Global Bars; a travel special
A fresh-faced wharf rat, 2004
Before I somehow fell into writing about beer, back in the day, more than anything else I wanted to be a travel writer. Well; more than anything else I wanted to be Hal and Roger Hunt’s third brother, partaking in their animal-chasing Adventures in exotic places.* I used to pore over maps, memorise atlases, imbibe the novels of Willard Price; anything to find out more about the world beyond my bedroom window. Being a travel writer seemed like a dream job; getting paid to explore parts of the globe you would never normally have the chance to reach, and then tell people what it was like when you got home. And they would listen!
* ‘Richard Hunt, logistics specialist and spider avoiderer’.
It never turned out that way, of course. Despite signing up for a course on how to become a travel writer (for my assignment, I was dispatched to Lancaster), it petered out into a vague itch whenever I was on holiday somewhere – that feeling that I could be writing about this, this thing that I am doing now! Or that thing I’ll be doing later! It never happened of course – the only thing I gained from this time in my life was a LOT of geographical knowledge; flags of the world, mountain ranges, capital cities. Sure, it’s paid off down the line, in pub quizzes and whenever I need to entertain my other half, but that’s as far as it got for the dream of travel writing.
Having said that, I’ve been hugely lucky in the places I’ve managed to visit, since then. My first ever foreign holiday was to the north of Italy, and we went by rail. I can still remember the feeling of going to sleep on a speeding train, zipping under the Alps. When I woke, I jumped up to the window, in my pants, and flung back the curtain to see where we were. Parked on a siding in Piedmont, as it happened, with a platform of commuters suddenly as surprised as I was. Other than taking terrible photos, I had no real outlet for these travels – until I eventually moved to Australia, around the time when the first blogging wave was developing.
This became my way of recording what I was up to, at first to let my family know I hadn’t succumbed to any of the venom-laced terrors that lurk down under – such as the Redbacks that we genuinely had in our garden, for instance (I threw nothing on our barbie other than the occasional glance from behind a closed patio door). I blogged about the places I’d pitched up in, staggered off buses in, flown many hours to be in. It was great – although hardly anyone read it, it didn’t matter; provided I could get to an internet café, I had the outlet I had always wanted. Blogging and travelling become synonymous.
When I returned from Australia, having hermetically spider-proofed my luggage before departing for the airport, I began instead to write about beer. It occurred to me that many of the stunning places I’d visited I’d done so before I saw the beery light – that weakly glimmering resonance that pings into life when you walk into a bar somewhere, and automatically start scanning the counter top, or the fridges. But that doesn’t mean I haven’t been to some utterly brilliant bars, in all kinds of weird and wonderful places. As I guess we all know, the ‘where’ is often more important than the ‘what’.
This past couple of weeks, I’ve been transported back to my times overseas, thanks to brilliant travel-beer writing from my peers. Recent posts from Matt Curtis, Pete Brown and Ron Pattinson have reminded me why I wanted to start writing in the first place, back when the only option was to pick up a Dorling Kindersley. So, with that in mind, each day this week I’m going to write about a bar I discovered, at some point in my pre-beery life. Starting tomorrow (like Matt) in New Zealand, with – in Willard Price’s parlance – Cocktail Adventure.
