JOHN SIMPSON

To a journalist, this isn’t altogether unusual; we aren’t usually popular visitors. I’m not allowed into various countries, some of them quite pleasant. Botswana, for instance, is one of the nicest, safest and most democratic states in Africa, and it is a delightful place to take a holiday. Yet because of things I’ve written about the treatment of the Bushmen there, I’ve been banned from going back.

But the country I most want to take my wife and little son to is, of all places, Zimbabwe. You probably think the people there are starving and terrorised; but although there is occasional famine, it’s no worse than – well, I won’t name names, since the business of banning people can be contagious. Let’s just say there are plenty of equally bad places around the world where people still happily go for their holidays.

I’ve recently come back from a clandestine week in Zimbabwe. It had to be clandestine, since the BBC isn’t allowed to go there. ‘The BBC is banned from Zimbabwe,’ we would say in our news bulletins, ‘so this report was compiled in Johannesburg’.

Nothing makes you want to go somewhere more than the knowledge that you’re not supposed to be there. The great Victorian soldier and traveller Fred Burnaby, whose book A Ride to Khiva (published in 1876) remains one of the most readable and enjoyable of travellers’ tales, explained why he was so determined to travel to Central Asia when the Russians wouldn’t let foreigners go there. ‘I have, unfortunately for my own interests,’ Burnaby wrote, ‘from my earliest childhood had what my old nurse used to call a most “contradictorious” spirit.’ Contradictoriousness dictated that at some stage I would have to visit Zimbabwe, whether the government there wanted me to or not.

This is not an article about journalism but about good places to visit on holiday, so I won’t go into details – except to say that in a misguided effort to disguise my appearance I wore a hideous white baseball cap – not a successful fashion statement. And it didn’t even work. I was spotted several times in Harare (the BBC has a big audience in Zimbabwe), but fortunately no one called for the cops.

There were one or two mild shocks. In the pleasant suburb of Borrowdale, I went to a trekking outfitters called Fereday’s. The last time I was in Harare, Fereday’s was based in its original 1910 store, in the old centre of the city. But the area doesn’t attract much passing trade any more. Now the store sells cheap plastic things made in China.

The new store has lost its wonderful dark, dusty 1910 atmosphere. Now it is bright and cheerful, though some of the old fittings have been salvaged to give it a bit of gravitas. Best of all, it still sells the green holdalls I have travelled the world with, as well as all sorts of other smart and rugged things. But this isn’t the first time I’ve sung the praises of Fereday’s equipment; and it was something of a jolt, since I was supposed to be undercover, to see a big photocopy of a newspaper interview with my wife and me from some years back in Fereday’s window, together with a large picture. Yet if the manager of the shop wondered privately what I was doing in Zimbabwe, he didn’t show any surprise or undue curiosity.