On 5 January 1986, the Observer packed its bags for a travel special, first stopping to ask some seasoned travellers what always went in theirs. Adventurer Christina Dodwell took a 2oz hammock and family photos, but never a gun: ‘In a lot of places life is cheap and guns are valuable.’ Tight-jeaned travel journalist Michael Wood took a Swiss Army Knife (‘Mainly for pulling wine corks’) and august travel writer Eric Newby a hat ‘from an imperial hatmakers in Venice’.
Destination-wise, there were some curveballs, particularly Katharine Whitehorn, dispatched to take part in a murder-mystery weekend in a Quaker-run guest house in New York state. As ‘Joslyn Frank’, a journalist in Tirolean headgear, she evaded suspicion when ‘Kurt Kraus, dreaded drama critic… collapsed into his dinner in suspicious circumstances’. Instead, she watched the detectives, who’d paid $600 ‘for such nonsense’.
Joanna Lumley went on a pony safari in Kenya, swimming across a hippo-infested river and showering under a watering can. Simon Hoggart was sent on a ‘no wimps’ white water rafting trip in Maine: ‘What you feel is a wall of water hitting you, covering you, making you feel wetter than you had ever conceived possible.’ In photos, Hoggart’s smile was so Cheshire Cat broad, a fellow passenger asked: ‘Excuse me, are you running for public office?’
In a beautifully evocative piece, Claudia Roden returned to Cairo after 30 years. The charmed, cosmopolitan annexe of Belle Epoque Europe she had known as a child was gone: Cairo was ‘one big construction site’; the villas where she had grown up and socialised had become embassies; vestiges of grandeur and poetry rubbed shoulders with filth and squalor. Still, her return was a sensory transport to childhood: jasmine, the call to prayer, her parents’ names still familiar in the Greek pastry shop. ‘I recognise the trees and the flowers, the balcony where an aunt used to paint, another where cousins had a hammock. Everything is familiar.’
