Fri 19 Aug 2011 |
|
Pisa leans on tourist tat |
|
Wherever I happen to go wandering in the world, I always find it fascinating to see what souvenirs are on offer. Apart from an unhealthy fascination with the tacky, you can tell a lot about your proximity to the tourist-hordes by the things you see for sale. Oxford Street mugs? Turn and run. Knock-off Yankees caps fluttering in the wind? You won’t see the Manhattan canyons for the Mid-Western package tourists.
Souvenir shopping is obviously a matter of highly subjective taste, but it really is incredible to see some of the rubbish out there that people will pay good money for. Bits of singing plastic, religious icons, bawdy jokes on cheap mugs.. the list goes on.
The one dependable is the ubiquitous 'I (heart) London' /Tokyo/New York T-shirts. They’re everywhere, and to my mind are the souvenir equivalent of watching paint dry – boring, uninspired and the mark of a tourist with no imagination. And please, if you decide to buy one, don’t do like so many tourists I saw in New York, and wear your 'I (heart) New York' shirt while you’re still in the Big Apple? Please?
But I have another reason for a heightened interest in tacky souvenirs. For years now my brother and I have had a competition of sorts, and it goes a little something like this.
Wherever we travel in the world, we have to buy a souvenir for the other. To briefly wear the souvenir-shopping yellow jersey, it has to be a souvenir so tacky – so devoid of artistic merit or plausible good taste – that it tips the scales into becoming so ugly it’s beautiful.
It’s a hard ask, let me tell you, and countless hours have been spent scouring tourist markets for the ugliest possible souvenirs. Of course I’m shopping with my tongue firmly in cheek, so it’s always entertaining to see those travellers earnestly discussing the merits of a snow-globe with the Eiffel Tower versus one of those over-sized pencils evidently made to be used by giants.
All of which means that we each have a respectable pile of glossy plastic tourist-tat sitting atop bookshelves and desks... gaudy reminders of places we haven’t visited. A clock (not working) set in a plastic diorama of the Greek island of Rhodes; a dashboard Ganesha deity (9V battery not included); a toothpick holder in the shape of the Kuala Lumpur Petronas Towers, a Venetian gondola trimmed in shiny silver plastic; nesting dolls of an Arabic family... the list goes on. As does the competition.
So I was saddened to read this week that the Italian town of Pisa is cracking down on the high-art of tacky souvenirs. Our competition started only after I last visited the city of the Leaning Tower, but it means my chances of upping the ante with some suggestive underwear now appears lost forever. Perhaps an 'I (heart) Pisa' shirt will have to do.
|
|
A month or two back I was asked to be part of a profile piece in Fresh Living magazine on people who travel a lot for a living. I was happy to do the short interview, but the photo-shoot certainly taught me a few lessons about being on the other side of the camera! It's out in the July issue, if you're interested, but this is what it had to say...
Born-and-bred Capetonian Richard spent a decade meandering between Rhodes University, Joburg and London, until he settled back in Cape Town.
When did the travel bug first bite? In my first year of varsity I cajoled a few friends into a VW Caddie and we set off for Mozambique. Since then I’ve always had a suitcase within arm’s reach, and my camera and Moleskine at the ready.
What are your stand-out travel experiences? Being mesmerised by the Perito Moreno glacier in Argentina. Who’d have thought watching ice melt could be so exciting! Cruising the Beagle Channel off Ushuaia, Antarctica (the southernmost town in the world) in search of orcas was cool, too.
What’s your favourite destination in SA? The Cederberg. There isn’t much to beat sitting on the stoep of the Sleepad hut, deep in the mountains, sipping single-malt whisky out of a tin mug. Back-to-basics bliss.
Your top travel tip? Scan your passport and email it to a web-based email account. You might need it unexpectedly.
|
I took a whirlwind trip to Switzerland to check out the new SWISS cabins (outstanding) and spent some time on the (unfailingly punctual) railways. The flipside of a whirlwind intercontinental trip is that you also end up spending a lot of time in airports. Cape Town, Johannesburg, Zurich... then repeat in reverse.
Along the way I was reading a fascinating – and fitting – book on my Kindle: ‘A week at the airport’, by Alain de Botton.
This erudite author/philosopher spent a week at Heathrow’s Terminal 5 (recently expanded, if you read below) and the book is a collection of his observations, anecdotes and musings. It’s fascinating reading, especially when you find yourself as one of the thousands of nomads roaming the endless corridors of the world’s airports.
Perhaps the first thing we do when strolling through the automatic doors is to look up at the destination board of departing flights, and I just loved what de Botton had to say about the promise of adventure they hold: “The lack of detail about the destinations serves only to stir unfocused images of nostalgia and longing: Tel Aviv, Tripoli, Miami, Muscat via Abu Dhabi, Grandy Cayman via Nassau... all of these promises of alternative lives, to which we might appeal at moments of claustrophobia and stagnation”
That ‘alternative life’, the chance to be someone completely different – or equally, yourself without the labels of home – is for me one of the real joys of travelling. And anybody with itchy feet will know well that sense of stagnation, and the need to head off into the wild blue yonder.
But as much time as I spend on the proverbial road, there’s always a longing – an excitement – at the thought of returning home. The return to the familiar, the loved ones, the favourite chair, the coffee brewed the way I like to make it. All of those things draw us home eventually, but – as Alain rightly notes – it is to a changed place: “Home all at once seems the strangest of destinations, its every detail relativised by the other lands one has visited.”
But for me – and perhaps you - after awhile, that sense of familiar begins to worsen the itch. We forget the queues of tourists, the in-flight meals, the jetlag, the lost luggage and rip-off taxi drivers. We happily slip on our rose-tinted glasses and “gradually return to identifying happiness with elsewhere.”
I know I am guilty of that, no doubt. A nagging urge to get on the road again – “we recover an appetite for packing, hoping and screaming” - yet once on the road there’s again a sense of quiet excitement at returning home.
Perhaps it’s just my restless feet, but if you need to calm your mind on the next long-haul flight to somewhere far-off and exotic, you’d do well to ponder your place in the world’s planes with a page through ‘A week at the airport’. |
Fri 01 Apr 2011 |
|
Oh dear; Beluga's dim sum fail |
|
Sadly, the new dim sum menu at Beluga not really up to scratch. Even at half-price before 7pm. Stodgy dough on siu mai and har gau; bland flavours in steamed buns; prawns were minced, not whole; ponzu sauce served in bottles reminiscent of Spur circa-1987. And no pork! No pork in dim sum? What next!?
Har gau with spinach and cream cheese… that’s what! Lord above, it brings a tear to my eye just to think of how they’re murdering my favourite Asian snack.
Potstickers not bad, but overall the fillings would raise a revolt in Canton. When was the last time you saw beef fillet- and springbok-filled dim sum in Hong Kong, exactly?
To be honest, it looks like they're thrown authenticity out the window in favour of appealing to the hungry masses. Flavours all completely off-key for this wonderful staple of Cantonese cooking. So all in all, simply not worth it. So far Kitima in Hout Bay is at the top of the Cape Town dim sum ranking... now if only they had a bigger selection.
The sushi top-up wasn't bad, but 1890 in Obs still superior for similar prices. For the first time we actually had a good waiter, but the cooler-than-thou blonde hostesses that 'greet' customers can really go and take a flying leap... have they never heard the word 'hospitality', I wonder? No warmth, no concern for your dining experience, just attitude, attitude, attitude. Won’t someone from Societi Bistro please go and give them some lessons?
And to top it off, the outdoor area was a fug of nicotine-tinged smoke... not really conducive to enjoying one’s food, no? So yes, that was officially the last time I will eat at Beluga. If anyone has more tips for dim sum in Cape Town, I’m all ears...
|
For a travel journalist, this might sound like stating the blindingly obvious... but I’ve been spending a fair bit of time in hotels recently.
However, these aren’t the fleapits in Earl’s Court (Best Western... avoid at all costs) or the shimmering Taj Lake Palace in Udaipur (start saving now, trust me). The hotels I’ve been visiting lately have been a 15-minute drive from my front door.
Few locals (bar travel journalists on a story) are likely to spend the night a short drive from home, but what’s struck me in the past few weeks is how our top-end hotels are increasingly opening their doors to locals; embracing the city folk rather than trying to keep them at bay.
A good case in point is Cape Town’s famous Mount Nelson Hotel. The pink lady has a rich history in the Mother City, but for many years it was a brave Capetonian who dared to drive the palm-lined road to the front door.
Happily, that is all changing. A few years back, the hotel’s Planet champagne bar became the place to spot celebrities in town, from Paris Hilton to Robbie Williams. Nowadays, the celeb-fever has calmed down, and it’s become a simply stunning place to enjoy an after-work drink. Just a pity about the over-priced martinis.
The dowdy old Cape Colony has also made way for the chic new Planet Restaurant which, under the experienced hand of executive chef Rudi Liedenberg, is likely to draw in ever-more local diners.
I found a similar trend at the glitzy One&Only too, with the new general manager explaining that they’ve realised they need to make the hotel a bigger part of the fabric of the city. While the Vista bar does have great views of the mountain and the city, the hotel-lobby-feel doesn’t really appeal to me.
However, the hotel does have two great restaurants that are certainly capturing Capetonians’ imagination – Asian-fusion at Nobu, and the revamped Reuben’s. Both offer pretty good value, when considering the quality of food and service. Although I’m yet to try the spa, I hear that their prices have been dropped too, in a bid to attract locals.
All in all, it’s good news for South Africans. While I haven’t spent much time in Joburg hotels lately, I know that places like Melrose Arch Hotel and The Saxon are similarly making themselves more available to locals.
So I guess it’s over to us to make use of it. Perhaps next time you’re in the mood for a mini-break, simply drop by your nearest swish hotel for drinks and dinner, and live out your international traveller fantasies...
|
|
|
Or just a sign of commercialism heading south? Refuse to shop at Melissa's nowadays: overpriced and average
Feed Entries