Ticket touts, turds and a taddle-tale

Picture – if you will – a steel-panelled cylinder made in the 60s, seventy feet long and twelve feet wide. Picture two hundred peasants, merchants and general riff raff crammed inside. Picture it creeping through the baking hot Indian countryside. Picture this happening at dawn after a night with no sleep. And lastly, picture three unhappy western travellers – accustomed to niceties such as a couple of inches of personal space, seats which don’t crush the spine and the absence of some irritating toilet-trader excavating his feet and clearing his throat like a two-stroke tuk-tuk in front of one’s face. If you can, you are picturing General Population Class train travel from Mumbai to Ahmedabad during Diwali, when nothing else is available.

The all-emcompassing dreadfulness of the experience begins with the ticket purchase the day before. You’re directed from one non-functioning and utterly nonsensical website to another before you discover the entire process is designed to break the spirit of the wired traveller. So you give up and grudgingly trudge through the crowds to the station.

The train station you’ve been directed too is, naturally, unable to help. So you spend an hour in a four wheeled furnace driven by a guy who’s played too much rally driving on his Commodore 64, and eventually you get to the right station. This, you soon understand, is but a physical manifestation of the website, but with the additional delights of unbearable heat, sickening stench, and – in addition to the thousands of men standing around and shouting apparently at themselves – the flagship of Indian bureaucracy. They are prouder of this than anything else.

The form-filling in India deserves a moment’s digression. Everywhere you go and everything you do, there’ll be a form to be filled out – usually complete with irresistible contradictions – and a sheer litany of details required. An internet café – I kid you not – will usually demand not merely your name, age, birth date and address in India, but passport number, visa number, passport issue date, passport issue place, visa issue date and place, address outside of India, email address, contact phone number and, (in one excruciating place which offered dial-up speed and a suspiciously sticky keyboard) both parents’ full names.

“Tell them to sod off!” you might retort. This – I assure you – doesn’t work. Resistance to the form filling process is met with looks varying from manifest incomprehension to curious bewilderment to barely-veiled hostility. You can try compromising – filling in some of the details and drawing a line at “Age Of Mother’s Loss of Virginity”, or “Average Daily Bowel Movement Frequency” – but all this leads to is the aspiring bureaucrat traipsing back demanding more. Exactly the same process takes place at every hotel. Every booking in a travel agent. Forms and forms and even more forms all demanding the minutiae of your life. Time and time again.

Ultimately, you concede you’re not in a bargaining position at all. Because stone-age bandwidth and sticky keys notwithstanding, this is travel, and this is the 21st century. And you need Internet more than he needs the aggravation of someone from the Ministry of Pedantry coming round with a clipboard.

The form filling is everywhere – and most of the time it’s a time consuming but tolerable nuisance. But at the railway station – oh Lord! – the least accessible system conceived by Man is accompanied by about as much organisation and forethought as you’d get in show-and-tell for special ed kindergarteners. First you need to find your train number and fill it in. This is not easy. Once done, you queue for a reservation form. This is not easy either, because the child in front has shat itself without a nappy, and twelve barefoot urchins are eyeing your backpack. Nevertheless, you fill out the form and get to the front of the queue, open your mouth to speak, and immediately three men push in and start barking Hindi at the official behind the desk. You push and shove and shout back but they speak about as much English as you speak Hindi, and moreover, the official is ignoring you and attending to them. You then realise that this is India, and the only way to get attention at all is to push through as many people as possible, elbows flailing backpack swinging, and completely disregard the existence of the queue in the first place. This will get you served.

But of course it won’t – because you get instructed by the bored official that you forgot to enter “Father’s Sperm Count” and “Girlfriend’s Fellatio Technique” in the box at the bottom. Once the form is complete, the really awful truth dawns. This is Diwali week – the festival of lights in which everyone in India travels and the consequences of which you were too stupid to anticipate – and every train for the next eight days is not merely full, but has a three-figure waiting list.

Until this point, you’ve not noticed the eighty or ninety sly and ridiculously-moustached men loitering furtively in the shadows. Like the cheetah in the grass waiting for the limping gazelle, they wait for the moment your travel plans collapse around you and your face reveals your desperation – and they strike.

These men are the touts, and they call themselves – again, I kid you not – “corruption agents”. I suppose you have to commend their candour. They explain to you – and you manage to corroborate this – that paying under-the-table to the train officials is not only the done thing, but in fact the only way to get a train ticket at all. At, of course, a criminal mark-up.

“But”, you protest, “All the trains are full!” You point to a 10x8 seat availability matrix on the board showing trains down the side and classes across the top – and it’s filled exclusively with zeroes. The shady-looking one with rodentish eyes who's pushed to the front sniggers. And clears his throat and spits – sending a shimmering oyster of beef-coloured phlem flying past your head. You fantasise about cutting his eyeballs out with the pocket knife you’re fingering in your pocket, but the idea of a week trapped in Mumbai helps to quell this urge.

The long and the short of it is that you (and by this I mean everyone, not just gullible rich tourists) pay these guys to buy tickets for you. All the train network employees are corrupt too, of course, so they claim the trains are full when they’re anything but. So the phlemmy rodent-man pays the corrupt douchebag of an official, and sure enough you get your ticket at an exorbitant rate.

But no! He returns, touching and placating you with mock sincerity, and hands you a document with the ominous initials WL. Waiting List. You get into a heated argument (helped by having a gargantuan travel companion who can trample them under his clown feet) and you get some of your money back with the understanding you show up at the station an hour before the train leaves the next day, and some more money will get you assigned seats – presumably at the expense of a family of poor chumps going home to visit their relatives for the holidays.

5am the next morning, you arrive ticketless expecting a relatively deserted station only to find 50,000 people engaged in what can only be a faithful recreation of the First Zulu War. You track down the thieving pustule of an imp-man who shafted you the night before, you find out that the waiting list – unsurprisingly – has gotten longer rather than shorter, and you end up paying way, way too much for General Population Class. Also known as the way the Germans took the Jews on holiday to Auschwitz.

So, we’re back to the sweltering, steel cylinder creeping across India at the speed of a motorised wheelchair running low on batteries. After waiting on a platform which looks over an enchanting view of piles of human effluent dropping straight down from the toilets, you take your seats – benches, actually – which provide roughly half the width and a third the legroom of an economy class airline seat. Through the sleepless morning fog and the atrocious smell and the overwhelming noise of people yelling and pushing in the Indian way, your heart sinks at the prospect of ten hours huddled like battery hens in this oven (the accompanying photo, by the way, was before anyone really got on board and doesn’t begin to tell the story). You find you’re sitting next to a bunch of people carrying a stench that could outlast religion. So you and your travel companions move to some seats five metres away in order to sit together. A sudden hush - the din stops as people struggle to comprehend anyone sitting in other than assigned seats. And then you encounter a complete and utter pubic louse of a man who’s having his shoes shined by a miserable and malnourished child and telling everyone his opinion on everything. Although obviously due to patriarchal pride and overcompensation for the shame of having to travel Auschwitz Class, he’s a person you want to disembowel and force feed his innards. You wouldn’t wish him on your worst enemy.

He starts lecturing us on why we need to be in our proper seats. Irate, we retort that if his compatriots had only learned about Imperial Leather instead of just imperial mistreatment of everyone else, we wouldn’t need to move in the first place. The ticket inspector arrives and the pubic louse sees his moment. Standing up to impose his full five feet of height, he excitedly recounts the story of how the three westerners left their assigned seats!! – something apparently unprecedented in Indian transport history. Eventually, our use of logic and reason is considered cheating, and we’re forced back to our assigned places. We huff and sulk. We check our watches to find there's almost the entire journey to go.

Five men clear their throats, spray snot out of a nostril in no particular direction, and spit.

But it’s about to get much worse. Much, much worse.

Because although all the seats are full as you pull out of Mumbai Central Station, this doesn’t mean the carriage – which the Germans must’ve sold to the Indians during Partition – is full. Not at all. The two hundred people sitting down are a mere third of the carriage’s capacity.

So you pull into Borivali in the outskirts of Mumbai, to be greeted by a platform of people one hundred deep. The moment the train stops, they engage in an orgiastic display of violent pushing and screaming. The doors are immediately crammed with three people who are now of course, wedged stuck and being pushed by three dozen people behind them. In the crowd, women and children are pushed over, elderly men thrown aside, punches thrown (well, this is India, so girly slaps really), and eventually bones give, the dam breaks and the three guys in the doorway tumble forward and everyone charges on board.

The two hundred in the carriage becomes five hundred within seconds. With absolutely no comprehension of personal space or the acceptability of leaning over a complete stranger and dangling sweat-sodden armpits in his face, the newcomers fill every square inch of floor space. Including the small gap between your seated legs. For Londoners, imagine the Northern Line, southbound at 8am. Double the people, double the heat, quadruple the smell, increase the cacophony by five orders of magnitude, and halve the ventilation. Oh yes, and it’s ten hours.

But it gets worse. Because then the beggars, the Eunuchs and the vendors arrive and the carriage is transformed into a heaving and chaotic bazaar. The Eunuchs – dressed in saris and make-up and with male voices – push through, forcefully begging. You have to feel for them – many were boys castrated by their beggar parents in order to earn more money. The women start cooking food on the floor, and the noise of everything is just deafening. People start singing, which is only mildly better than the constant yelling and pushing. And all you want to do is stretch your leg, take a moment’s respite from the heat, go to the toilet (bad, bad idea – best to soil yourself, really) or kill people en masse.

And anyone who’s ever tried to sleep in church knows how hard it is on hard, straight-backed benches. Your head lolls, your back cramps, and your buttocks go numb – and this is with the salubrious tedium of a sermon to help your reverie, not the chariot scene from Ben Hur going on around you while all the men hack and cough, stare, take off their sandals and begin picking their feet with toothpicks which then go back in their mouths.

I’m not saying don’t take the train in India. On the contrary, I’m writing this moment on the express from Jaipur to Agra and then Amritsar. The scenery is stunning (see photo). I have a seat to myself, and the smell is really no worse than you’d get bathing in a septic tank after Glastonbury. I’m just saying: don’t do it during Diwali. Don’t take Auschwitz Class. Don’t under any circumstances venture into the toilets. Don’t queue – always push. And if some silver-haired, shoe-shined, diminutive taddle-tale is sitting around like Lord Muck and opining on everything under the sun, don’t be unnerved by your inclination to disembowel him or carry him into the toilet and shove his face down the squat hole. Nurse that inclination, embrace it! Let it grow! In India, sometimes it’s the only way of knowing you’re still human.

Largess, Love Stories & Life on the Eighteenth

Nehru once described India as “a bundle of contradictions held together by strong but invisible threads”. It’d be hard work finding an apter description. The myriad reinventions of this majestic country over thousands of years tell a fascinating tale, from which a vibrant, modern yet troubled nation has emerged to confuse, scare and entice the intrepid voyager who dares – to the raised eyebrows of his acquaintances – to “do India”.

Mark Twain mused similarly: "So far as I am able to judge, nothing has been left undone, either by man or nature, to make India the most extraordinary country that the sun visits on his rounds. Nothing seems to have been forgotten, nothing overlooked." And a close friend of mine solemnly informed me that India stands for “I’ll Never Do It Again”. After a mere week, I think I can profess this tongue-in-cheek witticism to be utter rot. I will, without a doubt, do it again.

It’s hard to put one’s finger on why. Without any condescension at all – because these are fabulously generous and warm-hearted people – it might be the childlikeness of the Indians. The film industry – centred here in Mumbai – produces, in this city alone, 900 films per year, or almost three a day. There can’t be many people in the West unaware at least superficially of the reach and reputation of Bollywood. But flipping channels on the telly – as everywhere – offers revealing insight into the nature and values of a people. Producers and programmers and advertisers understand their audience – it’s their job, after all – and India television is replete with a bizarre mix of singing, slapstick, and the obligatory bout of sobbing every few minutes. My host and friend here – a remarkable and articulate man named Russel, about whom I’ll say more later – puts it thus:

“You must understand that emotion is a very important thing for Indians. We cry together, we laugh together. Most of the time we sleep in the same room all together. And expressing ourselves is who we are”.

This is evident everywhere you look. In the human cauldron that is India's urban street, everybody shouts to everybody else about every possible thing. Hands gesticulate wildly as people barter and push and sell their wares. On the telly and in the innumerable Bollywood offerings which litter the hundreds of channels, the stories are easy to follow for the non-Hindi speaker, such are the exaggerated gestures, the cringeworthy crying scenes over the latest my-life-is-over tragedy such as Boy not desiring Girl as Wife, or the tiresome need to break into poorly-synched song every six or seven minutes. When they’re not singing or crying, the actors (and I use that term generously) gaze wistfully off-camera like a Days of Our Lives parody, without any discernible parody. Otherwise, they seem to slap each other in the face a great deal and run around at high speed. The Indians admire all things British – that much is clear (Jade Goody excepted of course). It’s a shame they’re under the misapprehension that Benny Hill and the Carry On films represent the pinnacle of comedic sophistication. Just like the prevailing wisdom here that the best solution to any administrative problem is to add another couple of layers of bureaucracy. Because that’s what the British would’ve done, of course.

All of this is ‘childlike’, but I honestly mean it in the best possible way and I trust no offence is caused. The films that studiously avoid any bad language or risqué scenes; the belief that even in a movie concerning profound and serious issues it’s permissible to break into song at the drop of a hat. The way not only the children on the street but the adults, too, greet a stranger with a Cheshire grin and are desperate to know from where he comes, what he thinks of India and what it’s like to travel so far. This is an innocence you don’t see in Europe or the States or even in South East Asia. It's a really nice feeling.

I’ve been joined for my five weeks in India by a splendid Englishman named Matt, whom I met in Istanbul and whose itinerary converged nicely with my own. Matt – as well as being black, a feature that elicits curiosity and astonishment everywhere we’ve gone in Turkey and here – is also 204cm tall. Which means that although I talk to his navel when we speak, the Indians are practically rubbing noses with his kneecaps. In Turkey, shouts of “Big man!! Black man!! Basketball!” would ring out in every street we passed through. And the exact same is true here. But the Indians are warmer, more affectionate, more tactile than the Turks and we’ve drawn a crowd everywhere we’ve been. A walk through the markets in Chembur saw us mobbed by textile traders, all of whom entered into sudden and noisy competition to see who could produce a pair of jeans long enough to accommodate his stupendously long legs.

The thing is, they weren’t particularly trying to sell us anything. I’ve travelled enough to recognise it when I see it. But these ten or so men were so delighted to see a man of such unusual proportions in the flesh, we found ourselves in a frenzied scrum of tape measures, reels of cloth and a barrage of gleeful questions. That is, until one particularly forward young chap saw fit to push to the front of the crowd, point to Matt’s groin, and with a preceding reputation of black men evidently in mind, asked him about the size of his equipment. Which would’ve been fine until he reached out (well, reached up, actually) to grab a handful – presumably for the purpose of comparison with his his countrymen (for those wanting further research on this subject, see http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/south_asia/6161691.stm). We bade a hasty farewell.

I tell this story just to illustrate my point – that there is something very childlike about the people here, as if in Eden before Eve listened to the counsel of the snake. As I said before, I spent a couple of days staying with a man called Russel and his family, an experience which a thousand guidebooks and tens of interviews with academics or journalists could never replicate. Russel is 34, and lives with his wife Usha, his mother and formidable matriarch Elsa and his sons Kenford and Danny – eight and two respectively. Their house is like so many in India, two rooms with toilet facilities shared with a bunch of neighbours, and slim mattresses which get thrown on the kitchen floor at bedtime. The family all sleep together, they always eat together. To conserve water (heavily rationed by the city of Mumbai which cannot cope with a population that has doubled to 16 million in the past quarter century) they sometimes bathe together. Living with a family like this is the definitive travel experience – you can learn more about people in a couple of days like this than you would in a year of hotels, restaurants and taxis.

You see first hand the shortcomings of the nuclear family – the importance of having uncles and aunts and particularly grandparents around as you grow up. You appreciate the importance of meal times as a communal experience, an opportunity to bond and laugh and share news. You come to understand the pride that comes with being aspirational and driven, in being able to provide well for your children, to give them opportunities in life which your parents and their parents and theirs before them were unable to do so. Russel, who works as a systems integrator for a company – whatever that means – never completed university. He hated his father since an early age because his father married at 43 and inadequately prepared for the consequences of that. So by the time Russel and his brothers needed support to take on further education commensurate with their obvious intelligence, his father had retired with nothing. And India is not a place where you can just support yourself if you wish to study past high school. And so Russel has paid for his brother to study in the US, and paid for his father’s considerable medical bills in the final years of his life. But watching him work incredibly long hours, return home and find the energy to play with his children, love his wife and talk to his mother, I was struck, once more, by the fact that some people in this world really are to be admired. Although he earns a pittance by Western standards, he is determined to make sure that his boys – both smart as buttons themselves – will have the chance to keep the social climb going. He has pulled a middle-class life out of the scattered detritus of misfortune and inopportunity, helped his brother to do the same, and still welcomes travellers from around the world into his home and refuses to accept anything in return.

Russel is Christian, and met Usha – Hindu - when he was sixteen and she twelve. They fell in love and – in his words – ‘courted’ for seven years, which consisted of five minutes per day at the bus stop together. In a move which I find utterly bewildering (as I do all things connected with religion), she began the complicated process of converting to Christianity, and they married. He went to Muscat in Oman for a while to make a better living, but they couldn’t bear being apart and he returned back, and they had Ken and Danny. What I find moving about this story is the honour and simpleness of their courtship and the profundity of a love that waits seven years of a few snatched minutes per day in order to have a loving family full of generosity and ambition for their children.

This is not a uniquely Indian thing, naturally. I wouldn’t claim that all Indian families are supportive, caring and welcoming any more than I would argue all French, Australian, German or Welsh families were loveless, detached and unhappy. But the fact remains that – religious and cultural reasons notwithstanding – the divorce rate is very, very low here and most people remain close to their elderly parents. There’s a lot we could learn. The disconnect of the western nuclear family model which produces maladaptive and angry teens, brattish kids, pre-nupped marriages and torturous yearly gatherings contrasts starkly with my time here so far. Russel, Usha et al live in something between a slum and a housing estate – former stables and barracks for the pre-independence British cavalry which has morphed into a heaving, cramped community of thousands of families living on top of each other. Children sleep regularly at one another’s houses every night. Food and various provisions are shared and swapped. Tuk-tuks and motorbikes speed through potholed and dusty alleys four feet wide. And all of this backs onto the eighteenth hole of the President’s Golf Club, where the greens and fairways are irrigated around the clock while the shantytown has its drinking water rationed, and India’s growing number of millionaires and billionaires are meekly followed around the fairways by caddies waiting to be thrown a few rupees.

There’s only so much you can say about social inequality in any place. You can describe the abstract juxtaposition of obscene wealth and obscener poverty – but it only says so much. It can’t really paint the picture. You can take photos – which do paint a picture – but the image is always subjectively filtered through the mind and the lens of the observer. There’ll always be a contrary tale to tell.

Or you can give some raw numbers - like the fact that it’s possible to pay four days’ worth of a rickshaw driver’s average salary on a cup of coffee in a swanky hotel – which would be like a £300 cappuccino in London. Numbers are cold and detached and they don’t tell which is the greater injustice – the criminal expense of the coffee or the criminal salary of the driver. So, permit me a few statistics instead.

In 2007, there are 41 million registered cases of diabetes, expected to double in the next two decades. India has surpassed South Africa as the country with the highest number of HIV cases (5.7 million) – a figure probably grossly conservative, and in large part due to Indian men’s unwillingness to wear condoms and women’s (particularly prostitutes’) inability to enforce their use. I posted the BBC story about Indian men and condoms above rather facetiously, but it may hide a broader problem to be addressed. Moreover, human rights groups estimate there are 60 million child labourers. 350 millions Indians live below the poverty line. The population growth rate exceeds the economic growth rate, and although the middle class is swelling, the average annual wage is US$710 per year and up to 400 million Indians live on a dollar a day or less. And despite the massive urbanisation with characterises all parts of the developing world, three quarters of Indians still live in rural areas, where income is a quarter that of city dwellers.

This last point is a question I have posed to a variety of people here – to students, to a kindly Hindu priest I met who was recovering from typhoid at the hospital where I stayed on my second night, to the traders and to Russel and Usha: As people flock to the megacities from rural areas, does their standard of living actually increase? Or perhaps more accurately – because this is closer to the subject of my book – what happens to their quality of life? Because observing the wretchedness of life for the urban poor, it’s difficult to conceive of a life with significantly less. Thousands upon thousands of people sleep on the pavement – some of whom have presumably come to the big city with grand dreams which have fallen tragically flat. And this is in the richest, most cosmopolitan and dynamic city in the country – the financial and commercial capital of a nation that’ll one day be a superpower.

Perhaps I’m being hopelessly naïve. Perhaps my scepticism at why anyone would leave a rural village only to struggle for a shanty life in a polluted, overcrowded, disgustingly congested city like Mumbai comes from being yet to see what rural Indian life is like. Russel – originally from a small town in Gujarat – assures me this is the case. Life in a rural area, he says, is beset with enormous financial costs compared with urban life, and the idealised peaceful village life I imagine isn’t a reality at all. The Indian rail system – the biggest employer in the world, by the way – is so advanced, so widespread (thanks in large part, it has to be said, to the colonial British) that there’s no village in India truly untouched by urbanisation. Cable TV and mobile phones are everywhere but salaries are lower and costs are higher. According to Russel and at least one economics undergraduate I interviewed, it’s the trappings of relatively affordable western luxuries which draws people to the cities.

It’s disingenuous to think that cheap mobile contracts and MTV account for this enormous migration. But their point was that India is not – as I’d suggested – like China, where people leave behind a rudimentary agrarian life to make their fortune in one of the twenty or so cities with over ten million inhabitants. Rather, village life in India has become a prohibitively expensive, poor, smaller version of urban life – and both standard of living and quality of life are relative concepts. The shantytowns which line the fence of the golf club – and which are periodically torn down by the local government only to pop right back up again – may be poor and dirty, but they’re a step up from life on the street and village life too. This is something I find hard to accept, and the coming weeks will reveal much, much more.

Beyond the poverty and the unfairness, beyond the simple and uncomplicated stories of love and family bonds in the movies, you can absorb so much more here. You sense the pride that accompanies having a job and making a living – the truth that so often, when you try to tip a merchant or vendor a few extra rupees as gratitude for his courtesy and goodwill, that tip is refused with a look of embarrassment. Or the fact that when I brought gifts to Russel and his family as thanks for showing me the city, feeding me and generally making me feel at home, the response was one of sheepish discomfort rather than unfettered gratitude. Or the taxi driver who, when seeing that Matt and I were sweating in his sweltering cab like cows being led to an abattoir, stopped to buy us bottles of cold water and would not accept a penny. These people, these open, friendly, generous and, yes, childlike people are the most wonderful part so far of this wonderful country. They have curious cultural affectations such as a side-to-side, up-and-down, figure-eight head-wobble (which I’ve coined the “Stevie Wonder”) that can mean ‘yes’, ‘no’ or ‘maybe’ with no obvious way of discerning which. The children gather round demanding that you play cricket with them. And despite most Indians tolerating hardship that we should never and will never know, they smile and engage you with their eyes, knowing full well that you carry in your wallet a month’s worth of their salary and worked much less hard for it.

The weeks to come will tell me how much of this is specific to Mumbai. All the guidebooks and everyone you speak to will tell you that Mumbai is to India as New York is to the US or London is to the UK: big, cosmopolitan, and completely unrepresentative of the country as a whole.

There’s too much more to say. The perplexing choice of the Indians to, when selecting a car on which to model their taxis, choose an Italian model which rusts faster than it drives and breaks down on average every 75 metres. Or the Hindu festival earlier this week during which married women fast for the day to give thanks to and for their husbands (it goes without saying that there’s no corresponding festival in which the men fast; it was men, after all, who invented the festival in the first place). Or the endemic corruption. Or the artificially low unemployment rate brought about by having men in uniform standing around everywhere with nothing at all to do. Or the fact that recent and rapid economic development means that everyone owns a mobile, but nobody has ever had a landline.

There’ll be time for all of this – but for now, I’ll sign off by recounting that on my second day, while travelling to the hospital where I was put up by a physician I met, I saw a deaf man and a blind man crossing the road together. It reminded me, naturally, of Gene Wilder and Richard Prior in “See no evil, Hear no evil” – the blind man listening for sounds and signing to the deaf man, and the latter guiding the former through the traffic. And it occurred to me, for perhaps the hundredth time that day – as it has every day of this journey – that if everyone showed that sort of solidarity with one another, the world would be an even more extraordinary place than it already is.

“I’ll Never Do It Again”?

What crap.

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.