IN THE YEAR of our Lord 2008 it sounds like a horribly parochial confession to admit that I am still in thrall to the sights of Europe, but it happens to be the truth. What's worse, one of my most memorable travel experiences is no more "out there" than the drive westward from Malaga in the Costa del Sol
After you tick off the iconic names of each fake jewel in the crown of the Costa del Sol - Torremolinos, Benalmadena, Marbella and Estepona - you feel yourself moving further back in time. The rock of Gibraltar looms ahead; that obstinate limestone thumb protruding from the ocean, originally called Jabal Tariq, after the Berber general.
Then the motorway begins to slice through the hillside, splitting arid Andalucian fields, and soon you're up among the wind farms high over Tarifa, a windsurfer's mecca at the gate to the Mediterranean. Thousands of white metal mills are stationed on every peak; at the very intersection of paleontology and science fiction. They fairly whip around up here. Tarifa is the windiest place in Europe, the southernmost tip of Spain, and the vantage point is perfect to pick out, quite clearly across the shimmering water . . . Africa.
Sometimes it seems as if all of life is little more than a process of demystification - of gradual drawing whatever abstract, frightening and fascinating wonders consumed our dreamscapes as children into flat sharp focus, so that they can never again captivate us to the same extent.
Knowledge can crush the imagination and these days we don't even have to travel to have our romantic notions about foreign lands disabused by Ewan McGregor on his motorbike, and that dude from Monty Python. It's not just presenters either. The guy on the 46A bus in Dublin jumped out of a plane in Japan just last month, and the bus driver glacier-skis in Canada. Your dentist says that Vietnam is rubbish - but check out Laos, and the internet has 360-degree panoramic views of the ruins at Machu Picchu.
As a child I had an idealised vision of life in Amsterdam, based on a story I read about a child who used to ice-skate to school along frozen
canals. Fifteen years later, from my point of arrival at Central Station, it took about 10 seconds to disabuse me of that notion of Dutch city living.
Now the entire ice-skating story has been elbowed to the margins of my memory and replaced with images of American frat boys giggling hysterically and clinging to each other at the counter of a waffle shop, contemplating the utter hilarity of the word "syrup" on the menu.
More so even than the memories I have of travel, I treasure the sense of wonder I have about places I have yet to see - the ice-skater in every other undiscovered place in the world. The only view I have of Africa so far is that glimpse across the water from Tarifa, but I have cobbled together an impression of the vast continent in myriad other ways. My view is impressionistic and subjective. It offers the opposite of authority, balance and experience, but it'll give those of you who have been lucky enough to see Africa an idea of what it's like to see it from the mountaintop in southern Spain.
Remember the clipped pronunciation of "diplomatic immunity" by Joss Ackland in his role as the hateful South African terrorist in
Lethal Weapon II
? I start there. Then I think of how a girl I know was so moved by the film
Cry Freedom
(which she saw on a school trip) that upon
leaving the cinema she bought an indelible marker and scrawled "JUSTICE" on the leg of her jeans. Then I recall how an old friend told me about a family trip to Malawi when he was a boy, wherein his family stayed at the house of an African family who . . . get this . . . kept tame cheetahs. When I ask him about the possibility of monkey butlers and giraffes playing whist in the conservatory, Ben gets quite angry. He will not back down on the domestic cheetah issue.
From there I think of Toto, and my first view of Africa in musical form. "I know that I must do what's right, sure as Kilimanjaro rises like an empress above the Serengeti" must qualify as one of the most unwieldy similes ever committed to tape, and yet it is lodged in my cerebral cortex as surely as . . . well, I don't know.
Lastly, there are the writings of a man who lived for half a century in Tangier. The first time I grasped what the scale of the continent might be was after 200 pages of The Sheltering Sky, by Paul Bowles, when I learned that on her travels from Tangier, the newly-widowed Kit Moresby had only reached Sudan - still technically northern Africa. At that point, I distinctly recall getting the map out. Bowles's description of mid-day in the Sahara may also have played a part in keeping me away. "During the middle of the day it was no longer the sun alone that persecuted from above - the entire sky was like a metal dome grown white with heat. The merciless light pushed down from all directions; the sun was the whole sky." Possibly, these references relate about as well to Africa as Foster & Allen do to Ireland. I don't know. I've visited countries and witnessed a huge discrepancy between my own imagination and reality. But I owe it to myself to go to Africa and find out for once and for all. At least the trip is
guaranteed to remove lyrics of Toto from my head.
John Butler blogs at