Sometimes, when I can’t sleep, I picture all the places I’ve stayed.
I pick a trip – maybe the month I spent travelling from Valladolid to Mexico City – and try to remember every room I slept in along the way. It’s difficult because I hardly ever stay anywhere for more than two nights. Plus, the game has to be played in chronological order, so I can’t fast-forward to that beautiful B&B in Oaxaca with the hammocks and the chunky ceramic coffee mugs without having first recalled all the places that preceded it.
Years ago a friend and I spent our university summer holidays travelling around China. I started in Beijing and flew home five weeks later with rolls of camera film that, when developed, revealed hundreds of images of imperial palaces and Buddhist pagodas. Tiered towers, winged roofs, vengeful deities, incense coils filling the frame with blue smoke. But the photos that make me smile when I look back through my scrapbook – the ones that really remind me of those humid, hectic days – and the ones I wish I had more of – are of the places we stayed.
There’s me brushing my teeth on the deck of a boat travelling from Chongqing to Wuhan. It’s pretty much all I have to show for the three days spent floating down the Yangtze, cast out of our cabin by cockroaches. We got to see the Three Gorges before they were flooded, but those long Uno-playing nights are what I remember most.
A few weeks later, there I am again, lying on the mattress of our cramped cubbyhole in Hong Kong’s infamous Chungking Mansions – back against one wall, sandal-tanned feet touching the opposite wall. The following night, a photo of my friend fresh from the shower, wrapped in a fluffy white bathrobe, pretending to make a call from our room at the Mandarin Oriental – a present from her dad on the last night of our trip.
Whether it’s a place to retreat to at the end of the day or a place to escape as soon as the sun rises, rooms are as much a defining part of a trip as the sights you see along the way. The time spent in each becomes indelibly, intimately intertwined with the destination – the space looming large over my memories.
Some of the rooms I can still see most clearly are from solo travels. Dancing on a huge double bed in Bangkok, listening to pirated CDs on my Discman, the lid melted and pockmarked by overenthusiastic DEET application. A wooden hut at the bottom of Peru’s Colca Canyon. Checking into a rented room in Naples’ grimy Piazza Giuseppe Garibaldi late one evening, the reality of a recent break-up suddenly crashing over on me as I stood under the dribbling shower. I stayed there for a week and lay awake each night listening to people arguing and bottles breaking outside. During the day, I visited Ischia and Pompeii and Positano, sun-weary and falling asleep on trains and ferries and rocky beaches.
In lockdown(s), as travel plans were postponed and then cancelled, I spent sleepless nights retracing my Interrail route through Europe via youth hostels and campsites, a nunnery in Florence where I slept beneath a wall of crucifixes, a 24-bed dorm on the outskirts of Berlin where we were the only guests and some random man’s spare room in Vienna after he approached us at the train station late one evening.
As my mind wanders through each remembered room, I find myself back in India, gasping awake, slick with sweat, listening to the absence of sound as power cuts stopped the slowly rotating fan and I curdled in the heat. In Vietnam, the endless stream of scooters passing beneath one room, monsoon rain crashing against the window of another. I return to Myanmar with my husband. Lizards scampering up the walls of a lakeside lodge in Indawgyi, sitting on our balcony drinking lukewarm beers in Pindaya, pouring water down a broken toilet in Taunggyi the night I got sick.
As lockdown marched on, April turned into May and then suddenly it was summer. I lay in our bed at home in London feeling utterly lost. Staring at the same shapes on the shelves, the same shadows, the same lamppost filtering orange light through the blinds.
Then in July the chance to spend the night somewhere else. The low-level agoraphobia of the early morning taxi ride to the airport, edging further away from our flat where we’d been in months. The face masks on the flight and the temperature checks at arrivals. And then a new room, a new bed, chairs quickly covered in clothes, a map spread on the table, shutters flung open to reveal Dom Luís I Bridge.
When I think back to that glorious week in Portugal, I remember drinking bottles and bottles of chilled white wine, riding the rickety wooden tram along Porto’s waterfront, sweating our way around Sintra, taking the train to a beach on the outskirts of Lisbon. But, more than ever, I remember the rooms.
Heading back to our attic apartment for an afternoon nap, listening to the sounds rising from Rossio Square. Wringing out swimmers and flinging them over the towel rail. The novelty of getting ready for the evening, hair still wet, skipping over puddles on the bathroom floor to grab my lipstick, placing bottles of fizzy water in the fridge for later. In the early hours, stopping by the window to see the sun rise over Castelo de S Jorge as I stumbled to the toilet.
As we plan this year’s summer escapes, I know there’ll be a slew of new rooms to remember – and wondering what they’ll be like is all part of anticipating our arrival. But then as I get older, I find I increasingly like the room I’m already in which is something else I wrote about a while ago…
Aside from my 4am mental wanderings, Window Swap delivers a welcome change of scene to my laptop when work is dragging
Speaking of – I’m writing and posting this on a Tuesday as usual (apart from when work gets in the way) but because yesterday was a public holiday here in the UK, today has a very Monday feel. Here’s a poem summing up my utter inertia from the fabulous Tim Key:
Finished reading: Two books by Polish authors that I wrongly thought might be a bit dry but were delightful. One from independent publisher And Other Stories, which I’m so in love with I now have a subscription which means I get to see my name in print every time they send me a new title. Let’s face it, it’s the closest to being a published novelist I’ll ever get. It’s called Lublin by Manya Wilkinson and was a perfect combination of really sad and really funny – it features some of the best jokes I’ve ever been told – and is easily one of the stranger coming-of-age stories I’ve read. The second was for my local book club and it’s Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead by Olga Tokarczuk featuring a charmingly offbeat old woman as a protagonist who likes animals and isn’t too fussed about men. A murder mystery with a supernatural/astrological slant that’s also quite a bit about mundane day-to-day life? Sign me up!
Valladolid, as in Spain?! To Mexico? Every 2 nights. That's wild. Must have felt like forever. Really adventurous post, love it ❤️