*The following pictures are taken in Machu Picchu and the Sacred Valley outside Cuzco, Peru, home to some of the most stunning archaeological sites in South America, if not the world.
Assuming a person is not motivated entirely by money, and assuming that they are not in fact a giant, cold-blooded lizard, there is little reason they would enjoy living in Dubai. With no live music, no history, no outdoors, no culture, no comedy, no sport, no locals, no reality, brutal weather, inflated prices and endless, gnawing guilt to deal with, about the only thing a person can do to keep themselves from going fucking mad is to talk to the people around them, usually while drinking heavily.
Naturally, not everyone was a shitbag - I even made some pals - but overall the whole thing made me terribly homesick. Months, years, after leaving home, I still felt dreadful knowing that I had friends at home with whom I could share as much or as little as I liked. People who I didn't have to introduce myself to every week. People who didn't give a cat's cock about what had happened at work. People who'd seen me at my lowest point and scraped me off the floor – and some for whom I'd done the scraping. Good folk who I could talk to about global conflict, or a memory from school, or the outcome of a bloody dog race. As time passed, so my confusion about why I'd shunned all that familiarity grew.
Now things can be as temporary as half and hour, and they might not even speak my language, and we might have nothing more in common than being in the same fucking room for 30 seconds.
So the strangers come and go (most don't even bother with their names; we don't either) and we keep travelling, together and alone, wanting to cry with gratitude on the rare occasions Skype affords us a grainy image of a familiar face.
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| Photo: Wee Mo |
This, in turn, brings a whole raft of new problems. Firstly, with a turnover of staff I hadn't witnessed since McDonalds, I would typically find myself in the pub having the same conversation every week, for months on end: where are you from? What are you working on? What did you do at home? How long are you going to stay here? From there, it would degenerate into an endless bitching session about unintelligent or incapable bosses, for many of whom, quality daily output could only be quantified by their slimy, 11am shite.
So pathetically repetitive and frequent were these chats with new-found friends, that it often became impossible to tell what had been said before. And so people would say the same things again. And the whole scene was so fucking pitifully inane that no one seemed to notice, or care about, the endless spinning of the wheel.
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| Photo: Wee Mo |
There was another problem too. It is best summed up by the last sentence in this brilliant quote from A.A. Gill in his eerily accurate piece on Dubai for Vanity Fair: “[White shit-bags] come here to be young, single, greedy, and insincere. None of them are very clever. So they live lives that revolve around drink and porn sex and pool parties and barbecues with a lot of hysterical laughing and theme nights, karaoke, and slobbery, regretful coupling. In fact, as in all cases of embarrassing arrested development, these expats on the short-term make don’t expect to put down roots here, have children here, or grow old here.”
And, like a chemistry teacher who's been diagnosed with terminal cancer and decides to break bad, when someone thinks the end could come at any moment, they generally tend not to give a tax-free fuck about how they conduct themselves. If you don't really know anyone anyway, why be sincere? Why be honest? Why not spread gossip? Why not shag him/her/it? Why not order that other drink? Why not call him/her/it a c***? Why consider the consequences?
Why, in short, care?
But, I thought, it's OK because all this shit in Dubai is temporary, and if nothing else, I got to see a bit of the world, and I met the girl I'll marry and so, overall, despite how lonely I've felt, I'm a goddamn winner.
Besides, I thought, I'm going travelling, and I'll get out of all this. And I'll meet new people.
And then I did.
The conversation now runs as follows: where are you from? Where have you been? Where are you going? What's been your favourite place? What did you do at home? When are you going back?
It's impossible to escape it either – in a way, we need it. It's not like Wee Mo and I have days apart at the end of which we can compare and contrast notes. We know everything about every moment of each other's day.
Perhaps worst of all are those fleeting moments when we feel that, y'know, perhaps we could really get on with this or that person, but then their bus arrives and they leave after just five minutes. In fact, the only time we've had a break from all this transience was on the boat to Antarctica. There, trapped for 10 days, everyone could get past the introductions and the tired anecdotes, get out and see something, share a real experience. Leaving felt like fucking crap, really it did.
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| Photo: Wee Mo |
I'll be home in about 125 days, home for good after two years and 11 months of travelling.
I just hope to hell my friends recognise me when I get there – and that they fancy a chat.
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| Photo: Wee Mo |