Saturday in Wandering Man’s household is Guardian day. Not moral guardian or other examples of the word’s use. No, in Wandering Man’s abode it’s reading the Guardian day, as in the print version of the well known socialist, liberal intelligentsia, rule of law undermining, revolutionary, communist supporting……
OK. Most Saturdays, in the local artfully dishevelled trendy cafe over a bowl of organic, hand knitted yoghurt, Wandering Man opens the Guardian newspaper and get’s his fill of liberal journalism, confirming his bubbled view of the world.
And what a bubble. According to the newspaper’s own market research:
- 88% of Guardian readers believe it is important that their clothes smell fresh
- 77% are more likely to say the point of drinking is to get drunk
- 54% of readers understand enough of another language to read newspapers or listen to radio news
Well I suppose one of of three ain’t bad.
However, very occasionally amongst the articles on where the best Sunday lunch/skinny latte/ethically traded poncho can be found in the Outer Hebrides, there are little nuggets of tantalisation that stop you in your tracks. Whilst there are plentiful adverts aimed at finding ‘bathing difficulty solutions’, there are also ethically informed instructions on how, where and when to go to places that might be suitable for the average quinoa eating reader.
For example, many years ago, Wandering man and a jolly Liverpudlian fellow from his workplace spent a couple of weeks in a South African township where the locals kept carelessly losing some of their patients. Taking a short weekend break from wandering around the township trying to find them, they set off to do some fishing in a small village along the coast, and stayed in a hotel that had been advertised in a feature in the Guardian Travel pages.
They arrived to find an extremely shabby ‘hostel’ with broken chairs and a collapsing veranda run by a couple of recent arrivals to South Africa from Europe who had clearly duped the Guardian into featuring their whole scheme. From time to time, other sundry Guardian readers who had followed the same advice arrived with the intention of a nice relaxing weekend by the estuary, expecting just enough of a rough edge to satisfy their sense of social justice.
The place was a Liberal elite sucking vortex. No one admitted it and all pretended this was just what they had wanted as they lay down on the mattress strewn floor under flimsy sheets during the freezing nights.
It took a mere 13 years for the memory of following the Guardian’s travel advice to fade before Wandering Man responded once again to the paper’s liberal call to travel arms. As he digested his yoghurt and took a sip of the skinny affogato macchiato in front of him, he turned the page to see a description of the Nepalese ‘Indigenous People’s Trail’. Affectionately known as the ‘Forgotten Trail’ this seemed perfect. If the locals had forgotten where it was then it surely boded well as the next adventure for Wandering Man and Rose. After all, Rose lived in the same sub-continent. It was literally round the corner for him.
A brief email and Rose responded. “Splendid old chap. Let’s go there before everyone else does.” On closer inspection it simply breathed perfection. Few signs, no map, less than 1000 or so visitors since the trail opened, a six hour dawn bus ride from Kathmandu to the trailhead. This was a trip almost certainly specifically designed for the two of us.
What could possibly go wrong?