Neither Here Nor There - Travels In Europe Part 10

21. Sofia

I was looking forward to Bulgaria. It had been easily the most interesting, if not the most comfortable, of the places Katz and I had visited.

I remembered Sofia as being a city of broad boulevards so empty of traffic that people walked down the middle of them, stepping aside only to make room for the occasional black Zill limousine carrying Party functionaries to some dark, Orwellian ministry or other. I have never been in a more timeless city. It could have been any time in the last forty or fifty years. There were simply no clues to suggest what decade it was; the shape of the few cars on the road, the clothes people wore, the looks of the shops and buildings were all curiously uninformed by fashion.

Sofia had a dark and enormous department store called TSUM, at least as big as Selfridges in London, spread over five floors and containing not a single product that appeared to have been produced more recently than 1938 chunky Bakelite radios, big stubby black fountain pens that looked like something Lord Grade would try to smoke, steam-powered washing machines, that sort of thing. I remember standing in the television and radio department in a crowd of people watching some historical drama in which two actors wearing beards that were hooked over their ears sat talking in a study, the walls of which were clearly painted on canvas. The television had no exaggeration a four-inch circular black and white screen and this this was attracting a crowd. was attracting a crowd.

I spent almost a whole day in TSUM, wandering in amazement, not just because the products were so wondrously old-fashioned but because whole families visited it as if it were some sort of marvellous museum of science and technology. I hoped things hadn't changed.

I arrived at Sofia Airport a little after nine. The foreign-exchange office was closed and, as you cannot get Bulgarian money outside of the country, I was effectively penniless. I woke a sleeping cab driver outside the front entrance and asked him if he would take me into the city for dollars. This is illegal, and I had visions of him reporting me to two guys in trench coats, but he was only too pleased to get his hands on hard currency and took me the nine miles into the city for $10. The cab, an ancient Moskvich, was propelled by a series of smoky blue explosions from the exhaust. It would move ten feet, pause and then lurch another ten feet with the aid of a fresh explosion. We were almost the only car on the streets.

He dropped me at the Sheraton on Lenin Square, quite the grandest hotel I had stayed in on this trip, but I had been told that it was the only only place to stay in Sofia. Until a couple of years earlier it had been the Hotel Balkan, but then Sheraton took it over and the company has done a consummate job of renovating it. It was all shiny marble and plush sofas. I was impressed. place to stay in Sofia. Until a couple of years earlier it had been the Hotel Balkan, but then Sheraton took it over and the company has done a consummate job of renovating it. It was all shiny marble and plush sofas. I was impressed.

The girl at the check-in desk explained the hard currency system in operation at the hotel, which was very confusing. Some of the hotel's restaurants, bars and shops accepted only hard currency and some accepted only Bulgarian leva and some accepted both. I didn't really take any of it in.

I went straight out for a walk, eager to see the town. I was delighted to find that I remembered so much of it. There across the square was the big statue of Lenin. Facing it was TSUM, as vast as I remembered it and still clearly in business, and around the corner was the Place 9 Septemvri, a boulevard paved in golden bricks and dominated by the ma.s.sive headquarters of the Communist Party, soon to be sacked by a mob and nearly burned down. I walked down it now and plunged off into the dark and narrow streets of the downtown.

Sofia must be one of the darkest cities in the world. Only the occasional lightning flashes of a tram at the far end of a street revealed the full outlines of the buildings. For the rest there were just weak pools of light beneath the well-s.p.a.ced lampposts and a little seepage of illumination from the few bars and restaurants that were still open and doing, without exception, a desultory business. Almost every shop window was dark. None the less the streets were crowded with people, many of them evidently having just concluded a night out and now standing in the road trying to flag down the few cabs that flew past.

I made a lazy circuit of the downtown and emerged in front of TSUM. The goods in the darkened windows looked to be distinctly more up to date than on my previous visit, but at least it was still in business. This, I decided, would be my first port of call in the morning.

In the event, TSUM wasn't open when I hit the sunny streets, so I walked instead up a long straight avenue called Vitosha where most of the other main stores seemed to be. None of them were open yet either, but already long queues were forming at most doors. I had read that things were desperate in Bulgaria that people began queuing for milk at four-thirty in the morning, that the price of some staples had gone up 800 per cent in a year, that the country had $10.8 billion of debt and so little money that there were only funds enough in the central bank to cover seven minutes' worth of imports but nothing had prepared me for the sight of several hundred people queuing around the block just to buy a loaf of bread or a few ounces of scraggy meat.

When they opened, most shops posted some beefy sour-puss in the doorway who would let the customers in one at a time. The shelves were always bare. Things were sold straight out of a crate on the floor by the till, and presumably when the crate was empty the door was locked and the rest of the queue was sent away. I watched one woman come out of a baker's with a small loaf of bread and immediately join another long queue at a butcher's next door. They must have to do this every day with everything they buy. What a life.

It had been nothing like this in 1973. Then the shops had been full of goods, but no one appeared to have money to buy them. Now everyone was clutching fistfuls of money, but there was nothing to spend it on.

I went into one shop called 1001 CTOK?. There was no orderly queue, just an almost incredible crush of people around the door. I didn't so much enter of my own volition as get swept in. Inside there was a mob of people around a single gla.s.s display case, waving money and jockeying for attention. All the other cases in the shop were empty, though there were salespeople still posted behind them. I slid through the crowd to see what it was the people were so eager to buy and it was just a pathetic a.s.sortment of odds and ends some plastic cruet sets, twenty long-handled brushes with no identifiable function, some small gla.s.s ashtrays, and an a.s.sortment of tin-foil plates and pie dishes such as you get free in the West when you buy something to heat in the oven.

Clearly people weren't shopping so much as scavenging for purchasable goods. Again and again, as I ventured up Vitosha, I would peer into the impenetrable gloom of shop windows and discover after a moment that I had attracted a small crowd looking over my shoulder to see what I had spotted. But there was nothing to spot. One electrical shop I pa.s.sed had three Russian hi-fi systems, two stereo and one mono (when was the last time you saw a mono hi-fi?), but they all had k.n.o.bs missing and didn't look as if they would last five minutes.

Another shop sold nothing but two kinds of tins yellow tins and green tins, stacked in their hundreds in neat pyramids on every shelf. It was the only well-stocked shop I saw all day. I have no idea what was in the tins the labels gave no hint but I can only a.s.sume that it must have been pretty dire or they would have sold out long ago. It was the most depressing morning I have spent in a long time.

I went to TSUM fearing the worst and found it. Whole departments were stripped bare, including my beloved TV section. The premier department store in the country couldn't offer its customers a single television, radio or other electrical item. In some departments three salespeople stood by a till with nothing to sell but perhaps a small stack of tea towels, but elsewhere there would be a lone desperate salesgirl trying to deal with throngs of people because a shipment of something desirable had just come in. At one counter on the third floor a big cardboard box full of socks had just arrived hundreds and hundreds of socks, all an identical mustard-brown colour, all in thin cotton in the same size and all in bundles of a dozen and people were buying double armloads of them. I suppose you buy what you can and think about what you are going to do with it afterwards give some to your father-in-law for Christmas, swap some for a hunk of meat, reward a neighbour for queuing for you.

The saddest department was the toys one shelf full of identical, ineffably cuddly teddy bears made out of synthetic wool, two dozen identical plastic toy trucks with bowed wheels and peeling, crooked labels, and fourteen metal tricycles all painted the same shade of blue and every one of them sc.r.a.ped or bashed in some way.

On the top two floors were whole departments full of boxes of unidentifiable odds and ends. If you have ever taken apart some mechanical contraption a doorbell or a washing-machine motor and had it all spring loose on you and 150 mysterious pieces have gone bouncing in every direction, well, those pieces are what they sell upstairs at TSUM springs and cogs and small oddments of shaped metal that look as if they must fit together in some way. Scores of people were gravely picking through the boxes.

The busiest department was on the ground floor in what I suppose you would call the notions department. It was like a crowd scene in a G.o.dzilla movie after the news has got out that the monster is on his way to town. All they seemed to sell was b.u.t.tons, wrist.w.a.tch straps and ribbons, but then I saw that what everyone was queuing for was a freshly arrived consignment of alarm clocks. They were just simple, cheap-looking plastic alarm clocks, but the shoppers were clearly ready to kill to get one. The department was run by two of the most disagreeable-looking women I ever hope to see. I watched with a kind of dumb fascination. A shy-looking young man whom I took to be North Vietnamese finally reached the till and they ignored him. He held out a wad of money with an entreating look and they just dealt with the people behind him. I don't know why. Finally one of the salesladies pushed his money away and told him to clear off. The man looked as if he could cry. I felt almost as if I could too. I don't know why they were so nasty to him. But he put his money in his pocket and melted into the crowd.

Imagine living like that. Imagine coming home from work and your partner saying, 'Honey, guess what? I had the most wonderful day shopping. I found a loaf of bread, six inches of ribbon, a useful-looking metal thingy and a doughnut.'

'Really? A doughnut?'

'Well, actually, I was lying about the doughnut.'

The odd thing was that the people looked amazingly stylish. I don't know how they manage it with so little to buy. In the old days the clothes on all the people looked as if they had been designed by the manager of a Russian tractor factory. People constantly came up to me and Katz offering to buy our jeans. One young guy was so dementedly desperate for a pair of Levi's that he actually started taking his trousers off on the street and urging us to do likewise so that we could effect a trade. Katz and I tried to explain that we didn't want his trousers they were made out of, like, hemp hemp and asked him if he had anything else, a younger sister or some Cyrillic p.o.r.no, but he appeared to have nothing worth swapping, and we left him desolate on a street corner, his heart broken and his flies gaping. Now, however, everyone was as smartly dressed as anywhere else in Europe actually more so, since they took such obvious care and pride in their wardrobe. And the women were simply beautiful, all of them with black hair, chocolate eyes and the most wonderful white teeth. Sofia has, without any doubt, the most beautiful women in Europe. and asked him if he had anything else, a younger sister or some Cyrillic p.o.r.no, but he appeared to have nothing worth swapping, and we left him desolate on a street corner, his heart broken and his flies gaping. Now, however, everyone was as smartly dressed as anywhere else in Europe actually more so, since they took such obvious care and pride in their wardrobe. And the women were simply beautiful, all of them with black hair, chocolate eyes and the most wonderful white teeth. Sofia has, without any doubt, the most beautiful women in Europe.

I spent the better part of a week just walking around. Sofia is full of monuments with crushingly socialist names the Stadium of the People's Army, the Memorial of the Antifascist Campaigners, the National Palace of Culture but most of these are contained within some quite lovely parks, with long avenues of chestnuts, benches, swings, even sometimes a boating lake, and often attractive views of the green, hazy mountains that stand at the city's back.

I saw the sights. I went to the old royal palace on Place 9 Septemvri, now the home of the National Gallery of Painting and Sculpture, where I suddenly understood why I was unable to name a single Bulgarian artist, and afterwards crossed the street to have a look at the tomb of Georgi Dimitrov, the national hero or at least he was until the fall of the Iron Curtain. Now the Bulgarians appeared not to be so certain. There was some minor graffiti on his mausoleum unthinkable even a couple of months before, I would wager and you could no longer go in and look at his body, preserved under gla.s.s in the fashion beloved of Communists. I remember when Katz and I went to see it in '73, Katz leaned close to the case, sniffed in an obvious manner and said to me in a slightly too-loud voice, 'Something smell a bit off to you?', which nearly got us arrested. Dimitrov was treated like a G.o.d. Now, with Communism crumbling, people didn't even want to see him any more.

I went too to the National History Museum and the Alexander Nevsky Memorial Church and the National Archaeological Museum and one or two other diversions, but mostly I just went for long walks and waited for evening to come.

Evening was kind to Sofia. When the shops were shut the queues vanished and people took to strolling on the streets, looking much happier. Sometimes there were small political gatherings outside Dimitrov's tomb and you could see that people were enjoying the unaccustomed luxury of being able to talk freely. One evening outside the old royal palace somebody set up along a wall an arrangement of photographs of the exiled royals, King Simeon and his family. Crowds pressed to see the pictures. I thought it odd at first, but you can imagine what it would be like in Britain if the royal family had been banished forty years ago (now there's a thought for you) and people had been denied any official information about them. So suddenly now the Bulgarians could see what had become of their equivalent of Princess Margaret and the Duke of Edinburgh and all the others. I had a look myself, rather hoping to discover that King Simeon was now managing a Dairy Queen in Sweet.w.a.ter, Texas, but in fact he appeared to be living a life of elegance and comfort in Paris, so I declined the invitation to sign a pet.i.tion calling for his reinstatement.

Every evening I went looking for the Club Babalu, a nightclub where Katz and I hung out every night of our stay. That wasn't its real name; we just called it that because it looked so much like Desi Arnaz's Club Babalu on I Love Lucy. I Love Lucy. It was like something straight out of the early 1950s, and it was It was like something straight out of the early 1950s, and it was the the hot spot in Sofia. People went there for their anniversaries. hot spot in Sofia. People went there for their anniversaries.

Katz and I sat nightly in a balcony overlooking the dance floor drinking Polish beer and watching a rock 'n' roll band (I use the phrase in its Bulgarian sense) whose enthusiasm almost made up for its near total lack of talent. The band played songs that had not been heard in the rest of the world for twenty years 'Fernando's Hideaway', 'Love Letters in the Sand', 'Green Door' and people our age were dancing to them as if they were the latest thing, which I suppose in Bulgaria they may have been. The best part was that Katz and I were treated like celebrities American tourists were that rare in Sofia then. (They still are, come to that.) People joined us at our table, bought us drinks. Girls asked us to dance with them. We got so drunk every night that we missed a dozen opportunities for s.e.xual gratification, but it was wonderful none the less.

I so much wanted to find the Babalu again that I looked all over the city and even strolled out to the train station, a long and unrewarding walk, thinking that if I retraced the route Katz and I had taken into the city, I might kindle my memory, but no such luck. And then on a Friday evening, as I was strolling past the restaurant of the Grand Hotel for about the twentieth time that week, I was brought up so short by the sound of tinny guitars and scratchy amplifiers that I actually smacked my nose against the gla.s.s in turning to look. It was the Club Babalu! I had walked past it again and again, but without the awful music I hadn't even noticed it. Now suddenly I recognized every inch of it. There was the balcony. There was our table. Even the waitresses looked vaguely familiar, if a tad older. Happy memories came flooding back.

I went straight in to order a Polish beer, but a guy on the door in an oversized black suit wouldn't let me enter. He wasn't being nasty, but he just wouldn't let me in. I didn't understand why. You get used to not understanding why in Bulgaria after a while, so I continued with my walk. About twenty minutes later, after my nightly circuit of the dark hulk of the Nevsky church, I ambled back past the Grand and realized why I had been denied entrance. They were closing. It was nine-thirty on a Friday night and this was the liveliest place in town. Bulgaria, I reflected as I walked back to the hotel, isn't a country; it's a near-death experience.

I was lucky that I could retreat whenever I wanted to the luxurious sanctum of the Sheraton, where I could get cold beers and decent food and watch CNN on the TV in my room. I cravenly took all my meals there. I tried hard to find a local restaurant that looked half-way decent and could not. Sofia has the most unlively bars and restaurants plain, poorly lit, with maybe just a factory calendar on the wall and every surface covered in Formica. I did stop once at a place out near Juzen Park, but the menu was in Cyrillic and I couldn't understand a thing. I looked around to see what other people were eating, thinking I might just point to something on someone else's table, but they were eating foods that didn't even look like food all gruel and watery vegetables and I fled back to the hotel, where the menu was in English and the food was appealing.

But I paid for my comfort with a twice-daily dose of guilt. Each time I dined in the Sheraton, I was glumly aware that I was eating better than nine million Bulgarians. I found this economic apartheid repugnant, if irresistible. How can you have a country in which your own citizens are forbidden to go into certain places? If a Bulgarian was by some miracle of thrift and enterprise sufficiently well-heeled, he could go into two of the hotel's restaurants, the Wiener Cafe and Melnik Grill, but the entrances were on a side street. You couldn't get to them through the hotel. You had to go out of the front door and walk around the corner. Common people couldn't come into the hotel proper, as I could. Hundreds of them must walk by it every working day and wonder what it's like inside. Well, it's wonderful to a Bulgarian it would seem to offer a life of richness and comfort almost beyond conception: a posh bar where you could get c.o.c.ktails with ice cubes, restaurants serving foods that haven't been seen elsewhere in the country for years, a shop selling chocolates, brandy and cigarettes and other luxuries so unattainable that the average Bulgarian would be foolish even to dream of them.

It amazed me that I didn't get beaten up every time I emerged from the hotel I'd I'd want to beat me up and I know what a sweet guy I am but no one showed me anything but kindness and friendship. People would come up to me constantly and ask if I wanted to change money, but I didn't, I couldn't. It was illegal and besides I didn't want any more Bulgarian money than I had: there was nothing to buy with it. Why should I stand in a queue for two hours to buy a pack of cigarettes with leva when I could get better cigarettes for less money in ten seconds in my own hotel? 'I'm really sorry,' I kept saying, and they seemed to understand. want to beat me up and I know what a sweet guy I am but no one showed me anything but kindness and friendship. People would come up to me constantly and ask if I wanted to change money, but I didn't, I couldn't. It was illegal and besides I didn't want any more Bulgarian money than I had: there was nothing to buy with it. Why should I stand in a queue for two hours to buy a pack of cigarettes with leva when I could get better cigarettes for less money in ten seconds in my own hotel? 'I'm really sorry,' I kept saying, and they seemed to understand.

I began to get obsessed with trying to spend some money, but there was nothing to spend it on, nothing. One of the parks, I discovered one Sunday morning, was full of artists selling their own work and I thought, Great! I'll buy a picture. But they were all terrible. Most of them were technically accomplished, but the subjects were just so awful vivid sunsets with orange and pink clouds, and surreal, Salvador Dali-like paintings of melted objects. It was as if they were so far out of touch with the world that they didn't know what to paint.

The further you roam in Sofia the better it gets. I took to going for day-long walks out into the hilly districts on the south-east side of the city, an area of forests, parks, neighbourhoods of rather grand apartment buildings, winding tranquil streets, some nice homes. As I was walking back into the city, over a footbridge across the Slivnica River and down some anonymous residential street, it struck me that this really was quite a beautiful city. More than that, it was the most European of all the cities I had been to. There were no modern shopping centres, no big gas stations, no McDonald's or Pizza Huts, no revolving signs for Coca-Cola. No city I had ever been to had more thoroughly resisted the blandishments of American culture. It was completely, comprehensively European. This was, I realized with a sense of profound unease, the Europe I had dreamed of as a child.

It is hard to know what will become of Bulgaria. A couple of weeks after my visit, the people of the country, in a moment of madness, freely voted for a Communist regime, the only country in eastern Europe to voluntarily retain the old form of government.

This was 1990, the year that Communism died in Europe, and it seemed to me strange that in all the words that were written about the fall of the Iron Curtain n.o.body anywhere lamented that it was the end of a n.o.ble experiment. I know Communism never worked and I would have hated living under it myself, but it seems to me none the less that there is a kind of sadness in the thought that the only economic system that appears to work is one based on self-interest and greed.

Communism in Bulgaria won't last. It can't last. No people will retain a government that can't feed them or let them provide toys for their children. I'm certain that if I come back to Sofia in five years it will be full of Pizza Huts and Laura Ashleys and the streets will be clogged with BMWs, and all the people will be much happier. I can't blame them a bit, but I'm glad I saw it before it changed.

22. Istanbul

Katz and I went from Sofia to Istanbul on the Orient Express. I had thought that it would be full of romance I rather imagined some turbanned servant coming round with cups of sweet coffee and complimentary hot towels but in fact it was awful in every way: hot, foetid, airless, threadbare, crowded, old, slow. By 1973, the Orient Express was just a name on a rusty piece of metal on the side of any old train between Belgrade and Istanbul. A couple of years later it was discontinued altogether.

We had a compartment to ourselves as we left Sofia, but about two stops later the door slid brusquely open and an extended family of noisy fat people, looking like a walking testimonial to the inadvisability of chronic inbreeding, barged in laden with cardboard suitcases and string bags of evil-smelling food. They plonked themselves down, forcing me and Katz into opposite corners, and immediately began delving in the food bags, pa.s.sing round handkerchiefs full of little dead fish, hunks of dry bread, runny boiled eggs and dripping slabs of pungent curdled cheese whose smell put me in mind of the time my family returned from summer vacation to discover that my mother had inadvertently locked the cat in the broom cupboard for the three hottest weeks of the year. They ate with smacking lips, wiping their stubby fingers on their shirts, before sinking one by one into deep and spluttering comas. By some quirk of Balkan digestion, they expanded as they slept, squeezing us further and further into our respective corners until we were pressed against the wall like lumps of Blu-Tack. We had twenty-two hours of this to get through.

By this point on our trip Katz and I had spent nearly four months together and were thoroughly sick of each other. We had long days in which we either bickered endlessly or didn't speak. On this day, as I recall, we hadn't been speaking, but late in the night, as the train trundled sluggishly across the scrubby void that is western Turkey, Katz disturbed me from a light but delirious slumber by tapping me on the shoulder and saying accusingly, 'Is that dog s.h.i.t on the bottom of your shoe?'

I sat up a fraction. 'What?'

'Is that dog s.h.i.t on the bottom of your shoe?'

'I don't know, the lab report's not back yet,' I replied drily.

'I'm serious, is that dog s.h.i.t?'

'How should I know?'

Katz leaned far enough forward to give it a good look and a cautious sniff. 'It is is dog s.h.i.t,' he announced with an odd tone of satisfaction. dog s.h.i.t,' he announced with an odd tone of satisfaction.

'Well, keep quiet about it or everybody'll want some.'

'Go and clean it off, will ya? It's making me nauseous.'

And here the bickering started, in intense little whispers.

'You go and clean it off.'

'It's your shoes.'

'Well, I kind of like it. Besides, it kills the smell of this guy next to me.'

'Well, it's making me nauseous.'

'Well, I don't give a s.h.i.t.'

'Well, I think you're a f.u.c.k-head.'

'Oh, you do, do you?'

'Yes, as a matter of fact. You've been a f.u.c.k-head since Austria.'

'Well, you've been a f.u.c.k-head since birth.'

'Me?' A wounded look. 'That's rich. You were a f.u.c.k-head in the womb, womb, Bryson. You've got three kinds of chromosomes: X, Y and f.u.c.k-head.' Bryson. You've got three kinds of chromosomes: X, Y and f.u.c.k-head.'

And so it went. Istanbul clearly was not destined to be a success for us. Katz hated it and he hated me. I mostly hated Katz, but I didn't much care for Istanbul either. It was, like the train that took us there, hot, foetid, crowded and threadbare. The streets were full of urchins who s.n.a.t.c.hed anything you didn't cling to with both hands and the food was simply dreadful, all foul-smelling cheese and mysterious lumps of goo. One night Katz nearly got us killed when he enquired of a waiter, 'Tell me, do you have cows s.h.i.t straight onto the plate or do you scoop it on afterwards?'

One of the sustaining pleasures for Katz in the later stages of the trip was talking candidly in this way to people who could not understand him, making smiling enquiries of a policeman concerning the celebrated tininess of his p.e.n.i.s or telling a surly waiter, 'Can we have the bill, Boris? We've got to run because your wife's promised to give us both b.l.o.w. .j.o.bs.'

But in this instance it turned out that the waiter had worked in a little place off the Tottenham Court Road for thirteen years and he understood Katz's question only too well. He directed us to the door with the aid of a meat cleaver, making wholly justified remarks about the n.o.bility of Turkish cuisine and the insolence of young tourists.

With this final pleasure denied him on the grounds of prudence and a sincere threat from me that I would kill him myself if an English-speaking Turk didn't do it first, Katz spent the remainder of our time in Istanbul in a moody silence, except for growling at touts in the Grand Bazaar to f.u.c.k off and leave him alone, but this I excused on the basis of justified provocation. We had reached the end of the road in every sense. It was a long week.

I wondered now, as I rode a taxi in from the airport through the hot, airless, teeming streets of Istanbul, whether my att.i.tude would be more receptive this time.

Things did not start well. I had made a reservation at the Sheraton through the company's internal reservation system in Sofia, but the hotel turned out to be miles away from the Golden Horn and old town. The room was clean and pa.s.sably sw.a.n.k, but the television didn't work, and when I went to the bathroom to wash my hands and face, the pipes juddered and banged like something from a poltergeist movie and then, with a series of gasps, issued a steady brown soup. I let the water run for ten minutes, but it never cleared or even thinned. For this I was paying $150 a night.

I sat on the toilet, watching the water run, thinking what an odd thing tourism is. You fly off to a strange land, eagerly abandoning all the comforts of home, and then expend vast quant.i.ties of time and money in a largely futile effort to recapture the comforts that you wouldn't have lost if you hadn't left home in the first place.

Sighing, I smeared a little of the brown water around my face, then went out to see Istanbul. It is the noisiest, dirtiest, busiest city I've ever seen. Everywhere there is noise car horns tooting, sirens shrilling, people shouting, muezzins wailing, ferries on the Bosphorus sounding their booming horns. Everywhere, too, there is ceaseless activity people pushing carts, carrying trays of food or coffee, humping huge and ungainly loads (I saw one guy with a sofa on his back), people every five feet selling something: lottery tickets, wrist.w.a.tches, cigarettes, replica perfumes.

Every few paces people come up to you wanting to shine your shoes, sell you postcards or guidebooks, lead you to their brother's carpet shop or otherwise induce you to part with some trifling sum of money. Along the Galata Bridge, swarming with pedestrians, beggars and load bearers, amateur fishermen stood pulling the most poisoned-looking fish I ever hope to see from the oily waters below. At the end of the bridge two guys were crossing the street to Sirkeci Station, threading their way through the traffic leading brown bears on leashes. No one gave them a second glance. Istanbul is, in short, one of those great and exhilarating cities where almost anything seems possible.

The one truly unbearable thing in the city is the Turkish pop music. It is inescapable. It a.s.saults you from every restaurant doorway, from every lemonade stand, from every pa.s.sing cab. If you can imagine a man having a vasectomy without anaesthetic to a background accompaniment of frantic sitar-playing, you will have some idea of what popular Turkish music is like.

I wandered around for a couple of hours, impressed by the tumult, amazed that in one place there could be so much activity. I walked past the Blue Mosque and Aya Sofia, peeling postcard salesmen from my sleeve as I went, and tried to go to Topkapi, but it was closed. I headed instead for what I thought was the national archaeological museum, but I somehow missed it and found myself presently at the entrance to a large, inviting and miraculously tranquil park, the Gulhane. It was full of cool shade and happy families. There was a free zoo, evidently much loved by children, and somewhere a cafe playing Turkish torture music, but softly enough to be tolerable.

At the bottom of a gently sloping central avenue, the park ended in a sudden and stunning view of the Bosphorus, glittery and blue. I took a seat at an open-air taverna, ordered a c.o.ke and gazed across the water to the white houses gleaming on the brown hillside of uskudar two miles across the strait. Distant cars glinted in the hot sunshine and ferries plied doggedly back and forth across the Bosphorus and on out to the distant Princes' Islands, adrift in a bluish haze. It was beautiful and a perfect place to stop.

I had clearly come to the end of my own road. That was Asia over there; this was as far as I could go in Europe. It was time to go home. My long-suffering wife was pregnant with her semi-annual baby. The younger children, she had told me on the phone, were beginning to call any grown man 'Daddy'. The gra.s.s was waist-high. One of the field walls was tumbling down. The sheep were in the meadow. The cows were in the corn. There was a lot for me to do.

And I was, I admit, ready to go. I missed my family and the comfortable familiarities of home. I was tired of the daily drudgery of keeping myself fed and bedded, tired of trains and buses, tired of existing in a world of strangers, tired of being forever perplexed and lost, tired above all of my own dull company. How many times in recent days had I sat trapped on buses or trains listening to my idly prattling mind and wished that I could just get up and walk out on myself?

At the same time, I had a quite irrational urge to keep going. There is something about the momentum of travelling that makes you want to just keep moving, to never stop. That was Asia over there, after all right there in my view. Asia. Asia. The thought of it seemed incredible. I could be there in minutes. I still had money left. An untouched continent lay before me. The thought of it seemed incredible. I could be there in minutes. I still had money left. An untouched continent lay before me.

But I didn't go. Instead I ordered another c.o.ke and watched the ferries. In other circ.u.mstances I think I might have gone. But that of course is neither here nor there.

Bill Bryson's opening lines were:

'I come from Des Moines. Someone had to come from Des Moines. Someone had to.'

This is what followed: The Lost Continent A road trip around the puzzle that is small-town America introduces the world to the adjective 'Brysonesque'.

'A very funny performance, littered with wonderful lines and memorable images' LITERARY REVIEW LITERARY REVIEW Neither Here Nor There Europe never seemed funny until Bill Bryson looked at it.

'Hugely funny ( (not sn.i.g.g.e.r-sn.i.g.g.e.r funny but great-big-belly-laugh-till-you-cry funny)' DAILY TELEGRAPH DAILY TELEGRAPH Made in America A compelling ride along the Route 66 of American language and popular culture gets beneath the skin of the country.

'A tremendous sa.s.sy work, full of zip, pizzazz and all those other great American qualities' INDEPENDENT ON SUNDAY INDEPENDENT ON SUNDAY Notes from a Small Island A eulogy to Bryson's beloved Britain captures the very essence of the original 'green and pleasant land'.

'Not a book that should be read in public, for fear of emitting loud snorts' a book that should be read in public, for fear of emitting loud snorts' THE TIMES THE TIMES A Walk in the Woods Bryson's punishing (by his standards) hike across the celebrated Appalachian Trail, the longest footpath in the world.

'This is a seriously funny book' SUNDAY TIMES SUNDAY TIMES Notes from a Big Country Bryson brings his inimitable wit to bear on that strangest of phenomena the American way of life.

'Not only hilarious but also insightful and informative' only hilarious but also insightful and informative' INDEPENDENT ON SUNDAY INDEPENDENT ON SUNDAY Down Under An extraordinary journey to the heart of another big country Australia.

'Bryson is the perfect travelling companion ... When it comes to travel's peculiars the man still has no peers' THE TIMES THE TIMES A Short History of Nearly Everything Travels through time and s.p.a.ce to explain the world, the universe and everything.

'Truly impressive ... It's hard to imagine a better rough guide to science' GUARDIAN GUARDIAN The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid Quintessential Bryson a funny, moving and perceptive journey through his childhood.

'He can capture the flavour of the past with the lightest of touches' SUNDAY TELEGRAPH SUNDAY TELEGRAPH