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The winner of the Independent on Sunday/ Bradt Travel Writing Competition was announced at the awards ceremony at our store in London last night (22 July). Kate Megeary, an as yet unpublished writer, wowed the judges with ‘The Perfection of Improvisation’ and won the grand prize of a trip to Kyrgyzstan and a commission from The Independent.

The theme this year was “The Heart of the City” and more than 200 entries were submitted for the competition.

Douglas Schatz, managing director of Stanfords, chose the winner and said, “The sharp and lively descriptions of the people the author observes as she wanders the streets of Havana create a sense of vibrant life in the heart of the city, despite its familiar decay and constraints. And in the end the moment of improvisation that arises from a spontaneous human connection is one of those uplifting events that make travel so rewarding.”

The Independent on Sunday will publish Kate Megeary’s winning entry and offer her a commission for a 1,200-word article based on the prize holiday. The prize is a seven-night holiday for two in Kyrgyzstan. Flights have been donated by flybmi, while Regent Holidaysis arranging the itinerary, including tours of Bishkek and Karakol, and visits to the alpine Altyn-Arasham Valley and the red cliffs of Jety-Oguz Gorge.

And here is the winning piece:

The Perfection of Improvisation

Kate Megeary, unpublished writer

A small brown dog wearing a faded pink t-shirt jogged down a dirt street. I decided to follow him. He seemed as good a guide as any. He was in no rush, stopping to sniff the flip-flopped feet of the fat brown girls who sat gossiping on doorsteps, rocking babies, their tight, skimpy vests revealing cleavage you could lose an arm in.

The dog took me down the narrow back streets of Old Havana, where faded pastel paint peeled from the façades of elderly buildings. White sheets and blue shirts were strung up to dry over the twisted stumps of wrought iron balconies; women leant over crumbling carved stone balustrades and shouted to their children in the street. These once pristine and exclusive colonial mansions quietly decay whilst life inside them thrives. Here lies the beauty of Habana Vieja, evident in her decline.

My guide stopped, his ears pricked, as he spotted a man in torn denim shorts with a thick gold chain around his neck. The man wiped sweat from his armpits with a handkerchief and shouted up at a window high above the street. A woman with curlers in her hair leant out of the window and lowered a wicker basket on a piece of rope. The man took his pizza out of the basket, replaced it with a bank note and the basket was raised again.

A gang of kids with skinny legs and grubby t-shirts had set up a baseball pitch at a crossroads, each pavement corner representing a base. I stopped to let them pitch. “Hey beautiful lady,” called a small boy, smiling mischievously at me as he threw a small coconut. Another boy hit the makeshift ball expertly with a stick. The dog caught the ball in its mouth. The children shouted. The dog ran. I was guideless once again.

The uneven dirt streets gave way abruptly to newly laid cobbles and opened out onto Plaza Catedral. The limestone cathedral was weathered by centuries of hurricanes. Fossilised sea-creatures were embedded in its walls, as though the building itself had risen, fully formed, from the sea. Waist-coated waiters served over-priced mojitos to tourists wearing Che Guevara t-shirts, expensive cameras slung around their necks. A brass band played Guantanamera. Ancient black ladies with their life stories etched on their faces wore gaudy satin flamenco dresses and flowers in their hair. They posed for the tourists, huge Cuban cigars dangling, unlit, from their lips.

I bought an ice cream from the ground floor window of someone’s house and rested on a bench. A good-looking young man sat down next to me and asked where I was from. We talked, he in broken English, I in tentative Spanish. Suddenly, he stood up. I turned and saw a policeman standing silently nearby, arms across his chest, staring at the man as he walked away.

The Caribbean sun began to lose its heat. I sat outside on the terrace of a hotel bar. The staff looked bored and tired. The bar was empty, except for Yamila. She was a beautiful mulatta with waist length hair and daring eyes. She told me she was learning English. That she wanted to travel. An overweight tourist with grey hair and a pink silk shirt sat down at the bar and ordered a cocktail. Yamila excused herself and went over to him.

I gazed at the ferries crossing Havana bay while the sea turned orange, then grey. When I could no longer make out the white star of the Cuban flag that fluttered above the ferry terminal, Yamila reappeared with flushed cheeks and tousled hair. “Vamos,” she said, offering me her hand.

She took me to the Malecón. Sweeping around the northern edge of the city, the Malecón’s protective wall shelters Havana from the sea. Locals sat hip to hip along the wall, playing music, fishing, dancing, swapping stories, sharing worries, selling peanuts, looking north across the sea.

Yamila’s friends were waiting. We drank rum and watched the lights of Havana rippling in the stinking black water below the wall.

“You must be hungry,” said Yamila.

A boy was sitting on the wall next to us, his pole in the water, two unidentifiable fish by his side. Yamila gave the boy a peso and walked away with the fish. She returned ten minutes later carrying freshly fried fish and some rice on the lid of a cardboard box.

She took her ID card from her purse and showed it to me, proudly pointing out her photo, her name, her date of birth, explaining that Cubans must carry this card with them at all times. Laughing, she cut a slice of fish with the edge of the card and scooped it up along with some rice. Nodding encouragement and grinning, she offered it to me.

                                  

James Innes Williams went to Marrakech in the company of Travellers’ Tales, the travel writing and photography training company.

After exploring the souks of the Medina and the vibrant Jemaa El Fna, they then travelled up and over the High Atlas, and made in roads to the desert, all the time practising their writing and photography techniques.

At the end of the week, James caught up with the three tutors, Jon Lorie the director and ex-editor of Traveller magazine, distinguished travel and history writer Anthony Sattin and the force behind the BBC Unforgettable series, photographer Steve Watkins. Here, in the third of a series of interviews, James talks with Anthony Sattin.

How did you become a travel writer?

Quite by chance. I’ve always travelled and I’ve always been a writer but I had no ambition to be a travel writer at all. Then quite by chance, I had an idea. I was a fiction writer and I had an idea about writing a book about travellers in Egypt – the history of the European advance into Egypt. So I travelled around in Egypt and was loving that and then quite out of the blue The Sunday Times called and asked if I would write a travel story for them. And I had no idea that people did such things. I don’t think I’d ever read a travel story at that point. But they were just creating the travel section in the paper; there was a travel page before. And they were looking for writers rather than journalists, they actually made that distinction. So they were particularly looking for novelists who would stand out. So I said, “Yeah, sure, why not?”

And you’ve been doing it ever since. But you’re writing a lot of history too, why is that?

Yeah, more history now than travel. It was partly a response to reviewing so many travel books and being so disappointed with so many of them! But also travel writing goes in cycles, I think, and you know there was this huge boom in the nineties and there was a huge amount of indiscriminate publishing. Every publisher suddenly had to publish travel books and they were selling, especially in the early nineties, late eighties, and that has more or less petered out. You ask the big publishers now and they’ll say travel doesn’t sell. But I am planning a travel book but it’s just a question of in which order I do the things I plan to do.

How did you then get into teaching and what are you getting from it?

I’d always been completely against teaching; it had never interested me at all. I did this creative writing course at East Anglia, and there were eight of us on it, and I think of the eight two of us went on to publish fiction and four went into teaching and the other two just dropped out completely from that world. And there was that line, ‘Those that can, do; those that can’t, teach.’ So that had always been part of my thinking too. If I can write, then why not write? But here in Marrakech last year I was running a literary salon for a weekend, talking about my work. It was a charity event. Part of the deal was that I would give a writing talk in the morning and so there were some people who had paid a huge amount of money to come along to this but there were also some kids from the American school here in Marrakech, Moroccans, and they were so wonderful and it was such a thrill to have these kids who’d never thought of writing something like that before. And just to open that door for them, I came away completely excited by it.

You’ll carry on?

Yes, I don’t want to do too much of it. I remember the boredom of my lecturers at university going over the same old stuff. I wouldn’t want to do too much, but I enjoy it for that.

What’s the difference in technique between writing articles and writing books?

It’s completely different. And I think generally it does appeal to one person or the other. Do you have the stamina to write a travel book? You know it takes a lot of time and, let’s be practical about it, a lot of money as well. You know, we live in an expensive country. And how are you going to do it? So lot’s of people immediately rule themselves out from writing travel books because it’s not something they could do. And I encourage everybody to be realistic about their aims and, I think, if you’re going to start something you owe it to yourself to finish, so you owe it to yourself to be realistic about whether you can finish it or not. But it’s a lot easier to break into travel writing as a travel journalist writing for newspapers and magazines.

What’s your top tip for writing description?

The top tip for writing description, as for writing anything, is finding significant detail. Finding something that expresses something, that will say something general within that specific. You know, the little detail, the little thing that immediately says you’re in Marrakech.

And your top tip for impressing an editor or publisher?

Know who you are talking to, do your research. Let them know that you know who they are, that you have bothered to find out. I get into trouble still.

What’s the benefit of being in Marrakech, do you think, for training?

Being able to be in a place that’s particularly inspiring. You know, there’s so much to write about here. And being able to go out, walk around, come back and get everyone to write about what we’ve all just seen and in a group of ten, get ten completely different takes on the same little walk you did through the souk. It’s wonderful. It’s not something you can do so easily if you’re sitting in a room in Hampstead.

What’s your favourite aspect of travel?

I love the beginning of every trip. I still get excited going to the airport or to the port, my life just reduced to one bag and I’m off. Who knows what will happen? It’s the possibilities, the anticipation and the possibilities – on a good trip the possibilities are endless. I think if I didn’t have that sense I wouldn’t travel anymore. I would hate to go in to thinking, “Oh God, I wish I wasn’t leaving home.”

What’s the worst thing about travel?

Oh, airlines obviously. Usually it’s the most expensive part of your travel and the least pleasant part of the experience. Why is the food so bad? Why as someone of 6’2” do I have to sit with my knees up around my ears? Why, why, why. Why is the air so bad? Why don’t they pressurise the cabin properly? It’s quite easily achieved.

When will see you at Stanfords again? And what will make up the contents of the book you’ll be signing?

When you invite me! It’ll be Egypt again, Egypt in the winter of 1849. The winter we would all have loved to be in Egypt sailing up the Nile.

So, do you have a publication date you’re aiming for?

Yes, but it would be embarrassing to tell you because I’m obviously not going to hit it!

Author: James Innes Williams

Trying to order chicken without words can be very embarassing. In one local restaurant in Tbilisi I tried everything – waving my arms, making cluck-cluck noises, walking like a rooster… When I thought my only achievement was making everybody laugh out loud and gave up, the man from the next table came up to us and with generous gestures invited us to join him and his friends. That first night in Georgia was the only night we attempted to eat alone.

Continue reading Republic of Georgia

Why do you want to go to Colombia?”, asked everybody incredulously. Apart from the fact that I want to go everywhere which is reason enough for me (“because it’s there”, as they say), there are more than enough reasons to single out Colombia. Great coffee is a rather convincing one. Vast jungle, beautiful palm-lined beaches with beautiful snow-capped peaks visible in the distance, some of South America’s most beautiful Spanish colonial towns and very lively, interesting and very beautiful people are a few other reasons that come to mind. And no, not every Colombian is a drug baron. In fact, I did not meet a single one.

On my first day in Colombia I did meet thousands of pilgrims, however, at Las Lajas where the Virgin Mary had been sighted in the past and a spectacular church was built across the deep canyon to mark the spot. I seem to be quite good at running into public holidays without knowing about them as I arrived fresh from an Ecuadorian election into Colombian Independence Day celebrations with flags flying, men marching and pilgrims flocking. This means all the hotels are full, yet magically I always find the last vacant room in town eventually. Continue reading Colombia