I suspect the year appeared to zoom by  because it was so eventful. One minute I’m blagging my daughter onto the end of a closed queue to meet Rapunzel from Tangled at Euro Disneyland, the next I’m on a gallery crawl in Prishtina with some of Kosovo’s most exciting new artists. And that’s not to mention a crazy absinthe-fuelled evening in a Bohemian castle with the guys from The Adventurists. Or a ride deep into the Accursed Mountains in a London Black cab. Or appearing on a TV chat show in Kenya, based in the back of a matatu.

A difficult task, to be sure, but I’ve made an attempt to collate my highlights of 2011. I suspect if I put my mind to it, I could quite easily come up with another eight or so.

1. My Associate Web Editor gig at Wanderlust magazine

A part-time gig that gives me time to do my other stuff – and allows me to interview some of my all-time heroes like P J O’Rourke? What’s not to like?!

2. Finally visiting my 100th country

It was a long time coming. And there were a few false dawns. (A trip to Iraq cancelled because of a certain Icelandic ash cloud, being the most disappointing). But in July I was finally able to tick my 100th country visited. Luxembourg. I couldn’t go hardcore, so I went lame.

3. Pulp at the Brixton Academy

Reputedly their last ever gig in London and suitably epic. If my mate Richard hadn’t had his phone nicked in the moshpit it would have been nigh on perfect.

4. The Storymoja Hay Festival in Nairobi

One of the Hay Festival family of international literature festivals, Storymoja was a real blast. The Kenyans were super enthusiastic, I made some great new friends (Samir Dave, Neil Shah, Ben Okri, Neil Hennessy et al) and re-aquainted myself with Nairobi’s notorious nightlife at the Black Diamond in Westlands. I also learned something about myself – according to this interview, I studied Medieval Sciences at university.

5. The Mongol Rally

Well, a little bit of it, anyway. I was ‘embedded’ with team Genghis Carnage on the first leg from London to Prague. Enough time to visit my 100th country, sleep in a Belgian cornfield and see men dressed as harem girls drinking absinthe in a medieval Czech castle. I must do the whole thing one day!

6. Watching St George win the World Club Challenge

Typical. The team I’ve supported all my life hasn’t won a premiership for 30 years and they go and do it while I’m living in London. Thankfully, as the premiers in Australia they came over to play the UK Super League winners, Wigan, in the World Club Challenge. They won. And I got to go back to Wigan, one of my favourite places in the UK.

7. Kosovo

I visited Europe’s newest country as part of Wanderlust’s Under £250 challenge and had an absolute awesome time. It was real ‘old skool’ trip, the perfect mix of incredible hospitality, affordable prices and unexpected adventures. When I arrived at an old kulla in Junik, for example, I was plied with free beers and some guys at the next table pulled out some traditional two-string and three-string guitars and started playing old Albanian folk songs. Keep an eye out for ebook about my adventures called The Blackbird of Dardania, coming out soon.

8. Dinner at the 805 with Ben Okri

Ben’s partner Rosemary Clunie invited me to a private viewing of her new exhibition at the Menier Gallery. And afterwards we all bundled into a cab and headed up 805 Old Kent Road, a fantastic Nigerian restaurant hidden behind etched glass windows. Not only was the food superb, I felt like I’d walked on to the set of a Nollywood movie. Brilliant.

What were your highlights?

I love it. But I can see how it could divide opinion.

What do you think?

You’ll find more images here on Vespa’s Facebook page.

You may have noticed from my Facebook pages and my Twitter feed that I’m currently in Kosovo.

I’m doing the trip as part of Wanderlust magazine’s ’25 for £250′ promotion.

The idea is to have a great adventure for under £250, including airfares. I got a great deal to Skopje with Wizz Air. And I’ve been have a low cost whale of a time in one of the world’s newest countries since Thursday.

It’s my last night and I’m in Prizren. So far I’ve been on a gallery crawl in Prishtina, crossed the Serbian barricade in Mitrovica and spent the night deep in the Accursed Mountains. Last night I stumbled upon an impromptu evening of traditional Albanian music in a Kulla in Junik and this morning I was served raki with my breakfast!

There’s still £30 in the kitty. And I’m getting a lift to Skopje with a Kosovar guy living in London I met on the plane coming over. Might just let my hair down and see the Baba Stars at Mypub.

Not that it will cost me much. Beer is only 50 cents a bottle.

I was new to this whole Apps thing, so I joined the throngs gathered beneath the monitors to double check the departure time. The train was on the board, but the platform hadn’t been assigned yet. On a whim I decided to wander out to Platform 8.

The train was already there. After confirming with the cleaners that it was indeed the 10.25 to Bristol Temple Meads, I clambered on board and claimed a forward facing seat with it’s own power outlet. It was another five minutes before the hordes who had gathered under the monitor boards descended, stuffing their bags on the overhead racks and casting dirty looks at me for securing such a coveted spot.

I thought of that moment this morning when I heard the news that Steve Jobs had died. The device that he had envisaged, had pushed through, developed and changed the way I travelled. It moulded and influenced my journey in ways that I hadn’t imagined. I’m not sure that I had a better trip. But I had a different one.

Later on that same trip my iPhone got me a free place to stay on the Isle of Arran. I’d idly noted on Facebook that I was feeling green on a particularly rough ferry crossing. Almost immediately I was pinged a message from a friend in Australia. He had a nephew working at a resort on Arran and had just texted him to expect me. I got free digs in the staff quarters and went very, very close to winning my first ever pub quiz. My iPhone nearly played a part there too, but I valiantly fought off the urge to nip off to the toilets to Google the answer to a particularly tricky question. I ended up losing by one point, to a man who marked his own answers.

My iPhone proved invaluable throughout the rest of my trip around the UK. I used the map app for directions to the archives in Bristol where I was able to confirm my family’s convict past. I booked a Ryanair flight out of Glasgow Prestwick, where Elvis Presley briefly stepped on British soil and my grandfather landed as a navigator in the Second World War. And whenever I got homesick I could flick through an album of photos of my daughter I’d loaded before I’d left home.

More recently, I downloaded the Footprint Guide to Nairobi, instantly shaving 650g off the weight of my carry-on luggage. Which saved me a considerable amount of money when Ethiopian Airlines cracked down on hand luggage and my bag came in just under their draconian seven kilo limit.

Not all of Steve Jobs’ products have had a positive effect on the way I travel. While I appreciate being able to travel with most of my music collection in my pocket – calling up some obscure Ethiopian jazz track should the whim possess me – I also miss an old pre-departure ritual of trawling through LPs and CDs and making tapes of the albums and tracks I decided were essential for that particular journey. I’d always make ten tapes. It was all the space I could spare. And I’d always be sick and tired of them by the end of my journey. But each of those songs are indelibly linked to a particular time and place. You don’t get that when you have close to 10,000 songs on shuffle.

And don’t get me started about people using their iPads to take photos. It’s wrong and it’s sad and it has to stop now.

I worry too that we are becoming too dependent on our i-devices, planning and booking our journeys to the nth degree, and robbing ourselves of serendipitous discoveries and the simple joy of getting lost. That we spend far too much time staring at our 5 x 7 cm instead of looking up and soaking up the wonders of the real world around us.

The good news is that smart phones still come with an off switch. As Steve Jobs said himself in a commencement address to students at Stanford University in 2005, “Your time is limited, don’t waste it living someone else’s life.”

But I tell you what. When a smart phone gets you a seat on a train with a power point it’s worth its weight in gold.

Even though it is said same smart phone’s crappy battery that makes you need the power point in the first place.

The whirligig of promotional duties continue here in Kenya. This morning I was up at 6am to appear on one of Nairobi’s more unusual talk shows. One set in a matatu.

Basically, a brightly coloured matatu, fitted out with cameras, drives out to the suburbs of Nairobi and the presenters try to convince punters to take a free ride into town. Then, on the way into town, the punters take part in a discussion about a topic for the day with a surprise guest before being dropped off at a convenient city centre location.

Today the topic was the reading culture in Kenya. And the surprise guest was me – in my capacity as a leading world expert of the reading habits of Nairobians. (I was regarded as something of an expert on True Love twenty years ago.)

It’s a great concept and I had a lot of fun. It was hard to convince people on board at first. They were naturally suspicious of a van circulating their suburb offering free rides. But once they got on board they got into the spirit of things. Even after being asked to take a solemn oath that Matatu TV could do what the hell they wanted to with the footage.

The general consensus seemed to be that there weren’t enough hours in the day and that books were expensive. And by the time kids finished school they were so sick of books they didn’t want to look at books again. Indeed, there’s a tradition here of having a book bonfire to celebrate finishing your studies. Which is all a bit Kristellnacht for my liking.

So, all round an informative, fun and surreal morning. The young rasta man was worth the price of admission alone!

Ben Okri and Hari Kunzru. Literary legends. Fellow Storymoja Hay Festival guests.

And I got them to pose with me next to a sign about public urination.

I guess that’s just the kind of guy I am.

Research has shown it’s not an ancient Chinese proverb after all but rather an ‘Orientalism’ made up in the 1800′s and legitimised when John F Kennedy used it in a speech in Cape Town.

Regardless, it sprang to mind over my first two days in Nairobi. My arrival coincided with a kidnapping, a murder and a pipeline explosion. Not to mention my flight over being diverted to Rome because one of the passengers took a turn.

It seems that I have been ‘cursed’ to travel in interesting times.

No change there, then.

But before I leave I want to leave you with another guest blog about the Kenyan capital. This time from AiDeeDystopia.

Enjoy.

Now imagine you are landing in Nairobi a night like this. From the windows of the Boeing you see the red-orange beacon flickering on the wing. And below is the capital shimmering with stars. The nose tips and the Boeing body dives in. Close up, your eyes range over the assortment of switched on tubelights and turned on TV’s, trying to peek further into the underlying life of the Nairobi world and hoping, before the undercarriage hits the fine tarmac, to spot through an open window, in a split second, the steaming beef and vegetables being scooped out of the pan.

And when you come out of the airport there is suddenly daylight. You don’t know why. A taxi comes along and you take it. As it moves you hear the faint drone, from downtown, of the bipolar bible men who shout into traffic lights on Kenyatta Avenue and speak in Ecclesiastes.

Taxi man tells you arrival at the hotel is going to take a while because the new double decker flyovers coming out from the traffic fizz on Uhuru (like big, wide, flat and curving grey straws) are not yet ready to suck in the cola of heavy traffic.

He says “Call me Nairobi traffic na mimi ni yule yule, hapa hapa, huku huku, sibadilishi wala sibadiliki.” (“I am the horns of Toyota, the engine purr of Probox, the squeak of engineless mkokoteni that is laden with cockerels tied at the legs and packed for the slaughter at dinner, and bunches of bananas for the kiosk; I am the industrial R&B blasting from the matatus that roll in the deep with Adele; I do not change my underwear and neither does my underwear change me.”)

Your taxi man is simply a collection of roundness: soccer ball head, tapeworm stuffed potbelly, crude oval legs. He smokes a cigarette and sometimes chomps on Cadbury’s chocolate. Your taxi man gradually eases you into downtown.

A white capped policeman stands alone on a packed highway, bites into his walkie talkie, and eyes a mob lynch on Kenyatta Avenue.

The cars are so many you smell gasoline.

Your taxi man has a problem easing you out of downtown.

This means the sun is now dropping at 5 o’ clock.

Your taxi man says “Call him Nairobi Sun. He is cutting downtown into shapes of his girlfriend, the dying and slanting Miss Day Shadows – these unsheathed KICC long nails of hers and her Eye & Em long fingers and her Lonhro long legs. You see Miss Day Shadows’ parts arranged almost parallel, block and street upon block and street. You cast them like her too, here at this edge of my taxi. Then this section where too many of us are coming out of caves of Tusky’s and Info-Touch Cyber’s and Mohammed Ibrahim’s Assorted Stalls, so we have to Stand On Zanzibar whilst waiting to make our way out of here please. Maybe you were expecting a forest designed by Ernest Hemingway but it is mega-pixel perfection only spoiled by a run over dog, or a sprawling garbage heap vultured by Marabou Storks, or some half-human street urchin oozing mucous and swarmed all over by flies, or a City Council litter bin stuffed with expired and yellow certificates of vaccination.”

You are now looking at the legs of this blue chip damsel walking down Kenyatta Avenue. At her high heels which are faux suede with peep toe fronts, ruffle ruched around the front keyholes, and they have back zipper closures, and comfy cushion footbeds, and ribbed soles, not to mention the one and a half inch platforms and five inch heels, fuschia coloured.

You look at the footwear of your round taxi man, he wears tyre sandals. That is sandals made from the hide of car tyres. Somewhere along the trip he tells you how his wife washed his feet and bandaged them at the end of a long day when he first tried his new sandals because the texture of their car tyre hide blistered his feet, made them bleed.

It is almost night, the beginning of a Friday evening. Your taxi man has almost reached your hotel. Nairobians are out of their offices, are in their cars and are going home. Headlights everywhere.

He says “They are going home, man.”

They go home and switch on their tubelights, turn on their TV’s, activate their microwaves, boot their laptops; open their fridges and bring out the banana yoghurts; slosh the pans with the olive oil and throw in the veggies and beef. Stir fry and serve.

LINKS
Storymoja Hay Festival
AiDeeDystopia
More than you need to know about injera

I love this pic from my talk at the Wonky Cock at the Shambala Festival. I look like a Reverend from the Deep South imploring my congregation to “Feel the power of the Lord!”

Truth be told, I was probably telling the audience about Mirindi’s toilet in Tirane, a story from The Wrong Way Home.

You know the one. Where I visit his toilet and the walls are papered with pages from Penthouse Forum on one side and The Book of the Mormons on the other. You’d don’t? You really ought to download a copy of the book for your Kindle right now!

The pictures come courtesy of The Adventurists who have a blog post about the Wonky Cock talks here. I must thank them again for inviting me to speak at the festival. It was a load of fun.

LINKS
The Wrong Way Home
Buy The Wrong Way Home eBook
The Adventurists
The Adevnturists rouse Shambala’s mighty Wonky Cock

It’s not something I’ve done before but I thought “Why not?” These guys are flying me over to Nairobi and putting me up so it’s the least I can do. (It doesn’t hurt that the blogs they’ve sent me are really pretty good.)

The first is from a guy who goes by the name of Just Sham It who describes his blog as a “fusion of misanthropy, harsh truths and subtle hope.” His post is called The nature of a Nairobi minute. Enjoy!

“Sunrise painted an alien orange hue due to industrial area fumes.

Waking through nocturnal nights and sleeping through daydreaming days.

Sky blue hyenas roam the streets scavenging everything they can sniff out.

Their bellies bigger than their empathy.

Crystallized corruption clogs our congested noses.

The predations of Dr. Mat Atu and their symbiotic little makangas rule the roads with raging authority.

Wildebeests migrate from home to work on a twenty four hour cycle. Pavement psychopaths born every minute wielding plastic bag weapons.

Worker monkeys endlessly tap the keyboards of high powered computers.

Artistic meerkats clamber in and around Alliance Française spitting out their colourful wisdom into capsules of timeless travel.

Giraffe-like merchants trade their wares in shops full of hopeful business, their necks always strained for the next sale.

The snakes sickeningly slither and coil themselves around parliamental pillars of power while whispering with poisonous tongues and dreaming of white house views.

Lawyer spiders spin webs too thin to capture anything significant in. They’re just there for show.

Outside, the religion of capitalism takes over in the financial city. Money becomes a modern day God as people line up to pray at the temples of banks, confessing at ATMs.

Chinese storks wearing shiny hats coordinate infrastructural construction.

A big facelift for the city with a giant injection of Chinese botox.

The kids play the streets with wide smiles, skinny things with little limbs.

Large metallic pterodactyls fly in and out of JKIA and Wilson airport having eaten a belly full of tourists.

The four spires of I&M building look like they’re about to harness some massive electric discharge from the ominous dark clouds above.

At night, the young and rich rabbits come out to do what rabbits do best. Nightclubs overflow with aggression and lust.

Vixens walk the streets wearing tantalizing expressions, shouting out dirty thoughts.

Smooth cats run affluent bars and clubs, selling alcohol to lull the masses into a sense of social hierarchy.

Old vultures sit atop the building of society giving out rotten advice.

Crocodilian crooks drag their way across the vulnerable underbelly of the city spilling the blood of rabbits, meerkats, giraffes, monkeys, wildebeest, vixens and smooth cats alike. The snakes are never affected. They just slither into the cracks. The vultures are never affected either. They just spread their wings and make contact with the wind.

The sky blue hyenas sit back and laugh at it all.”

Link: Just Sham It – Dirge of the City