The best way to travel this summer is via the airwaves
Delays, cancellations, queues, fractious fellow passengers. And now we learn from yesterday’s Telegraph that not even the great British passport has the clout it once had (if you can extract one at all, that is, from the chaos of the Passport Office). It’s getting to the point where travel is beginning to seem not worth the effort.
Thankfully radio is still here to whisk us away to places exotic and exciting in the comfort of wherever we already happen to be. Crossing Continents (Radio 4, Thursday) got a new series off to a roaring start with a hugely atmospheric documentary from the forests of far-away Nepal. Presented by the BBC’S Indonesia editor Rebecca Henschke, it was ostensibly the “story of a rare conservation success” and how the Bengal tiger is making a comeback after years on the brink of extinction.
But this was just as much a piece about unintended consequences and the hidden price of the tourist dollar. Because in Nepal tigers mean tourism, and the cost of more tigers and more tourism is a rising number of tiger attacks on local villagers. The report opened with one (surprisingly forgiving) victim’s gulp-inducing survival story of a tiger pouncing on him and clawing his face.
Immediately followed by some retrospectively horrifying archive of a visit by the Queen and Prince Philip in the early 1960s that – incredible as it might seem now – took in a tiger hunt. Talk about illustrating how times have changed.
Henschke did an impeccable job of illuminating the issues now: going out on anti-poacher patrols with the military, assessing whether the enormous conservation efforts already put in might risk “pushing the tiger population beyond what’s sustainable”, talking to locals who have lost relatives recently in tiger attacks and highlighting the rising tide of fear and protest.
In the end, the programme’s conclusion was that, with the right balance of education and security, an equilibrium might be struck where tigers and humans could co-exist, and both species would reap the benefits. It also conveyed an enormously strong sense of place – from the roars of tigers to the swish of forest vegetation and the gentle singing of locals. So much so, to go there to see tigers in real life seemed altogether unnecessary, excessive even.
Far less exotic, but even more enticing was Antonia Quirke’s trip to the tiny Scottish island of Kerrera in Open Country (Radio 4, Thursday). This was a gem of a programme, of a kind that works best on radio because just the thought of Kerrera – 50 residents, no shops, one tea garden and just one, brand new, road – instantaneously transported one to relaxing realms of the imagination where, just a brief ferry ride away, “the sun is out, it’s quite warm and it is simultaneously raining”.
Quirke’s descriptions of Kerrera really did evoke a minor paradise. What came across most was the lingering otherworldliness of the place, the sense of it hiding in plain sight just 400metres across the water from Oban, the rush of inspiration that had JMW Turner filling sketchbooks feverishly in 1831 and a notion that it probably hasn’t, in essence, changed all that much since – despite the new four-mile road that had been “gouged” out of the landscape and still needs a bit of bedding in.
The reality may well be different. It sounded like Kerrera gets rather busy in the summer. But then, that’s the advantage of travelling by radio, it is easy to avoid the crowds.
“I’m walking along a pristine white sandy beach, the sea is dazzling turquoise and I’m surrounded by palm trees,” said Claire Hynes at the beginning of My Granny the Slave (World Service, yesterday), a documentary that probed history and identity by whisking us off to the Caribbean to contrast the “paradise island” image of Antigua with its history of colonial violence and exploitation. Hynes, a British writer and academic, was in Antigua to discover more about her own identity by researching the life of an ancestor, Missy Williams, who bravely escaped a life of enslavement.
Her search yielded much about the island’s brutal history. Just as fascinating, though, were the tensions that Hynes highlighted between Antiguans who find their identity in the past and others who prefer to put that past behind them and “move forward”. It was a theme that pushed an already absorbing documentary into a less personal, more politically challenging space, expanding out to fresh horizons. Even on radio, it seems, travel can broaden the mind.