The Feeling

Young men in cheap suits, too big for their lean bodies, smoked hungrily as they jogged down the splay of marble steps outside Haydarpasa station on the Asian shore of the Bosphorus. There were girls with long faces and thick, coarse hair wearing jeans or loose skirts. Little children in woollen jumpers skipped over the cold puddles on the paving. The ferries came slugging in across the grey water under the scatterings of pale gulls and the needling Ottoman skyline of the western shore was memory-hazed behind cold, damp mist, run down-channel from the Black Sea. Ramadan had ended two days earlier and the damp, late-autumn cold carried an air of frenzied relief. There was a smell of salt and estuary mud, and tea and fresh bread.

I sat on the steps eating warm, crisp simit – thin bagels caked with sesame seeds – I had bought from a shabby, chin-stubbled man beside an old grey-green tomb on the waterfront.
The stone of the steps was cold and damp to touch and behind me the great caverns of the station with its long white platforms and tarnished brass railings hummed with curdled voices. I already had my ticket; my train would leave in 30 minutes.
I had woken with a headache that morning, lying on the floor under the strip lights of a London airport; the cheap flight had roared out of morning fog and landed four hours later in a screaming rainstorm on the eastern edge of Istanbul. A bus took me into a grey city with busy streets. Concrete housing, grim and mildewed in the cold-wet light, stepped up hillsides, and strips of oddly accented letters marked the shop-fronts. Only the towering, rocketing pencil-minarets of the grey-ribbed mosques – absurdly, almost impossibly tall and slender – marked this as somewhere special.
It had been two and a half years since I had been in these places: places where you were only a certain number of bus and train rides in one direction from China and India, or in another direction from Africa and red-stone gulf shores. That night I would sleep in the cold capital drifting on the great emptiness of the Anatolian steppe; in 48 hours I would be somewhere under icy, glass-sharp sunlight in the hard brown mountains near the Iranian frontier.

It had stopped raining by the time I reached Hayderpasa station. I bought my ticket to Ankara, went outside and bought two simit wrapped in a scrap of newspaper, and sat on the steps to wait.
And then the Feeling hit me. Across the smoke-grey straight I could see the outline of the Blue Mosque and the Hagia Sophia; over my shoulder and starting from the white platforms of the station ran a thousand miles of train track and straight road over cold, empty land under huge, empty sky.
Little flickering sparks of pleasure went pulsing up from my belly, across my shoulders and down the lengths of my arms. It made me move, sitting there on the cold marble steps; I wriggled, twisting my spine as the Feeling pulsed over me again, and I grinned like an idiot. Then I swung myself upright, lifted my pack – which seemed to weigh nothing – and skipped up through the station gates to catch my train.

The Feeling is not the same thing as the regular, reliable pleasure of travel; nor is it the sense-drunk immersion of a new morning in a new country after an hours-of-darkness arrival. And it is not the awed-honoured privilege that comes from being on some high pass or opening mountain wall or white coral shore. All those things are perfectly predictable. You can mark them in your diary with a scratch of blue-black ink ahead of time, knowing that they will be there like a departure date, waiting for you.
The Feeling is not like that. It is elusive and unpredictable, and it is rare. It comes suddenly at odd, unexpected moments, not those that ought to prompt it, but it is unmistakeable. You cannot chase it, cannot create it artificially – that’s what makes it the Feeling.

I once spent six months moving through the shattered islands of Southeast Asia, and then through the hot green-yellow countryside and welding-spark and mechanic’s-grease cities of old Indochina. I enjoyed it all immensely, but the feeling only came to me once, only three days before I flew back to the UK. I was on a third class train, rattling towards Bangkok from the Cambodian border. The carriage was half-empty and it rained through the afternoon as we stopped at neat country stations with white-and-brown latticework waiting halls, and trimmed flowerbeds and smooth-faced stationmasters standing straight-backed in the rain, saluting the train as it departed. Later the rain eased and the sky was a great layered slab of pearly grey. The countryside was flat and marked with overgrown fields where the heavy trees and bushes clambered over one another. Away to the north, as the soft-blue daylight began to fail, there was a long, solid bank of blue hills, with a sky showing salmon-coloured behind them.
I leant on the open window and the air was damp and cool and clean-smelling and we would not arrive in the city until long after dark and I knew that there was a cheap Chinese hotel near the station where I could take a room. And then, quite unexpectedly, the Feeling hit me. I was tired, and I had been travelling for half a year, and Vietnam had tried my patience, but it hit me just the same. I tingled all over and wriggled in my seat as the train bent away over the flat-heavy farmland towards Bangkok.

It came on another occasion, more feasibly, in Morocco. I had been working in a job I didn’t like for over six months since I came back from some long bout of travelling. I quit the day before I flew out for two weeks walking in the High Atlas. And two day later I was sitting on the floor of a dirty minibus between legs and sacks as we juddered up the road to Imlil. They’ve surfaced it with smooth tarmac now, but then it was just a long, bending scar of broken stones. It was souk day in Asni and the minibus was full of villagers and I found myself in a tormented space on the floor. All I could see was dusty sunlight, and occasionally a flash of autumn-turning poplar leaves or high brown mountain wall through a square of dust-grease window, but I started to giggle. The Berbers giggled back at me, thinking I was laughing at the absurd discomfort of my position as the minibus bucked over the ruts; but it was not that: even as my legs cramped up and my back began to ache, even though I could see nothing of the towering landscapes, the Feeling had hit me.

I remember it too on a ruin of a bus, pulling away into India from the border post at Wagah, the heavy white morning of the Punjab frying away to a scorching yellow. They were harvesting in the flat, canal-cut fields, and my bag was still filthy with the grey dust of the Karakoram. And in other places too.
Not for trafficking alone…

I only spent one week in Turkey on that trip that began in the cold dampness outside Haydarpasa, but the Feeling hit me twice. It was the middle of November last year.
The second time was five days later, in the cold of the afternoon above Dogubayazit, twenty miles from the Iranian border, Armenia to the north, Mount Ararat blazing to the west across an empty, flat-bellied valley. I was walking down the running road from the flaming crags and the Ishak Pasa palace, a ruined eyrie of honeyed sandstone on a high buttress. It was stunningly cold and the wind was like broken glass, but the light was harder and brighter than granite and the hills were stark and ragged. This landscape, this hardness, this openness ran in every direction, all the way back to Europe, south to Mesopotamia and east all the way to the cold desert fringe of China. Kurdish boys in threadbare jackets were chasing flocks of woolly brown goats over the thin, sour soil and I kept my hands deep inside my pockets.
The Feeling hit me suddenly with the cold wind as I headed back towards the scruffy little town. I started laughing, aloud, and the pace of my walking broke into ragged skips, and – quite honestly – I could have danced.


© Tim Hannigan 2008