Rock and Hard Places (23 page)

 

WE ARRIVE AT The Bottom Line club in Shepherd’s Bush, London, with three hours to kill before Def Leppard’s second performance of the day. Mutiny is in the air, especially among the press not due to carry on to Canada in the afternoon. The two leitmotif phrases of the morning are “Do you know what time they’re going to open the bar?” and “Bugger this for a game of soldiers, I’ve had my fun, I’m off.” A full-scale rebellion is only narrowly averted by the serving of an immense buffet to we accredited scroungers.

A few of us nonetheless get bored enough to go and do our jobs, and head outside to talk to the punters waiting for the limited free tickets for the show. The people at the front have been queueing 24 hours, huddled in sleeping bags next to their camp stoves. “It’s a privilege, man,” one of them shouts. “It’s history in the making.” It must be wonderful, to be so easily pleased. He shakes a fist triumphantly and tries to give me a hug. Further along the line, a film crew from one of those insufferably bright and chirpy breakfast television programmes are encouraging some fans to sing their favourite Def Leppard songs for the camera. It isn’t pretty. Those harmonies, like air traffic control and neurosurgery, should not be attempted by amateurs.

Shortly before the doors are opened, Def Leppard assemble behind the crush barriers at the front of the stage for a brief press conference.
They say that, gosh, wow, this whole thing is just so crazy and, hey, you don’t have to be mad to work here but it helps, ha ha. I toy with the idea of adopting a stentorian Finnish accent and feigning outrage at the corporate decadence of it all (“Yes, Mr. Leppard, please. I am Sven Svennsenn, zer rocking and zer rolling correspondent of zer Daily Reindeer of Helsinki, yes, undt I am sinking zat perhapz you could haff been buildink zer hospital for zer unhappy children with this money, is? I am sinking zat perhaps zis means—ho!—zat your rock is out of my question, hey?”) but I can’t find a way through the rank of cameras. Besides which, the canapes are really rather good.

 

THE SECOND SHOW is much the same as the first, and after they finish, Def Leppard leave the building for Heathrow and their flight to Vancouver, along with the representatives of those press organisations deemed important enough to go to all three continents.
Melody Maker
is not among them, as they probably thought we’d only take the piss, so Sweet and I stuff our pockets full of caviar sandwiches and walk out into the sun, looking for a taxi.

 

 

 

T
HIS IS A declaration that may well prompt throbbing of veins and empurpling of complexions, but here goes: being a travel writer isn’t as easy as it looks. I feel that this is something I should qualify hastily, i.e., in less time than it takes someone to load a gun and discover my address. I therefore urge you to understand that I’m not about to complain that the fold-down beds in business class don’t quite accommodate all six feet of me (they do), or that staying, at someone else’s expense, in hotel suites with bathrooms bigger than your entire apartment isn’t marvellous (it is). The travel part of travel writing is a doddle. It’s the writing that’s tricky.

I’m talking specifically about what has come to be understood as travel writing as you generally see—or, I’m willing to bet, far more often ignore—in the travel sections of newspapers and magazines. To an even greater degree than other segments of an increasingly craven and uncritical mainstream media, these sections are hopelessly beholden to the idea that nothing that appears in their pages must be affronting or confronting to anybody whose eyes may happen to rest upon them, and especially not to their advertisers (who are, almost invariably, the people who actually pay for the writers’ travel). So these outlets are, with a few honourable exceptions, difficult to write for on two counts. First, they’re rarely willing to let you go anywhere interesting.
Second, they won’t let you say anything interesting about the dull places to which they are prepared to send you.

This observation is like everything else in this book, rooted in a strictly personal preference—it may well be that millions of people enjoy consuming eye-glazing advertising copy phoned in by some junketing hack idly rearranging the lexicon of travel section clichés (“land of contrasts,” and so forth). Such a revelation would, I confess, make no less sense to me than the way that millions of people choose to spend their own holidays—which is to spend them in the sort of places people take holidays. There is no body of people, not even the religiously devout or jazz fans, that baffle and boggle me more than the travelling public. I simply don’t understand why they go the places they go—which is to say, the places everybody else has been already. And I don’t understand why they do the things they do when they get to them—i.e., the things everybody else does. The defining absurdity of modern mass tourism is the crowd perpetually gathered in the Louvre, beneath the
Mona Lisa
, taking pictures of it. Assuming that few if any of these people are commendably ambitious art thieves, what are they doing with these photographs? How does that conversation proceed when they show their snaps around back home? “And that’s the
Mona Lisa
.” “Really? Is that what it looks like? I’ll be damned.”

This should not be construed as the lofty railings of a misanthropic snob with a rampaging ego who perceives himself as a capital-T Traveller as opposed to a mere tourist. I mean, I am a misanthropic snob with a rampaging ego, but I’m perfectly happy to acknowledge that, when I’m working abroad, I’m really just a tourist with a press card and a certain implicit license to ask people annoying questions and generally get in the way. I also appreciate—that is, am frequently briskly reminded by friends who work for a living—that if your professional life is an arduous and regimented one, then the traditional holiday of sunbaked idleness punctuated by various ritualised merriments provides welcome opportunity to lift weary eyes to a view other than the grindstone. The problem is that the vista isn’t going to be all that interesting, and certainly not surprising.

Smart-aleck travel writers making fun of travellers is a tradition dating back to the 1869 publication of Mark Twain’s
Innocents Abroad
, his account of touring Europe and the Holy Land with a gaggle of American pilgrims. It’s a matchlessly funny book, but back then there actually was good reason to
visit the obvious places, and see the obvious stuff. The tourist’s world was still substantially mysterious, rather than a checklist of landmarks that look like the pictures (Stonehenge, if you hadn’t seen a thousand images of it, would be impressive and moving; now, it’s just smaller than you imagined). Most importantly, a century or more ago, such a trip would have been an adventure, a struggle, an accomplishment—three elements key to any worthwhile enterprise and three things missing from a sorry percentage of the modern jobs from which the modern tourist vacations.

Nobody needs to spend further time on a palm-fronded Balinese beach. Not one of the six billion human beings presently breathing wants to see another photograph of the Coliseum. Not even your closest friends and family—or, I reckon, you—are interested in a yarn about Disneyland, or the Tower of London, or the Taj Mahal. So I guess the travel feature that follows is a kind of plea to travellers, and to travel editors, to recognise that the world is bigger place than they might think, and that almost all of it is startling, fascinating and wonderful (apart, perhaps, from Lunderskov, Denmark, where in September 2008 a local innkeeper answered my enquiry as regards what a visiting reporter might do on his afternoon off by mournfully intoning, “We have a pond.”). Even—or, perhaps, especially—when you decide to try taking a holiday in pretty much the last place anybody would.

A DOSIMETER IS a grey, rectangular device about the size of an early-90s mobile phone. On its LCD screen, numbers flicker. These measure the radiation to which the dosimeter is being exposed. Yuri, our guide, explains what the number means in merciless technical detail, but I don’t really take it in. This is partly because I never really take in any technical detail, but mostly because the one technical detail I have taken in is concerning me a bit. Yuri has told me that in areas of normal background radiation, like any reasonably-sized city, the display on his beeping, whirring dosimeter would read 0.014. Maybe a bit more, maybe a bit less, but 0.014 or thereabouts.

While Yuri has been explaining this, I’ve been watching the numbers on the device in his hand climb past 0.014—quite a way past 0.014. I’ve watched them clear 0.020, 0.050, 0.100, and then carry on,
like a space shuttle’s speedometer at take-off: 0.200, 0.300, 0.400. At about 0.500 I start holding my breath, which I exhale at 0.700 when I admit to myself that holding my breath isn’t going to make much difference. Up past 0.800 the display goes, flickers past 0.900 and then settles at 0.880: about sixty times normal background radiation.

“They’re called microroentgens,” says Yuri, as I write it down. “M-I-C-R-O-R-O-E-N-T-G-E-N-S. About 880. No, hang on, 900. Something like that. Don’t worry. It won’t do you any harm.”

About 200 metres away stands what must be the least visited famous building in the world, the most ostracised member of the fraternity of distinguished landmarks, the one edifice doomed never to dine at the cool buildings’ table with the Sydney Opera House and the Taj Mahal: the giant grey sarcophagus that shrouds Reactor No. 4 of the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Station, which exploded in the small hours of April 26, 1986, belching a colossal cloud of radioactive dust across Europe and wreaking damage which may not be comprehended for centuries. Photographer James Reeve and I have come to redress the balance. As we wave the dosimeter about in search of more spectacular readings, we’re doing the equivalent of posing goofily in front of the Coliseum, or buying postcards of the Eiffel Tower.

We’re tourists.

 

THE CHERNOBYL TOURIST business is the least developed part of Ukraine’s undeveloped tourist business. There are no hotels inside Chernobyl’s Exclusion Zone, the 4,300 square kilometres around the ruined plant, blocked off by military checkpoints. The authorities don’t want anyone wandering around the Zone unsupervised, so Chernobyl is strictly a day trip from Ukraine’s capital, Kiev, a two-hour drive to the south. You book through one of the companies in Kiev that organise the excursions. They fix the paperwork necessary to enter the Zone and provide a car, driver and guide. There are no restaurants in the Zone, either, though lunch is part of the deal (the food, you are solemnly assured, is trucked in from a very long way away). And neither has any provision been made for people who might wish to purchase souvenirs. A shame, as the possibilities are spectacular: glow-in-the-dark fridge magnets, gloves with six fingers on each hand, t-shirts saying “I visited Reactor No. 4 and all I got was sixty times the normal background radiation.”

Our driver, Sergei, forty-seven, knows the Zone well. In the 1980s, he was a driver for Soviet news agency Tass, and he took reporters into Chernobyl after the accident. Later, he ferried the engineers who built the sarcophagus over the simmering reactor. After Sergei negotiates the checkpoint at Dytyatky, which marks the edge of the Zone, the most immediately surprising thing about the Exclusion Zone is how unexclusive it is. This is no incandescent moonscape bereft of life but for the occasional five-armed zombie. There are thick forests of fir and birch and many, many animals: deer, birds, stray dogs and cats.

The Zone is also startlingly busy with people: technicians, forest rangers, police, soldiers. The small town of Chernobyl—now offices and accommodation for the Zone’s workers—is almost lively. The Zone may be toxic and dangerous, but it was never wholly abandoned. Bizarre though it seems, the nuclear plant continued to operate long after Reactor No. 4 erupted. Reactor No. 2 was closed in 1991 after a fire, albeit one that didn’t release any radioactive material. Reactor No. 1 was switched off in 1996. Reactor No. 3, housed in the same building as the gutted Reactor No. 4, supplied power to Ukraine until December of 2000.

Sergei drives us to the office of the Ministry of Ukraine of Emergencies and Affairs of Population Protection from the Consequences of Chernobyl Catastrophe (their business cards must be the size of dinner trays). Here, we are introduced to Yuri, our guide for the day. Yuri, a thirty-one-year-old former English teacher, and once the drummer in a local speed metal group, has lived in the area all his life. His hometown, Chernigov, wasn’t evacuated after the accident, but he remembers that when it rained the next day, there were yellow spots on Chernigov’s pavement. Like all the 3,500 people who work inside the Zone, he operates according to rota to allow his body time to process the junk it soaks up: fifteen days in, fifteen days out. He says his wife was worried about him taking the job—“About the potence,” he grins—but says he’s already got two kids, and besides which, he makes three times doing PR here what he would teaching outside the Zone.