The world

A bar fly's guide to the globe

Philip Sherwell

ar be it from me to perpetuate myths about the boozy foreign correspondent, but in our profession it is sometimes necessary to visit the odd bar. It is a burden we bear. That is my justification for a career path which one friend recently described as `Around the World in 80 Bars'. But the real challenge is to unearth bars which capture the essence of a place. So here are some spots that Phileas Fogg missed on his trav- els.

What better place to have started this tour than in a bar which must come pretty close to offering the world's most spectacu- lar city view? From the Rainbow Room on the 54th floor of New York's Rockefeller Plaza, the lights of Manhattan flicker seductively at night. We raised our glasses to the trip ahead with the season's 'It' drink, the Cosmopolitan — a potent pink martini of vodka, cranberry juice and lime juice. It is better than it sounds.

After a transatlantic jaunt, I arrived in east Berlin. The place had a capital 'E,' when I first arrived, and there was an impressive granite Lenin round the corner from my drab flat overlooking Karl Marx Allee. The Lenin statue is long gone, of course, and most of our favourite hangouts in the old Workers' Paradise are now the domain of fashion-conscious westerners. After the flight, I recovered over a Sekt breakfast at the refined people-watching haunt of Café Einstein, a Jugendstil villa where the anti-Hitler plotters met in 1944. Sekt (a surprisingly good German imitation of champagne) is best drunk early in the day — it is too insubstantial for the evening. So later I headed to the Zur let- zten Instanz, one of the city's oldest pubs where politicos, lawyers and their clients traditionally mingle. This is a glad-hander's

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local, and we risked a slap on the back from the current mayor as we gossiped about who was in and who was out over our beer. It brought back memories of the days when the city still had two mayors touting for our affections.

It is a short flight from the old East Berlin airport to the Balkans. Every war- zone has its hotel, and Croatia's was the Esplanade, with its grand Habsburg archi- tecture and lugubrious waiters. During the early days of the fighting, when only flur- ries of tracer bullets and missile salvoes broke the blackout, there was little choice but to spend the night knocking back Slivovitz in the hotel bar with the only guests — a motley band of journalists and mercenaries. An elderly pianist occasional- ly spluttered into action as we recounted war stories behind the thick, red curtains and taped-up windows which separated us from a silent city. Now Zagreb is at peace and packed with chic new bars. But the Esplanade lured me back with its memories of long nights and tall stories.

Skipping the Middle East dry zone and the Indian Ocean, we reached the Sri Lankan capital, Colombo, and its eccentric but elegant piece de resistance, the Galle Face Hotel. Strictly speaking, there is no bar at the Galle Face. Its maverick owner does not approve of alcoholic consumption. Nor does he much care for such sins as smoking and sloth (signs remind guests that the cigarette they puff in bed could be their last and exhort them to walk down- stairs rather than use the lift). Despite this puritanical streak, the terrace remains the best place in Colombo to escape the heat and dust for sundowners as the breeze blows in off the ocean — even if our host has employed his most ancient retainers here to ensure that if we did insist on a drink we wouldn't be getting our second round soon.

Bangkok was our next stop. Patpong, the thriving red-light district, offers any num- ber of bars where you can watch unseemly goings-on with ping-pong balls over exorbi- tantly priced whisky and soda. But I prefer Soi 4, a packed alleyway of bars and clubs where expats and locals, trendies and transvestites rub shoulders in raucous har- mony until the early hours. Chairs and tables spill onto the narrow street, jostling for space with the dried squid vendors on their bikes and noodle stands serving tasty — if not always fastidious — fast rood. While Shanghai is swinging again and Canton sometimes appears to have declared capitalist UDI, Peking most defi- nitely remains the orthodox heart of Red China. But even here the winds of the mar- ket are rustling through the wide, grey socialist boulevards. For the most dramatic illustration of this I joined the bright young things at the V Club. The opening of this palace of bourgeois decadence would have been unthinkable just a few years ago. The guests were overwhelmingly nouveau riche young Chinese, many of them the offspring of party bosses who oversaw the crushing of the Tiananmen Square protest. Which just goes to show, as the late pop singer Marc Bolan observed, 'You don't fool the children of the revolution.'

From Peking, we headed due south and Down Under. If there is one nation that doesn't need an excuse to hit the bottle it is the Australians. In the Wild West gold-belt town of Kalgoorlie, where the temperature rarely dips below the 100 mark, I sought refuge from the drop-dead heat and sank a cold beer in the Exchange Hotel (dress code for men, vest and shorts; for women, less). Here was a chance to study the unre- constructed Aussie bloke in his natural

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habitat. Sitting at a crossroads in the mid- dle of town, with its stained-glass windows and pressed-tin ceilings, the Exchange is a turn-of-the-century cathedral to beer. The bar bristles with the 'vintages' — Fosters, VB, Swan — that have sustained the town's goldminers for decades.

There was just time for a Pacific stop- over in Pago Pago (an unwritten 'n' makes the name rhyme with tango tango), capital of American Samoa. The easy availability of American junk food has played havoc with a Polynesian physique which already tended to the obese — this is a part of the world where airport staff weigh the passengers to check whether the planes will be able to take off. And then there is the rain... .

Respite from the precipitation came at Sadie's, a smart bar and restaurant where yachties, expats and Samoans mix. The weather was a good excuse to down a daiquiri in an establishment named after Pago Pago's most famous resident. The original Sadie Thompson — as chronicled by Somerset Maugham — worked as a laundress by day and traded other wares by night after being evicted from Hawaii's red- light district. Her colourful stay ended when she was found slumped drunk in the street and pitched onto a steamer to Syd- ney.

I took my leave with a bit more dignity, and by aeroplane, not steamer, for the final leg back to Manhattan. It had been a blur at times, but I had picked up stories, friends, advice and atmosphere in those bars along the way. Sadie knew that it can be a hard life on the road, but someone has to do it.

Philip Sherwell is the Express correspondent in New York. He previously worked as a jour- nalist in Bangkok and Berlin.