Postscript: Halfway home already

Insofar as this trip has had a grand design behind it, ending in Hong Kong was a key part of that design. After three months where every day presented experiences in some way unfamiliar, be that in language, in food, in scenery, in levels of privacy, in levels of hygiene, and where every day involved repacking my rucksack, not knowing where I would be unpacking it that evening, a week in Hong Kong seemed like the right antidote to all this uncertainty.

And so it has proved. I am preparing to fly home, well rested and well fed, indeed rather too well fed, thanks to the kindness of the Lam family. Not for me the confused rush of recollections on arrival at Heathrow of what the old country is like, as I have already taken in those small details, which are rather dull on their own but which define everyday life: driving on the left; double decker buses; properly lit supermarkets which sell food which has been in the shop less than six months; easy availability of coffee; three-pin electrical sockets. I have also taken in the lack of dirt, the accessibility of both seaside and high peaks, and the balmy climate. Hong Kong's charm for me is that it has the energy of a city developed by settlers (and I mean Chinese as much as British) who grasped the uniqueness of the location and of the status of the place, and knew that they could make something special of it, and that this energy is, even now, set against a backbone of good old Britishness. I suppose it has also helped to demystify China itself for me, now I can view Chinese culture from a halfway house, just as in the early days of British rule the presence of Hong Kong as an intermediate post simplified matters for Europeans trying to trade with China.

Being halfway home, I'm conscious that the narrow window of opportunity for summing-up is even now passing by. It would be futile to attempt to pull together grand observations on the entire journey, and to share with you all that I've learned about myself in the course of the journey would be to enter into navel-gazing hell. Instead I want to offer one thought about one thing that makes travelling great, and which I haven't mentioned much through this blog.

I think back to only the fourth day of my journey, when I lay awake in bed in a hostel in Sighisoara, Romania. (I am happy to name and shame Nathan's Villa, and to beg that none of you even considers staying in this dreadful place.) Those who have been reading since my earliest posts will remember that Nathan's Villa owes its continued existence to the twin myths of Dracula and Europe's cheapest alcohol. The other travellers at Nathan's let it be known that they thought I was a stuck-up English snob for refusing (good-humouredly) to join them at a local strip club. Later on, amongst the many small-hours conversations going on next door following their return which were preventing me from sleeping, I heard one particular observation that stayed with me: "I guess I'm here because I'm running away from my ex-girlfriend. In fact I think everybody I've met while travelling has been running away from something."

Thinking this over gave me what were perhaps the only serious jitters of my journey. To constantly meet travellers who were running away from something was a very unappealing prospect, as I presumed that made them introspective and unwilling to make an effort to interact with the local culture (at least while it kept its clothes on), and by extension intolerant of any traveller who didn't fall in with this pattern. That’s not travelling. Travelling is making the world a more inclusive, welcoming place, not a more isolating and intimidating one.

In the days and weeks that followed, I became in some ways glad to have had the Nathan's experience, because it was so unrepresentative of what came after. In a small way, this could be to do with my destinations, which became progressively less-visited, and so I should have expected to find more like-minded people. But mostly, it's because the great majority of people who choose to come away and visit far-flung places do so for positive reasons: they respect others who do so and understand how they can enrich their own experience of the places they visit.

This is why I want to mention my fellow travellers, who brought me closer not only to the places I visited, but also to the places they had travelled that I hadn't, and to their own backgrounds. That I would learn an enormous amount from meeting the locals, I think, was self-evident. That I would be as stimulated by my fellow travellers was much less of a foregone conclusion.

In Beijing, I had one of the more extraordinary encounters of the journey. I found myself sharing a dorm with an elderly gentleman who bore a passing resemblance to Father Christmas. He introduced himself in an Australian accent as Joe, and after we had talked a while, he handed me a hard-backed copy of his travel diary from a previous trip some five years ago. He is, it turns out, 85 years old, and travels alone to a new country several times a year. "I am the Old Backpacker," he annouced proudly. I asked him why he chooses to travel in this way. "I came to realise soon after I started travelling that when I stayed in cheap places where there were lots of other travellers, I met more people, and more diverse people, and that made the whole experience more memorable."

Travelling is where everybody, no matter what their background, can relate. I met 18-year-old gap year students out on the town; I met 85-year-old backpackers; I met all sorts of people in between, and as long as they took pleasure from other people's different backgrounds and experiences, they gave me pleasure too.

So thanks to all my fellow travellers, thanks to all the fabulous people of the countries I discovered, and thanks to all who have read this far. It has been incredible to be there, and fun sharing it with you. See you all soon.

Gansu and Qinghai: From the holy mountain

The route of my journey has, you will recall, roughly followed the Silk Road, the route by which the eponymous material once reached a baffled but receptive West, and by which such imports as grapes, glass, ivory, saffron, peacocks, leopards, and not least Buddhism and Islam found their way to China. The end of the Silk Road was traditionally at Xi'an (then called Chang'an), the seat of the great Chinese dynasties whose openness or otherwise to the outside world had so much influence on the prosperity of the cities along the way. Having reached Xi'an myself, I face a choice of what to do in the remaining eleven days of my allotted time in China. Mindful that I passed over a large chunk of the Silk Road in the air two weeks previously, the obsessive in me takes control, and so it is that I head west to fill in some of the gaps.

This is not classic tourist territory, which makes travelling here alternately frustrating and amusing. It is frustrating when I arrive tired in a new town, and the staff of hotels, restaurants and shops immediately start giggling at the funny-looking foreigner. Unsure of how to deal with me, they decide that they can't - one night in a fast-food restaurant I automatically get given Coke because they can't work out how to ask what drink I'd like (point at the drinks machine, perhaps?) I'm also now horribly familiar with the words "mei you", literally "no have", which I hear with predictable regularity in railway stations, but also in clearly empty hotels. But it can also be amusing and fascinating: having arrived in the truly desolate little town of Tongren one evening, and needing some cheering up, I settle upon what looks like the best restaurant in town for dinner. Each of the tables seats at least six diners, and as the only customer I am outnumbered ten to one by serving staff. This means that they have little to do, apart from giggle, chase each other round the restaurant, and pour more tea for me every time I take so much as a sip. Having learned the Chinese word for beef, which I consider to be by far the safest bet when trying to avoid obscure body parts, I order from the Chinese menu. The dish arrives and is, against all odds, delicious, even if I hadn't managed to recognise the Chinese word for "extremely hot chillies". Almost immediately, the overbearing manager approaches the table, apologises to me, and removes my bowl of rice. I hear raised voices in the kitchen area. The waitress returns five minutes later with a seemingly identical bowl. I can only assume the problem is something to do with the waitress being from Barcelona.

One of the unexpected pleasures of this stage of the journey is the number of parallels that I can draw between places I visit and places I already know, from previous travels and, satisfyingly, from this journey also. How much richer a new discovery is, if it can be put in context, rather than being taken simply on its own terms! (This is one of the things that made travelling in China up until now a tricky experience. I have felt quite keenly the lack of context available to me.) Thus the drive from the town of Tianshui up to the mountain of Maiji Shan is oddly similar to the drive up from Trabzon in Turkey to Sumela Monastery, which I visited over two months ago: up a valley with slightly overgrown greenery, unfinished looking dwellings dotted around the fields rather than gathered into villages, and a definite sense of going up and away from civilisation. Both places are extraordinary examples of the faithful being inspired to carve into a mountain for the sake of their faith, different though those faiths might be. While Sumela is the site of a Christian monastery from as early as the fifth century, the monks deliberately positioning themselves as far from other human habitation as possible and building their monastery literally into the side of a cliff to ensure its isolation, Maiji Shan was intended to be discovered by as many pilgrims as possible. Its location thirty kilometres from the Silk Road meant that Buddhist believers could easily come by to admire, and to fund further development. And fund it they did - starting in the fifth century, and continuing for over a thousand years, niches were carved into the cliff face and decorated with murals (which are unfortunately now mostly destroyed by the weather, though most of the figures still remain), and clay figures large and small of Buddha, Botthisattva and other disciples were placed inside. The visitor nowadays has to negotiate an incredibly unlikely labyrinth of walkways which is quite literally bolted on to the mountainside, and which gives access to nearly eight thousand statues in two hundred caves. There are four great complexes of caves like this in China, three of them on or near the Silk Road, and there is probably no better illustration of how the trade route was about more than just silk and peacocks.

In the following days, the associations keep forming in my mind. Lanzhou, the capital of Gansu province, is apparently the most polluted city in the world (so I'm naturally quite disappointed to find the weather bright and clear when I visit). It sits beside the Yellow River (which, at this point, really is yellow), and on the far side is a range of hills, which I feel compelled to climb. Looking down over the powerful river and the city beyond from the hills, I am reminded of being above the Danube, back at the beginning of June. But there are too many pointy skyscrapers for that. Ah, that's it (and I start to feel very pleased with myself) - Lanzhou is a cross between Budapest and Pittsburgh.

But the most pleasurable association I make is between the guesthouse I stay in while in Xiahe, two hundred kilometres from Lanzhou, and so much of the charming privately-run accommodation that I have come across, particularly in Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan. As I have become accustomed to staying in quite exceptionally anodyne Chinese hotels, to be able to stay in a family-run establishment comes as a huge relief - I had quite forgotten that accommodation could be both cheap and characterful. This is mostly because Xiahe isn't really a Chinese town at all - it's over half Tibetan, and houses the most important monastery of the Tibetan 'yellow hat' Buddhist sect outside the official territory of Tibet. What's more, it is located at the distinctly Tibetan altitude of 2900 metres above sea level.

I come to realise that the Tibetans have a problem, quite apart from the decimation of their population or the plundering of their culture. It is that the stereotype of the meek and saintly Tibetans, calmly weathering all the storms that come their way with a spin of a prayer wheel and a cup of yak butter tea, is a lot more widespread than it should be. I had grasped this only vaguely before, and am myself quite surprised to find the Tibetan population of Xiahe more obviously rough than their Chinese neighbours: lank-haired youths roll around the street, and even some of the monks look decidedly worldly. (Marauding Tibetans were, after all, in part responsible for the decline of the Silk Road as a trading route around the year 1000.)

But the Frenchman who approaches me in Xiahe and asks me to recommend a hotel really should know better. "They're all m*****f*****s in this town. Anywhere else, I can get a hotel room for 40 yuan, with TV. But here they say 180 and the only discount they'll give me is 160. I tell them, are you really Tibetan? Because you are more stupid than the Chinese. I tell them I am a writer and a journalist and I am working for the freeing of their f****** country but they treat me like this. Well I tell him to f*** his hotel room..." If the friends of Tibet were all as patronising as this individual, the Tibetans would truly be between a rock and a hard place.

Putting aside my preconceptions, I walk round the monastery and the town. Pilgrims are everywhere, walking round the series of nearly twelve hundred prayer wheels that surround the monastery. Like so many others, I am entranced by the serenity and joyousness of the art: not only the limitlessly benevolent gold Buddha statues, but the details that crowd the walls of scenes from the natural world: mountains, sea, fish and birds, all rendered in white, blue, green and orange, yet somehow avoiding gaudiness.

We discover some surprising facts about the monks' lifestyles, though: given the cold climate, they are allowed to eat meat, although they mustn't prepare it themselves. This means that every restaurant in town is crowded with monks getting their fix of boiled yak (which is actually delicious, by the way, against all the odds - a bit like beef with the density of venison, I thought). The newer entrants are allowed to let themselves in gently by continuing to wear trainers. And as for the mobile phones, well, they're so cheap in China, why not? (I'm indebted to Shari for bringing some of these facts to my attention.)

I have an idea, based on most of the good travel books I've read (the title of a fine example of which, by William Dalrymple, I have lifted for this post), that a good travel story concludes with the protagonist somewhere remote and solitary, and provides an image that defines and sums up the journey, rather than the prosaic business of returning to the real world and the crowds and shops and flights that the reader needs no help imagining. I have, rather melodramatically I admit, been hoping that my journey could end with such a moment. When I climb up to Heaven Lake, near Xunhua in Qinghai province, I think I have found it. The lake, like so many beautiful natural features in China, is sacred: both to Tibetan Buddhists and also to the local Salar Muslims. To get there I have to take a taxi ride through what for my money must be China's answer to the Grand Canyon and up a series of hairpin bends, and then climb a steep half hour on foot through thick mixed forest, shrouded in mist like so much that lies at this altitude. But when I get there, the trees reach down almost to the edge, the lake sits clear below me, and there is a felled tree by the water, which I can sit on, a thousand miles from Beijing and however many miles from home, with no-one else in sight, looking at my reflection, with some ideas for music I could write circulating in my head, and I can think: "Good. I did it."

So now it's time for me to leave mainland China and head to Hong Kong for some relaxation and the kind hospitality of the Lam family. I'll post once more, I think, from Hong Kong, but come September 8th I'll be on the plane back home, and will be seeing you all before long. To be truthful, now I've left my travelling persona up at Heaven Lake, coming home seems the most exciting part of all.

Eastern China: Cycling in the dark

When planning to spend some time abroad after university, I had a dread of ending up stuck in an industrial town with a population of several million where there are no sights beyond factories, and nothing to do except seek out the particularly happening local kiosks. Chinese cities held something of a perverse fascination in this respect. Look in the guidebook for the population figures and you find that pretty much every provincial capital has a population of over a million, while three million is more normal, and then there are the real monsters, which have been given provincial status of their own, which get into eight digits.

Fortunately, the prospects for the traveller are not as bleak as I thought. Beijing, of course, has every bit as much to keep one occupied as any other great world capital. Xi'an, with a population of nearly seven million, still feels remarkably compact, which makes me wonder about the population density: no wonder the Chinese have such high tolerance for noise! (One seven-hour bus journey involves the driver leaning on his horn at the sight of any vehicle in front, whether it be in his way or just in the next-door lane, and staying on the horn until we pass the vehicle. The horn is so loud it seems to be directed inside the bus. Then there are the music videos and the mindless Chinese comedy - OK, so I'm being judgmental here, it may be highly intellectual for all that I could understand but all indications were otherwise.)

Only Taiyuan (population three million), capital of Shanxi province, six hours' drive southwest of Beijing, conforms to my preconception. We see a quite extraordinary number of restaurants where the chef is stirring something in an enormous, grimy looking vat, and battered metal teapots sit on every table. Small video shops are doing a great trade in pirate DVDs. Foodstores selling what from a distance look like more upmarket goods are actually stacked high with shiny boxes of 'powdered food substitute for the old and infirm'. Hotels all seem to advertise the availability of 'o'clock rooms' (think about it...) In the bus station, a sign reads 'No Spitting', a command that is being ignored at considerable volume by many of the waiting room's occupants, and the toilets cause at least one potential visitor to think twice about entering. Most of these buildings are covered in white tiles. (Someone missed a fantastic business opportunity about twenty years ago selling white tiles to the Chinese.) Behind them lurk the old, mud-coloured six-storey apartment blocks.

All this is fine if it's just one district of town, but in the hour that it takes our bus to get out of the place, the scene is repeated street after street as the city has replicated itself, seemingly ad infinitum.

This sounds rather relentlessly negative, which I hasten to add is largely not my experience of China at all. Kirsi and I (for she was, to my delight, able to join me for ten very happy days) were exhilarated by the energy of Beijing and the grandeur of Xi'an, and slightly taken aback by the vigour with which Beijing is preparing for the Olympics (the souvenirs are already on sale, and the TV news in English featured several minutes of interviews with foreign tourists on which mementoes they had bought), but we also learned that China is huge enough to be a mass of contradictions and inequalities - a real capitalist society in fact.

It's also a place in which the past and the present are oddly separated. For the most part, I honestly don't think I've seen a building, with the exception of places of worship, private houses, and bell towers, that predates 1949. (I don't count the old foreign concession area of Tianjin, where the British, French, Germans and Italians all left examples of their own architectural styles - seeing an Anglican church with a red London phonebox outside it did cause me to double take somewhat.) On any historic building, the commentary is quick to point out that restoration has been made possible through government support, and this shows how supportive the government is of the national heritage. Yet when I try to visit the area of Tianjin which was, in the time of the foreign concessions, labelled 'Chinatown', I find it has been demolished to make way for some fancy apartment blocks.

The reason why places such as Taiyuan are growing so quickly is to take in more and more of the migrants from the countryside who are still being driven to the cities by the massive gap in living standards between the two. In Pingyao, a small walled town near to Taiyuan in which buildings hundreds of years old have been preserved precisely because the town ran out of money, our guide gives us a rather offbeat tour of local calligraphy workshops, schools, Protestant churches, and a traditional Chinese doctor's surgery. I like the doctor's surgery best: under a single electric bulb, the doctor spends a long time checking the pulse of his patient, and then having ascertained that there's nothing seriously the matter, invites the tourists, sitting on a wooden bench in the semi-darkness near the door, to take photos of him and his patient, while in one corner two women behind a glass counter dispense remedies from an enormous set of drawers. In the school, the day is still continuing at half past five, the students rushing in from the dingy corridors hung with portraits of Marx, Lenin and Mao, fifty to a room, to their desks which are almost invisible under the number of books piled on top of them. The students look lively, and independent minded, and the teachers slightly meek.

But our tour is interesting precisely because out on the main streets, tourism is about the only industry going on. Our guide says there are clothing factories in town, but doesn't sound very convincing. He himself used to work in a factory but was made redundant seven years ago. In fact, Pingyao is strangely like Bukhara for me: a well-preserved old town with far too many empty hotels, men on every street corner wanting to drive us somewhere in their rickshaws, and a quite astonishing number of souvenir shops. It seems as if everybody is quietly hoping that tourism will solve all their problems, and as such makes me anxious to get away.

It's not just western tourists who frequent these places, though: the Chinese tourism market is apparently booming, as an increasing number of Chinese have money in their pockets. An interesting effect of this is that bargaining for hotel rooms, for instance, is more difficult than it might once have been, as the Chinese middle class, I am told, will rarely bargain because they hate to look poor. And the middle class also have enough money to frequent Western chains, such as Starbucks, for which I briefly develop a slightly embarrassing passion...

There comes a time in China when the uncertainty of mealtimes overwhelms the traveller. Sometimes there's an English menu, but you can never be certain that your chicken with cashew nuts won't turn out to be pork without cashew nuts. Sometimes there's a picture menu, but that nice-looking thing that looks a bit like a merguez sausage may turn out for some reason to be sweet, or what looks like diced potato may turn out to be some type of beancurd that wobbles in a potentially stomach-unsettling way. Sometimes (and then you're in really dire straits) you just have to point at the entirely Chinese menu and hope that what you get brought isn't too bad. And then it turns out to be tripe in a chilli broth with overcooked cabbage. And then you have no appetite any more.

I won't deny that we've had some really excellent food here. But there is a time when, just after the aforementioned tripe episode, I begin to crave certainty. At this point Starbucks appears like a shining beacon, and after a large frappucino with cream, all's right with the world. I even consider going to KFC for dinner that night, for a full dose of cultural imperalism, but I fight the temptation. Incidentally, I am very much amused by the notion, suggested to me by a fellow traveller, that the reason for KFC's enormous success in China may be the passing resemblance of Colonel Sanders to Confucius. The red colour can't hurt, either.

I won't deny that I miss the reassurance that a slight knowledge of the Chinese language would bring me in so many situations. It can be frustrating not to be able to go to the next level and interact with the people. But I've had a wonderful travelling companion to moan to, and by any measure the tourist sights are amazing: the Forbidden City, the Summer Palace, the Great Wall, the Terracotta Warriors to name a few.

My favourite, though, is cycling round the city walls in Xi'an. These have a circumference of 14km, and we begin just as it is getting dark (on one-gear bikes with no lights), the walls illuminated by red lanterns, and the noisy city some twenty metres below us, while we are perfectly alone. Is there anywhere else in the world where this would be possible? Grandeur mixed with banality, and not a little danger - possibly my most perfectly Chinese experience so far.

Xinjiang: Traitor to the cause

On the map, western China is an enormous swathe of nothingness, fringed of course by the world's most stupendous mountain ranges, but in its interior, virtually featureless. Xinjiang, the westernmost province, accounts for fully one sixth of the area of China. Urumqi, its capital, is apparently the furthest city in the world from an ocean.

Here, I thought, was my chance to experience real limitless space. Even travelling the trans-Siberian railway, it's slightly disappointing to realise that all the settlements in the area are strung out along the railway, so one doesn't get much impression of the vast stretches of wilderness to either side. Here, there aren't any settlements. There is nothing between you and the desert.

Limitless space is, I can now inform you, a real pain to travel across. For the first few hours of my train journey between Kashgar (China's westernmost city, and my first stop) and Turpan, 22 hours by train to the east, it is quite hypnotic. At this time of year, everything is a shade of light grey. The desert to our left is mostly small grey stones, rising more or less regularly into low and bare grey hills behind. The brick supports for the railway track that stretch off a short way to either side periodically are of brick, but the same grey colour, and an impressive reminder of the Chinese fearlessness when faced with the trickest of engineering challenges. (A brand new railway built 1300km across a desert is, some might say, foolhardy, but that couldn't stop them. And of course, compared to the new railway into Tibet, this is child's play.) The desert to our right contains no hills, just grey stones, grey dust, and above it, a sky that is the same unrelenting grey colour. Later, a dust storm blows up, and blurs entirely the distinction between ground and sky.

Through all this, I am bolt upright in what can best be described as a commuter carriage. The Chinese train system seems to me completely impenetrable, with sleeper berths always sold out if I try to book them close to the time of departure, but not yet on sale if I try to book them further in advance. So I end up with the enticingly named 'hard seat ticket'. Unless you are a fearsome Chinese granny, who will shamelessly spread out across three seats, some of which have been sold to other people, it is, I find, completely impossible to sleep. Two people are sitting facing me, which makes it impossible to push my legs more than about ten degrees in front of me. The best sleep I get that night is standing up in the alcove at the end of our carriage. The desert doesn't seem so hypnotic any more. I have, I think, got to find a better way than this to travel.

Kashgar has only been linked to the outside world by train since 1999. Just like in Tibet, the local population viewed the opening of the railway as an effort at colonisation by Han Chinese. The locals are overwhelmingly Uighur (pronounced variously, "wee-ger", or more amusingly, "wigga"), a group with no ethnic connection to the Chinese, but rather to the Central Asians. They look rather like Uzbeks, practise Islam, and trade with Kazakhs and Pakistanis. And trading has been Kashgar's business for two thousand years, as a key stop on the old Silk Road, an oasis between the twin hardships of the desert and the mountains. The old town of Kashgar is everything I expected from a chaotic, teeming Asian city, with a scarcely believable density of activity given the heat. A man carries a sheep in his arms, while another follows bleating behind. Kebab masters waft smoke across the street with pieces of cardboard. Blacksmiths turn out lethally sharp knives. Bakers pile up nan breads patterned with the intricacy of ceramic plates. Bicycle bells sound insistently, and the horns of the few car drivers in these narrow streets reach a fever pitch of frustration. For some reason, only the hairdressers, inside their hole-in-the-wall premises, are not taking part - for the most part they seem to be quietly dozing. Again, the low buildings of brick and adobe, the roads and the sky are more or less the same colour. It is absolutely sweltering.

Through the middle of all this cut a number of suspiciously straight dual-carriageway boulevards. The people on the pavements mostly look the same as in the old town, but the buildings are in the new, slightly dirty white-tiled style that is the modern Chinese vernacular. Along one of them is a Mao statue, almost the largest in China. It's an unequivocal reminder of who is boss in Kashgar. Every time some gleaming new temple to China's great consumer revolution is needed, you can be sure it's the Uighur homes that are going to make way for it.

I originally thought this was simply the Chinese authorities stamping their authority on the Uighurs, as after all Xinjiang has been a restless place by Chinese standards. (I even heard it said that most of the al-Qaeda leadership may be hiding in western Xinjiang, and that the Americans know this but are powerless as it's Chinese territory - which seems a fanciful theory, given that it's hardly in the Chinese government's interest to have separatists in their own country harbouring the world's most wanted men, but an interesting illustration of just how remote the place is, nonetheless.) In fact, I don't think it's that simple, as I see the same process in Beijing, with the old, admittedly unsanitary, but still charming neighbourhoods progressively being razed, presumably because they're not advanced enough for the image of an Olympic host city. There is clearly a remnant of Cultural Revolution thinking still active, where the old must be put away, and by those standards the old city of Kashgar, regardless of ethnicity, is definitely an anachronism.

The status of 'national minorites' is in any case something the Chinese are sensitive about. The old-style, low-denomination banknotes all feature a couple of idealised women of one or another minority group in China, dressed up in their traditional clothes and looking very satisfied with themselves. I go into the town mosque in Kashgar, and an information board congratulates the People's Republic for restoring the mosque and points out how this proves how China values and respects its minorities. Most of the tourists visiting the mosque are Chinese, their colourful and often fashionable clothes and expensive cameras in such contrast to the Uighurs, whose men, at least, still dress in the now-familiar monochromes of Central Asia. I even find, on a further exploration through the old town, that there is a section that is 'protected' by the authorities, because a young man stops me and tries to get me to buy a ticket to continue further along the street. He shows me a leaflet of the 'beautiful old town of Kashgar', with cheerful looking blacksmiths, Uighur street musicians, and spotlessly restored homes, all approved for tourists to visit, and all of which I can see for just a dollar. I thank him, but turn back in the other direction, back to the real world.

For the traveller, one real advantage of Chinese influence in Kashgar has been on the food. Suddenly, all the Central Asian staples that I'd grown utterly sick of (because there are only a few: plov, the rice and mutton dish; laghman, thick noodles in soup or topped with vegetables and meat; manty, steamed meat dumplings; and mutton kebabs of varying quality) are transformed, and mealtimes become a pleasure again (and very cheap indeed). In Urumqi, where I come to try to secure a train ticket to Beijing, I am unable to resist eating in a 'Muslim flavoured restaurant', where I have my last fix of Uighur laghman before heading east.

But how to head east? I go to the train station hoping to secure a sleeper berth some time in the next couple of days for the 45 hour journey to Beijing. Apparently all the sleepers are booked up for an entire week (strange, as I have been told it's not permitted to book more than five days in advance), but I can have a hard seat if I want. So I weigh up the options: either I endure two whole days trying to sleep standing up, or I betray the whole principle of my journey and throw in my lot with Hainan Airlines.

Six hours later, I am thirty thousand feet above the desert and thinking how much prettier the landscape looks from this height. I said long ago that I'm not obsessive about principles, didn't I? I drink a beer to that and stretch out my legs while the desert rolls on below.

Kyrgyzstan: How I came to like fermented horse's milk

It's probably fair to say that very few people visit Kyrgyzstan for the cities. My guidebook describes the capital, Bishkek, as a "relaxed and handsome place", but then lists the top sight as a park where there are lots of cafes to drink cold beer. Samarkand this isn't.

It was the scenery I'd come for, really: an amazing 94% of the country is mountainous, which makes it hard for even the most unfit of travellers to avoid some kind of physical exercise. This, I thought, was an excellent reason to make a trek in the mountains and, while dashing past the wheezing masses halfway up some taxing pass, to feel good about the effect of two months of traveling on my own level of fitness. So it was that I made a two-night trek to lake Song-Kol, situated at over 3000 metres above sea level.

Of course, it doesn't work like that. Collapsing (almost literally) over the threshold of the yurt where we are to stay the first of our two nights of trekking, my fellow traveller Mike and I are somewhat embarrassed to be greeted by two ladies from Belgium, who, as they readily admit, are not at the peak of physical fitness, but who have somehow done the distance in six hours rather than the nine hours it has taken us.

It was truly the worst day of walking I've had in my life, worse than the Snowfield of Certain Death in Crianlarich, which takes some beating. Not having the time to get ourselves properly kitted out with maps and provisions, Mike and I had decided to hire a guide. The guide, however, seemed not to understand that to guide tourists effectively, it's better to actually be with them. Leaving us after half an hour of walking because he had left his mobile phone in the taxi that had taken us to our starting point, and promising to catch us up, he entrusts us to the care of Renat, his 2o-year-old cousin, who lives in Bishkek and, we discover (crucially, rather too late), has never actually been to the mountains before. Nevertheless, he initially responds to our concerns with reassurances that he knows exactly where he is going. "So have you been here before?" we ask, on more than one occasion, already knowing the answer we would receive.

Having surreptitiously asking the way in Kyrgyz to every single one of the few walkers or horsemen we'd met coming the other way, he eventually announces that the yurt is "just over those hills there". And so we begin to climb, straight into a sea of thistles on a 45-degree slope. When you have 20 kilos of rucksack on your back, you haven't had lunch because the guide has decided that maybe we would like to walk an entire day on empty stomachs, and you are rapidly reaching the end of your water supply because no-one told you that there were no streams on the hillside, this is not exactly funny. In fact, it's more than a little dangerous. At this point Mike and I lose our temper with the hapless Renat and his assertions that yes, this is the right way, and no, there isn't a road that doesn't involve seas of thistles, and yes, he can guarantee that even without a map or the most basic knowledge of the region. We decide that if we don't find a more sensible way and some access to refreshment within half an hour, we are going down.

Skirting round several vertiginous drops, and swearing profusely, we finally come across a tiny farm, whose owner instantly salvages our expedition by inviting us in for tea, bread, cream and jam (an English cream tea, very nearly...) And it is there that we are offered kymys. I had previously done my very level best to avoid kymys, the fabled Kyrgyz national drink of fermented mare's milk, especially as the first time I was offered it coincided with a nasty recurrence of the stomach bug that had trailed me round Uzbekistan, but in that sweltering little hovel, surrounded by expectant Kyrgyz faces, I am ready to drink absolutely anything liquid. I am not even concerned any more, as I had been previously, at how they get the stuff fermenting in the first place. So I close my eyes, and by an admittedly rather large stretch of the imagination I can almost imagine I am drinking beer. Until, that is, the aftertaste hits me, which I can only describe as "salty horse".

And so it was we had got the strength to continue up to the yurt, and to be humiliated in front of the Belgians. Even then I don't sleep much that night, as I have drunk at least twelve cups of tea that day...

The second day proves much less eventful, and I am rather pleased by the novelty of swimming in a lake at over 3000 metres above sea level. Nevertheless, I am content after that to just look at the mountains rather than go up any more into them.

It's good, then, that the mammoth journey into China, over the 3752m Torugart Pass, has truly spectacular scenery, the road rising almost imperceptibly through the oddly expansive grasslands that characterize Kyrgyzstan. These grasslands are known as jailoos (pronounced "J-Lo"), which means summer pastures, so the Kyrgyz drive their horses, cows and sheep up to these highlands when the weather is warm enough, erect a yurt, and stay there all summer. For me it's a fascinating insight into a people almost untouched, because of their isolation in this remote mountain area, by long decades of Russian influence (or, for that matter, by Islam). Such a large part of the Kyrgyz nomadic tradition has been left intact, and it's quite heartening to be able to use tourism resources such as Community Based Tourism of Kyrgyzstan, which enable people like me to see this tradition first hand, to know that our money is going to the local community where it is most needed, and to give the locals an appreciative and curious audience for their festivals.

One such festival takes place on Sairala-Saz jailoo, and enables me and around forty others to watch a bard reciting part of the national epic, Manas, which is several times longer than the Odyssey, which apparently it resembles in content, being all about the many and various adventures of a central hero (who has conveniently become a figurehead for the Kyrgyz nation). Unfortunately I haven't seen an English translation so I have to be quite vague on what actually happens, but the bard in his embroidered coat, peaked hat, and white cowboy boots, and sporting a long grey moustache, is pretty damn charismatic. When he dons a pair of outlandish sunglasses a little later, I think he probably sees himself as a kind of Kyrgyz James Brown.

After the bard has finished, we are treated to the Kyrgyz national game, which like most Kyrgyz sports involves horse riding. To describe it as a little like polo does little justice to the sheer oddness of a game whose 'ball' is the headless carcass of a goat, the object being for one of the two teams of horsemen to pick up the goat and put it down on a designated spot. As you can probably imagine, there is a considerable amount of rough and tumble involved, amongst the players, the horses, the dogs that run around and for some reason think it fun to pull the horses' tails, and even on occasion amongst the spectators, as the action overheats slightly and the spectators' area is invaded by goat-wielding horsemen, whilst we attempt not to get trampled. All good fun, but I came away thinking it would be hard to see the idea travelling far.

In fact, as we head towards the Torugart pass, past the high-altitude Chatyr-Kol lake which is so shallow it is hard to tell from the road where the lake ends and the surrounding grassland begins, and with a wall of jagged snowy mountains on our right, I reflect that the distinctness of this culture, and its impermeability, has disoriented me rather. Perhaps, after all these countries with a common past in the Soviet empire, I'm even rather disappointed at the lack of expected Soviet kitsch. So it seems like an appropriate time to be travelling onwards, over this most remote frontier of the old dominion of Moscow, and into a different world. China will be, no doubt, a huge challenge in its utter newness to me. But it's one that, right now, I feel well prepared for.

Uzbekistan: Last one to leave please turn off the lights

I have at home a book which I received as a school prize in, I think, 1991, called Portrait of the Soviet Union, by Fitzroy Maclean (of Eastern Approaches fame). The text is, frankly, rather disappointing from one who led such an iconoclastic youth, swallowing as it does the Party line on ever-rising living standards, freedoms and world-leading technological progress, but what has kept me coming back for years and years is a set of pictures of unfathomably remote and exotic-looking places: Samarkand, Bukhara, Khiva. Free-standing minarets of brick taper up into the sky, flanked by cobalt-blue domes and archways decorated with white, green and blue tilework, shining brilliantly in the desert sun. It was pictures like these that started off an ambition to visit these strange places and to relate them to the world I knew.

It’s an ambition I have just managed to fulfil in Uzbekistan. Approaching Samarkand’s Registan, I keep my eyes down, careful not to spoil the impact of the moment by viewing the scene before I am in the ideal position. Raising my eyes, the view lives up to my high expectations: three medressas, two facing each other with one in the middle, forming three sides of a square. Each has a front arch some thirty metres high, with tilework that is predominantly a brilliant blue. The right-hand one, highly unusually, is decorated with images of roaring lions, together with a sun with a human face. Elsewhere, designs based on abstracted versions of flowers, or simpler geometric patterns of stars and diamonds, spill over the facades in extrovert fashion. The minarets standing beside these archways are also decorated, and the patterns, which repeat on both a small and a large scale, draw the eye upwards to the out-turned summits. This was the centerpiece of the great city of Amir Timur (Tamerlane). Like so many locations closer to home as well as in Central Asia, one wonders at the paradox that such cruel tyrants also instigated such beautiful buildings. A description, I’m afraid, cannot convey the magic of this place, and certainly not with my modest means, so I recommend making a visit there…

Fortunately, I manage to see the Registan before coming down with a temperature, which puts my sightseeing into low gear for a few days. Such a minor ailment, in the context of a strange country and 40-degree heat, is instantly transformed, in my feverish state, into something life-threatening. So it is that I spend most of that night wondering exactly which chicken dinner from the last two weeks made me the unwitting conduit for the early stages of a pandemic. (I find this slightly more amusing now than I did, but I’m still staying off the poultry.)

Despite the glories of the ancient buildings of Samarkand, it’s hard to get an idea of the whole as it used to be, as the rather undistinguished modern town sprawls around it. So I was glad to have spent the previous three days in Bukhara, whose old town must be virtually unchanged since 1839, when Captain Stoddart rode up to the citadel to reassure the emir of Bukhara that Britain had no designs upon his territory. He didn’t get to see much more of Bukhara, as the notoriously vain emir, piqued by Stoddart’s arrival with a letter from the governor-general of India rather than from Queen Victoria, had him thrown into the ‘bug pit’, where he spent the next three years at the bottom of a six-metre drop, in the company of scorpions, lice and rats. (I go to visit the ‘bug pit’, which is of course now disappointingly clean and hygienic.) Later on, he was joined by Captain Conolly, who was sent to try to secure Stoddart’s release, and the two were executed publicly in 1842. The clothes that one sees around Bukhara may be less colourful than in those days and the beards shorter, but the lanes and the high walls of the old town still hold surprises at every turn, from the finger-pointing grannies demanding to know why I’m not married yet, to the newly-restored synagogue, home to the only substantial surviving Jewish community in Central Asia, to an unexpected vista opening on to the city’s landmark minaret, or to the man offering me stew and watermelon for lunch in his courtyard.

This man is Husan, who despite his sickly-looking face and his crooked smile, is instantly recognizable as a decent sort, and whose work seems to consist of seeking out tourists and inviting them back to try his wife’s cooking. We sit around making unremarkable small talk about his children and cats, until he realizes he can talk to me in Russian, at which point he changes from an amiable simpleton into a deeply angry man.

I tell him about an incident that morning, when I was cornered by a 14-year-old girl selling souvenirs, whose utter fearlessness in business and intimidating fluency in English added at least six or seven years to her age. When it became clear that I wasn’t going to be swayed into buying anything from her, she kept repeating “Buy something!” and complaining that she hadn’t sold anything that morning. Despite my efforts to persuade her that a large Japanese tour group was just around the corner, eventually all the bravado and business patter drained away and she was visibly upset and would barely talk to me. I sense a real desperation in the souvenir sellers of Bukhara, lurking on every corner, inside every monument, as if they had thought that tourists were an easy source of dollars, but only came to realize too late that it wasn’t so easy after all. Husan sighs: “You know, in the former times, children never had to work like this. They could just go to school and come home and then enjoy their summer. What are we doing to them?”

Everyone, he maintains, has promised great things for Uzbekistan but life has just got worse and worse. Friendship with America and Russia was promised, but to no avail. The racism suffered by the many Uzbeks going to work in Russia in the black economy has worsened year on year (out of 15 million Uzbeks, 2 million are said to be in short-term employment in Russia at any given time). Karimov never meets ordinary people these days, Husan says, because the risk he will be attacked is too great.

I am quite surprised to be talked to like this in a country where the president is reputed to boil his political opponents alive. But this isn’t Turkmenistan, after all – if people are unhappy, they are not slow in saying so, and on several occasions during the week, Uzbeks young and old let me know exactly how unhappy they are. I have seen plenty of places where the poverty is all too evident, but nowhere where everybody seems quite so dissatisfied with their lot. And my last stop in Uzbekistan teaches me that if a region looks outwardly prosperous, this in fact counts for very little.

The Fergana Valley is the easternmost region of Uzbekistan, its most densely populated area, its most conservative, and its most fertile. I decide to come this way and then cross directly into Kyrgyzstan because I can’t find a worthwhile reason to dip into Kazakhstan for three days and then leave again. So it is that I end up in Andijan, infamous for having had at least 500 of its inhabitants massacred by government troops in 2004. (The government claimed that the demonstrators were dangerous Islamic fundamentalists, but very few were convinced by this explanation.) This makes me disinclined to hang around. Although a very unremarkable-looking place, with endless grids of tree-lined streets and single-storey buildings and no discernible centre, my first impressions are of prosperity: the roads are smooth, the houses are well painted, roses and marigolds line the sides of the roads for miles around, the trees are heaving with fruit.

Although I come to Andijan intending to leave straight away, Masud has other ideas. One of the passengers sharing my taxi from Tashkent, he is on his way home after six months working in Kazakhstan, and is about to start building a new house in preparation for getting married next year. He invites me to stay in his village just outside Andijan, and so I do, for two days.

The house consists of a large courtyard, around which are two simply but comfortably furnished rooms, piled high with carpets and blankets, the beginnings of Masud’s new house, and an extensive orchard. We sleep outside, looking through the grapevines at the stars above us. Nearby is a fast-flowing river where the youth of the village bathe and try not to get swept away. I am ordered to eat superhuman quantities of the ubiquitous Central Asian rice dish, plov. The hospitality is wonderful, but in truth I can’t wait to get away. On reading why this is, you may argue that I should have been prepared for all these things in such a conservative corner of Asia, but the reality still comes as a shock.

One reason is that I find the attitudes towards women difficult to deal with. The women in the house, and Masud’s 15-year-old sister in particular, do absolutely everything, from setting up the beds, through making the tea, to getting the men bowls of water to shave in. In the street, every single man who passes is greeted with a handshake, but the few women who appear pass unacknowledged. And all along, I am being told, subtly, that there must be something wrong with the West if it allows its young men to remain unmarried in their late twenties. Masud, who is 25, went out and selected a 16-year-old from the neighbourhood to be his wife, and cannot understand that I cannot and would not do the same. So he changes tack, only to be surprised at my refusal of his kind offer to find me a prostitute.

On the second evening I meet a group of Masud’s friends, who are, of course, all male, and we sit outside drink tea and eating nan bread and watermelon. As has become depressingly predictable, within a couple of minutes the conversation switches to money, and specifically, what people get paid in Britain. A barrage of questions follows on: How do I get a visa? Can you invite me? Do I need to have a job? What will I get paid? I do my best to put both sides of the picture, and to make them understand the high cost of living in Britain, and to try and convince them that there are plenty of unhappy people there too, but in each of the eight faces in front of me I can see my presence has sowed the seeds of an idea, and I don’t like the idea that I might be somehow responsible for any further discontent in rural Uzbekistan.

Coming home, Masud asks me if I will send him a present from Britain. Sure, I say, thinking I will send a CD or something like that. But no: he would like some cash to help him with his new house and get his business started: “maybe four thousand dollars a year, or five thousand.” I look at him, and he’s not joking. I try and explain that I’m actually quite embarrassed to be asked and a little offended, but I’m not sure that the message sinks in.

In the end I decide that the gulf between us is just too great and that I must just forgive him. But as soon as I am in the taxi to the Kyrgyz border the next day I genuinely breathe a sigh of relief. Until, that is, an Uzbek woman from the next door room in my Kyrgyz hotel knocks on my door that evening to ask me to explain what a “Green Card” is...

Turkmenistan (ii): To the end of the world and back

As you can imagine, I feel both quite privileged to be visiting Turkmenistan and more than a little curious. As we approach the western port of Turkmenistan (called Turkmenbashi, obviously) one of the Azeri boat crew sniffs: “Turkmenistan is a very stupid country. You’ll never see how people live. If you did, you’d be very unhappy.” My great hope is that I’ll uncover at least a few cracks in the armour, preferably without attracting attention from the secret police. They don’t make it easy for individual travellers, though. The reason I’m travelling with Khim and Cecilia is that we have to be met by a guide at the border, who accompanies us throughout our stay (and in my case, transports me in his car) to make sure we don’t get up to any mischief, the only exception being in Ashgabat where we can do more or less what we want.

When I meet the guide, Dima, my immediate assumption is that we will get something of a balanced perspective on the country. Dima is a Russian Turkmen, and what with Turkmenbashi’s insistence that the Turkmen language must be used in all official capacities, the non-Turkmen speaking Russians have had a hard time recently. Over dinner that night, in “the expensive place” (which means that a very decent meal costs GBP2.50 as opposed to GBP1.50 in “the cheap place”), he proves me spectacularly wrong. Dima has a hectoring voice which becomes quite high-pitched when he gets excited. When he talks about life in Turkmenistan he is very excited indeed. “In Ashgabat we have amazing new buildings, all made of marble. Our National Museum cost $100 million. Our National Mosque cost $150 million. Our country is rich, because of oil. Petrol, you will see it costs $1 for a full tank. Gas and water and electricity are free. I have a 100 square metre apartment and rent I pay $15 a month. Our people are not earning so much, you see, but they have a good life because our president is very strong. From Ashgabat, 150 kilometres we are building six-lane highways. You can get 10 kilos of tomatoes for $1, or 40 kilos of bread…”

I am listening intently, desperate to take in the entire extraordinary monologue. Nobody knows quite what to say by the time he’s finished. He combines the arrogance of the former overlord with the enthusiasm of the adopted citizen of a country whose perceived successes he’s only to happy to muscle in on. No wonder that in the following days, as his lack of interest in anything connected to our lives becomes apparent, it becomes a game among us to taunt him gently by asking innocuous-sounding questions and watch him deliberately not understand them.

“It seems that your government is encouraging religion, is that right?” I ask a couple of days later, over breakfast. Given Turkmenbashi’s love of building mosques, I thought this would be a fairly uncontroversial way to get the insider’s perspective on the way the country is run. “Sorry, I don’t understand”, he answers unconvincingly. “I mean that in places like Uzbekistan, they look at Islam as a threat, but here it seems to be encouraged actively.” Dima looks at me. “You know, in Uzbekistan they have many problems. The people are so poor, they earn only half what the Turkmens earn. They eat only bread and onions. You go to Uzbekistan, all the buildings, pfhur! So old and ugly! And we have free petrol, free water, free electricity…”

Later that day, approaching Ashgabat, we pass the Walk of Health (see my last post for details). Dima points it out with unmistakeable pride. I decide that the obvious question needs to be asked. “Where does it go to?” “Oh, everybody.” “No, where does it go to?” “Schoolchildren, tourists, old people, everyone – you know, my mother, she is pensioner, but she goes up there every Saturday.” “No, I don’t think you understand. It must go somewhere – where does it end?” Dima looks at me as if I am a major inconvenience. He points to the bottom of the hill, very close to us. “There.”

Ashgabat turns out to be nothing short of astonishing. Even before entering the city, its location, wedged between the desert to the north and the monochromatic brown Kopet Dag mountains to the south, forming the border with Iran, is inspired. Some years ago, I owned a second-hand copy of Lonely Planet's first ever guide to central Asia, in which the verdict on the capital was: "Ashgabat may not be at the end of the world, but it feels like it can't be far away." For better or for worse, no-one would recognise that description any more. Driving through the new parts of Ashgabat is like being transported within a game of Sim City. Everywhere, new elite apartment blocks are springing up, gleaming and uniformly white like Florida condominia turned sinister. The enormous new ministries and monuments are all constructed out of white marble, and are an exact analogy with Stalin-period architecture: they could be thought handsome but for their overpowering whiff of totalitarianism. A few cars cruise down the spotless six-lane highways outside. These are broken up with parks studded with impossibly elaborate fountains, and statues of the president and of his writings. Between all this, I occasionally come across an old, low-rise district of town, presumably inhabited by people who have long grown used to the idea that their neighbourhood is soon for the bulldozers and they won’t get a cent in compensation.

Turkmenbashi's face grins from every public building, and those that do not feature the president invariably proclaim that "The 21st century is the Turkmen Golden Age". This promise is built on the idea that the proceeds from the country’s oil and gas wealth will raise the standard of living of the ordinary Turkmen to at least that of Kuwait. But with the sheer amount of money being spent on follies like the biggest mosque in Central Asia, with a 65m dome of pure gold (and most of the inscriptions inside seemingly exhorting the worshippers to praise Turkmenbashi, rather than any other deity), and the official biggest fountain in the world, while the average Turkmen makes do with the same goods in the shops as in any other ex-Soviet country, it’s sadly obvious that Turkmenbashi is building his castle on sand, both figuratively and literally.

After a couple of days in town, I begin to appreciate a further aspect of the new country: apart from going round and looking at the (admittedly fascinating) monuments, there is nothing to do. I wander around a bookshop, but this doesn’t take long as apart from some dog-eared second-hand paperbacks in Russian, there is virtually nothing except school textbooks and the collected wisdom of you-know-who. The national museum, whose interior is strangely akin to the headquarters of some City accountancy firm, is divided between some absorbing displays from the major archeological sites of the country, and the decidedly less absorbing “Exhibition commemorating the 14th anniversary of the foundation of Independent and Permanently Neutral Turkmenistan”. (The 14th anniversary was a year ago. Presumably the exhibition is to be left up permanently because to remove those exhibits from the President’s youth would be sacrilege.) Turkmen TV, while I was there, spent most of the news bulletin covering a children’s sports day in Ashgabat. (I’m not joking.) And as for cinemas or live music, they have been declared “un-Turkmen” art forms, so the new white marble Magtumguly Drama Theatre is about the only option in town. Even here, though, traditional Turkmen dancing is about as adventurous as it gets.

All this makes it even more intriguing to meet the people and to find out whether they have anything more going on in their heads than Dima does. The first thing that strikes me is how jovial and open they are. On our first night in the port of Turkmenbashi, Massimo, the Italian motorcyclist, and I are on a mission, understandably, to find somewhere to watch the World Cup final. The only problem is that it begins at 11pm, and as the waitress in the first café we try tells us: “in this town we’re not allowed to work past 11”. But even while she is warning us off, a cheerful middle-aged man is inviting us back to his flat to watch the match on a Turkish satellite channel. This we do, and are plied with tea, bread, cheese and sweets by his wife and sons. I only later find out that they are entertaining us in cheerful disobedience of a rule which orders that people must not take foreigners into their homes beyond midnight, so I sincerely hope that no-one got into trouble on our account. (Massimo was pleased at the end of the night anyway.) They are curious to know about our native counties, but waste no time in reminding us about how easy it is to live in a country where electricity, gas and water are free, but they sound genuinely contented about this, in contrast to Dima’s waves of propaganda.

A few days later, I meet up with three young Turkmens, all working towards getting into university. They are much more clued-up about the world than I had expected, thanks in part to a schools’ programme that sends able students to high schools in the US for their penultimate year of school. Their school follows its own curriculum, including plenty of dangerously un-Turkmen extracurricular pursuits. But in them, too, I sense an innate and unfeigned pride in this country that, when they were born, didn’t even exist. “People from other ex-Soviet countries laugh at us about all our golden statues and things like that,” one of them tells me, “and it actually quite offends me.”

Even so, national pride clearly isn’t enough, because when I ask them where they are planning to go to university, one is going to Bulgaria, another is looking to Russia, and the third wants to try for a place in America. “You know, here in Turkmenistan they make us take two years between school and university,” one of them tells me, “and the boys serve in the army and the girls work. But after all that they make you sit a Rukhnama exam to get in to university. Well, I read the Rukhnama once and I forgot it all straight away, so I don’t think an exam in it would be much fun.”

I suspect that when Turkmenbashi’s sandcastle comes crashing down, these articulate, entertaining youngsters will already be elsewhere. And about that time, even Dima sounded a bit doubtful: “The thing is, we don’t know what will happen when he dies, because we have only one president.” My plea to the Turkmens would be: please, please, please don’t junk the revolving golden statue…

Turkmenistan (i): My top ten favourite facts about Turkmenistan

It occurred to me that some of you may be unfamiliar with the peculiarities of Turkmenistan, and that you're therefore missing out on some gems. So, I'll put up something about my experiences there in the next few days, but until then, here's my Turkmen Top Ten:

• I would say that 1% of public buildings in Turkmenistan are named after national poet Magtumguly. A further 1% are named after Hero of Turkmenistan Gurbansoltan Eje. The remaining 98% are named after President-for-Life Saparmyrat Turkmenbashi the Great, founder of Independent and Permanently Neutral Turkmenistan. His real name is Saparmyrat Niyazov, but on independence he took the name Turkmenbashi, which means “Father of the Turkmen”. But who is Gurbansoltan Eje, you ask. She’s Turkmenbashi’s mother.
• Turkmenbashi formally renounced communism in favour of Islam, and to prove his sincerity made a pilgrimage to Mecca in 1994. To commemorate this occasion he built an enormous mosque, and named it the ‘Saparmyrat Hajji Mosque’. He has kindly suggested that, as many Turkmens may lack the means to get to Mecca, they might make a pilgrimage to his mosque once a year instead.
• In 2001 Turkmenbashi brought out his book Rukhnama, which means ‘book of the soul’. It is often referred to as ‘the holy Rukhnama’. Every Turkmen has to read it, and every Turkmen wanting to enter university has to pass a Rukhnama exam. So important is this work, with its tastefully pink and green cover, that there is a statue of it in the capital. That’s right, a statue of a book.
• As stated above, Turkmenistan is recognized as a ‘permanently neutral’ nation by the UN. To commemorate this Turkmenbashi had an Arch of Neutrality built. It is crowned by a 12-metre statue of His Excellency which revolves through the day to face the sun.
• Turkmenistan has a Ministry of Fairness.
• The capital, Ashgabat, holds the world record for the most hotels in one street (currently around 25). They have all been built in the last 10 years and are invariably half-empty. Taxi drivers looking for a particular hotel drive along stopping at every single one to check, because no-one can remember what order they are in.
• In 2002, Turkmenbashi had the idea of renaming all the streets in Ashgabat with numbers e.g. “1985 street”, “2032 street”, and so on. The problem is that they aren’t laid out in numerical order, so the only effect has been to make everyone get lost.
• A couple of years ago, the international press reported that Turkmenbashi had decreed that an ice palace should be built in the desert for the benefit of the populace, and the consensus was that he had finally gone completely bonkers. Unfortunately, this turned out to be a mistake in translation, and he was actually referring to an ice rink in Ashgabat.
• One of the newest additions to the Turkmen landscape is the Walk of Health, which consists of two concrete staircases built into the mountainside near Ashgabat. One is 8km and the other 27km. They don’t actually lead anywhere, they’re just there.
• Ashgabat is close to the Iranian border, is a popular weekend destination for Iranians, who come to Turkmenistan to enjoy the freedoms. The idea of anyone coming to Turkmenistan for the freedoms still amuses me.
  

In my week in Turkmenistan, I tried to get some sense of how much the system there really was a joke, as the above might lead you to believe, and how much it was actually a truly sinister old-school dictatorship. I thought I got some of the way there. More on that soon.

Azerbaijan (ii): A little too much excitement

I now think that the beginning of my last post looks a little naive in retrospect, because I had my own run-in with the Azeri border guards just hours after I wrote it. Those of a nervous disposition might like not to read the details - just be assured that it didn't end in any sort of mental, physical, or financial damage...

As you may have gleaned, from Azerbaijan the only direct way to Turkmenistan is by ferry across the Caspian, a journey of about 16 hours. Although this is considered quite a popular route (in the rather pitiful context of pan-Turkic tourism), there isn't any timetable - nor is there any set price, or indeed any guarantee that once a boat comes in it will agree to take any passengers at all, if it's carrying anything that might be construed in any way as dangerous.

Considering this, I initially get away remarkably lightly, having been told to report to the port at 9 in the morning, and then having been told that a boat was coming in at 12, and to come back then to sort out tickets. I also manage to run into my fellow travelers for the Turkmen leg, Khim and Cecilia, who are motorcyclists from Switzerland on a journey that makes mine look like going down for last orders at the Raven. (Given that we have to be guided round Turkmenistan, I think we are all glad to be able to share the costs between three of us.) We also link up with another motorcyclist, Massimo from Italy, who is coming on the same sailing.

Tickets are bought without a problem, and it isn’t even that hard to negotiate permits for the motorbikes to be carried in the hold. The ship, which looks just like any car ferry (although it includes a roll-on-roll-off facility for trains, so most of the hold is already taken up with a couple of goods trains) is waiting for us.

And then we go to the customs and passport control building. “Open your bag,” commands the young guard. I am used to this by now. At the same time that his eyes light on my camera, his colleague’s light on the Armenian visa in my passport. “So you were in Armenia?” “Yes.” “How did you find it there?” “OK.” (This isn’t the moment to demonstrate conversational skills, I feel.) Any hope that this might be the end of the matter is drowned in a barrage of horribly predictable questions: “Where did you stay? How long? Who with? Did you go to Karabakh?” “Oh no, not to Karabakh”, I say, confident in the knowledge that there’s nothing in my passport to indicate that I did go. He picks up my camera. “Please can you show me your photos of Armenia.” Oh dear.

I try and stall him as long as possible, I really do, but despite my best efforts at changing the subject he is not letting me get away without a peek at my holiday snaps. As I have not been able to download my photos, they are all sitting on my camera. Clearly trembling, I begin: “This is Yerevan. And that’s a park in Yerevan. And this is my friend. And that’s my friend’s friend. And that’s my friend’s friend’s dog.” “Did you go to Karabakh?” “No.” “OK, go on.”

Then we get to the incriminating evidence. “Where’s that?” he demands, pointing at a particular beautiful view of four waves of mountains. “South of Armenia somewhere.” “What’s this?” “A wall.” (Technically true – except it was made entirely out of car number plates gathered by Armenians after the Azeris had fled one village.) “What’s this town?” “Goris, I think.” He talks into his phone, speaking in Azeri, but I do recognize the word “Stepanakert”. I’ve been well and truly rumbled, I think, and start wondering what Azeri jails are like, deciding that they would probably achieve the unlikely distinction of being less pleasant than the hotel where I’ve spent the past four days.

To his credit, he never jumps up and shouts out that he’s found a spy. He flicks through a photo of the most iconic monument of Karabakh without so much as a word. He’s either very restrained or very stupid.

Finally, he repeats his questions. “Now, I want to remind myself. How long did you spend in Armenia? Where did you stay? Did you go to Karabakh?” To this last question my answer is a lie which has now assumed Comical Ali proportions. A silence, which feels immense to me but probably is a matter of a couple of seconds. I’m still thinking about that Azeri jail…

“Thank you for your time, you may go. Please understand, asking these questions is just our job.” “Thank you, goodbye”, I mumble, already halfway out of the door. I go and hide by the still-closed entrance to the ferry. As soon as I’m allowed on (which is not for an hour or so), I am suddenly extremely glad I brought a couple of beers with me.

I’m still not quite sure what happened there, but I got out unscathed, so I don’t mind too much. Also, as Khim points out after the event, they had actually already stamped my passport by that point. Let’s just say, though, that I wouldn’t be too surprised, if I applied for another visa for Azerbaijan in the near future, if it were to be mysteriously refused. But see my last post for reasons why that wouldn’t be much of a tragedy…

Azerbaijan: The Beast of Baku

The border guard enters the train compartment and flicks through the passport. "Where's your visa?" A silence. "But I'm only in transit, I was told I could get one at the border." The guard shakes his head: "You can only get one if you fly in." "You mean I can't get a visa here at all?" "No, you'll have to go back to Tbilisi." "But I've got tickets booked to leave from Baku. And I haven't got any Georgian money left." "That's not my problem, that's your problem. Now please leave the train."

Had you there - actually that wasn't me who left the train, that was the Italian sharing my compartment. It is a great satisfaction to me that all my visas are in order (I can recommend the wonderful Rob Lourens at Scott's Real Life Tours in London if anyone is planning anything similar - for a very reasonable fee he will save you all the trouble of queueing outside all those embassies). This isn't to say that my time in Azerbaijan is without setbacks.

Firstly, the currency system makes pre-decimalised Britain look like a model of common sense. The currency is the manat, which has just been devalued by a factor of 5,000. Thus, when someone says something costs “5”, this might mean 5 new manat, or it might mean 5,000 old manat (1 new manat), or (the masterstroke) it might mean 10 new manat, because Azeris are prone to counting in shirvans, which are unofficial but equivalent to 2 new manat. I feel early on that some people are exploiting this confusion. Having struggled from Baku train station to the seafront to eat lunch, across some of the least pedestrian-friendly streets I have ever encountered (nobody thought to build subways to go with the six-lane boulevards, and pedestrian crossings are treated by drivers as open invitations to put their foot to the floor), I am surprised when the modest lunch I have just eaten brings an unitemised bill of 13 manat (about 8GBP). I spend a while trying to work through the maths and eventually I query this with the waiter. “Oh, excuse me”, he says, and brings out another bill, rather suspiciously quickly, this time for 4 manat.

Baku’s major industry, and it is huge, is oil, and this brings with it a swarm of expats, who pace the streets mournfully, thinking that maybe Aberdeen wasn’t so bad after all. One of these, an Englishman approaches me in the street. He introduces himself as Rob, and asks me if I know where the British Embassy is, because his bag containing his money and mobile phone has just been stolen. Having just seen off the minor but highly unsavoury lunch scam, I am ready to sympathise. He says he is just about to start working for BP, and is doing some courses in preparation. I offer to walk him to the Embassy – he says he will be fine, but offers to buy me dinner that night. I readily agree, and we fix a place and time. Finally, he asks me for 10 manat to get a taxi back to his hotel, which is out of town and where he has left his bank card. I oblige, and he says “You’re a gentleman – an officer and a gentleman.” Then we go our separate ways.

You’re probably laughing already – don’t – I really wanted to think that Englishmen abroad would stick together and not pull confidence tricks on one another – but I think you can guess what happens that evening: I wait for our 9.00 rendezvous from 8.45 until 9.45, but no Rob. (Conveniently, he’s had his phone stolen and his hotel’s a long way away so I have no means of contacting him.) I eventually wander away, hungry and angry with myself for having fallen for a con for what I think is the first time in my life, even though the sum involved is so pitifully small. Yet I am so angry that the next day, despite a heavy rainstorm, I make sure I walk down the same streets where I met him at about the same time – and, astonishingly, there he is. He looks like he’s been out in the rain all night. He claims that he arrived about 9.30 the previous evening because he got a bit delayed on the way from the hotel (evidently untrue) and that he still didn’t have any money, but was going to be sorted out in a couple of hours after which time he would give me a call and arrange a place to meet where he could buy me a beer. I actually disappoint myself by not telling him what a lowlife scumbag I think he is, and instead play along and say I’ll wait for his call.

Imagining just how stupid he thinks I must be, I decide to trail him and his Azeri friends, KGB-style, round the streets. They walk very slowly, so it is easy to do, and for some reason keep going round in circles. (Predictably, no-one seems to find my behaviour at all strange.) By this stage I am so fed up of Baku, its dirt which means I need to shower twice a day, its standing-room-only minibuses from which it’s impossible to see where you are, its surly waitresses who tell me I can’t order just tea but need to order either Mars or Snickers to go with it, and particularly with the fat gold-toothed Uzbek with whom I end up sharing a hotel room and who wants me to buy a restaurant in London so he can come and cook there, that I can’t be bothered to do anything else. Eventually, just as I have worked out how I am going to confront him (this takes almost an hour of trailing, that’s how slow my mind is working), he and his friends disappear in a crowd and I feel yet more of an idiot. And in case you hadn’t appreciated, I’m doing this for the sake of about 6 quid.

Undoubtedly, I have been acting like a bit of an idiot. But eventually everyone who tries recording their travels, and as such, makes some attempt to uncover the essence of the places they visit so as to be able to share them with others, comes across some place which repels them to such an extent that they don’t have the inclination to try any more. Baku is like that for me. It is full of grand late 19th century architecture, built at the height of the initial oil boom, and I see nothing but self-satisfaction in those facades, the self-satisfaction of people who have made a lot of money overnight, and show this off by building a city overnight. Now, huge residential towers for the new wave who have made fortunes through oil are springing up, and they too seem like a naked display of wealth, unredeemed by any sort of charm. What’s more, it has all the familiar inequalities on display of any ex-Soviet capital. And so Baku doesn’t work for me as a European city or an Asian one; as a style capital or as a chaotic marketplace; as a capitalist showcase or a socialist utopia.

Still, I have to spend a while here, because I have to keep my ear to the ground to find out when the unscheduled boats across the Caspian to Turkmenistan are going. It is just as well that there are a couple of fascinating trips to be made into the hinterland.

With three fellow travelers, all mercifully equipped with a highly developed sense of the absurd, I venture out further into the peninsula on which Baku is located. This contains a fascinating Zoroastrian fire temple, built over a natural flame that used to burn in the ground in this area which is so fabulously wealthy in natural resources that they more often than not seep to the surface. The temple used to attract not only Zoroastrians, but also Hindus making pilgrimages from India and sometimes coming to live in the compound. Both religions, so different from each other, hold fire to be sacred, and this temple is a rare and fascinating example of two religions coexisting peacefully side by side in a shared holy place.

The same activity within the earth that leads to natural gas flames (which have long since dried up, unfortunately) is also responsible, in several places across Azerbaijan, for the deeply odd phenomenon of mud volcanoes. The ones that I visited are reached by a track across the scrubby semi-desert (actually the lake bed of the Caspian when the water level was much higher 10,000 or so years ago), 10km from the nearest town, and are exactly what the title suggests: intermittently fizzing and belching pools of thick grey mud, which occasionally and amusingly spit mud high into the air and send miniature rivers of it trickling down their sides. Even better, the place was absolutely deserted, so I was able to appreciate its oddness undisturbed.

But the ultimate day trip from Baku, albeit one which comes very much under the heading of “alternative”, is to go out through the appalling post-industrial wasteland which surrounds the city, and to appreciate just how much damage the hasty exploitation of the resources of the Caspian and its surrounding area, starting with Stalin’s Five-Year Plans, and continuing for many decades, did to the environment of the peninsula. I couldn’t face visiting the Baby Cemetery in Sumqayit, which held a large proportion of the USSR’s petrochemical industry, and which consequently held the world record for child mortality, but I and my fellow travelers did take a trip to Artyom Island, on the very end of the peninsula. It’s incredible that anyone is still living here, but they are: in a landscape of power lines and extraction materials, some half-submerged as the water levels have risen, where any green in the landscape is a lurid, artificial looking green, where fetid pools swirl with a mixture of salt and oil, and where amongst all this industrial material – nothing moves. We are fascinated and photograph it at length, incurring the wrath of more than one local. But nothing prepared us for the most amazing thing, which is that there is a really quite acceptable café in the middle of it all…

I’m off to Turkmenistan now, assuming I get on the boat, where the Internet is virtually banned, so don’t worry if you don’t hear from me for quite a while. I will return with my impressions of the ‘North Korea of Central Asia’ when I can, so be sure to tune in for that!

Armenia: The great homecoming

I hadn't anticipated a reaction quite on this scale. In response to the merest passing mention of Azerbaijan, the old woman spits: "I hate them. You've heard about Karabakh?" I nod. "You know what they did? They took our young women and made them into shashlyk. You know, cannibalism." I am temporarily stuck for an answer, but the old woman, who previously had told me she used to lecture in physics at the state university, has not run out of bile. "And the Turks," - my heart sinks - "you've heard of the genocide?" Again I nod. "They killed one and a half million of us. Why, I don't know. You know, I hate them. And do you know what, only fourteen other countries have recognised the genocide. Australia, yes, France, yes, Germany, yes, but Britain hasn't." By this stage I'm unsure whether this is meant as a personal reproach to me or not, but I decide not to find out.

We are on the bus from Tbilisi to Yerevan, a painfully slow old thing which is sadly ill-equipped for the mountain roads of northern Armenia, and which prolongs the 250km journey over nearly ten hours. This would be less painful for me, were the old woman not so insistent that conversation with her would prove more beneficial than my book (our first few minutes are spent trying to teach her, unsuccessfully, to pronounce Titus Groan). Her tirades against Armenia's neighbours are punctuated by rhapsodising about the decency and hard-working nature of her own countrymen, and about the glories of the Armenian church, the alphabet (which, in common with the Armenian church, dates back to the 4th century, and which I didn't even attempt to learn - its supposed inventor, Meshrop Mashtots, is very probably the country's biggest historical celebrity), and even about the airport building (when she says it's unique, she agrees with my guidebook, but they use that word with different intent). And every now and then she returns to her lament for the loss of empire: Armenia's territory used to cover 300,000 sq km, including a large part of Turkey, and stretching south as far as the Tigris, whereas now it occupies less than 30,000 sq km, almost all mountainous.

In all, her conversation is the same uneasy melange of national chauvinism and sentimentality that I recognise from some of the older Russians I have met on my travels. I hope fervently that these opinions will not be repeated too often by others: while the sincere puzzlement at the Armenian people's constant bad luck through history makes me sympathetic, the constant dwelling on the former borders of Armenia makes me much less so, as some of the territorial quibbling dates back to the days when England ruled three quarters of France.

Later in the week, I am treated to extended exposure to the outlook of a fascinating group of diasporan Armenians. Only a third of Armenians actually live in Armenia itself. Historically, many lived also in nearby lands such as Persia and Syria. They also inhabited the eastern part of Ottoman Turkey, which is what, in short, triggered a wave of repressions from the late 19th century, culminating in the horrific genocide that raged in varying degrees of intensity from 1915-22. At this point, many left for further-flung destinations: Los Angeles, Paris, Australia and Canada for instance, and were followed by further waves fleeing the various upheavals in the region as the century progressed. (I discover that System of a Down, Cher and, rather wonderfully, Charles Aznavour, are all Armenian, and have a lot of fun imagining a concert featuring them all at the same time.) So it is that the four Armenians I end up travelling with, all from California, are making highly emotional first visits to Armenia proper.

One, Andryush, fled Iran during the war with Iraq in the 1980s, unable to bear his children being called 'dirty Christians' any longer. A married couple, Melkhon and Grace, left Lebanon at around the same time to escape the civil war, and the other, a sweetly maternal lady, spoke endearingly terrible English despite having lived in America for decades.

Before joining this group, I spend two days in Yerevan, a city which is much maligned by the Americans expats I am fortunate enough to befriend while there, but which manages to put its best face on for the visitor. I am impressed by the spacious avenues, with trees concealing high-ceilinged 1920s apartment buildings, built in the days when the Soviets didn't just do everything on the cheap. I like the many parks, which are home to an astonishing number of outside cafes. (In fact, there are far too many cafes for the population. I wonder if this is the modern equivalent of those kiosk cities that still exist outside many Metro stations, where 20 or 30 kiosks all sell exactly the same things, usually at the same prices.) I am in awe of the ancient church at Echmiadzin, parts of which date back to the 4th century, when Armenia became the first country in history to convert to Christianity. But all through this I am toying with what some of you might think to describe as a Truly Heinous Idea: I am planning a trip to Nagorno-Karabakh.

The extent of my knowledge before going to Karabakh was that Armenia and Azerbaijan fought a war over it in the early 1990s which, though won by Armenia, is still unresolved, and that it now exists in an uneasy independent status, because of which the Foreign Office advises against going there. However, Lonely Planet assures me that, as long as you don't go trekking on your own due to the landmine risk, it's as safe as Armenia (which, except for the finger-pointing old women on the buses, is pretty safe), and that it contains some of the most impressive churches and monasteries in Armenia, as well as some of the most spectacular scenery.

When I saw a three-day tour to Karabakh advertised in Yerevan, it didn't take me long to sign up, disappointed as I still was with my failure to reach the most spectacular parts of Georgia the week before. And before anyone has a coronary at the thought of me going there, it did indeed prove to be completely safe. Being now almost 100% Armenian, it is considered a suitable destination for Armenian pensioners, and if it is safe enough for Armenian pensioners, it is safe enough for me. Incidentally, the food is almost all organic and of an extremely high standard. I can't say the same of the local mulberry vodka, which is 57% alcohol and so unpleasant that I am forced to make some of the later toasts one dinnertime with water, fortunately avoiding causing major offence.

And so it is that on Thursday morning I find myself on a minibus out of Yerevan heading south with the four Californian-Armenians, our guide Rima, and our driver Vahan (the only level-headed driver in the whole of the Caucasus). The roads in Armenia are surprisingly good, as building new roads is a popular way for rich diasporans to help the motherland. Our first stop is a view of Mount Ararat, now some way inside Turkey but part of historical Armenian territory and clearly visible from Yerevan. This is rather poignant for the others, particularly for Melkhon, who explains that even though he never saw Ararat, he was taught so many stories about it at school that he was able to paint it from memory.

It is not until that evening that we approach Karabakh. The view from Armenia proper is amazing: a deep valley, then four waves of mountains, each one higher than the last, the front waves thickly forested, but gradually lightening in colour until the pale rock of the furthest wave, which is catching the evening sun. No wonder both Armenians and Azeris have claimed it as their own isolated fortress heartland. It's impossibly quiet, too.

The road through the valley is quite exciting, as we're on a road controlled by Armenians that is technically surrounded on both sides by Azeri territory. In practice, the area is deserted, and what activity one finds in those parts is all of the Armenian variety. I'm not thinking about Azeri snipers, but about my visa. As a self-proclaimed independent country, Karabakh issues visas for everybody except Armenians, and so I was due to get one in Yerevan. However, I was insistent that the visa must not be put in my passport, but on a separate paper, as otherwise I would be refused entry to Azerbaijan. The embassy in Yerevan claimed they were unable to do this any more, but I could get a visa at the border. In the event I don't because the border post is already closed for the night, so we continue on to the capital, Stepanakert.

Stepanakert is a town of 40,000 whose salient feature is that it has no salient features: it looks like any other Armenian town, with the exception of the brand-new and rather unnecessary dual carriageways at the edge of town. Our hotel turns out to be far more comfortable than anywhere else I've stayed on this trip so far.

The next morning, any evidence of the war is mostly confined to Rima's commentary. We drive past a village which, she explains, used to be a 'Turkish' village (Armenians have a tendency to conflate the Turks and the Azeris, which for some reason I find slightly dishonest). The Armenians ordered the 'Turks' to leave during the war, but shortly afterwards all the people were shot. The Armenian army was blamed, but post-mortems showed that the 'Turkish' forces must have been responsible. The company on the bus tut furiously at this story. It is at this point I realise that I am going to get a tour of the Armenians heartland, not a balanced understanding of the forces at work in the Karabakh war.

And indeed, we soon steer away from such emotive sights and concentrate on the fabulous hilltop monastery of Gandzasar, built in the 13th century. Its present pristine appearance is due, yet again, to the generosity of rich diasporans, who poured money into Karabakh in the late 1990s. A fascinating story about Gandzasar concerns the local priest, who was guarding the monastery alone during the war, and on noticing a military vehicle coming up the winding road that leads to the monastery, stationed himself outside the gate with a gun and prepared for the worst. When he realised the vehicle contained not Azeris, but Armenians, come to tell him that they had retaken a key town, he went into the church to give thanks, to find that a pattern resembling a male profile had begun to appear on the wall. It is still visible today.

Our last stop of the day, though, brings me much closer to recent events. Shushi is a town in the hills above Stepanakert that used to be mainly populated by Azeris, and was an important cultural centre to both Azeris and Armenians. The Azeris spent five years firing down from Shushi upon Stepanakert, until one night the Armenians scaled a seemingly impossible slope and toook the town back, possibly the major turning point of the war. The Azeris left hastily, and the population is now around 5,000, compared to 25,000 beforehand. It's a very moving place: one blackened apartment building has the remnants of a shopfront that reads, rather poignantly, "Goods for children", people stand in groups in the street as if wondering where they are, and in some neighbourhoods perhaps one house in ten has been reconstructed, and the rest simply lie empty. We drive past the ruined mosque to see children scrambling up to the top of one of the minarets and shouting out to their friends from the top. The others in my group spend a long while in the town's church, praying. I would like to explore the town more, and take pictures, but it seems unwise to ask them "Could you let me have half an hour to go and take pictures of the place you guys destroyed?"

I remind Rima at least three times that day that I don't have a visa and she assures me there is no need to worry: we can do it later. As we are waved, uninspected, through the checkpoint on Saturday morning on the way back to Yerevan, I still don't have one. I can't help thinking that I didn't really need to be in breach of Karabakh law on top of everything else. But all's well that ends well. And at least the Azeris will never know...