Balconies and Back Streets

There is a street in Guanajuato that is so narrow, from one of its balconies you could reach over and shake hands with someone on the other side. Of course this is by no means unique, but in this instance one of the addresses was a craft shop, which extended up to the first floor. From here I stepped out onto the balcony and gazed several inches across at the bedroom over the way.

It would, I reflected make a perfect setting for a film set based around the theme of illicit young lovers. Shakespeare would have been impressed.

And if the craft shop owner ever felt like making a few extra Pesos, I am sure if he had a kind word with the people from opposite, they could strike a business deal, whereby courting couples, on payment of a fee to the establishments could lean over across the two balconies and grasp hands, whilst being photographed from down below. It felt like a missed opportunity.

There are also many streets in the old part of Guanajuato, where the footpaths are so narrow as to make even single file walking a bit of an achievement, and where as lorries emitting exhaust fumes pass through, the olde world charm is somewhat lost.

It reminded me of a satirical postcard I once saw of a dilapidated cobbled back street in northern England. The 1930s photograph showed shabbily dressed shoeless kids sat on the doorstep of a terraced house. One of them clutched a football. Parked in the middle of the very narrow road was a Rolls Royce, which took up the whole width of the place. ‘Vote Conservative for wider streets’ was the caption on the card, which you understand had not been produced by the Conservative Party.

Arriving into the Unknown – The Past

I book my travel ticket to an unvisited country and I go. But in between, to research or not to research? Of course, forewarned, is forearmed, but the element of surprise often contributes to any adventure.

There are many cities away from the developed world, where such has been my level of prior exposure over a period of years through a range of media images that a powerful stereotype is ingrained on the mind. And then on arrival, the stereotype either proves to have a lot of substance or exaggeration.

Often these prior images concern the chaotic process of arriving in dense cities from somewhere on their environs, maybe the airport. And often, bit by bit, as you edge closer to the city centre, these visions are made flesh. Ugliness starts to rear its head – shantytowns, street urchins at cross roads knocking on car windows, bumper to bumper traffic, a distinct lack of order. The closer you get to the city’s core – it geographic heart, the more frequently these sights start to occur.

Bombay

So in Bombay, it was the chaos on both the roads (bullock carts, yellow taxis and old reconditioned red London buses) and on the footpaths (tall carts with concrete wheels being pushed by men with waif like physique, laden high with produce or textiles, Until finally, downtown, walking the footpath became more hazardous, than crossing the roads, as concrete wheels trundled an inch away from my toes).

Cairo

Or take Cairo in 1990, sitting on a dilapidated service bus, as it makes it way from the airport to El Tachire square. As we get ever closer to the city centre, I’m gripped by a kind of apprehension; a fear of being swallowed up by the throbbing masses and never making it back out of Cairo alive.

I was struggling to see what life on the footpath was like; struggling to sneak a glimpse past a swarm of Lunghi clad men who occupied near enough every square inch of the buse’s interior. What tiny bit of space there is, being taken up by goats, baskets of live chickens, containers of pulses and spices. Immediately outside the window, people clung onto the side of the bus for a free ride. And there was me thinking that this was an entertainment of sorts. It was the first time that I had been let lose on a non-European metropolis, and the frenetic activity inside and outside the bus certainly bore no resemblance to anything that I had previously witnessed.

I was sat at the front of the bus, on top of a wheel hub-casing, rucksack clasped against my chest. The vehicle wound its way through six lanes of traffic. And I never wanted the journey to end, not due to it being an invigorating assault on the senses, but because I had not got a dammed clue where I was in Africa’s largest city; totally disorientated in the maelstrom; not quite sure how things would turn out once I stepped down onto the pavement.

During subsequent travels, I have thought back many times to this episode and said, ‘Yes that ride in Cairo was my real initiation into travel, everything else had been a bit, well, lifeless.