There is an irresistible lure in crossing a border, purely because you can…
Being entertained by maps
From fairly early in my career as an annoying child, my parents realised the way to stop me screaming to go into every Little Chef we drove past was to hand me a map. It would result in instant silence as my little eyes whizzed up and down the A-roads, through the large grey splodges of urban sprawl and on to tiny Leicestershire villages with faintly ridiculous names.
It still works now. Put a map in my hands, and I turn into the sort of becalmed simpleton who would list clapping and popping bubble wrap amongst his hobbies. I like seeing where places are in relation to each other, and find that every inspection throws up a new surprise. Did you know, for example, that Edinburgh is further west than Bristol?
Strange borders of the world
I love looking at borders, and weird geographical anomalies. I’ve never seen an exclave that I’ve not wanted to visit immediately, while thoroughly illogical strips of land that seem to defy logic are guaranteed to engross me. That long thin bit that sticks out of north-eastern Namibia so that it forms a four-way border with Zambia, Zimbabwe and Botswana? It’s brilliant. The wobbly line that suddenly goes straight on the border of New South Wales and Victoria in Australia? I stared at that for years until I realised that the straight bit must start at the source of the Murray River.
This fascination with borders means that I take an extremely childish approach to crossing them. I’ve no idea why, say, Andorra has got a right to be a country while Yorkshire hasn’t. But if I’m in the north of Spain it’ll just sit there looking at me until I break and rush into the soul-crushing embrace of its many duty free shops.
Crossing borders into Lesotho and Liechtenstein
I’m the sort of person that – just because I can – will spend three hours in Lesotho, four hours in Liechtenstein and five hours in the awful Malaysian city that sits across the causeway from Singapore.
This unfortunate habit reared its ugly head again while I was in Geneva recently. Spending five days in Geneva is something of an endurance test, and on the fourth day, I cracked. I looked at the evidence, and decided that it was perfectly feasible to walk to France. I snaffled a walking map from the tourist office and headed off towards a faceless dormitory town possessing the sole redeeming quality of not being in Switzerland.
Getting lost on the way to France
While I love maps, I don’t love them enough to actually follow them. Irrespective of what they may say, I can always find a better way. Who needs a picturesque riverside trail when you can stroll along a major trunk road going in the wrong direction? Why amble through the woodlands when you can see a nice water treatment works?
The real benefit to this approach is that you can walk down lots of drives, thinking they’re footpaths. At the end of each one, you get to meet a terrified elderly lady who thinks you’ve come to burgle her house with merciless levels of violence.
Alas, borders aren’t always that arbitrary – they’re often placed logically along prominent geographical features, such as rivers. Or mountain ranges.
Walking around a small lake, I could see two rather forbidding Alps in front of me. If France was at the top of one of them, my mission was doomed to failure. Alas, a map is fairly useless if you don’t know where you are on it, so I resorted to the cheat’s method – Google Maps on my phone. It did its technological small talk with the satellites and told me exactly where I was. I’d crossed into France about 20 minutes ago.
The Schengen Agreement: Making borders boring
Since the Schengen Agreement came in, many European border crossings have become similarly underwhelming affairs. There are no queues, no bribe-hungry guards, no passport stamps and virtually no indication that you’re somewhere new. It’s quite sad.
Walking back into Switzerland, I passed the old customs hut in the middle of the road. The windows were shut, no-one was there. A once majestic scene of pettily bureaucratic glory had been reduced to nothing; the lines on my beloved map little more than a wispy memory.
A plan for the old border huts
There must be thousands of these huts across Europe, passed daily by hordes of motorists who’d quite like to be stopped and forced to hand over their passport. Someone should start buying them up and turning them into pubs. Those pubs should then join together in a geeky alliance, a target for map fetishists who want a beer in every single one of them. And if they issued special stamps as proof, the baton of cartographical tradition would be passed on beautifully.
This story was originally written for National Geographic Traveller UK.
