The winner of the 2009 Bradt Travel Guides/Independent on Sunday Travel Writing Competition was announced at the Award Ceremony held at Stanfords, London.
Hilary Bradt, Chairman of Bradt Travel Guides, said the quality of the writing this year surpassed all previous years making the task of choosing the short-listed six finalists extremely difficult.
Well known journalist and travel writer Matthew Parris had the unenviable task of choosing the overall winner.
With her entry entitled The Night Kitchens of Zeida, Andrea Kirkby wins a holiday for two in Colombia, kindly sponsored by the Colombia Tourist Office, Proexport and The Traveller, as well as a commission for an article to be published in The Independent on Sunday.
The winner in the Unpublished Writers’ category is Kate Cantrell who flew over from Australia to attend the Award Ceremony. Kate, pictured here with deciding judge, Matthew Parris, wins a place on a travel-writing course in Spain, courtesy of
Travellers’ Tales.
Congratulations to Andrea and Kate.
And here are the winning pieces:
!! The Night Kitchens of Zeida
by Andrea Kirkby
We’ve dozed fitfully on the way here, as the bus swerves its twisting way through the Atlas foothills, passing headlamps and the dim glow of the dashboard the only light that breaks the absolute Moroccan night.
I’m half asleep as the bus pulls into town. Rubbing my eyes, as the blur of waking dissolves, I see a wide street, low buildings, a line of buses. Gravel crunches under the tyres as we pull over. It’s one o’clock in the morning.
We’ll be here an hour. I try to sleep, give it up as a bad job after ten minutes, decide to get out and look around.
Above, the stars shine sharp and cold in the utter dark. The puny streetlights of the town are too few to taint the sky with orange. On the other side of the road, the houses are dark. Cats slink across the parking lot, fix the bus with shining eyes, and with a flick of tail disappear into the night.
But this side of the road glares with electric lamps.
This is a nowhere town. Low buildings of breezeblock. A single long road. Somewhere between Azrou and Midelt, in the blank space in the map in the Rough Guide. I can’t even find out what the place is called. Nondescript by day, it seems the place comes alive only at night, when every bus travelling the long road from Fes or Meknes to the south stops here.
Every stall facing the road is brightly lit as a stage or a peepshow. In one, a sweaty man moulds minced meat into brochettes, pinpointed by the light in his grid-like box. (I’m reminded strangely of a Vermeer.) In another, a butcher cleaves a joint in two.
I hear the grudging hiss of a sharp knife through meat. The smell of blood is oddly heavy and sweet. Outside the next stall, a half carcass is hanging, the bull’s tail still attached. A man comes, buys a half kilo of meat, sees it carved off the bone, and takes it next door to be cooked.
A cat brushes my leg as it scuttles past, looking for scraps.
The line of stalls seems to extend for miles. There must be twenty or thirty buses stopped here. The noise of their engines never stops.
It’s so like a surreal dream that I pinch my leg through my jeans pocket to make sure I’m awake. The smell of mint prickles my nose, and I wander over to one of the stalls where a waiter is pushing fresh mint leaves roughly into a teapot. I hadn’t realised how cold the night had become till the sugary liquid warms my stomach.
The engine of a bus starts turning over. A man with an anorak over his djellaba dashes out of a cafe; it’s a false alarm. But I look at my watch; it’s nearly two in the morning. Time to get back to my bus.
Back into the black night, past bright shops where customers seem frozen in the moment as if by a flash light. Back on our way through the dark, from this town we didn’t know existed to the deserts of the south.
As we leave, I see the sign. Zeida. I write down the name on the back of my bus ticket.
!! Colours Unknown
by Kate Cantrell
I found colour under the orange sky of Chiang Mai, on an ordinary day spent wandering. In the morning, I walked to the rice fields with a basket and knife. In the afternoon, I was white with red cheeks, crammed (and cramping) in the back of a Ute with seven cocoa coloured boys. Some in straw hats, some in worn tees, all smiling ridiculously at me.
Farang.
I smiled ridiculously back.
During that day spent driving, in circles and changing gears, when the sun was so hot it warmed water tanks and cuddled babies to sleep, I didn’t know what borders we were crossing or drifting in between. The day I found the colours was a day like all the rest. I was homesick and sunburnt and fat on mangosteen. I was communicating with the locals through pictures and pointing, and idle words we had learned of each other’s language.
Hello. No. Jing jing?
In the days before I went wandering, I got last minute nerves and needles, and worst than that, a lousy travel guide sealed in bubble wrap. The first chapter said: the Thais are friendly people. The second did translations: Thailand, meaning land of the free. The author, whose name I can’t remember, flagged local treasure and trash, and served all his sees and don’t sees with a warm slice of fatherly advice. When you go to Thailand, he said, you won’t understand what you see.
The next chapter listed examples in a table that covered many pages: tuk tuks, lady boys on Sukhumvit, fish factories, monks collecting fruit from the poor. The guide spoke of silent stirrings, things unspoken for. It said nothing of the colours.
I found colours in Maepon I never imagined back home. Colours you can’t sell, or mix in tins, or squeeze out of plastic tubes. Real greens that spill out of seeds and yellows that hang off banana trees. At the waterfalls, I found secret blues in deep rock pools, hidden from dusty hands. In the jungle I saw poisonous lemons and limes, and a shade of grey I can only call elephant. I found musk too. Pure lolly musk mixed in a sky of smoky pinks, crushed candy cane and milky marshmallow clouds.
On the road each day, we passed carts and emerald temples, and scenes that did not make sense: an old woman breastfeeding a grown child, a boy with no legs. In the middle of the night, there were dark colours that stumbled home from the city, and in the morning, there were faces without names. In the hill tribe villages where we stopped to sleep, there were things we saw but did not see. Things that went missing in the night. Little things, like fruit and children.
Each morning, when the sun rose on the fattest mountain, I closed my eyes and moved a tiny cut out of myself across a paper map. I sketched the country, roughly, as a triangle upside down, and marked its borders relatively, close to the familiar contours of home. I was unsure, all the time, where we were going, and where we had come from, and why, in the midst of all this unknowing, I never felt so sure.
Wherever we went, the faces changed. And the stories.
But the colours stayed the same.
The roads we chose in Thailand rarely met others. Only the buffalo rose to meet us. We drank water from oil cans and cried when burning chillies ascended into the air. Everywhere we went, time melted off its edges. The hours blen
ded in. Signs marked the way, but they pointed backwards and forward, and were written in strange letters I had never seen before.
Sometimes I would nod at the horizon, and shrug my shoulders.
My questions were answered, always, with a ridiculous smile.
Farang.
When we were lost, really lost, the trees weren’t really trees. They were markers. The mango trees were safe zones. They watched over us like old farmers, their backs bent, their ears full of mosquitoes. The papayas were police officers who whispered warnings: danger, turn back. In the monsoon season, their branches grew rotten fruit, their roots caught on fire.
One afternoon we wandered off the highway, into the city.
We stopped at Seven Eleven.
One of the boys nodded at me to go inside.
Inside, there were things my whiteness remembered: sugar, cigarettes, packets that reeked of home. In the midst of aisle three, somewhere between the Tic Tacs and Twisties, I was lost again, more lost than on the road. On the way out, I saw more whiteness entering: a boy with dreads, his guitar dragging behind.
Where are you going in such a hurry?
I smiled. Ridiculously.
Farang.