We have just taken off from Dubai for St Petersburg. My son is marvelling at the immensity of Dubai’s airport—now officially the busiest in the world. We have stood on a bus—stifling, cramped—and boarded our air-conditioned connecting flight with a deep sense of relief. We have watched the planes lining up behind ours on the shimmering tarmac, and have noted the outside temperature flashing on the screen: 44 degrees Celsius. Thank God we’re getting out of here.
But all I can think of as our plane speeds along the runway and takes off for cooler climes is the labourers constructing this oven of a city. I don’t have the figures at my fingertips, but I tell my son about the migrants I’ve read about from poorer countries who flock here in search of (comparatively) well-paid work, and who send their remittances to their impoverished families back home. Many of them work in inhumane, slave-like conditions. Some are held hostage and forced to work for their fare home
Earlier, we’d bought roubles at a currency exchange kiosk managed by a man from Bangalore. We’d walked up staircases whose bannisters and tiles were being polished by Indians and Bangladeshis, and had been admitted into the business lounge by a man from Indonesia.
A Chinese woman at the breakfast bar pointed the way to our gate. All smiling, polite and professional. All migrants a long, long way from home, working for the benefit of those with the means to travel.
I was reminded of the Filipino woman who sat beside me once on a flight from Manila to Hong Kong, plastic shopping bag filled with possessions on her lap, head flopped into her hands. I asked if I could help her, but she couldn’t even lift her weeping eyes to look at me. When we landed, she rushed to the bathroom and vomited into the basin. She was a nanny, leaving behind her own children to look after those of a wealthy family instead.
This is the problem with travel: you discover a world whose majesty exceeds your wildest dreams, but which is cruel beyond imagining. You adventure into heartbreakingly beautiful landscapes, but find (if you care to look) heartbreak underpinning them all: cultures eradicated, people suppressed, religions exterminated. Almost everywhere you go you find people and corporations and governments exploiting the weakest and most disadvantaged for their own benefit.
And you understand, if you have a conscience, that