David Tang. From the air, it looks fabulous, then as you descend, you notice ominous masses of concrete blocks, and by the time you get into the terminal, you are hit by a hurricane of alarm and ugliness. Hordes of tourists with hairy shins jostle in the hot and humid luggage hall. Mexican customs officers, all decorated to the hilt, look menacing.
Outside, an ocean of touts bombard visitors, the taxis are cheap and smelly, and luggage has to be guarded closely in case it is snatched. Along the coast hideous buildings cluster around the shoreline.
The whole place is a giant blancmange of a holiday camp, cramped with screaming children, obese parents and mobster-like Latinos, with their ageing mistresses soaked in suntan oils and smeared with pillar-box lipsticks. Inside the hotels there is the echoing hum of conveyor belts of monster buffets decked out with mini-umbrella cocktails, and monotonous Caribbean steel pan music. I spent a day exploring that commercial cesspool while in transit to Havana.
It was a stopover that nearly ended my faith in travelling. But thankfully, the people I saw there were robot tourists, not cerebral travellers. Burnie is another alarming city, a port on the northern coast of Tasmania. On my first night there, I ventured into a bar because it had the brightest light along the street.
Sipping on my shandy, I was approached by a muscle-bound local, who introduced himself to me as Steve, a sheep farmer. He asked if I would dance with him. The moment he was out of sight, I bolted out of the bar and ran back to my nearby hotel where I bolted my door. In the morning, such was my appetite to rid myself of my unpleasant city experience I drove to the western tip of the Tasmanian island, where Aborigines were slaughtered and the Tasmanian tiger became extinct.
