There's no getting around the fact that Serbia has a bad reputation. It's always had a bad reputation. Obviously it's been brushing it up in recent years just in case we forgot why we were avoiding it in the first place. I've just been, and admittedly I went because it was on the way to somewhere else. I was travelling up the Danube trying to get to Budapest and there was Serbia in the way. But, I have to tell you, it's a pretty fabulous place. A surprisingly fabulous place. Mostly what I mean is Belgrade. It's beautiful. Impressively grand. A 19th-century place built out of vanity and pride, which are two of the best emotions to build on. Modesty and self-deprecation may be admirable in people, but they're an anticlimax in urban planning.
To begin with, it's on a river, and as anyone who's been to more than three cities will tell you, the propinquity of large bodies of water is a prerequisite for a really first-rate burg. Belgrade is on the confluence of two of them. It also has a castle. A very impressive castle from multiple centuries with many impressive walls, keeps, turrets, et cetera. A river and a castle are the makings of a flush in the city department. Belgrade is also a city that likes to do its living outside. There are cobbled streets packed with cafés whose tables join up into long, winding promenades of flirtation and vicious argument. With Serbs, it's often difficult to tell the difference.
There's one street of cool bars that's known as Silicone Valley because of the quality of the breasts on display. When I say âcool' it is in a particularly Slavic way. It is a particularly Slavic cool â that is to say cool in the way a Chinese Elvis look-alike contest is cool. Serbs don't really do Western cool. What they do is posing in a manner that implies there might be some cool going around. This is the only place in the world where I've seen an adultish man wearing a T-shirt that says âAmateur Porn Star', and if you think that's a total absence of cool, then I have to tell you that he had his girlfriend with him. How chic do you think she felt?
I see you've been staring at our women, my joke-telling guide said. No, no, go ahead, Serbian women are famous for being the most beautiful women in the whole world. A discussion on which nation has the most beautiful women in the whole world could collapse the United Nations. All I can say is that Serbia would be unlucky not to find itself in the quarter-finals. Serbian women are very striking: lanky and heavy-chested, long straight hair, generally of some kitchen blondeness, high cheeks, wide eyes, strong features set in expressions of man-killing disdain. I never saw a Serbian woman smile. Not once.
I mentioned this to my hilarious guide. No, they don't have a sense of humour, he said. Oh, so your sense of humour is solely a male, masculine thing? Yes, he said, it's not nice for women to laugh. Would you like your woman to laugh? Maybe she'd laugh at you. Yes, I can see that would be difficult.
I really did love Belgrade, and I wanted to love the Serbs. They are a nation on probation, and have been for a hundred years. They suffer from being squeezed between larger, gaudier, richer neighbours, the Ottomans and the Habsburgs. Serbs dreamt of a greater Serbia, and they got Yugoslavia instead. They desperately want to be relaxed and laid-back and turn up at the party correctly dressed. But they can't leave the history thing alone.
There is some fantastic food here. I ate brilliant slowcooked buried lamb, one of the best dishes of mixed offal I've had for years and marvellous Serbian coffee with doughnuts and a sort of yoghurt cheese sour-cream thing. (Serbian coffee is really Turkish coffee, but without the punch in the throat for calling it Turkish.)
Really, you should go to Belgrade. You know, my guide told me, we are the only city in Europe that's been bombed four times in the 20th century. Oh yes. Once in the First World War by Austrians, twice in the Second World War by Germans, and then Russians, and last and not least by NATO. Well, fancy that.
Of all the slums in the world,
none is beneath hope or beyond
care and optimism. Except
those aesthetic and intellectual
shanties that money buys.
Last year, somewhere on a street that probably doesn't have a name at a door without a number on the outskirts of a hot, dirty city in a suburb that's been called something collective and unlikely, a tired man with a fearful family finally put down his meagre but heavy enough collection of plastic bags and worn buckets and sticks and tarpaulins, sunk to an earth floor, looked at a tin roof and said, we're home. His wife would've sent a child to get some water while she lit a fire. They weren't to know this, this frail, delicate family, but they were a tipping point. As they stepped over this particular threshold, they marked an astonishing and memorable moment in the march of mankind. They will never know it, and we will never know who they were; all we do know is that somewhere, out there, someone moved into some city and turned the world urban.
For the first time in all of history, indeed in all the history of all the species that came before our species, more humans live in the city than in the country. We are now more metropolitan than rural, and that has taken 10,000-odd years to come about. From the first settled agrarian communities in the fertile crescent between the Tigris and the Euphrates till now, there has been a steady drift towards pavement and brick. We are civic hominids, collective folk. We may not like or trust each other's company. We may need to make elaborate rules and etiquettes just to hang out together, but it does seem to be our preferred habitat. We are street-corner creatures rather than the denizens of hedge and copse.
The most common address in the world, the place you're most likely to find most of us, is a slum. I'm fascinated by slums. I'm fascinated mostly because I don't have to live in one. Very few people visit slums. I've only ever come across two cities where they do tourist trips to their slums: Rio and Johannesburg. In Rio, you can go to a favela on a safari in a Land Rover driven by a guide dressed up like Sanders of the River in an African white hunter's hat. You're told to keep your hands inside the vehicle and not to antagonise the wildlife; if confronted, don't make any sudden moves. The favelas in Rio are integral parts of the city. They climb up hills and have famously the best views.
All slums are places that exist outside of control, without regulation or plan. They are amateur and desperate and extreme. They have an energy and an ingenuity that is inspiring and depressing. Like the âflying toilets' of Kibera. Kibera is a huge slum outside Nairobi, possibly the biggest in Africa. There is precious little water and absolutely no sanitation for one million people, so they defecate into the thin ubiquitous plastic bags of Africa and then fling them with abandon, possibly with joy, into ditches, onto roofs, at passers-by. The bags collect in great stinking heaps and wait for the rains to wash them into the water table, through people's bedrooms and kitchens and across the slimy roads.
Slums are always temporary. No one moves into one or builds one and thinks, this is me, this is forever, this is Dunroamin. But they remain, calloused and crumbling, always evolving, growing like human aviaries. Slums are at once disheartening and a terrible indictment, an accusation, but they are also a marvel, a hope, an ambition. And they have the intrinsic beauty, the majesty even, of the human will. Like the packing-case-and-plastic shanties that crawl up the motorways and roundabouts and the corners of Bombay, a city that is such a magnet to the subcontinent that it's considering locking itself away behind a wall like a vast gated community, insisting on invitations to get in. It is a great economic nightclub.
My top six slums are: the Mercato, the rambling warren of a market in Addis Ababa, where khat is sold. The shantytowns of Antananarivo, the capital of Madagascar, that look quaintly like huts in Dutch paintings, in this, one of Africa's most beautiful cities. Glasgow East: tough and gritty, an ancient enclave of hardened arteries and attitudes, but with an indomitable grim humour. The Afghan refugee camps in Peshawar: this was the most beguiling and is now possibly the most hideously dangerous city in the North-West Frontier Province. Kaliningrad, a Russian enclave on the Baltic between Lithuania and Poland: utterly forgotten, once a closed military city, now a festering pocket of organised crime, pollution and decay. And by far and away the worst slum in the entire world, the City of the Sun in Port-au-Prince, sprawling along the shore, bisected by sluggish rivers of sewerage, this great shadow Hades of greed, black magic and fear is the most mesmerising place I've ever been. A silent set-aside of depravation and terror where, conversely, I met some of the kindest and warmest people in all of the West Indies. The City of the Sun is the bottom of the bottom of the pile, the end beneath which it is difficult to fall. But still here you see children carrying satchels going to school, nurses in uniform going to comfort richer sick people, workmen carrying bags of tools to make nicer cities more habitable.
Nowhere is beneath hope, beyond care and optimism or do-it-yourself miracles. Except the slums that money buys. I'm writing this in New York, and New Yorkers spend a lot of time complaining about the gentrification of Manhattan. The city has grown monstrously expensive; money has seeped into every poor corner and knocked it through and exposed its brickwork and put renewable hardwood floors over it. Money has bought order and quiet and civic responsibility and health and safety and an early bed. It's improved the coffee and the sushi, but it's also driven out the things people move to cities to get. The enthusiasm, the naughtiness, the young, the pretty, the unpublished poets, the unhung painters.
All cities move up and down an organic scale, from the flying toilet to the dog-walkers. All cities are making a slow progress from bottom-rung to we've-arrived. There is a point in the middle where they are for a moment, for a decade, so marvellous a cosmopolitan mix of grit and ambition, of anger and laughter. Of all the slums I've been to, the two very, very worst, by a long street, were Monte Carlo and Las Vegas. Nothing is as filthy and dispiriting as the places money made for its own edification and greed. Aesthetic and intellectual shanties, moral flying shit-bags.
If you want an authentic travel
experience, try Albania: there's
something very liberating about
visiting a country with nothing
going for it.
We don't travel to see places. We travel to see things in places. For instance, I've lived in London all of my ambulatory life and in that time I've never once been to St Paul's Cathedral, and neither have I seen the changing of the guard, and I haven't had tea at The Ritz. They're just not part of my city. But for many people passing through, they are the city.
I've always wondered how many natives of Bangkok have had soapy four-hand stress-relief massages, such a central feature of the sophisticated executive visitor's visit. When I asked a masseur, she said almost every bloody man in Bangkok was up for a bit of stress management, including her worthless, good-for-nothing husband. I should say that I am the only round-eye man I know who has been through Bangkok and not had a massage. Frankly, I get performance anxiety on my own. So the point is, I have a strangely inauthentic memory of Bangkok.
Never trust or travel with someone who says that they can show you the real somewhere or take you to the city that the locals know. If you'd been visiting London last week and seen my local city, you'd have read the papers for an hour, then sat in a doctor's waiting room for half an hour, got a prescription, gone to the chemist, waited another half an hour, walked for 10 minutes, then retraced your steps back to the chemist's because you'd forgotten the razor blades, and then you'd have gone to the supermarket and bought four bananas. You'd have eaten a banana in the street, then walked home to watch an old John Wayne film all afternoon. See, it's authentic, but it's not any more real than going to the Tower of London, Madame Tussaud's, eating jellied eels, sinking 10 pints of warm brown bitter and doing the Lambeth Walk.
Nobody has secret access to a real country, as if the rest of the country was unreal. I was thinking about this because I just got back from a place without any places in it at all, Albania. Its only memorable monuments are Roman, and no one's ever going to come up to you at a party when you get back and say, with an imperious drawl, did you manage to see the temple or the church or the palace or the museum? I wish you'd told me you were going, I could've given you a few tips and some addresses.
The problem with Albania is that it's way too real. There are no unreal bits to retreat into. The moment you step off the plane at Mother Teresa airport, it slaps you with the cold fish of reality: the place is a mess. It's not just a mess, it's a punch-drunk mess. The wonder of this Adriatic sliver of the Balkans is that it's still standing. It has gone 12 rounds with every political and economic system known to hominids and a couple of them that are exclusively its own, and it has lost on points to all of them. Communist, fascist, warlord, monarchist, you name it, Albanians have been beaten senseless by it. Punchy, but still game â that's Albania.
And there is something very relaxing about going to a country that has absolutely nothing to recommend it. Normally, you travel and you get a list that's longer than a Chinese menu of places that you simply have to see, and you spend your time committing cultural triage in churches and palaces and feeling rushed and guilty and oppressed by the piles of cultural beauty. Well, there's no danger of that in Tirana.
No, there's nothing to see, and there's nowhere to be. There's not even anything to eat. This is the only country I've been to that doesn't have a national dish. Or even a disgusting local delicacy that you have to take home with you in a tin with a picture of a smiling peasant girl hugging a cow on it, or a cardboard box that leaks nameless fat from whatever preserved body part it holds.