Silk Road: London to...where?

2006-09-06T04:04:00.000Z

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.

2006-08-29T10:58:00.000Z

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.

2006-08-23T11:06:00.000Z

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.

2006-08-13T02:30:00.000Z

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.

2006-08-03T12:28:00.000Z

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.

2006-07-25T15:45:00.000Z

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...

2006-07-17T14:17:00.000Z

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…

2006-07-16T13:58:00.000Z

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.

2006-07-16T13:04:00.000Z

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…

2006-07-07T15:03:00.000Z

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!

2006-07-04T13:43:00.000Z

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...

2006-06-27T12:43:00.000Z

Georgia: "Go Rowney!"

My defining moment in Georgia came on my last night, when I found a large screen off Tbilisi's smart main street, Rustaveli, to watch England play Ecuador. To my surprise, at least half of the 200-strong crowd were wearing England shirts. They knew all the chants, they danced and cheered after the England goal, and their post-match celebrations, which spilled out on to the street, were in the best English tradition, so much so that they had to be broken up by the police because they were causing serious disruption to the traffic. This being Georgia, though, one kid managed to cut his hand on some broken glass and left a picturesque trail of blood all over the floor.

Number one key fact about Georgia, you see, is that their flag bears a striking resemblance to the English one. Go into any Georgian church and you're practically guaranteed that there will be a fresco of St George and the dragon somewhere. I even managed to stay overnight with one Giorgi Giorgadze. So I really shouldn't have been surprised about the support for the sporting legions of St George.

It's an incredibly old country, the second in the world (after Armenia) to adopt Christianity in the fourth century A.D. The aforementioned Giorgi gave me a lesson in Georgian history, which was, as expected, an immensely complicated patchwork, involving centuries in which the country was made up of a number of small kingdoms such as Colchis, Iveria and Abkhazia, a brief period of real power in the 11th and 12th centuries, during which time the first united Georgian kingdom was proclaimed, and then a long period under first Mongol, then Persian, then Russian rule.

But that gives a misleading impression of Georgia as a homogeneous land. In fact it's not stable at all, with one part seceding (Abkhazia), one part wanting to unite with a province of Russia (South Ossetia), and one part occasionally bombed by the Russians because it is believed to contain Chechen rebels (Tusheti), all of which makes planning an itinerary quite a challenge. Even when the itinerary is planned, the transport system makes getting around even more of an adventure. And so it's been incredibly hard to get a grip on Georgia in the time I've had. So I hope the following fragments help you in some way to build up a picture of the place. (And feel free to skip some if you have to get back to work, you won't miss anything critical...)

* * * * * * * * *

I get on the bus at Trabzon in Turkey. The windscreen has a couple of holes in it which look suspiciously like they may have been caused by bullets. Immediately an impromptu market begins, with bananas being swapped for sour plums, biscuits for crisps, and it is so contagious that I am soon joining in myself. As a result I get adopted by a family on their way back to Tbilisi from holiday in Turkey. Shota, aged fourteen, is travelling with his heavily pregnant sister and her husband. They pester me to spend as long in Tbilisi as I can, and promise to show me everything when I get there - so I promise to phone, as the prospect of having a native guide is a very attractive one. The pregnant sister's presence turns out to be something of a blessing because once at the border we get moved to the front of every single queue. Except that the bus takes nine hours to clear customs and we finally arrive in Batumi, just 20 kilometres from the border and my destination, at half past three in the morning, having taken 13 hours to cover 200km... Most interesting for me all the way through though is how old the sister might be. "I'm fifteen years old", she tells me later without prompting, "and I got married at fourteen." I am interested to know whether this is legal or not. "Oh yes, it is in Georgia, but I had to run away from home to do it because no-one likes their children getting married that young. But if Zura and I love each other then there's nothing anyone can do about it. And anyway, my mother doesn't mind any more." I am left slightly speechless, because I never really believed that it could be properly legal to marry that young, because she seems such a normal girl in every other way and completely at ease with the situation, with not a hint of childishness about her (save perhaps when she claims to be unaware that there are any regions of Georgia which are at all dangerous), but unfortunately most of all because my Russian language capabilities are not sufficient to find out if she really understands the consequences...

* * * * * * * * *

Wandering around Batumi the next day, I realise that the Lonely Planet's description of the buildings as 'more akin to a Caribbean banana republic than the Caucasus' is spot on. Low rise 19th century buildings with large balconies on which old men are dozing are shielded by rows of palm trees. In the evening, I order a beer and am given something which says 'extra strong 16%'. Thankfully, it's nothing of the sort. I can't understand anything else on the bottle because Georgian is a language with its own alphabet. None of the letters bear any resemblance to anything in the Roman, Greek or Cyrillic alphabets, so reading it is decidedly hard going. By the end of the week I've just about managed to work out which direction I should be going on the Tbilisi metro (although I sometimes overshoot my station when the carriage is crowded and the doors malfunction...)

* * * * * * * * *

My breakfast coffee, already very sweet, arrives with a large bowl of sugar beside it. Never mind, if my teeth rot, I suppose I can get some nice gold ones. They seem to be fashionable around here.

* * * * * * * * *

A few of you will eventually receive postcards posted in Kutaisi. When they arrive, please note the immense care that went into putting the stamps on. When they only have 20 tetri stamps, and the average postcard costs 300 tetri, you need a particularly heroic sticker-on to cope with the task.

* * * * * * * * *

Georgian food is something of a national treasure. When I was in Moscow I used to eat it all the time, partly because it's genuinely very tasty, and partly because it was the only way I could get fresh vegetables as part of my meal. One of the nice things about homestays, which I used quite a lot in Georgia, is that you tend to get cooked for. Mrs Giorgadze, I am happy to report, has quite phenomenal cooking skills, and made me a feast I shall never forget. The starter was a paste of aubergine, walnuts and garlic, and that was followed by a stew of meat and potatoes, laden with garlic, parsley and sour plums. Only later did I work out that the secret ingredient in Georgian cooking is in fact salt. No wonder I had to drink so much of the homemade wine to go with it. The wine is a rose - its pinkish colour comes from fermenting the skins slightly (wine fans, help me here, is this how a rose is made usually - I didn't think so), and it's naturally slightly fizzy. It, too, was an absolute delight.

* * * * * * * * *

From Kutaisi, I could see the mountains beginning, and felt immediately drawn towards them. I had to choose carefully where I went in the mountains, but the Racha region is considered fairly safe. Unfortunately, the only way to get there is by quite the most decrepit bus I have ever travelled on. I spend six bone-shaking hours surrounded by sacks of onions and potatoes, and there's actually only space for me because the rest of the onions and potatoes have been secured to the roof. Once in Utsera, which is sufficiently remote for me to be completely stranded, I find that the sanatorium I had hoped to stay in is in fact closed. There is nothing for it but to knock on doors to find somewhere to stay the night. Eventually a lady called Manana offers me a room for the night, free of charge (Georgian hospitality is truly legendary). She has two house guests called Giorgi and Noe. They are repainting a 9th century church in the village, and after a hard day of work they like nothing better than to steal their hostess's wine and make endless toasts to international friendship and the Orthodox Church with an impressionable foreigner. The wine must be drunk in shots. By the end of it I am mysteriously fluent in Russian. But I feel absolutely horrible.

* * * * * * * * *

The next day I decide to go for a walk. I follow the road uphill, surrounded by forested slopes, behind which I see bare grassy hills, and behind them snowy 4000 metre peaks. Unfortunately, I am unwittingly walking into a border zone. I know this because I meet two fierce-looking soldiers coming in the other direction. They confiscate my passport and march me back down again to where I am staying. I am panicking slightly that they might ask for massive bribes, but they don't, as one is too in love with the Georgian army and says it is the only thing he ever wanted a career in, and the other only knows two words of English: "David Beckham".

* * * * * * * * *

Coming down from the mountains is no less eventful than coming up. I am rather annoyed that, having got up at 5 a.m. to catch the bus down, it is stopped in its tracks after half an hour by a landslide. It takes seven hours for a tractor to arrive from the next village down to dig a way through. During this time, I discover that the coach driver has only one casette, and this contains the same six Russian pop songs which he leaves on endless loop. By the time I hear "My girlfriend Sandra" for the seventh time I am seriously considering walking the 100km back to Kutaisi.

* * * * * * * * *

Georgia lacks major national heroes, and one rather dubious consequence of this is that there are those who still admire one Josef Dzugashvili, a cobbler's son from Gori, in the very centre of Georgia, better known as Stalin. Gori is known for its Stalin Museum, which was set up in the 1930s and since then has been brought up to date with, er, a bit about World War Two. We are led round by a dreadful, painted-up, wobbling Soviet throwback, who delivers her commentary in the kind of tone that makes clear that questions are very unwelcome. We are even treated to the classic Soviet cliche: "Many mistakes were made during collectivisation, but..." I come out utterly mystified, and slightly sickened by the whole thing, as the focus of the museum has clearly not changed since the Soviet times. Surely, though, the only possible justification for keeping a Stalin Museum running is to try to claim him as a great Georgian, but the museum makes very little of his Georgian background. Putting his childhood home inside its own custom-made temple is a nice touch, though.

* * * * * * * * *

There is a tremendous amount of optimism in Georgia today. One feels churlish in questioning how long it will last, after the Rose Revolution swept away former Soviet Foreign Minister Eduard Shevardnadze in favour of the 35-year-old American-educated Mikhail Saakashvili in late 2003. In what other country could you buy a set of postcards commemorating George Bush's recent visit? Giorgi Giorgadze was in Tbilisi to hear Bush speak, and the way that Giorgi (a deeply intelligent man) seemed to sense that this was evidence that Georgia was starting to move in the right direction made me shut up and listen, when I really wanted to start making quips about Bush saying "Hello Atlanta..." I went to visit the museum of the Soviet occupation (which I couldn't help feeling came from a different country than the one which perpetuates the memory of Stalin), and in amongst the horrific evidence of death lists and deportations, and an endless litany of commemoration, the parts that made the most impression were at the very beginning and the very end. At the beginning, video footage of Saakashvili and his followers storming parliament, and Shevardnadze being bundled out by his bodyguards in the middle of a speech, and all this only two years ago, in the country where I've just enjoyed incredible hospitality and kindness. And at the end, a map with red lines around Abkhazia and South Ossetia and the caption "The occupation continues..."

* * * * * * * * *

In Tbilisi I phoned and arranged to meet Shota. I waited over an hour but he didn't show up. Never mind, I thought, there's football to watch. And in the end, I probably had a better time...

2006-06-17T17:30:00.000Z

Turkey: 'Hello mister...'

First of all I have to say that I'm very tired of Turkish pop. Its biggest star - still - seems to be Tarkan, the androgynous pop prince whose biggest hit came to the West as 'Kiss Kiss', sung by Holly Valance. This was evidently seen as such a crossover triumph that the original is still played on the radio at least eight times a day as a consequence (including in the internet cafe as I write, hence this moan). In fairness, I haven't once heard 'Yesterday' while here, so at least Turkey is striking out bravely on its own in that respect.

I'm sure some of you have been to Istanbul, and will either smile in recognition or yawn as I recount my run-ins with the carpet touts. If you haven't been, take this piece of advice: when in Istanbul, stay in Sultanahmet (the tourist centre) long enough to see Haghia Sophia, Topkapı Palace and the Blue Mosque, which are all wonderful, and then go to another part of town as quickly as possible. Otherwise you will entirely unjustly start cursing Turkey and the Turks, because you will come to believe that people only ever talk to you if they want to sell you something.

My two favourites (although only in retrospect) were on Wednesday morning, when I was planning a visit to the Blue Mosque. The first did the standard 'Where you from?' and when I replied that I was from London, offered the standard 'Lovely jubbly'. (I have a wonderful image of Del Boy trying to sell stuff in Istanbul and having a hopeless time because he just isn't unscrupulous enough.) But I did insist, politely but firmly, that I was not interested in buying a carpet and that he was not about to persuade me otherwise. Whereupon he deployed a new and innovative sales technique. 'Americans they always come and buy but British no. British are cold people. You see, I am honestly man. America is the richest country but Britain, you have good footballers [I almost had to challenge this, what with Paraguay still fresh in my mind] but what else? Nothing.' Feeling cruel, I deadpanned, 'Yes, ours is a rubbish culture. We have nothing. I often wish I was American.' Evidently thoroughly confused, he slunk away.

Next, approaching the Blue Mosque, I was stopped by a smart-looking man. 'You'll have to be quick if you want to go in there. It closes at twelve thirty.' I thanked him for the information. What a kind and helpful chap. Alarm bells only started to ring once inside, when he approached me again while I was staring at the dazzling play of light on the tiling, and started telling me about the precepts of Islam (in no great detail, I should add), and then quickly slipped in the killer line: 'You see, I have a business. Will you come and see, no obligation to buy?' He was a little bit confused as to why I seemed to 'misunderstand' the concept of 'no obligation to buy', but had we not been in a holy place I might have used some very ungentlemanly words.

In truth I was by this stage thoroughly disillusioned with the whole place, and had to seek salvation in the best way I knew: doner kebabs. (I have to say that it has been a revelation to discover that these things can actually taste of real meat.) Over lunch I resolved to see a different part of Istanbul, hoping thereby to salvage my opinion of the city and its people. So I went across the Golden Horn to Dolmabahce Palace.

Less well-known than the great palace complex of Topkapı, I suppose, Dolmabahce was built in the mid 19th century as an attempt to persuade the world that the Ottoman empire was not declining, that the sultans had the burgeoning nationalism of their many subjects under control, and that they were doing this by modernising and becoming closer to Europe. There is a strong Italian influence at work in Dolmabahce, not least in the decorations of the ceilings, which are in a richly rococo style that, to my inexperienced eye, seemed like it would have been considered at least 100 years out of date in any other European country. But in the context of the Ottoman situation at the time it was no doubt an important gesture. These decorations were mostly carved on the upper floor (the one reserved for the sultans), and painted on the lower floor (a mostly administrative space). The dimensions of many of the rooms are in fact modest (certainly compared to the tastes of Mr Ceausescu) but every now and then one encouters a wilfully extravagant detail: the decoration of entire rooms in red, for instance, red being the sultan's colour, or the crystal banisters on the main staircase.

In fact, once one appreciates the situation in those days, the whole place, despite its dimensions seems just as much of a folly as the People's Palace (see last post): let's just say that the sultans of the 19th century were not in the same league as Mehmet the Conqueror or Suleiman the Magnificent: in fact, one of them (Abdelaziz, I think) grew so fat he had to order in a specially reinforced bed. And by all accounts, building a new palace at vast expense did nothing to stop the gradual implosion of what was at one time the world's biggest empire.

Having had this change of scene, and having viewed a grand and ruinous folly (which as you've probably realised is not something I tend to pass up), I was refreshed enough to explore the area down from Taksim Square, the heart of modern Istanbul, and I'm glad to say that I belatedly began to appreciate what romance and mystique so many people have associated with this city. Dark alleyways with men drinking tea, fish markets, grand consulate villas, Greek and Armenian churches tucked away in the most obscure back alleys: I only wish I'd found it earlier because by this time it was time to press on.

I needed to go to Ankara to pick up a visa for Turkmenistan, which should provide me with a lifetime's supply of stories about grand and ruinous follies, but otherwise was unexcited about the prospect of going there. However, I did manage to rouse myself enough to visit Atatürk's mausoleum. This gave rise to a few thoughts about the oddities of the Turkish nation today, which I was able to test on a very chatty museum curator yesterday, and on Jo, an English journalist I ran into today who has been living in Turkey for the past five years.

The thing is that the veneration given to Atatürk very nearly amounts to a personality cult. Where I am now, in Trabzon on the north coast, the town museum contains very little of use, but they have spent a lot of money on restoring one of the rooms to the exact same state as when Atatürk stayed there for two nights on a visit to Trabzon in 1924. Admittedly, the sultans were pretty much incapable of governing by the end of World War I, even if their empire had not fallen apart before their eyes. And a huge struggle (with Atatürk at the helm) was needed to restore what the Turks saw as their rightful borders. His reforms of language, education, dress, and almost every other walk of life) seem to have been central to restoring the self-esteem of Turks. But they seem almost pathetically grateful for all this. Not for nothing was he given the name 'Father Turk'. It makes me wonder how they coped when he died.

Jo told me that Turkish school teaching can give the impression that Turkish history began in 1923, something which also explains the level of tension that exists these days with an Islamist strain entering their politics - one of Atatürk's most important achievements was to re-establish Turkey as a secular republic. No-one is quite sure whether they are part of Asia or Europe (although they do know they definitely aren't Arabs, who they roundly resent - and the Arabs retaliate by telling the Turks they aren't real Muslims) In a region where the past is such a charged issue, many people seem to have little connection to their own. And the official line is doing nothing to help this: in the museum attached to the Atatürk memorial one finds the Greeks demonised at every opportunity and the Armenians airbrushed out of history.

One thing is certain though - they have a very developed sense of capitalism. I'm looking forward to getting back to the old Soviet Union, where nobody cares whether you buy anything from them or not...

2006-06-12T18:22:00.000Z

Romania: Orphans, vampires, gypsies, mad dictators and the Cheeky Girls...

Yes, I think it's fair to say that poor old Romania suffers from a bit of an image problem in the UK. So I travelled to Romania hoping to blow some of these stereotypes out of the water.

The plan was to spend a few days in small towns in Transylvania before heading to Bucharest for some concrete overload. So my first destination was Sighisoara. I knew this as the birthplace of Vlad Tepes, better known as, er, Dracula, but also as one of the most unspoilt medieval towns in the area.

It doesn't start too well when, at the first train station we stop at, a train pulls up at the other platform. Immediately a lone gypsy girl of about seven rolls down the window and starts to beg for money. (So I take a photo instead. She seems happy with the attention.) Transylvania occupies a large part of western and central Romania, and the train line very quickly lifts out of the Great Hungarian Plain into a river valley, then a wider valley no more than about 3 miles wide, flanked by hills, at first forested, then either dotted with trees or bare. From a distance it is hard to tell whether the terracing effect on the hills is to do with former vineyards or former open cast mining. I think it's a bit of both. Mechanised agriculture is rare, and it is common to see squadrons of workers bent over in the fields, with a Dacia parked somewhere in the corner. A couple of scenes from some of the towns we pass would not look out of place in war zones: burnt-out factories and apartment buildings with all the windows missing. At this stage I wonder how this country ever thinks it's going to join the EU, an impression solidified when I arrive in Sighisoara, a small town of 25,000, on a wet evening, into a street populated entirely by gypsies and what in Russia used to be called 'flatheads'. A 'non-stop' alcohol store is providing a lively source of social life for the latter.

To top it all, I am walking into a Stupid Backpacker Trap: going to inspect a hostel place offered to me by the first person to meet me off the train. The place is called Nathan's Villa, where, as the flyer I get given promises, 'fun is a way of life'. Andrei, my guide, thinks he can see my eyes light up just thinking about it. I suppose he means the 'incredible bar/club' which turns out to be an underground room with a table, a couple of benches, and nothing else (certainly no bar), populated by six 'crazy guys', all English or American, who are smoking Romanian cigarettes and drinking (again in the persuasive language of the flyer) 'shit loads of beer', which I am told comes in 2 litre bottles from the 'non-stop' store down the road. Closer inspection of the leaflet yields the promise that 'you will never forget the parties here, unless you black out drinking Europe's cheapest alcohol'. Despite this, and despite the comments in the guestbook (choice entry, from Mia, a 'solo traveller': 'the night receptionist made love to me on the kitchen table at 2 in the morning' - nice one, Mia, classy lady...), I end up staying, lured by the promise of something more prosaic: 'free laundry'.

Returning later on from town, where I retreat on the pretext of needing some money, I decide to swallow my pride and join the 'crazy guys' in the basement. But they're just off to a strip club. They say 'you should come', more of a statement than an invitation, and go on about how cheap it is. I decline to join. This isn't popular. I go to bed, but sleep very little as they return in the middle of the night and sing 'I'm forever blowing bubbles' many times over. They might as well be in their local Wetherspoons. They are arseholes. I leave early in the morning before any of them have surfaced (not difficult, in fairness). Later in the week, someone I meet in Brasov who showed up at Nathan's the day after me and heard about the strip club visit reports that they came back chastened after all getting charged 10 euros per drink. I laugh and laugh.

As you probably realise, I could go on and on about this subject. Happily, my time in Sighisoara is not in fact remotely wasted. The Citadel, the houses of which are still inhabited today, is a marvellous place, founded by Saxon Germans in the 13th century, and still with its medieval walls mostly intact (9 out of the original 15 towers still remain, each one the domain of a particular craftsmen's guild). A lower town surrounds an upper town, perched right on the top of the hill and accessible by a splendid 17th century covered flight of stairs (I gave up counting at 150). The upper town contains little else except a cathedral, given a light and classical feel by the customary whitewashing of the original frescoes (although St George et all still poke out tantalisingly in places from the walls). Down in the lower town, next door to the gate tower which houses a town museum with a pleasingly random series of exhibits from rocket physics to the contents of the former town pharmacy store, is the Monastery Church, which conforms more to my naive idea of a Transylvanian church: much darker inside, it climaxes in a menacing altarpiece flanked by angels carrying spears and topped by Christ waving his cross at a rakish angle, and looking for all the world like a crazy stylite preacher.

The Germans founded seven major towns in this area, but none is as well preserved as Sighisoara. However, my next destinations are the bigger towns of Sibiu and Brasov, both of which provide an opportunity to imagine (with much less of a stretch than in equivalent places in Western Europe) life in a remote, but undeniably beautiful outpost of German settlement. There are few Germans left in these parts now (Sighisoara has just 500, barely enough to keep two enormous Lutheran churches functioning), but the towns still feel specifically German. It is only later that I understand that the whole region was for years a patchwork of German and Hungarian influences, with Romanians living uneasily alongside in all places (usually outside the city walls).

Almost everything in Sibiu is being restored, in preparation for it being European Capital of Culture 2007 (not bad for somewhere I'd not long ago been unaware of, but then again I wonder how many Romanians know where Liverpool is...) Every paving stone in the centre of town is being relaid, every building repainted: it's all most impressive and the only problem is that half the streets are closed. Brasov, by contrast, seems to have been on the tourist trail for a long while now, and is already gleaming. Its Black Church, another Lutheran one of course, is the largest church in Romania, and its setting extraordinary: as the town is hemmed in by mountains on three sides (they do in fact begin where the town ends), the modern suburbs spill away on to the plain.

What's good is that, after my unpleasant Sighisoara experience, the hostels I stay in are both comfortable and sociable places. In fact, in Sibiu I am the only guest, which means that Valy and Alex, the staff, are forced to socialise with me. Over a few glasses of Romanian wine (it actually tastes good, and very fruity, but one glass is enough to ensure that you know the next morning that you've been drinking it) we make the crucial discovery that the Romanian and British senses of humour are actually pretty similar: heavy on the irony and sarcasm, and thus it's easy to carry on a fun evening without too many cultural misunderstandings. One thing I get strongly from them is the love and reverence that Romanians have for their countryside: they can't stop talking about their trips to the country, talking to the peasants, and enjoying that way of life. I can't help comparing this with, say, the Russians, who love the forest but treat it most of the time as a leisure facility, or us Londoners who sometimes forget it even exists...

The journey between Brasov and Bucharest passes through some mountain scenery the equal of anything in Europe (the Carpathians get up to around 2600m at their highest point), and then, eerily, the plains begin again as the train rolls towards the capital.

The first thing I see on stepping out of Bucharest's Gara de Nord is a well-dressed couple kissing on a street corner, perhaps trying to perpetuate their city's 19th century reputation as the 'Paris of the East'. But all the boulevards around the train station were re-interpreted by Ceaucescu as part of his quest for the perfect socialist capital: still tree-lined and with wide promenades, they are now lined by ten-storey apartment blocks whose pretensions to grandeur are undone by their construction out of concrete that must have been rain-stained as soon as it was erected.

Having secured a place in a particularly reassuring hostel, located in an old house on a back street, away from the madness of the main boulevards, and with staff who would seemingly do anything for us, I explore a bit more. Bucharest is a huge place, with as much to offer as any other major European capital of 2 million inhabitants, and that old Parisian flavour is there in the back streets if you look hard enough, but one sight fascinates every visitor, myself included, in a particularly ghoulish way: the People's Palace. Ceaucescu wanted to unite all the government departments with the grossly swollen secret police service in one building, which furthermore had to provide an environment to impress foreign visitors with the best Romania had to offer. The result is the second-largest building in the world, an edifice so huge that it makes most of the statistics associated with it meaningless: the floor area is 365,000 square metres, 3,500 tonnes of crystal were used for the chandeliers in 1,000 rooms, and so it goes on. Our guide relished the more ridiculous stories associated with its construction, particularly the fact that the main staircase had to be rebuilt five times because the stairs were considered too steep for the diminutive Ceaucescu to walk down with dignity, and the fact that the main ballroom (almost the size of an Olympic swimming pool) was meant to hold portraits of Nicolae Ceaucescu on one wall and his wife Elena on the opposite wall, but when the couple fell out over a relatively trivial matter, Nicolae proposed replacing Elena's portrait - with a mirror.

The strangest moment of all was walking out on to the balcony where Ceaucescu had intended to give his interminable speeches to the long-suffering Romanian people (he never got the chance, stopped in his tracks by the 1989 revolution) and viewing the boulevard he had destroyed a sixth of the city to have built stretching away for 3.2km (completely uncoincidentally, it is marginally longer and marginally wider than the Champs-Elysees in Paris). More than in any other former communist city I have visited, the idea that the face of a city, and for that matter of a country, can be altered so massively by one man's whim terrified me. Every single grandiose block stretching away bore the imprint of Ceaucescu's twisted imagination, and it was impossible to view the scene without constantly being reminded of the amount of destruction that led to this horribly fascinating vista. It must be because of its recency that it hit me like this: this was just 20 years ago, in a country not so far away and not so different from our own. Which makes me wonder: what will they say in 20, 50, 100 years' time when the tourists come to visit? Will it seem like just another curious relic of a past empire, and become a loved part of its country's heritage, or will it seem perhaps the ultimate expression of a megalomania which listens to no-one else and acts with complete disregard for the consequences? You decide.

2006-06-06T17:24:00.000Z

As an aside:

Do feel free to use the function comment to discuss anything from my posts. These will be viewable by everyone, and others can respond to your comments too.

If anyone wants to hear more about certain things, do e-mail me on matthewos@hotmail.com and I'll email you back, or put up something more on the blog if I have any thoughts on it. I've left out a whole load about the Hungarian House of Terror, for instance, which is really interesting, but I've decided to save space and to go and get dinner instead...

2006-06-06T16:38:00.000Z

Hungary: For old times' sake

This is going to be a bit different from most of what's to come, as Budapest is somewhere that I know well, and that quite a lot of you will know too, so I've been looking out much more for the differences between what I found and what I remembered than for any new discoveries.

I'll be absolutely honest here. Having visited Hungary five times between 1990 and 1998, and not since, I really wanted it to be just as I remembered it, despite the fact that I know that life must have become a lot easier for ordinary Hungarians during the last 8 years.

Saturday brought mixed news on this front.

Hostel prices, for instance, have leapt; but thankfully, so has the quality.

Those wonderful Mitteleuropa coffee shops on Andrassy street, though still terrific for watching the world go by, and for eating cake that costs next to nothing, are beginning to show signs of succumbing to chains (OK, Hungarian chains - no 'skinny' anything on the menu, or tiresome attempts to convince us of the 'ethical' origin of the coffee beans - but all the same...) But the cake is still reassuringly (and almost certainly intentionally) slightly stale tasting, and the coffee still potent.

The prices at the opera house, where I and some friends spent a happy evening back in 1998 falling asleep through a Hungarian-language production of The Flying Dutchman, and trying to shake off an irritating Turkish backpacker whom we named Carpet Man on account of his excessively hairy chest, are still obscenely cheap - 3 pounds for Die Meistersinger - and they still look slightly askance at you if you enter in jeans (and to think, I nearly put my DJ in my rucksack...) However, the opera house has the same problems as every other opera house now: botched renovations which spoil the acoustics, the best singers in the company running off abroad for better pay, and a dispute between the management and the musical directorship, which led to the intended conductor for the performance of Die Meistersinger that I saw walking out, together with six senior players. Any of this sound familiar, ENO fans?

And I have to say that Walther was no Domingo, which made the endless iterations of his Prize Song a bit painful, and Beckmesser a rather tiresome clown, but even so, it was carried by a very authoritative Hans Sachs, and the whole thing was done with a good deal of gusto, which kept me awake and engaged during the whole six (yes, six) hours. Plus I got moved down to the best seats through the wonderful hospitality of my brother's friend Gyuri Mann, a singer in the chorus.

The buildings seem to have hardly changed - still, in the old part of town, crowding into the street in a rickety kind of way, a couple of storeys too high to look really safe, with none of the magnificent restoration of the Art Nouveau that I've encountered in, for instance, Riga. At lunch with the Hash House Harriers (who are an expat running club that meet on Sundays in cities across the world for a short run - or walk - guess which one I did? - and then a boozy lunch afterwards) Thomas, a crazy ranting Dane, suggested this could be down to Budapest competing with Prague for tourists. Budapest is a much bigger city - at nearly 2 million population it's a giant in the area - and there simply hasn't been enough money to do as widespread a job as you see in some of the other central European capitals. Also still visible is damage that might have come from the 1956 Soviet invasion or even the Second World War: it's quite common to find a backstreet where an old apartment building has had its balconies torn off, or patched up with wire, and nobody has done anything about it since.

One final thing remained to be done in my tour of old haunts: attempt to find the restaurant where I had spent a few happy evenings on previous visits. Thanks to a curiously retentive memory when it comes to things like restaurant meals, I even remembered the name and the vague location. And, to my utter joy, Alfoldi Kisvendeglo (sorry, accent sticklers, Hungarian has just too many accents for me to even attempt to spell these things right) , was still there, and utterly unchanged. I realised that it must have been that way for at least 30 years; Decor that is simultaneously dated and timeless; Hungarian rural scenes decorating the deep red wooden walls; large eight-place tables in the centre, which suggested a sociable atmosphere even while remaining empty; a tiny waiter in full evening dress who must have been 80 or more; the house speciality which is something between a scone and a bread, highly spiced with paprika, delivered to the table on the house; and best of all, veal porkolt (stew), dumplings, sauerkraut and a beer for a fiver. By the end, I felt my quest for the old Budapest had come very right indeed.

Coming next: Romania, or why I think all backpackers should be put in a van and driven off a cliff. It's going to be a good one...

2006-06-04T20:36:00.000Z

Off I go...

For those of you who haven't been subjected to my endless explanations, here's the plan. I'm trying to go from London to China entirely overland, which in this case means through Europe to Istanbul, then: Turkey, Georgia, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, and China. No Afghanistan, you notice, nor Iraq or even Chechnya. But plenty of places which lots of people seemed never to have heard of until I started wittering about them, which is why I hope you'll tolerate and even enjoy my selections of memorable encounters, musings on culture and politics, and (most importantly) transport trivia.

In terms of timing, each of those countries gets about a week, until China, which I'll be entering in early August, all being well, and then I'll be zipping swiftly across the country to meet up with the lovely Kirsi, who is flying into Beijing, before having a more leisurely nose around the east coast, and ending in Hong Kong.

There's a world map on the wall in front of me as I write, and I just glanced up at the distance I have to travel, which is rather daunting considering I've just made a 27 hour bus journey and from the map evidence it would seem that to get to Beijing, assuming a fast, comfortable, air conditioned coach that doesn't break down and goes in a straight line not worrying about details like lakes or mountains, would take, ooh, 270 more hours. Factoring in lakes and mountains we're probably looking at more like 2700.

To those of you wondering why on earth I spent that long on a bus when the flight would actually be cheaper (and that's BA, not Easyjet), I can say that if you could see me now you'd note a warm glow of satisfaction that I haven't broken my overland promise. Not that I decided on this for ecological reasons, more thinking that every journey needs a pointless obstacle, but I'll probably have a two foot beard by the end of this anyway so I might as well become an eco-warrior in the process.

'A warm glow of satisfaction' is not what you'd have seen around me at 8.15 on Friday morning when the bus departed Victoria. 'A stale cloud of alcohol' is closer to the truth. (Thanks, incidentally to all who made Thursday evening so enjoyable, and especially to Helen, who put me up, and even cooked dinner as well.) Bus journeys and sea crossings are not best known for helping hangovers, and even when I'd been able to nurse myself a bit more back to life, about 9.00 that evening passing Cologne, the driver's choice to subject us to 'Titanic' on the video screen ensured that I would get no sleep for over three hours, and moreover, that those three hours would do substantial damage to my blood pressure.

But next morning we were rolling towards Hungary and the end was in sight. Tune back in after a couple of days, by which time I should have some thoughts on this lovely city and the colourful characters I've run into whilst here.