There is a single non stop flight each week from Fiji to Hawaii which I had decided to book seats on when we were still in Australia and which carries us in less than six hours to a place that that is American in law but not entirely in spirit. What did I feel when we stepped off the flight late in the evening, passing easily through US immigration with a smile and then taking a taxi in the warm humidity, past neon lights, tall apartment blocks and west coast highways? A mix of emotions; ironically at home despite being in the middle of the Pacific Ocean while at the same time conscious of the warnings from some friends that we would be disappointed if we didn’t visit the other islands. But I was tired after traveling for so long and needed some time by my self to walk without purpose in a new city, to sit at a sidewalk cafe and observe life around me, have a massage if I felt like it, and if America is young, then this part of it is even younger, having joined the union in 1959 so there is an overwhelming optimism in the air despite the gloomy politics.

Our hotel was in the center of Honolulu and was a 1950’s example of the forward thinking and commercialism that defined mid-century US culture, some might call it kitsch or vulgar but I don’t, I respect the energy and optimism of that time even if it seemed sometimes like we had stepped out of a 1950’s post card or a scene on a Hawaiian shirt. It took a while to negotiate a good room, one that overlooked the central pool and steps from the tiki bar where vacationing Americans hung out for most of the evening drinking sweet alcoholic cocktails and fried finger food, it wasn’t long before we joined them. The best part was visiting an adjoining secret bar which was full of scantily dressed younger people, a backdrop of R & B and rap music, the first I had heard for a long time and already a fitting return to US culture.

Hawaii has a huge reputation to live up to. The famous TV series of the 1970’s portrayed its glamour and danger in a way that was completely unconvincing to a cynical teenager but was hard to look away from the fast cars, beaches and girls. When it first came out we watched with a black and white television and there was something compelling in the deep shadows and bleached sunlight, but when we eventually upgraded to a color television it was paradoxically even less realistic, at least for those of us watching under heavy grey rain clouds in England, our new TV delivering highly pixelated images of chemically blue skies, roaring Oceans and bronzed, sunglass wearing, gun slinging, too cool protagonists. It must have stuck in my memory as I always associated the state with that of an alternative world, one that I could never connect with.

It has soft goodwill, friends who have been here love it and talk about their vacations with hushed reverence. We reluctantly agreed to stay in Honolulu and take day trips, staying on Oahu. We had a loose agenda, a day snorkeling, another hiking on the northern part of the Island and a visit to Doris Dukes house “Shangri La” a place that was extraordinarily difficult to procure tickets for and we only did this by setting an early morning alarm clock when we were in Sydney.

One day we joined a cruise from the bay on a sail boat to snorkel with turtles. On the way out to the Pacific we had been told that there was a chance that we might see one of the late migrating whales heading back to Alaska. They make the journey here to Hawaii to mate, feed and get warm, escaping the harsh northern winters. About 30 minutes into the sail a cry went out and a plume of water could be seen about half a mile away, we turned in pursuit and then silence for about another ten minutes before miraculously seeing the whale rise from the Ocean and slam his tail onto the waters surface. It was a magical thing to behold, to share the seascape with one of these giants. More surprisingly was how close it was to the City, which we could see to our right bustling and restless. We turned back towards it and settled in an area already populated by about seven similar boats, put on our masks, snorkels and fins and jumped in. Almost immediately a turtle fearfully bolted past us and that was it….no more Ocean life but plenty of humans in the water, a group speaking Japanese, it was too crowded for me, or perhaps it was the absurdity of floating in the Pacific surrounded by a hundred or so people with the competing Japanese, European and American languages ringing in my ears, so I swam back in the increasingly chilly waters to the boat for a drink.

On another occasion we took an Uber to the west of the Island to hike up a well known trail that gave views over the Pacific. When we arrived it was clear that the trail wasn’t “easy” as promised but the opposite, requiring ropes at certain points to help you across steep rocks. Just as we reached our first view of the Pacific it was obvious that a storm was on its way, a milky sheet of rain was clearly moving across the Ocean in our direction, but Mary pressed on as I looked for shelter. Fortunately it was warm and I had a beach towel to cover me, but others were making their way down the trail quickly. They had inside knowledge of what happens on sudden downpours like this….the path turns rapidly to mud, with the addition of slippery rocks it becomes trechourous and it look an uncomfortable hour to negotiate back to the road safely, but we were covered in mud from frequent slips. We walked to the main road and then down slipways to the Ocean where we undressed and washed our clothes in the aggressive waves, letting them dry in the sun, before walking onwards to the beach and then lunch ion local town.

Our visit to Shangrila prompted conflicting emotions for me. We met in the museum of art in Honolulu which held an impressive collection of twentieth century art and then took a mini bus to a suburb at the edge of the city. The home itself is very private from the road, but opens up to the sea as it is built into land that gives extensive ocean front views. Doris Duke built this house to be used as a winter residence. Its components come from all over the world – and reflects here love for Islamic and Hindu art. But its not done in an academic manner or has any pretension stop be a museum of the highest quality – its an exercise in style. The other visitors dwelled over these artifacts and the glamour while I walked down to the edge of the garden overlooking a small cover which contained the fierce currents and waves channeled by the sea; there was a sign saying no access and swimming prohibited and surrounding this was a group of teenage boys in defiance, diving in. The house was indeed beautiful and the commitment to making it impressive, but she had the wealth to do this – money obtained from tobacco and the haunting of millions early deaths from lung cancer. Although Doris Duke, at the time the richest girl in the world, and someone who did some very admirable things in her, has a legacy tarnished by her fits of anger and the well reported death of a former employee yet we were all complicit in our silence and respectfulness; cynicism and politics apparently has no room here in this already over furnished place.

I was grateful for a few days in the city, walking with Mary to her Yoga, eating a Poke Bowl or Sushi in the evenings, taking the time to amble to the beach and photograph the surfers. I enjoyed the bars overlooking the Ocean with their outcast clientele, outrageously tattooed bar tenders, strangely I felt like I fit in.

Late March, early April is off season for tourists in this South Pacific Island for a singular reason; the weather is unpredictable, passing from the rainy season to the more desirable, or at least most expensive, days of un-interrupted sun. So a good time to be here, with fewer tourists and only a few brief but welcome, bursts of rain which take place normally in the evening hours or during the night. We had arrived from Auckland on a quick Air New Zealand flight that took us into Nadi airport on the main island of Fiji, Viti Levu, and then on by Taxi to a resort hotel in Denarau, a stepping stone before moving out to one of the smaller Islands in the South Pacific Ocean by ferry.

The taxi driver gave us our first Fijian history lesson being a fourth generation resident of Indian decent. This community is the second most populous section of society making up 38% of the population, arriving after 1879 as indentured laborers to work on sugar plantations to replace the existing slave workers. In the period between 1879 and 1916 over sixty thousand were brought over from India and most never left, changing forever the social fabric of these islands. The early laborers suffered harsh conditions and I suspect realized in time that theirs was simply a different kind of slavery, working long hours in formidable heat. Eventually they became landowners themselves, integrated into the islands culture and created businesses but it wasn’t until the early 1960’s before they gained representation in Parliament, still today the relationship between the Indigenous people of Fiji and the Indians is not harmonious. Our driver talked rapidly and proudly about his home, showering us with facts including one often repeated – there are 333 Islands in Fiji but only about a third are populated. Eventually, with some urging, he talked about his frustration over the political inequality. He also mentioned his fears of the Chinese entrepreneurs who build large commercial buildings without any sensitivity to the landscape, an almost universal fear of the Chinese was heard throughout the Southern hemisphere on our travels. Our short drive that had started with optimism had, I fear thanks to my questioning, made him a little withdrawn by the time we arrived.

Our hotel in Denarau was a little nondescript, a generic Hilton, furnished in the 1970’s and could have existed anywhere in the world. Fortunately it was for only one night and we took advantage of its location on the edge of the Ocean and ate outside….I walked around the property and into the neat and clean gated community surrounding the international Hotel brands. We had been warned by our driver about the multi million dollar homes which smugly peeped at us from between the thick vegetation on the narrow side walk, most had yachts docked on the canal at the foot of their properties.

The ferry took us out into a still Ocean and within about a half and hour we saw the first of many low lying Islands, I was struck by the contrast of the green of the land and the emerald purity of the water, the tranquility of the sea. It was a view I had seen many times before, we all have, it’s on our screen savers, a backdrop to commercials and movies becoming something beyond itself. Yet remarkably many of the other passers were absorbed on their phones while passing these volcalic islands, a place where ultramarine meets aquamarine, it took a moment to realize that one of the key pastimes in a resort like this was observing, usually critically, the other guests.

We made one stop before reaching our own Island resort, Tokoriki, to drop off and pick up those using a beach club on one of the smaller islands. Looking down into the water as we slowed and docked the ferry, I was awestruck with its clarity, for an absurd moment it seemed possible to reach down and drink it, but to observe the finest details on the reef, the radically shaped corals as well as schools of fish, their luminosity was overwhelming and beyond anything I’d seen underwater before or imagined existed.

There is a moment of theater, or perhaps comedy, when arriving at Tokoriki. We were met from the small dingy (trousers rolled up inelegantly, sandals in hand to cover the last few wet steps onto the sand) by the staff of the hotel on the beach, one of them dressed in the costume of the indigenous peoples, a dress made out of grass, holding a spear and large conch shell. For the petite, almost skeletal, Chinese girls it was a selfie opportunity not to be missed, and we looked on with complex feelings, something between contempt and envy at the pale translucence of their skin, their youth and innocence, but mainly the shameless narcissism. These apprehensions would assert themselves throughout our trip with Asian, American and European tourists apparently obsessed with their own image; multiple costume changes, videos taken from cameras or phones with the an empty beach or garish sunset as an only partially credible backdrop. One aspect of our arrival was authentic however, the welcome songs from the staff with lovely, sophisticated harmonizing which possessed heartfelt conviction, although towards what aim? we could only guess.

The days on the Island resort took on a pleasingly formulaic pattern; decisions about where to eat, whether to snorkel, sunbath, hike or read in the shade…..and it was the time in the Sea that gave us most meaning. From the beach we could walk and swim out to the reef, less than a hundred meters away, and there dive deep into the waters to get momentarily lost in the labyrinth of its ecosystem. On one occasion Mary tugged at me to see something which turned out to be (I found later) a reef shark passing us with indifference. In the rocks were startling, Yves Klein blue starfish and voluptuous corals looking healthy and unbleached; alive. But all this came at a cost if the timing of the dive was wrong, you had no alternative but to climb out of the water in low tide when the corals cut your feet, a lesson quickly learned and not repeated.

One day we took a boat with another couple and their child to a nearby Island, Modriki, whose moment of fame came from being the location used in Tom Hanks film Castaway. We took the opportunity to snorkel in deeper open water and enjoy the Oceans quiet. Before that I asked the main guide about shark attacks, a mild concern for those of us from the Spielberg generation, and he told us of several encounters while spearfishing from the main island, the sharks being more interested in the fish caught and held around his waist, bleeding into the water. But it is the barracudas that he fears most and so he carries a menacing diving knife which he claims has been used in self defense on several occasions although quietly I remained skeptical, speculating on how many of these apocryphal tales have been told to wide eyed and slightly fearful tourists like myself.

It was hard not to be intrigued by the all Fijian staff, by their natural beauty and by a certain androgyny or at least lack of machismo in some of the men, who wore flowers behind their ears, an old tradition, spoke gently and moved elegantly between our dining tables. The people of Fiji have existed for over 3,500 years, their earliest ancestors originating from Asia, what we call Taiwan today and Southern China. But their world was transformed 250 years ago with the arrival of the first Europeans, disrupting and transforming thousands of years of their civilization and so it’s impossible to ignore the trauma that Fijians have experienced in this time. The additional arrival of Indian immigrants has already been mentioned, but it is the arrival of disease that mostly impacted their lives, with the majority of the islands inhabitants being wiped out by germs rather than through fighting.

It was the arrival of the nineteenth century Europeans which must had terrified the people of Fiji in the early 1800’s. There is one character in particular that personifies the savagery that took place in those times, a Scandinavian adrift in the Southern hemisphere, appropriately it turns out, named Charlie Savage although his real name is likely to have been Kalle Svensson. Shipwrecked off Fiji, he came onto the Island with the rest of the crew, except one who died in the wreck, and with sufficient weaponry to impress the locals. The destiny of his surviving shipmates has been lost to time, or more accurately it is dependent on the frustrating unreliability of oral histories, in all likelihood they were killed and eaten, cannibalism being a common fate in those days. This brutal act was consequential, the sailors having a grim revenge in their afterlives delivering the first of many microbes that over time would devastate their murderers. At this time a ship of sailors would likely harbor syphilis, gonorrhea, tuberculosis and influenza but it was measles, contracted by a self proclaimed king who visited Sydney, that originated the first major pandemic in 1875, killing a quarter of the population.

Savage was able to persuade the chiefs of his value as a warrior and the superiority of guns over clubs so was spared as a war time asset. There one story frequently repeated about Savage; he took a canoe upriver to a village massacring most of the unarmed locals utilizing his musket so ruthlessly that the few survivors used the dead bodies as a shield as the river turned crimson with blood. So if you, like me, are believer in cross generation trauma, it is hard not to look at the hotel staff in wonder at their resilience surviving weaponry, disease and cruelty. This notion of the South Sean Islands being a haven of peace and innocence prior to the arrival of the Europeans has been the stuff of urban legends for centuries. The French painter Paul Gauguin, hearing whispers in Parisian bars from returning seamen of a place of endless sunshine and of the loving, carefree nature of the women living there, persuaded him to move to the neighboring Island of Tahiti. The truth is a little harder to bear, these islands were in a constant state of warfare and the battles were brutal, should you be on the losing side you would not be expected to survive.

We gained more insight into the lives of the hotel staff when taking a fifteen minute hike over the hill to a remote “hidden” beach on the other side of the Island. To access to the path it was necessary to go past the staff quarters, small squalid mobile homes, where they hang out with beers in the yard. It was a little voyeuristic seeing them like this, out of uniform in jeans and teeshirts, and both sides a little embarrassed by the unexpected encounter, the unsaid disparity in our circumstances. Once the hill had been crossed there were a couple of shanty dwellings, made from found scrap materials, surely frail and vulnerable to even the mildest of storms that might pass. They were inhabited by locals it was our first real contact with Fijians that were not in the tourist business, who smiled at us patiently, were tolerant of our interest in the meal they were cooking with smoke coming from the underground oven but I felt were glad to see us go.

We did leave the Island, after ten days of excellent food, weather and hospitality. On the boat journey back to mainland, crammed with the other guests, again the selfies and the posing – a perfectly calibrated version of their holiday to be shared with the hundreds (thousands?) of on line followers. Yet I was being too hard on them, there is a difference between traveling and vacationing, the latter is about switching off your mind while the former is the opposite; to absorb the details, be aware of the lack of parity between ourselves and the locals in terms of our wants, cultures, lifestyles, and then to leave with the dispiriting realization of the asymmetry in our level of happiness.

New Zealand is, we were told by several people prior to our visit, “good” at tourism. Many were from Australia – a short trip for them – but we struggled with planning our visit; the North Island or the South Island? Hotels or Air BnB? Which cities to visit, which to avoid? two weeks or four? A lengthy guide book didn’t help….it confused us more, leading us to wonder if everyone views this country with a kind of tentativeness, a reserve perhaps or simply an excess of politeness? Most people agree on its natural beauty and extraordinary topography, a geologists, photographer and outdoor enthusiasts dream. Its visual drama was sculpted by the islands volcanic nature which remains ever present from natural hot water springs to the earthquake devastation in Christchurch, it is a pair of South Pacific Polynesian islands still in motion; unsettled, unfinished and largely unpopulated.

We decided on comprise, to spend three weeks first touring the Southern part of the North Island (based upon a recommendation by a drunken acquaintance in a Sydney pub who couldn’t stop talking about Lake Taupo) and then to cross the Cook Strait by car ferry to the South Island where we would explore its northern region. It would mean missing the tourist pocket of Queenstown and the Fjords in the South and the less visited lovely beaches at the top of the North Islands which we both regretted. Next time perhaps.

Driving many miles across the two Islands I became aware of how little I knew of this country – It was place that had an unfair reputation when I was growing up in England as somewhere you went if you you couldn’t succeed at home, almost a statement of defeat and derision, an attitude that has reversed completely now with a more enlightened generation. I imagined small British communities where people built closed communities for themselves and relived their Northern European culture and cuisine on the other side of the world, amongst the wildness of the indigenous peoples and fierce creatures in the water.

Its our education system of course, and all the casual information we receive, accumulate and pass on that creates this bias, our deep prejudices, it’s a miracle that we make any sense of the world. I was reminded of an artist from England, Emma Kay, who had a moment in the 1990’s. Her work was centered around memory, she would use text and drawings to reveal the extent and limitations of her own knowledge, tackling topics like the work of Shakespeare or a map of the world. Sometimes humorous, other times sad, others impressive – a worthy exercise in humility and one which was much on my mind on the initial stages of the journey. My New Zealand could be written on a a single page; the All Black Rugby team with its Mauri war dance, the recent Earthquakes, the use of its landscape for the Lord of the Rings Movie franchise, its strict rules during the Covid epidemic, its recent female Prime Minister who was popular oversea’s but not so at home, but did I know how young the Island was? the extent and composition of its wildlife? Its culture? the answer was no to each of these questions.

We arrived in Auckland and checked into a boutique hotel with an optimistic, although perhaps reckless, policy of an open bar which provided our first revelation; that the best wines being made here are seldom found elsewhere. The most common Sauvignon Blancs from Marlborough in the South Island, such as Oyster Bay, are mass produced and distributed widely but most stay home and are enjoyed by the locals. The city of Auckland itself provided little interest for us, reminding us of Seattle both visually but also in its climate and temperament, leaving us cold as we were in search of the unfamiliar. Despite the initial disappointment with the city, we did strike up conversations with the locals who were quick to offer suggestions for the trip and had both genuine interest on our journey and a deep well of pride in their country. One surprise was the shortage of rental cars and so we ended up reluctantly with a tiny, high mileage, Toyota that we thrashed unashamedly throughout the country, half wondering if it was going to make it through the steep climbs and windy roads. Rarely have I felt so relieved on returning a rental car, only part of that was the sense guilt of its harsh treatment.

Our first stop was a lodge overlooking Lake Taupo a drive of about three hours south of Auckland. The famed beauty of the landscape was slow to reveal its self to us, an hour or so of suburban homes and industrial sites, but then the roads narrowed into single lanes and twisted around rugged, dense green hills as we approached the lake. Stepping out of the car we were overwhelmed by the perfection of the landscape. Surrounding us were high mountains, including “Mount Doom” from Peter Jacksons version of Lord of the Rings and in the distance the vast freshwater lake, the largest of its kind in the Southern Hemisphere.

Arriving at the cabin we greeted by a pair of fierce looking dogs who within a minute became firm friends and then keen playmates within a few more, leaping to catch a ball that I found in the grass. The sunset made fools of us, trying to catch its colors and changing moods with cell phone cameras as it slipped below the horizon. The next day we took a Catamaran onto the lake itself and saw the sundown from the waters edge, a boat with good natured passengers from all parts of the world, many of whom stripped down to swimsuits and leapt into the water which was a little to cold for us. We left Taupo reluctantly stopped at a small former colonial town called Whanganui, a perfectly pleasant but forgettable town, where we again boarded at an AirBnB for a night. Driving was relaxed with very few other cars on the road at times and so it didn’t take long to become accustomed to the dramatic nature of the landscape, with large scale boulders, the residue of eruptions thousands of years ago, scattered across the landscape like careless litter.

We drove further south to Wellington, a city defined by its topography; a harbor surrounded by steep hills where the most prosperous people live with spectacular views of the water and its famous sea passage, a rare case of a place named after James Cook, separating the two Islands. We had met one of these home owners in a thermal bath by Lake Taupo who, when finding we were headed to Wellington, invited us to their home which overlooked the Sound. An interesting couple; she had been a TV announcer on daytime Television and is recognized on the street, as she told us modestly, by the unemployed and elderly housebound. And her husband, clearly from a wealthy family as he pointed down to his buildings in the city center, who in his youth was an Olympian rower for New Zealand, competing in Mexico City and Tokyo in the 1960’s.

The car ferry was initially uneventful but as soon as you pass into the clutches of the Sound it became remarkable to see how dramatically close the ferry was to the shore. Dolphins greet you, swimming by the side of the boat to screek’s of delight from children. Upon disembarking the drive south takes you past the vast Marlborough vineyards with seemingly endless fields of regimented vines, and because it was getting cold, most were protected from the nightly chill. Our first destination was the town of Nelson and a nineteenth century house once owned by an early landscape photographer. The town center itself was largely new, and without much interest for us other than the naming of the streets after the English seafarer – Nelson – and novelists of his period, almost comically so, with names like Vincent Street, Nile Street, Hardy Street and Bronte Street, the list went on.

Throughout the trip I had been reading biographies of James Cook, partially because this part of the planet owes so much to his cartography, and partly because he is so misunderstood here. In Australia in particular I had conversations with highly intelligent people who found it inconceivable that he was someone with a kind nature and approached the indiginous people he encountered with respect and genuine inquiry. They had been taught that he was a brute and the architect for all the latter crimes against the Aborigine and Mauri Peoples and culture, a constant source of frustration during the trip. The Mauri people in particular, who have such powerful claims to the land, are in fact recent immigrants having arrived miraculously by canoe from Polynesia between 1200 and 1300 AD, only a few hundred years before the arrival of the first European, Abel Tasman in 1642. They were warriors and in possession of high intelligence and a sophisticated culture, as noted by James Cook on his arrival in 1765, and had made the most of the hostile land which had few animals at that time other than the dogs and rats brought by themselves and the bats that preceded them. The water was another story, rich in fish and aquatic life, some vicious and deadly. The European visitors and settles brought much of the wildlife we see today; Sheep of course, Cats, Goats, Pigs, Deer, Cattle but also unfavorable creatures such as Norwegian Rats and Wasps that have unsettled the equilibrium and harmony of its natural landscape.

The Mauri’s became known to the many waves of European seafarers to be unpredictable and eventually hostile, a treaty was signed between the new European settlers in 1840 called the Waitangi Treaty, but this didn’t last long and they were forced into a process of integration and Westernization something that still haunts the population today and dominates the countries politics. They occupy a significant part of the population, about 20%, their culture is respected and their language can be heard on car radio stations, on street signs and in the names of the towns and communities.

The drive had already illustrated the stark beauty of the land, later we would discover the delights of approaching the rugged coast that border deep blue sea’s on both sides of the island. Like our nineteenth century predecessors, we too found the compulsion to photograph these views and stopped frequently on the side of the road to take them only to realize how futile it was to capture the moment in this way, so much of the experience is lost on these dull digital files; where was the sounds of the wind and birds? the burst of light on the Ocean from quick moving clouds? the gradation of light on the mountains….On one occasion we took a hike to the waters edge to see a seal colony and were astonished by the large number of these animals basking in the weak midday sun, making their bleak, harrowing cries.

The challenges we faced when planning our trip we found to be of our own making. There were in fact plenty of hotels available, many places we might have stayed had we the right information. But there are things that people don’t say about this country; it you are a visitor from Europe you may be shocked by the new towns – the lack of old buildings and the preponderance of bland high streets. If you are a visitor from the USA it is surprising to see the lack of diversity (other than the mix of Maori and European settlers) and this absence is felt particularly in its music, architecture and visual art culture none of which, at least on first sight, was particularly interesting. Instead it is a place for sportsmen and women, lovers of the natural world, not a place for introspection perhaps, somewhere where at one point we coined the phrase “beauty fatigue” to describe our feelings as we turned yet one more corner to see an exquisite tableaux.

I was relieved to watch Bali disappear into a grey-blue haze through the window of our plane as we headed south towards Perth in Western Australia. Looking back at that troubled island I made promise never to return. I’m being a bit melodramatic, truthfully it was time to enjoy western comforts offered by Australia a country that I had visited five times before over a forty year period and which I always associate with an inexplicable sense of freedom, a feeling that I’m being offered a tantalizing chance to be reborn or at least re-invented; leaving the complications, snobbery and unfairness of the old world and stepping into the new with the enquiry and optimism it seems to demand.

It’s both easy and a little lazy when you are familiar with the USA to see Perth as a kind of miniature version of Los Angeles while Sydney and Melbourne on the eastern coast as New York and perhaps Philadelphia or Washington. Perth we quickly discovered is all about the car and the beaches, which are extremely beautiful and seemingly endless with soft pale sand and nearly empty on most week days. There is a pleasant complacency about the city which houses a little over two million people but which, perhaps unsurprisingly, has grown rapidly and is considered a boom town. Its ethnically diverse mix gives the city a unique flavor and entrepreneurial energy; we found that you are likely to be served in a restaurant by young English travelers on short term visa’s, to be driven in an Uber by Indian immigrants and to be fed in most places by the Chinese. Unfortunately my experience in Perth was tainted by the habitual results of Balinese food and hygiene which kept me in bed for much of the time.

We flew on to Sydney which, like the great Eastern cities of the USA, has the advantage of being built before the advent of cars and so it is a city that accommodates our needs better than most. It streets are formed based on a desire to walk rather than to drive and to be sociable, its terraced houses are tightly squeezed together and most still retain the victorian trappings of wrought iron balconies and corrugated iron roofs, humble materials that enclose once reasonably priced homes, forty years ago the could be purchased for 40,000 dollars and today you might need to add two zeros to acquire one. I don’t want to think about it too much. It was the very modesty of the housing stock that first attracted me to the city with its cafe culture and restaurants, bookshops and cinemas all within walking distance, and I loved it mainly for that reason.

The architecture is also the way its booms and busts have been memorialized. The colonial Victorian golden age can be seen in the formality of its government buildings but that British association is increasingly unwelcome. A modern Australian has an uneasy relationship with their past history particularly with the authority these buildings project and quite correctly suggest they would be better suited to the grey sky’s of England. This is not true of the many candy colored Art Deco buildings built between the wars, frequently cinemas for apartment blocks painted in optimistic torquiose’s, pinks and pale blues which the architects must surely have known would harmonize well with deep blue shadows and under steely, cloudless skies.

We should be also grateful for the years of depression and downward business cycles as these played a part in saving what must be hundreds of miles of inner city Victorian workers terraced houses which are now exquisitely preserved, frequently by the disproportionately large gay and artist community and now, I’m guessing, are occupied by Tech and Banking millionaires and although gentrification like this is a target for vitriol in some circles, who doesn’t admire the instinct to make nice homes, functioning neighborhoods particularly when it involves keeping and improving what existed before and not erasing the past carelessly?

When we visualize Sydney however it is two structures that immediate come to mind, the Harbor bridge and the Opera house nestled in the Botanic gardens that run down to the harbor. Both have interesting stories and barely made it in their existing forms, the Opera House was designed by the Scandinavian architect Jorn Utzon who famously resigned his commission prior to the completion of the interior. It was an ambitious design and was difficult to realize but significantly more forward thinking than the other competitors who put forward what we would thin of now as bland looking, low rise modernist structures that would have visibly disappeared on the site. There are images on the web of the competitors for this commission which illustrate how close Sydney came to having an unremarkable and featureless waterfront. Utzon was in is mid thirties when he won the prize and at that time he had already rubbed shoulders with the great architects and designers of this era; Frank Lloyd Wright, Eero Saarinen, Alvar Alto, Gunner Asplund and Charles Eames. His visionary design, like all great works of art could be interpreted in multiple ways and represented sails in the harbor, whales leaping, the buds of nature….it hardly matters, it is an optimistic and dramatic form which will always be an instantly recognizable landmark, symbol even, for the country. I always love walking there on arrival in Sydney, through the Royal Botanical Gardens with its deep shades and foreign tree’s, its helpful if there is a shriek of a parrot or other unworldly bird flashing deep blue’s and green’s around us, and like meeting a celebrity, the place is always a bit smaller in reality than in your imagination. There was bitterness from Utzon when he was pushed out of the project and he never returned to Australia to see his completed masterpiece, dying in 2008, 35 years after its completion.

For me, Sydney is the perfect city. It has the right scale and proportions and just enough energy to make it interesting, but not excessively so. A city that people can walk in, get lost in and make discoveries, admire the care people take over their homes. A city of theatre, galleries and bookstores – the latter easily outnumbering New York City. One of immigrants and new diverse ambition, a place of pubs, where you can socialize at a reasonable cost, an essential component of any civilized society. In Australia they get so many things right, from the moment you breeze through Immigration, to small things like the abundance of public toilets, that are always clean and available, to large things like glorious Botanical Gardens to shelter from the heat.

We drove down the coast of Australia from Sydney to Melbourne over six days. The landscape changed dramatically once we had left the lengthy drab suburbs of Sydney and found single lane roads surrounded by tall trees and signs indicating that straying wildlife requires drivers attention. The first kangaroo’s we saw sadly were dead on the side of the road, not unlike the deer we see in New York State. It wasn’t long before we had found a lodge to stay the night and encountered them in close range and suddenly, by our second night, they were common place.. On another stop we visited an Island where Kawala bears could be seen in the wild, many asleep or at least drowsily clutching the tree branches they had climbed.

It is always a mistake to revisit a place that holds a special meaning in your life which in my case is Bali, an island I visited over 40 years ago. Other than Europe, it was my first real oversea’s destination and only then at the urging of a travel agent who had found a cheap flight to Australia and suggested casually I might want to go there. It was the very best type of travel; I was naive and more than a little afraid (yet still less than I should have been) but absorbed it all like a sponge; I came without preconceptions and found myself to be the clumsy, unsophisticated person that I always suspected I was and left with a new understanding of the possibilities of the world, an appreciation of the unique cultures and energies of the East. It was a much needed mirror for me, the cynicism of the world I had acquired at as a teenager was found to be just a pose which quickly disintegrated in these wondrous and strange surroundings. Although I couldn’t claim to have gained any deep insight on the complexities of the Island, its secret rituals and ceremonies, in those months I did start to understand myself for the first time and what I wanted to do with my life.

So I knew that revisiting Bali after four decades would break my heart and I was prepared to some degree yet still hopeful that it would not be as bad as I had heard. I warned Mary that there would be adversaries that bit, stung and might even try to eat you, but the greatest risk at least to me was the hazards of memory and nostalgia. In the South of the Island it was worst than I could ever have anticipated. We stayed initially for five days on the very tip of the Southern Coast in Uluwatu about an hour from Denpasar Airport, arriving through densely packed roads buzzing with scooters and cars. Our accommodation was selected out of romantically and aesthetically inclined goals – perched on the edge of cliff in what remains of a rain forest populated by Monkeys who are entertaining on the first brief encounter but quickly become pests. We had an open view of the Ocean and could watch the surfers far from shore, the helicopters low passes and the constant loud respiration of the sea which I fell asleep to each evening and sometimes also to the night rain on the roof. It was a remote, beautiful spot and a little treacherous to reach along a path that had slippery steep stairs and few hand rails which only amplified its somewhat eclectic nature.

Despite what people might associate with Bali, this part of the Island is no paradise, there is frenetic development all around, billboards for villas with 35 year leases being built by and sold to Europeans, Russians, Americans….and the associated garbage that covers the sidewalks and the ocean that no one seems to care about or want to attend to. A German owned restaurant we frequented for a few evenings had Russians at a table next to us one night and Ukrainians the following, all military aged men and women. For me this part of the Island was a dispiriting place and I had to force myself to look at the new buildings, embarrassed by the red earth scars in the landscape, like a motorist encountering a traffic accident knowing you shouldn’t look but cannot help yourself. These new structures are all of course of a bland international style, poured concrete, large windows in black metal frames, nothing to do with the place itself or references to local styles, vernacular traditions nor use of local materials, seeming to exist to protect the owners from its environment rather than to participate in it.

A short walk away from the main streets and down a smaller path however might take you to some of the older traditional buildings and temples and on one occasion we strayed and heard an old Balinese man playing music for himself on a bamboo instrument which generated deep, melodic sounds which resonated widely into the surrounding fields and buildings, a soundtrack that would have been familiar a hundred years ago. The temples also were things of wonder, both at once elaborate and calming, despite or because they are surrounded by all the building activity.

But how will this resolve itself…..for those locals left with their delicate, personal, elegant rituals and beliefs against the immodesty of its visitors? Those twenty somethings who come here to live cheaply and forge an alternative lifestyle, apparently based around yoga, flat whites and hedonism who blindly accepted the digital world; the QR codes, WhatsApp and the credibility of the unsubstantial new vocations; “digital nomads” and “influencers”. There is a dire downward cycle also for some of the recently prosperous Balinese; thanks to their land being sold for serious money a young middle class has arisen looking to the West for its values and obliterating two thousand years of history and culture in a single generation. When I first visited Bali women tourists were told to respect Hindu traditions of covering their legs and shoulders, this time while in Uluwato we had no choice but to laugh despairingly at the sight of a Western women walking past wearing only a g-string and teeshirt and it came as no surprise when I read about a young Russian influencer, Luiza Kosykn, who was deported after outrage over a post where she posed naked in front of a 700 year tree.

We left the over populated South Coast and travelled about seven hours to the north of the Island. It was a car ride that had optimism at it’s root, I imagined that once we had gone north of the airport we would encounter old Bali; an Island of ancient building’s, rice fields, a gentleness to the temperature and a tenderness to its landscape and to some degree this was fulfilled but not before encountering the surreal situation of traffic jams in the country side. Even the most casual observer will realize that the existing roads are not be able to cope with the level of people on the island today, how will they manage with the completion of the new buildings? However from the frequently stationary vantage point of our car we were amazed at the colors of Bali; the vibrancy of the crudely painted greens, blues and oranges on hand trucks, walls and doors, the natural, primal gaudiness of the fruit on market stands and the sumptuousness of the elderly women’s traditional garb.

Our accommodation in Banjuwedang, in the North under the shadow of a cloud smeared volcano Mount Agung, was a hugely ambitious project and generally more successful form of tropical modernism. Unlike the buildings being constructed in the South, vacuum sealed against their surroundings, these are open and generous with outside bathrooms and kitchens leaving only the bedroom closed to the more frightening aspects of nature. It is the creation of a Dutch couple who fell in love with this part of the Island and built and then built more and more of these brutalist concrete structures letting nature interact with the architecture in way that makes sense.

It is much quieter in the North West, fewer scooters and tourists and the only real break in the silence is the rattling melody of the mosque loudspeakers that dominate the town for several hours each day. But the real magic of Bali lies under the Ocean and on a couple of occasions we snorkeled at the edge of the reefs; on one side in wonder at the abundance of multicolored fish, Parrot, Butterfly, Sun, and the other Ocean side the unworldly volume and depth of the empty blue void. Finally we encountered a large sea turtle and followed it for a while, imitating is movements and speed until we both drifted and floated onwards to our own worlds.

Our flight from London to Istanbul took a little over three hours on a sparce British Airways plane, half empty on a wintery January Saturday, without entertainment unless you allow for the turbulence that shook the plane alarmingly at times, but we will survive all this as we are taking the slow road to Australia this January: short flights, what you might describe a “luxury” hotels, car services and interesting stop overs. Istanbul, the first of those, is a strategic city, one that has been regarded for a very long time as being the meeting point of Eastern and Western culture, although today it might be more accurate to say it is a place of relative peace with conflict all around; to the north across the Black Sea lies Ukraine, to its south Lebanon, Syria, Iran and Israel. Despite this, and the fact that there are many refugees, mercenaries and probably spies from wars nearby, it feels a safe and prosperous place, indifferent even to its geographic position and that is because it has been this way for centuries, more than anything you come to realize it is a city of pragmatism, acceptance and resilience.

I approached it with good intentions and only a school boys knowledge of its history and left feeling even more helpless in grasping it complexity. Months ago I had bought a book by Turkeys best known contemporary novelist, Orhan Pamuk, and a recently written history of Istanbul both of which remain unfinished, there was something too emotionally dense, complicated and claustrophobic about them both which didn’t align with my frame of mind at the time. Yet I was looking for more than a practical stop over on route to Dubai which I can’t fully articulate, a common problem for many westerners in Muslim countries, which Edward Said, another much quoted intellectual who flies above my head, has made it his life’s work to explain. I quickly came to realize that I had ridiculously high expectations when visiting a country like Turkey and a City like Istanbul and so was destined for disappointment.

There are several ways to discover a city, my favored one is to get lost, stumble across a place full of locals, gain first hand a perspective of its size and temperament, assess its architecture and the physiognomy of its people where history is truly written, wander without a goal through side streets and alleys wondering belatedly if they are dangerous or not. And as we only have effectively two days we decided to spend our first in this way close to our hotel and the second more focused on the historical (and tourist) sights in the old one across the Bosphorous which divides the city but which was once, and presumably still is, its life blood.

We tackled the new city on foot on a cold, grey late Sunday morning and found our neighborhood to be the typical collision of wealthy clothing stores and internationally known coffee shops which improbably to strive and prosper. The area closest to our hotel is apparently the new “hot spot” and early in the day it felt drab, unpopulated but later that evening at 10.45 PM we had finished our drinks and walked out to streets that were full of people, sitting on sidewalk cafes drinking tea and eating sweet cakes which left me thinking this is what a city should be; a meeting place, a magnet for different communities, an arena to for the locals to flirt and to be seen.

Our trip to the old city was to see there of the most visited sites; the Blue Mosque, the Basilica Cistern and the Hagia Sofia Mosque. The most impressive was the Basilica which was not a site of worship but an underground cistern to supply filtrated water and at one time was surrounded by greenery. It was built in the sixth century by the Byzantine emperor Justin, or more accurately by 7000 slaves, on the site of existing water infrastructure that goes back several years earlier by the Romans. Its beauty couldn’t be tempered even by the tedium of our guide, an relentless source of uninteresting data and facts, which was exhausting and paradoxically left me wanting to know less, rather than more, about the site due to its governmental or institutional bias (or lack of one) a bland monologue which would certainly be approved by anyone of authority.

On our final day we visited the Museum of Innocence, a house full of ephemera associated with Orhan Pamuk and his novel of the same name. It was a cleverly installed set of rooms which owed a lot to twentieth century artists like Hans Bellmar, Sophie Calle, Joseph Cornel and Christian Boltanski and mostly consisted of found objects presented in cabinets which were supplemented by the contemporary addition of video screens. The most interesting part of the project in my view was the modest manifesto at its entry where he speaks of museums having the air of government office about them and that his realization is that museums can speak to individuals like novels. He states that he is against these precious monumental institutions being used as blueprints for future museums. Museums, in his view, should explore and uncover the universe and humanity of the new and modern man emerging from increasingly wealthy non western nations and that the aim of big, state sponsored museums is to represent the government. It neatly summed up my view about travel; we are steered towards the monumental sites and fear that we are missing out on key landmarks and institutions and by doing this we miss the meaning of place itself.

Your view of a city is also skewed by the place or places you come from and this had an impact on my opinion of Istanbul. Three weeks before we had been in the Caribbean Island of Bequai, a week later the brassy cities of Philadelphia and New York, then the week before we travelled to Istanbul we were in the UK; Marlow, Bath, the Cotswold town of Stroud and London. The UK had enjoyed typical weather for this winter month and it felt like we were under a dome of grey sky, almost as if we were within a cloud rather than under one, for the first four days saw no sign of sunshine and that opacity made the colors of the landscape even more damp and saturated leaving a shadowless, almost magical, spectrum of dense browns, grays and greens. It may sound depressing, to be in place where the day isn’t defined by the sun, but for me the opposite was true and I rejoiced in the absolute silence walking along the Thames and greeted a fellow walker un-ironically with “beautiful day!” and received back keen agreement.

We flew from Istanbul to Dubai, a flight as long as a Marin Scorsese movie, one of my goals of this trip, a joke however that is a little outworn already. The fasciation with the city comes from it giving us so obviously a view of the future as it has started almost from zero. We had the great fortune of having a friend living here, a person in the fashion world, who guided us to a lovely Arabian cafe reminding us of the elegance of middle eastern cuisine with its honeys, mint and halumi, then a boat ride with the local workers to the gold market at night under a cresent moon which reflected sensuously in the still waters.

Later that night we were taken through a secret door in a hotel to a large beautifully dark room where four dancers dressed as a Aztec warriors (if pre Colombian women had access to underwear and fishnet stockings) who entertained us by striking poses with the agonizing backdrop of thumping noise coming from the DJ. It was impossible to converse in such circumstances so we exchanged enthusiastic smiles across the table and I tried not to look at my watch too obviously although I was relieved to be out of there into the car park and watch our friend get into her BMW sports car and drive out fearlessly into Dubia’s midnight traffic. The next day we went to an arts foundation but found that the restaurant had extraordinary food so we settled in and enjoyed the middle eastern cuisine again before, a little too shamelessly, deciding to skip the museum itself, calling an Uber and back to the hotel where we watched movies and walked around the marina. Overall there was something hard to grasp on a first visit to Dubai despite the drama of the skyline, with a few ambitious skyscrapers defining it tucked amongst the many generic new buildings, it felt very much like Miami; a place growing too rapidly in an environmentally hazardous location, it needs more time than a casual stopover like this can provide.

A few days later we were happy to be on a plane to Bangkok, a trip of a little under six hours, arriving at night. Our hotel had a view across the city and again we were faced with the inevitable westernization and urbanization of the world, with unexceptional skyscrapers and aggressively developed freeways to meet the constant demand for car traffic. We had a stroke of good luck with the news via friend that the contempory artist Sam Samore was in town and willing to show us around a little. We were joined by one of his friends, an artist from Romania, Alana Teodorescu who arrived side saddle on the back of a motor scooter – the favored and quickest way to traverse the city – who had a mission to find a pop up couture show in one of the buildings nearby. Sam knew the area well so we set out to first get a coffee and then as we wandered around the undeveloped pocket of low rise and older buildings he started jotting down the “for rent” signs as this is the best way to discover new studio’s. It had the feeling of SoHo or Shoreditch in the late 1980’s early 1990’s – already starting gentrification but in a positive way, with young entrepreneurs and artists working together to make interesting spaces. As the afternoon wore on we had cocktails in what at first seemed a lovely, light filled former hospital, which now had an abundance of taxidermy, midcentury industrial light fixtures and candles that on closer inspection turned out to be electronic and rechargeable. Despite the elegance of the low lite room I could help accept that we could be almost anywhere in the world with this level of elevated styling and the more I noticed this added dimension of fakery I couldn’t help but feel a little offended by its cunning, almost as if these objects crated over from the West were in a conspiracy against me, to spoil the authenticity of my experience. All around there were similar new places to eat, a Spanish restaurant serving Tapas populated entirely by Europeans who, like ourselves, are happy to pay international prices and comfortable with the ambiguity of it all..

The following day was wasted on a trip to the (highly recommended on-line) weekend market, a long and joyless drive to a place where there was nothing we wanted to buy. There is an over abundance of “things”, everything we can get in the west but at a fraction of the cost, and it is overwhelming to be in the midst of such consumerism even though at night when everyone is out and driving on their scooters and eating in the open air restaurant’s its exhilarating to be within the vortex of such vitality. Our final day in Bangkok was at the Jim Thompson house a silk weaving entrepreneur who died, or rather disappeared, in mysterious circumstances in Malaysia’s Cameron Highlands. His house is a group of traditional structures all painted uniformly a deep red which contrasts with the greenery all around. His collection of Asian artifacts was enviable and included antique prints, Budda’s and various china objects in display cases and it was impossible to ignore his appreciation for the craftsmanship, aesthetic and visual beauty of these local antiquities.

This trip to Bangkok was both a starting and ending point as up until this destination we had existed in a comfortable pre-booked set of flights and hotels and in some ways traveling like this protects us from places, or rather lets us place a foot tentatively into them without any serious commitment. As you as you arrive in Thailand you are struck by the numbers of Western tourists, many of them much younger than ourselves and carrying large back backs living cheaply, and I recalled a conversationinthe Hamptons with an elderly women who had frequently scuba dived across Asia fifty years ago saying that it is all now ruined. At the time my first instinct was to think that it was simply less attractive for westerners wanting to observe the combination of natural beauty, architectural monuments, a very different society from our own and sadly poverty of the locals themselves. (On the other hand it has brought them hygiene, comfort, medical services and an opportunity to improve the quality of their lives). I remember being annoyed at her comment at the time which had a colonal perspective but now I have been back to Asia I tend to agree with her for different reasons, it has been damaged by the lack of central planning; the traffic jams, the ugly high rises, the USA branded junk food and thanks to cheap airlines, the westerners (like ourselves) who dominate the restaurants and tourist sites.

From the moment we gave up our Manhattan apartment earlier this year, the months of October and November had been on my mind as spending these particular months in Upstate New York has the capacity to dispirit and disorient even the most robust amongst us. The summer would be fine; we would alternate our time between city and country, housesitting for friends in New York, accepting invitations to the beach and the knowledge that we are to close down our house on Thanksgiving and head to warmer climates in December was comforting. But these two months loomed large, partially due to reputation and partially because of past experience where we constantly fed our wood burner and fumbled to get keys in iced door locks. It was a practical fear; the cold weather I dislike with roads turning treacherously to ice, memories of our house snowed in and feeling trapped by nature but it was also the drastic change in the landscape, suddenly denuded and washed out that held most dread. The few shops and restaurants that stayed open were now populated entirely by locals who viewed us with suspicion, it has the mood of Scandanavia in the winter, where senses are deeply affected by the changing seasons which are impactful here deep in the Catskill mountains.   

But these concerns it turned out were largely for nothing, we were thrilled by a glorious October, the warmest and driest in memory. The leaves had turned as always thanks to the annual miracle where the flow of chlorophyll is blocked in branches, the tree’s somehow holding the wisdom that winter and harm is about to arrive. The resulting landscape is now dominated by reds, orange and rust to be admired by carloads of New Yorkers. We were no more sophisticated and hooed and hawed like children at a firework display, the colors this year being particularly spectacular supported by a backdrop of an almost Mediterranean blue sky which greeted us daily and so it was the memory of these shimmering colors, the soft pinks and scarlet trees that paradoxically provided us with an assurance that nature will survive both outsmarting and outliving us humans.

And then came a mainly mild November where I took my daily silent walks up and down the mountain. With dry leaves crunching under foot, new information about our immediate landscape was revealed; the neighbor’s huts, a discarded refrigerator, and trucks tire impaled in the stream by a fallen tree and then suddenly darkness by 4.30 in the afternoon. More than anything I noticed the broken stone walls that had defined barriers between small holdings long forgotten and never memorialized. At the bottom of the mountain there are a few neighbors and the sweetish smell of a woodburning fire conjured a peaceful, contented domestic scene which is at odds with the people I see passing in their trucks with Trump stickers, ignoring the fire regulations in place during these excessively dry months and perhaps rejoicing in the new lawlessness they voted for. Their woodburning smoke trailed and lingered low to the ground, I noticed, and then again weaving through the pine trees held down by their waxy needles. But it is mainly the presence of a bear which alters our relationship with the landscape and now the quiet has a slightly sinister edge, most of the birds have flown south at this time with the exception of the harsh notes from the local crows, and so any sudden sound from the woods gets my attention. All logic tells me that the female bears will be in hibernation by now and the male ones will still be around peacefully for another month depending on how satiated they are already but it doesn’t help my nervousness. And the people up here, perhaps replicating these animal instincts, turn in on themselves and indulge their interior lives, long standing invitations for dinner parties are turned down at the last moment as if social skills are now forgotten or because it is too much effort, so we are left alone in our house with only the electric light of the moon to entertain us by floodlighting our yard in an unworldly white hue.

We have taken to driving 30 minutes to a small town in Sullivan County called Livingston Manor. The road takes us along a narrow, sometimes hair-raising, road first past “Small Pond” and then with satisfying logic to “Big Pond” before modest houses and airstreams announce our arrival into the town. One morning we had to break suddenly as there was unrecognizable roadkill being picked at by a large golden eagle which stared at us for a few seconds before slowly rising with what seemed like deep reluctance, its unwieldly wings a mess of feathers, before settling in a nearby bush then watched us with a look of impatience implying that this was a tiresome act of politeness.

In late October, early November we found ourselves back in the city for two ghoulish events, the Halloween parade and the US elections. As were staying in Greenwich Village it was an easy walk to see our friend who was dog sitting in a large apartment under the shadow of Washington Square. As the evening progressed more and more people dressed in costumes passed by as we sat on the steps as it was such a balmy evening and drank negroni’s. By the second drink our friend was drunk enough to heckle passersby’s which became increasingly alarming as we weren’t the only slightly inebriated people in the Square and there was only a flimsy fence between us and as we know, joy is only a thin veneer that can quickly turn into hostility in this city. On the walk home we were imprisoned for a while by the roadblocks and mass of spectators which always irritates me while the parade goes by with the normal intense racket leaving me reeling with the pointlessness of such occasions, it’s an event I look forward to each year and then belatedly realize that I would have preferred to watch it on television.

Our luck with the weather came to an abrupt end in the second to last week of November, a snowstorm came in and we spend the night awake listening to the sound of our flat roof being pounded. The silvery velvet view that greeted us when the sun rose was at once both magical and a little nerve wrecking as we scanned the immediate surroundings for fallen trees and branches. The Wi-Fi had gone out at about midnight then the power at 4.00am leaving us without heat, water, electricity and inadvertently providing us with an insight to what life was like here a hundred years ago. We lasted one night having secured a jigsaw puzzle and trivia cards in a local supermarket which we played later that evening wrapped in blankets in candlelight, shivering, distracted and if I’m honest, a little frightened. Two heavy duvet covers protected us from the cold, we nicknamed this our “iron lung”, but in the next morning when we woke again to no running water or flushing toilet, we made the easy decision to find a room in a nearby hotel. Sometimes you have to admit you are not really country people; resilient and hardy but instead that you value community and culture, require people around you even if they are slightly crazy, need basic comforts and the wail of a police siren, the pleading of a homeless person and a lunch interrupted by a hysterical person who had lost her phone; New York City in other words.

I have left New York City once before, in 1998, loading our possessions into a truck and shipping them to the UK where over a surprising short period of time they became scattered, lost, given or thrown away, the dust of our former lives casually forgotten. But never the place itself; we lasted about three years in London, very arduous ones and so we found ourselves making every excuse to return to the USA for weddings or holidays before moving back permanently, we thought, a few months before 9/11 which broke our hearts and changed the city for good.  This time, on May 30, we had more to pack having lived in the same building for twenty-two years, even moving apartments within it on one occasion. The psychological shock is tempered a little by the level of organization and physical effort. We had agreed on the move ten months earlier but hadn’t told many of our friends, most are overly emotionally bound by the city, believing it to be the greatest, sometimes the only city in the world and regard leaving it as a sign of defeat. One wrote to me saying “don’t give up” as if our former life was an ordeal to be endured which to some extent it was.

Moving is always traumatic and particularly in my case, where I can be sentimental and maybe even a little socially vulnerable when it comes to possessions, objects can be both repositories of memories and an elaborate form of self-expression. For some of the things I own I love the fact that I know its complete history, imagine the people who designed and made it and talk about them proudly to friends like an expert from Antiques Roadshow while they feign interest and change the subject. I had heard that in some Asian cultures people on reaching 60 started offloading their possessions out of courtesy to their children and lived more simply, with fewer things around them and without the responsibility of being custodians of beautiful objects and so I concluded that ridding myself of as much as possible was the right path to take. Ten days before the move, on the spur of the moment, we decided simply to sell as much as we could, our book collections, our furniture and most of Mary’s clothes. Almost daily we had a slightly world-weary individual appear in our apartment with a notebook scrutinizing what we had and what it was worth and then entire walls of packing boxes were being loaded up into van’s or cars, or our movers were being reinstructed to deliver some items to auction houses before the journey to our home Upstate.

Our movers were from the Baltic region and had extraordinary energy. It took no time before they had assessed our packed boxes critically despite my building them for weeks in advance and announced that it would cost me another 1,500 dollars as I had predictably misjudged the amount of packages and then told me directly, almost threateningly, that they expect a tip of 30% forcing a visit to the bank and an uncomfortable pocket full cash which I carried around resentfully for much of the day. We got off to a bad start, both their truck and my car received a parking ticket from an intransigent traffic warden who resisted my arguments and expressions of frustration and so added yet more to the cost of the move.

The plan was that I would leave for our upstate house earlier in my car and wait to help them unload and instruct them where to leave the boxes. I had positioned a GPS device within the packages allowing me to track the movement of the truck so I would have some notion of when they would arrive. This would be the cause of some alarm later in the day when I saw that the truck was still in Manhattan at 5.00 pm and they had a three-hour drive ahead of them and so I was already anxious about how late and poorly lite the move into our house would be. My worries were confirmed when they arrived close to 9.00 pm on the kind of pitch black night that is only known to country dwellers and I was already tired when they viewed the steep and muddy pathway into the house. They made it clear who was in control and spent inordinate amounts of time huddled in the truck where I saw them smoking and laughing in the darkness under the orange overhead cabin light and with the brittle stars of the night sky casting a cold light over the field above us.

Eventually they started bringing boxes inside, the goodwill of the original tall mover had gone, when I first met him earlier that day in New York he was projecting efficiency and professionalism while his shorter helper was so quiet I concluded he didn’t speak English. Now the roles had reversed, the taller one was making sarcastic comments about the size and weight of the boxes and the difficult nature of the move while the shorter, was playing good cop, and lifting the heaviest pieces alone down the bank. He would emerge with a smile and make admiring comments about our house while catching his breath, hands on hip like a prospective purchaser but it was clear that he was overcompensating for the mood of his sullen partner. Eventually the cash tip was handed over, not quite 30% but still a significant amount of money and I saw them sitting again in the truck for a while and I turned out the house lights to go to sleep. A little later the porch was a chair which should have been dropped off at the auction house, I didn’t care about this minor lapse, but it typified the attitude, they must have quietly snuck down and placed it there. I woke early and started cleaning the mud that they had left throughout and rearranged the boxes and furniture, all in a slight daze as I sleep poorly alone in the countryside always conscious and a little fearful of the night noises around me.

The next day I picked up Mary in Hudson and took her for dinner, our first night without a home in the city and a new life in the country. Arriving at the house in the semi darkness I saw a large form on our pathway, at first in the dim light I thought it was a human baby but then saw it was a very large dead bird, a pheasant or a turkey with its prehistoric neck and empty gaze, I jumped to the conclusion it had been placed there by an angry neighbor – a ritual warning but then, more hopefully, that it had been just hit by a car and found its way through the fence, either way it was it was an unhappy omen I concluded as I picked it up with a shovel, distressed and surprised about its weight, and threw it on a heap away from the house. The next morning it had gone, taken by one of our mysterious night creatures; a wild dog, a bear?

I had plenty of time to think about leaving the city in our home Upstate with nothing to distract me but the sound of the wind scaping though the trees and the blackness of the forest. On one occasion during my walk I heard the sound of a dog furiously barking some way off in the dense woods leading me to retreat as it implied an encounter that I would not want. However, for much of the summer we have strayed back in the city, housesitting for friends, mainly downtown, and on one occasion in the UN tower with views across the East River and onto the art deco “Pepsi Cola” sign which casts a red spell over the cityscape.

I’m writing this on the twenty third anniversary of 9/11 and from an apartment close to when we were living in Greenwich Village at the time of the attack. There is an almost 280 degree view from my desk and with this perfect blue sky it feels exactly like it did that on that day but now with an awkward stillness and mood of expectancy, irrationally I sense the possibility of imminent danger hanging over the city, not that any of the young residents would notice as they pack the bars and cafes on the street enjoying the last warm whispers of summer in the air. What is racing through their minds? Walking down along the Hudson to see the laser memorial which was largely ignored by the throng of twenty years olds jogging in sportswear or cycling, I heard the term “Finance Bro’s” several times to describe some of these young career optimists who are living uneasily in this liberal democracy, they use this city as a playground, and I hear many have inclinations to vote for Trump. I caution myself not to sound cynical towards youth or adopt the standard complaints of the elderly, every generation critical towards the preceding ones, claiming that their youth in the city was at the best time to be there.