over the centuries, and all it does is confuse you further. The history just runs too deep.

What is clear though, what must be obvious to the most lackadaisical of observers, is that this region is still profoundly poor, profoundly corrupt, and – despite the lure of the EU and the trickle of foreign capital becoming a torrent – sad and depressed. Many will disagree with such a characterisation, and there’s no shortage of anecdotal examples which lean the other way. But every shop with unaffordable goods, every university graduate who cannot leave and cannot get a job paying more than minimum wage, every incident of cronyism in the nascent democratic governments, every pensioner surviving on €50 per month while prices double and double – all of these lead you to one irresistible conclusion: that the Balkans and the former Eastern Bloc has a long way to go before it provides its citizens what they deserve. To be sure, it’s not the starvation poverty of sub-Saharan Africa or the child sex abuse of Cambodia or the unconscionable maltreatment of the Indian Untouchables. Of course it's not. I am prepared to accept that there are degrees of suffering, and, for the most part, people in this part of the world do have their basic needs met.

But as well as material poverty, there is the poverty of the human spirit, and it covers south east Europe like a grey, wet blanket. So many people are desperate to leave their countries. They’re exasperated with the failure of liberal democracy to provide what they feel it should. They’re sick of inflation keeping a middle class lifestyle tantalisingly out of reach. They’re (at best) ambivalent towards a EU that makes them jump through economic hoop after administrative hoop like dumb circus animals.

And most significantly of all, I think, almost to a person they feel their standard of living has dropped since the end of communism. I don’t know how one measures standard of living. There are too many plausible criteria to count – both for relative and absolute measures. But what’s changed in the past fifteen years is that now the citizens of these countries get to see western tourists, see western television, and see an alternate life that has pulled perhaps inexorably away from their own.

I don’t know it people really see progress as a “race” between
countries or not. Some definitely do. But the peoples of this region, with so much history and bloodshed and so much to be proud of too, see others in the world pulling away from them, and peace and seven percent economic growth or not – how can you be happy if you wake up every morning and see everyone else disappearing into the distance?

I’ve overstated my point of course – there’s plenty of development and positivism to see too. But I must say I’m glad to be moving on. Tomorrow to Turkey, and as I stay in a hostel on the Bosporus with my lovely friend Sarah, I will peer across the river for a whole week. And it’ll be a sad goodbye back at Europe for almost a year, and a big hello to Asia, where so very, very much awaits.

Gypsies, sunset, steak, and lovesickness

Passepartout is cross with me, and has spent the past couple of days greeting my every word with a torrent of sarcastic eye-rolling which I’m sure makes him privately dizzy. He accuses me of lovesickness and it’s just as well I’m discarding him at the Croat-Bosnian border. Lovesick I may be, but from a flatulent and sunburned Swedish Harry Potter-lookalike who lives on steak and lager, this seems an unfair slight. The lovesickness he rolls his eyes at is because of a raven-haired Korculan physicist named Sara. But a lot has happened since I last wrote, so I’ll start from the beginning and come back to Passepartout and his pigheaded condescension a bit later.

Serbia is a land of colour. I don’t mean it’s colourful in the sense of replete with bright colours. I mean that you feel the colours more than elsewhere – both their vividness and their absence. It’s really hard to describe. You have to see it to really get it.

It starts on the train ride into the country – and I can’t deny feeling real nervousness. Serbia is not the EU. It has no real prospects or intention of becoming part of the EU. Millions of litres of blood have been split on this soil over the past thousand years and longer, and much more recently than in western Europe. This is the Balkans. We (being NATO) bombed the crap out of it only eight years ago. Hungary and Czech feel like Eurodisney in comparison.

So the train rolls over the border and stops for what seems like forever. The gingerbread villages of southern Hungary with their flowerpots and white fences and farmers driving shiny tractors gives way to a deserted siding as you wait for the Serbian border police to board the train.

They do so, and painstakingly interview every passenger on board. The wait is interminable. You ask yourself whether you got rid of the magic mushrooms you bought in Vienna or whether the Dutch sex aids will start vibrating maniacally in your bag just as Lieutenant Bogdan – in camouflage fatigues and carrying a Kalashnikov and a catalogue of anti-imperial grievances – pushes sternly through your compartment door.

But the landscape is surreal. Even at 5pm, the sky is charcoal and the flat expanse of land drained and ashen. I felt, I must say, a little unwelcome – and I say this as an Australian who has been to Indonesia.

As it darkened and darkened it struck me – the darkness of this country is not just an ashen sky over blackened land, it must partly be due to a lack of reflected artificial light. For two or three hours we travelled through northern Serbia towards Belgrade and saw barely a light – despite the fact the countryside is plenty populated. For whatever Belgrade has become in the past few years, and despite the fact Serbia has become the tiger economy of the Balkans and a lightening rod for foreign investment, this is a dark country with a dark history.

But what surprise awaited us in Belgrade! We arrived at night and stumbled through potholed streets and lopsided alleyways, guided (or misguided) by Cyrillic street names which Passepartout claimed to be able to decipher without difficulty.

Three or four hours and a couple of wildly gesticulated conversations with sour-faced taxi drivers later, we arrived at our lodgings. Which turned out to be about thirty metres from where we started. But the next day brought with it a true sensory smorgasbord and I implore you all not merely to visit Belgrade – but to do it soon. Because as with everywhere in the former eastern bloc and Yugoslavia, the rate of Westernisation is truly frantic.

But Serbia is a country with profound problems. The billboards and neon advertising belie a massive disparity in wealth, a gini coefficient that would make an American CEO blush. The shops are full of broadly the same products one finds in London or Sydney – smartphones and plasma tellies, clothing which (although hardly Paris Fashion Week) are roughly the same as everywhere else. And the prices are the same as in western Europe.

But here is a problem I’ve seen all through the former East – the stores are empty because income is barely a quarter that of the West. My CSFI salary in London would afford me a truly exceptional lifestyle here but it would make me one of only a handful of people in the country able to afford the goods that fill the shelves. Who make up the other handful? The Mob, a handful of the Serbian elite who have made their money elsewhere, and arithmetically-challenged tourists who struggle to convert the currency and enthuse that a Nokia N95 is a real Belgrade bargain.

What’s more, the streets are filled with gypsies, the Roma, and the partially employed. Plus more stray cats and dogs than you’ve ever seen in your life. Street markets are everywhere but sell nothing you would ever wish to buy and the locals seem to feel the same. I watched a busy market for an hour and saw people examine broken digital watches and mobile chargers and cracked glasses and buy virtually nothing. Is it that uncontrollable inflation has extended from the big Market to the street market? Or just that they recognise crap when they see it too?

The grey darkness, as I said, is striking – and it admittedly didn’t help that it drizzled a fair bit of the time Passepartout and I were there. But the smell is discernible too – and it’s not a bad one at all, it’s just familiar to anyone who has visited large Asian cities. It’s the everywhere scent of cooking oil and outdoor food preparation, of street animals and communist-era car pollution, of dust and sewerage and newly-washed laundry. It may sound unpleasant but it’s not at all. It’s a smell that is real and intense and welcomingly reminiscent of my travels in Asia as a child.

We visited Tito’s mausoleum perched on a hill overlooking the city. An exorbitant taxi ride across potholes the size of bomb craters – some of which, I suppose, may actually have been – took us to where the strongman of rump Yugoslavia is buried. The Serbs revere him for resisting Soviet pressure and holding the federation together. He reminds them of a time when Yugoslavia was effectively Greater Serbia with many times the area and population it has now. Only last year Montenegro voted for independence, the last of the SFRY states to leave the once mighty Serbia. You can’t help but feel their nostalgia when talking to them. The young Serbs largely loath Milosevic and Mladic and the other military cronies from the Bosnian war, but even the most internationalist and cosmopolitan among them and those too young to have been drowned in nationalist propaganda feel aggrieved. Aggrieved at NATO for the 1999 campaign, aggrieved at the US, at the Hague Tribunal, at the EU which sneers at them, aggrieved at the Croats whom many consider to have been co-aggressors in the war. The world doesn’t see it that way – because history has written of a regime which was ruthless, racist and expansionist – but they do. With everyone I spoke to, I sensed bitterness at everything which has happened.

Tito’s burial place is one of the most unusual places I’ve visited. After he died in 1980 they built a museum around his grave, a place of such 1970s tackiness the Brady Bunch would’ve squealed in delight. It looks like the atrium of an unbearably nasty hotel and the museum where his considerable collection of gifts are housed is empty and sterile and staffed by a man who tried to charge an irate Passepartout €7 for a postcard. Passepartout told him in his now-fluent Serbian to stick the postcard up his commie rent-a-cop arse. We left.

On our last night in Belgrade we were joined by an Australian girl who has the kind of presence that when she enters a room it feels like someone left. Soporific but good-natured, she accompanied Passepartout and I to a tourist-less bistro in the suburbs where Passepartout had his fourth steak of the day and after seeing the most extraordinary sunset (smog-induced, alas) we listened to the locals belt out ancient and violent drinking songs. The lyrics to my favourite goes:

“When we cut off the breasts of the women and eat the children of the Muslims and the Jews, then will Serbia reclaim its rightful position as leaders. Because we rape the women and kill the men – we are warriors to the last man!!”

Okay, I’ve paraphrase a little, but I have this translation on good authority from Passepartout (who by this time was loudly boasting fluency in Serbian to anyone who would listen) so it is presumably accurate.

After the bistro we were led to an underground bar so cool it doesn’t even get busy until 3am and we drank ourselves stupid for hours with the locals and some expats until Passepartout wanted another steak so we settled for Preslavica – a Serbian hamburger the size of an Olympic discus – and caught our 6am train to Croatia.

I will save telling you about Split and its underage beehive, and the drive there at 190kph for another time because I’ve rambled on at some length already, so I’ll skip straight to the past four days which we’ve passed on the island of Korcula, three hours off the Croatian coast, and where I fell for Sara.

Korcula is – and I don’t think I’m going too far out on a limb here – perhaps the loveliest place I’ve ever visited. The island has 16000 inhabitants (of which 3500 live in the town of the same name), and it sits in the middle of an archipelago of crystal clear Adriatic waters, thick forests and a medieval old town which has resisted invaders for centuries. It is also – if you’re interested – the birthplace of Marco Polo.

Our days were spent exquisitely – kayaking, climbing a mountain in search of a Franciscan monastery, sipping espressos with the locals – and no list of adjectives can adequately convey how beautiful, peaceful and welcoming a place it is. Let me just tell you to go there at some point in your lives and you will understand what I mean.

I should wind up, so I’ll finish by telling the cause of Passepartout’s eye-rolling. On Monday, his aunt introduced us to Sara, a girl who grew up there but who now studies theoretical physics in Zagreb and who was back on the island for a couple of weeks. The introduction was made with evident intent to forge a romantic union between Passepartout and her (his aunt had to marry her still-husband in a shotgun wedding in the 60s after they were seen holding hands in public – but things have progressed a little since then).

It transpired that Sara is a lot more like me than like Passepartout (she farts less than 35 times a day, for one thing, and doesn’t give a rat’s arse about buying equities) and we hit it off immediately. She is chic and curious and struggles to understand people in groups. She is melancholic and deterministic and cynical about human nature. She is intrigued by the happiness of others and their lives and the nature of good and evil, and I was immediately smitten.

Passepartout is not quite as dim as he appears and realised this by the second day. “Jump her!” he implores. “She wants it! I asked her friends and they all said yes!” Bless him. But soon I began to understand how differently things work in this part of the world. In a small, catholic town on a remote island where everyone knows everyone and gossip is a de facto currency, a girl cannot be seen cavorting in public. My usual repertoire of innuendo, lascivious sniggering and smart-arse comments would not work here. This would require a crash course in the art of seduction.

The first evening that I walked her home (after Passepartout’s increasingly insistent suggestions) and after she had playfully tossed her hair and touched my arm and girly-giggled a couple of dozen times, I offered my arm as we walked through the moonlit main street. She declined it – the first time a girl ever has. I was crushed. Bewildered. Confused. Fuck Passepartout and his meddling! I vowed to put arsenic on his breakfast steak the next morning.

So I did not pursue and we parted with a smile and a nervous kiss on the cheek, but the next day my various investigations revealed that this is all part of the boy-girl game here – il faut ‘jouer le jeu’ – and she knew that I had one more night on the island. And to be seen walking arm in arm with a man back to her house at 3am would start tongues wagging – even if, alas, not our own.

So after a day spent with her at the beach (during which at one point she emerged glistening and bikini-clad from the water exactly the way Ursula Andress did in Dr No, and I lay on my front to conceal both my white belly and ... well… anyway) we went out again on my last night on the island. And we chatted and played and discussed the world and sat on the beach as the water lapped, and then…well, I will not allow this column to be reduced to salacious tabloid rot, but suffice to say that the night ended perfectly and reminded me once more that although for most people at most times in most places life is tedious and shit, there come occasional moments - for all of us - where you wouldn’t change a single thing.

So we parted, and I shall miss her and think very fondly of the few days we spent. And once I rid myself of Passepartout at the Bosnian border, my voyage will continue solo across the Balkans to Sarajevo and Sofia and Skopje. Alone, perhaps, but not lonely.