Kathmandu Or Bust

Last Stop Paradise

2006-07-15T14:51:00.000Z

On the eighth day the Lord created Paradise on Earth and plopped it in the ocean just off the north coast of Venezuela. Just to confuse everyone he called these islands Los Roques rather than Las Playas, which is what they really are along with a whole heap of coral. ..Oh, and He only mentioned it to the Italians, who it turns out can keep secrets as well as win World Cups.

I'd have written more but I've been way too busy relaxing in the sun. It's been a great way to end a fabulous trip!

Wetsuit Mountaineering

2006-07-07T20:25:00.000Z

The adventure is nearly over. We're in Caracas, surely one of the ugliest cities on Earth. It makes Middlesbrough look lovely, though the restaurants and salsa are rather better here. Still, we're off to enjoy our final few days on the Carribean Islas Los Roques, which are reputed to be as close to paradise as you can get this side of a chat with the grim reaper. I hope they turn out to be as beautiful as promised since this trip is going to be the final boot in the groin of my travel finances. I guess it's about time I went home and got a job!

In the past few days we've been alternating between cool mountains and bug infested swamplands that fester in unbelievable heat. Naturally, I preferred the mountains, though the sight in Los Llanos of groups of giant capybara, the world's largest rodent, was possibly worth the entry price paid in mosquito bites. Grace would disagree I suspect. Not everything has gone exactly to plan of late. A day of canyoning in the Andes went totally tits up, resulting in three of us inventing the new sport of mountaineering in wetsuits in order to get back to civilisation. It can get a bit sweaty in the suits, but they're handy for downpours during the wet season.

The Venezuelan coast is particularly spectacular with pristine beaches backed by coastal mountains that provide a magnificent backdrop. This is indeed where the wannabe Miss Worlds are all hanging out, though with a strictly fry it or throw it attitude to food preparation in this country they're not all going to live the dream. The people seem to have a lot more attitude in these coastal parts too, which can seem engaging or straight out rude by turns. You learn to tred a little warily as a gringo here.

...Oh, and England didn't win the World Cup again, in case you hadn't heard.

The Last Country

2006-06-29T20:55:00.000Z

It's rather a sad thought to think that Venezuela is my final country on this fourteen-month oddessey. It's number 39 if you don't include a few random plane changes in places as far ranging as Switzerland, Quatar and Equitorial Guinea, and also if you take the 'de facto' approach of not counting Tibet as a country in its own right. Anyway, it's been quite a journey.

And I'm not unhappy to make Venezuela the final stop. It's a vibrant, bustling country with bags of personality and a style that seems to mark it out from its Latin American neighbours. The leisured, slow lane life of colonial Cartagena, in Colombia, couldn't be more different to the lively atmosphere of the Andean city of Merida. This place has more extreme outdoor pursuits going down than you could do in a week, as well as the World's longest and highest cable car, taking you up to a nearby peak at 4,765m. It's a cool trip if a little relaxed in the safety department - the doors didn't quite shut in one of the cars and the maximum passenger load limit seemed to be more an aspiration than a regulation. It was freezing on the top with only about 10 metres visibility after the first snowfall of the year, but it was exhilarating to ride up into the clouds all the same. Mind you, I'm not sure the American tourist who went up in t-shirt and flip flops was quite so enthusiastic.

Venezuela has quite a few interesting quirks aside from its well known fondness for beauty contests - it's won more than any other nation, though I haven't encountered that many goddesses on my travels in the country so far. Perhaps that will change when I reach the beach! Taxis and many private cars here are enormous American gas-guzzlers, universally painted white it seems and normally looking like they've been on the road a good twenty to thirty years. I guess they can afford the fuel but not the new motors, though President Hugo Chavez's unilateral campaign against the USA, and all it stands for, doesn't exactly facilitate the flow of US imports. At night the local youths of the city like to hang out in these battered vehicles beside the main park with the car doors and trunks flung open as they blast latino music out at the world at large. It's all very friendly if a little difficult to sleep at times.

Holidaying in Colombia

2006-06-24T21:10:00.000Z

Nobody much comes to Colombia which is something of a shame. It's a rich and diversely beautiful country which is home to some of the most engaging and welcoming people I've met in all the Americas. Perhaps it's their realisation that with 'the kidnap capital of the World' moniker sullying the country's tourism efforts, it's all the more important to make the right impression with those intrepid travellers who do still come.

Colombia certainly has some pretty major problems. Aside from a 40 year civil war being waged with more than one 'left-wing' guerilla group, there is the problem of other paramilitary forces run on a sort of vigilante basis to protect landed interests, and then the problem that all sides are more or less implicated in the illegal but lucrative cocaine business, which supplies more than 80% of the cocaine sold in the US. Unsurprisingly, the US are deeply involved in funding a drugs eradication programme here and back the tough anti-drugs stance of the President of Colombia, who's just been re-elected. President Uribe is popular for his no compromises approach to the country's problems and you can watch footage of coca fields being burned by government forces on the TV of an evening. Still, there doesn't seem to any great hope that all this conflict and violence is about to come to an end, so Colombia looks set to remain the unvisited country of South America a good while longer.

All of which seems a world away when you're actually in Colombia. There are plenty of no-go areas and even the locals choose to travel internally within the country by plane. However, the safer places seem as safe as anywhere I've been since Mexico. You don't get hassled much and people go out of their way to assist you with no hint of an expected reward for their efforts. It's the repetition of a scenario that I've observed all over the World. The more of us that come to visit a place the less respect we receive as tourists and the more difficulties and hassles we encounter. No doubt a great deal of this is the fault of the tourists, not the locals, when it comes to making a bad impression. The less visited countries are invariably the most pleasant to experience in terms of dealings with local people, even if there are sometimes sacrifices to be made in terms of hotel standards and general tourist infrastructure.

In the case of Colombia, there is no sense in which a derth of foreign visitors has inhibited the country's modern development however. Walking around the posher parts of Bogata you could feel yourself to be at the heart of an affluent European city, with smart restaurants, pavement cafes and delicatessans that would give Harrods' food hall a run for its money. Consumerism is booming in Colombia, and the people seem smart and articulate, well versed in their own problems but dealing with them with a wicked sense of humour - after all, we were greeted by our guide in Bogata with a cheery 'Thank you for being brave enough to visit us here in Colombia'!

The Mundial

2006-06-12T20:52:00.000Z

The World Cup, or Mundial as they call it over here, is a pretty major event for South Americans. So it was that I found myself in the small Ecuadorian town of Latacunga surrounded by slow moving Toyota pick-up trucks honking their horns and spilling out hundreds of jubilant young people waving yellow flags. Ecuador had beaten Poland in their opening match and everyone was very very excited about it. What a contrast finding myself alone in a cafe the following morning watching England limp dismally to a win over fellow South Americans Paraguay.

We're holed up in a remote corner of the Andes for a few days, well away from the Mundial, enjoying invigorating walks at high altitude in spectacular mountain scenery. I haven't enjoyed the view from my bedroom window this much since I was in Nepal. We're staying at an American run eco-lodge equipped with every environmentally sustainable modernity you could require from 'dry toilets' through to a pet pig that eats the meagre leftovers that remain after sorting waste for recycling. There's also dogs and sheep to keep you company, and a llama that has a tendency to want to join you in the outside shower. Though occasionally you fear getting into trouble for eco-blundering, it's actually a wonderful place to stay and quite inspiring to see the way the owners have striven to put their profits back into supporting the needs of the local community, which is overwhelmingly indigenous and relatively poor even by Ecuadorian standards. I'm not looking forward to leaving this place to return to the big city lights of Quito.

Panama Hats

2006-06-09T22:19:00.000Z

I've been getting a bit lax with my hat purchasing since Africa, but I did procure a rather natty Panama hat in Merida, Mexico, which has seen quite a bit of wear in Central America and has almost blown away a fair few times. Oddly, Panama hats don't come from Panama. Traditionally they were made in Ecuador, but they were first popularized by workers digging the Panama Canal. The Yucatan version from Mexico is a quality sub-species of a superior weave. I've had quite a few compliments on the hat from locals, which certainly ranks as a first on my travels. With most of my other hat purchases they've just tended to point a finger at me and roar with laughter.

The back end of Central America has been a touch less exciting than the front end, partly I suspect because we've actually missed some of the best places to visit. Still, Costa Rica and Panama have been undeniably beautiful despite the rigours of their sweaty climates. It seems the closer you get to the Equator the more you have to get cosy with biting bugs of one sort or another, and several folk have been wandering around looking like they've just caught a nasty bout of the plague. The occasional foray into the mountains provides welcome relief from the bugs as well as the opportunity to explore coffee plantations and bath in mountainous thermal springs beneath yet more smoking volcanos.

And at the end of it all you hit the great metropolis of Panama City. It's not my favourite capital city of the trip despite friendly enough people and a dramatic setting on a sweeping bay of the Pacific with mountains behind. Somehow it lacks enough of a character or charm of its own to imprint on the memory, though it does have very funkily painted buses. What does impress though is the Panama Canal. A mighty engineering feat in its construction, it remains quite breathtaking to see even today as you watch container ships the size of multi-storey buildings edge by the narrowest of margins into and out of giant locks. By comparison, the Suez Canal seems like chicken feed

Lava Cocktails

2006-05-27T17:48:00.000Z

Unbelieveably I've been a year on the road [and occasionally the sea] with Dragoman. I celebrated the anniversary in style at the Volcan Arenal in Costa Rica, the World's second most active volcano, which erupts every twenty minutes or so. Though the summit is invariably swathed in cloud, you can spot the red glow of the odd pyroclastic flow rolling out under the night sky from beneath the cloudline. The volcano has a very sticky form of lava forced to the surface by water pressure which also cools the magma sufficiently so that it rolls rather than flows. The same water is itself heated in the process, which means there are numerous thermal springs dotted around the place. After peering through the murk at the red glow, we journeyed around the mountain to a fabulous hot springs bar where you can sit in a pool of warm water sipping the cocktail of your choice and gazing up at the night sky. The whole complex with its smartly dressed waiters serving bikini clad boozers late into the night has a quite sureal feel to it, like some sort of space age fantasy bar out of Star Wars or perhaps The Hitchhikers Guide To The Galaxy. It was all a very long way from that first night in a cheap motel in Dover.

I've been rather gorging on volcanos having recently scaled the active Masaya Volcano in Nicaragua. It's an incredible feeling to stand on the rim of a giant smoking hole in the earth, breathing in a sulphurous smelling air and understanding how ancient inhabitants of this land came to see these places as portals of the underworld. Despite their destructive power, these places are responsible for generating the incredible fertility of this part of the World too. Travelling through Costa Rica, a country which for once is really striving to preserve its unique ecosystems, you cannot fail to be amazed by the immense richness and diversity of the landscapes contained in such a small amount of space. The rivers and forests are literally teaming with life and the are skies filled with birds of every colour imaginable. It's a wildlife lover's fantasy country come true.

Sandinistas

2006-05-23T22:12:00.000Z

It's easy as a tourist to imagine that the history of Central America is simply the story of the Aztecs and Mayans, culminating in their ultimate demise at the hands of the Spanish Conquistadors. You can choose to travel the isthmus visiting Pre-Colombian ruins along the way while basing yourself in a series of lovely old colonial towns laid out by the first wave of Spanish settlers and now reinventing themselves as relaxed backpacker destinations. However, if you stray off the established tourist routes a little, it isn't so difficult to bring yourself up to date with much more recent history of an equally dark shade.

Throughout Central America a legacy of the colonial period was the concentration of wealth and power in the hands of a narrow elite of old Spanish families. The majority of the population remained politically and socially marginalized, poor, ill educated and bereft of much opportunity to improve their lot. In the 1970s and 1980s a wave of popular protest against the old regimes sparked by the communist Sandinista Revolution in Nicaragua unleashed an evil epoch in Central American history as the region became caught up in the final phase of the Cold War. Oppressive military regimes with appalling human rights records were propped up by American money and military equipment as President Reagan became obsessed with the idea that only extreme measures were going to prevent a domino effect of countries turning communist. Somehow the land of the free lost sight of the fact that the will of the people is the ultimate litmus test of liberty, and chose instead to back the oligarches in pursuit of ideological principles. The result was a terrible and drawn out tragedy for the people.

In Honduras, the the US strategy paid off and the status quo was preserved, leaving a country which today seems unusually stable for the region, but where the most extreme social inequalities still persist. In Guatemala, new life was breathed into a forty-year civil war in which Government targeting of the large indigenous population of the country was a particularly unpleasant dimension.

Perhaps the saddest chapter of this history was played out in tiny El Salvador, a country ripped apart in the 1980s by a savage civil war in which an estimated 100,000 people died. We made a special flying visit to the country to visit the civil war museum at the former FMLN guerilla headquarters in the eastern mountains. The low-key museum aspires to be non-political in aim and explanation, acting simply as a repository of memory for all the people of a country scarred by war. Of course it's a difficult aspiration to achieve when the guides are themselves ex-guerillas, and it was interesting to observe that the leader of a visiting school party from an obviously wealthy school had a somewhat different take on the war to our guide. Wherever the truth lies, and museum doesn't hide the fact that human rights abuses were perpetrated by the guerillas as well as the Government, it's difficult to visit the place and not be profoundly moved by the terrible suffering of El Salvadorean people in this period. Massive US backing of the Government and military ultimately failed to defeat that FMLN who signed up to a UN brokered peace settlement in the early 1990s. What most saddened the people I spoke to was that having in a sense fought a successful revolution, the FMLN and other political leaders had lost sight of many of the aims and objectives that had carried them forward in the first place. Indeed, there is some irony in the fact that a country that suffered so much at the hands of US foreign policy, and lived to tell the tale, has fairly recently opted to adopt the dollar as its currency.

In Nicaragua, the illegal backing of the right wing Contras (remember Colonel Oliver North and the Iran-Contra scandal?) failed to dislodge the Sandinistas, but severely damaged a country that ought by rights to have been one of the richest in the Americas. The Sandinistas eventually disappeared at the ballot box as the people became disillusioned with Soviet Block style hardships and food shortages, even if literacy rates had soared. Today Nicaragua still looks badly battered by its experiences. There are giant potholes on all but the main roads and much evidence of war damage and untended decay in buildings outside of the old colonial tourist centres (which have now been patched up). Unemployment in Nicaragua is at a staggering 73%. Some stability does seem to have been achieved, the economy is improving at last and there is little nostalgia for the ideological extremism of the Sandinistas. Instead local people here in Granada tell me they want to enjoy the benefits of capitalism but with a strong social dimension so that its fruits are shared more widely amongst the people. Nicaraguans strike me as perhaps the loveliest people I have met in Central America and I can only hope their fortunes significantly improve in the years ahead.

Honduras

2006-05-16T22:14:00.000Z

Honduras is one of the poorest countries in Central America and one of the most beautiful. Its western mountains are in many ways similar to those in neighbouring Guatemala, but here the landscapes seem less damaged by man. The forests are less scarred by slash and burn agriculture and the telltale marks of subsistance farming. The towns seem well ordered and surprisingly neat and tidy compared to elsewhere.

This is the country in the region that managed not to have a catastrophic civil war in the 1970s and 80s, instead becoming a prop and base for US military and undercover activity. The legacy of such times is a palpably American feel to the place in patches, both in terms of evidence of affluence and the presence of US tourists. Still the distribution of wealth is strikingly uneven. Honduras was the original Banana Republic and you get the impression that big business still retains control of most of the purse strings and doesn't pay out all that much to benefit the people.

We've been hanging out in Roatan, one of the Bay Islands, these past days. It's a bit of an unreal place, at least here in West End, one of the best places in the World for going scuba diving. It's a haven for ex-pat divers and beach bums who are catered for by a plethora of beach bars and restaurants serving international cuisine. I gave the sport a crack with a one day course, diving very apprehensively down to nine metres for 40 minutes and sort of enjoying myself in a nerve-racking kind of way. On the seabed I was greeted by a very jaunty looking lobster which I left alone to live out another day. It's been fun, but I'm looking forward to moving on.

Under The Volcanos

2006-05-16T21:23:00.000Z

Western Guatemala is a place of inspiring landscapes with towering cone shaped volcanos looming large over picturesque colonial towns and green hills patchworked with the smallholdings of Guatemala's large indigenuous rural population. It's also a landscape prone to the devasting effects of earthquakes and eruptions, as well as the occasional passing hurricane.

Tourism centres on the old town of Antigua, the colonial capital in Spanish days until a particularly large quake levelled the city in the late 18th C. Its hardy citizens rebuilt it in parts, but left a legacy of gently decaying ruined churches and monasteries in amongst the refurbished mansions. It has a faintly bohemian feel with language schools aplenty catering for young North Americans come down to improve their Spanish by day and kick back in the bars and cafes by night. There seemed to be a lot of weddings going down on the day we wandered about the place, the brides looking rather surly in white while the grooms were generally too squat and rotund to carry off the effect of wearing a double-breasted suit. Perhaps that was what was upsetting the brides.

It was good to push on into the Western Highlands from Antigua to visit some slightly more authentic communities in the mountains. At the highest town in Guatemala (2500m), we divided up to stay in the homes of local families, a fascinating experience. Grace and I stayed with Marina, a middle-aged mother of two who took us for a spin around the market before we helped her prepare dinner in her antiquated kitchen. She lived in an outlying village we reached by cramming into the back of a minivan with around 25 other women and children all dressed in the brightly coloured woven clothes worn by local indigenuous people. Our home for the night was a concrete shack shared with cats, dogs and hens, but it proved comfortable enough once you'd got settled in. Conversation was entirely in Spanish and managed to keep flowing for most of the evening, before Grace was invited to get togged up in traditional clothes and pose for photos in which she towered over our host at almost twice her height.

There were yet more volcanos surrounding Lake Atitlan, an unfeasibly beautiful mountain lake a little like Lake Como in Italy, but without the expensive hotels and luxury boats. Atitlan is home to some of the most traditional communities in Guatemala, each retaining distinctive local dress and customs despite their relative proximity to one another by boat, the only practical way to get around the place. Like a lot a places in Guatemala it's beginning to be seriously impacted on by tourism, with large numbers of local people working in the souvenir selling business in the main villages. It remains to be seen whether traditional lifestyles will survive this latest invasion as well as they managed to survive the arrival of the Spanish and Catholicism over 400 years ago.

Going Underground

2006-05-04T21:48:00.000Z

Having plunged the depths of the sea, it would have been rude not to have ventured underground to investigate the fascinating Mayan sacrificial cave at Actun Tunichil Muknal. The Maya believed in spirits of the underworld and revered caves as portals of the spirits. Still it is astonishing to discover that they explored up to a mile and half underground through caverns chest high in water to reach the enormous and haunting Cathedral Cavern, where human victims were ruthlessly sacrificed to the gods. It's quite an adventure getting to the Cavern even today with the aid of torches, and it's an odd feeling to be walking through an archaeolgical site at the end of the journey, watching your step in order not to tread on thousand year old human bones and pieces of pottery.

Archeaologists posit some sort of natural catrastrophe which hit the Mayan World in the 10th C and brought their great urban civilisation to an end. Perhaps a drought made feeding vast urban populations unsustainable. Whatever it was, things must have got pretty desperate for believers to venture quite so deep into the underworld to appease their gods with human victims.

Across the border in Guatamala is perhaps the greatest of all Mayan sites at Tikal. Its series of steeply stepped pyramids soar upwards above the jungle treetops to create an arresting image of a lost civilisation. The site is immense and wonderfully atmospheric at dawn as the sun rises through the jungle mist to light upon the stonework. As you wander jungle paths from one temple to another, you share the ruins with toucans sitting in the tree branches and tarantulas skulking in earth holes below your feet. Howler monkeys roar out their calls from up in the forest canopy like spirits of the dead wailing over the demise of a city that was once so great.

Guatamala is a country rebuilding itself after more than 40 years of civil war and political unrest. It seems a surprisingly together sort of a place considering its history. Still, you notice that life is markedly less affluent here than in Belize. Driving southwards through the beautiful jungle clad eastern mountains there is plenty of evidence of slash and burn agriculture taking place as people irreversibly damage a unique ecological environment in order to eke out a living. Eco-tourism is making inroads here though, as elsewhere in Central America, so it remains to be seen how things develop in the future.

And so I find myself at the end of another leg of this trip, sitting by the sea in the Carribean coastal village of Livingstone, home to Guatamala's only significant black community and a place that can only be accessed by boat. It's a last chance to gorge on seafood and reggae music before crossing the continent to end up in the old Spanish colonial city of Antigua. It's a strange thing to be able to drive across a continent in just a few hours.

Underwater Adventure

2006-04-27T17:23:00.000Z

Countries tend to blend into one another at their frontiers, and in terms of scenery that is certainly true arriving in Belize from Mexico. However, in all other respects, the two places couldn't be more different on first meeting. Apart from the peculiarity of hearing English spoken again, or at least a barely comprehensible creole variant on English, the whole atmosphere of the place seems positively Caribbean rather than Central American. Perhaps that will all change as we venture inland, but life on the Cayes (the island archipelago) is all rastas, rum and reggae music. The people are distinctly creole looking hereabouts and their houses of a style I've not encountered before - gabled buildings of clapper board, frequently raised on stilts and entered via an external stairway that gives access to a shady first floor verandah where you can hang your hammock. They even have a picture of the Queen on Belizean banknotes, smiling out at the laidback life here from a strangely youthful looking face.

We've been chilling for a couple of days on Caye Caulker, a small island behind the Great Belizean Barrier Reef. This place used to be a hippy hangout in the 60s, and is now a centre for some of the best diving and snorkeling in the World. Not being a great fan of swimming underwater I was a little apprehensive about giving snorkeling a go, but I took the proverbial plunge and it's been a hoot. Swimming with nurse sharks and sting rays, as well as vast shoals of indeterminate multi-coloured fish is an experience that makes you want to go home and start studying marine biology. As you cruise around the coral reef in a sail boat drinking rum punch on your way home to the accompaniment of a setting sun, you have to wonder how you're ever going to return to normal working life and the great British weather when this big adventure is finally over.

Lost Cities In The Jungle

2006-04-25T18:46:00.000Z

Leaving the Chiapas Highlands and entering the flat, humid, formerly inpenetrable plains of the Yucatan, you encounter a bewildering array of Mayan cities lost in the jungle. This area and neighbouring Belize were among the last parts of Central America to be subjugated by the Spanish, and until recently they remained difficult to access from the rest of the country. Even now there is a distinctive feel to the place and a noticeably different cuisine with strong citrus flavours in the cooking.

It's a hot, sweaty and godforsaken place for any civilisation to flourish, but nonetheless, the Mayan cities thrived here long after they had collapsed and been abandoned in their heartlands of Guatamala, and they were still occupied when the Spanish turned up to snuff them out in the mid-sixteenth century. The result is a remarkable collection of sites, with stone pyramids poking out through enveloping jungle at Palenque, and an enormous ballcourt at Chichen Itza with relief carvings showing the sacrificial execution of players at the end of the game - nobody is too sure nowadays whether it was the winners or losers who got the chop.

However, the most perfect location of all for a city must at Tulum, where a smaller fortified site occupies a promontory overlooking the Carribean. The sea here is pure aquamarine, rolling up to embrace an endless stretch of pure white sand. On first arrival we all just gasped with astonishment at the sight of something so inviting, and pretty much lost interest in developing our knowledge of the Mayans any further.

Fried Green Grasshoppers

2006-04-18T00:08:00.000Z

I definitely haven´t been experimenting enough recently with exotic cuisines, so when I arrived in the stunningly beautiful old colonial city of Oaxaca I made a beeline for the lady selling fried grasshoppers. I bought a mixed selection, though the size doesn´t seem dicernibly to effect the taste - salty and mildly spicy. The larger ones are perhaps a tad crunchier though. All in all, grasshoppers are not nearly as bad as you might imagine, though ultimately you can see why tacos and tortilla chips have given them the edge in the Mexican food export market. Oaxaca is also home to mezcal, chocolate and perhaps the best ice cream in Mexico. And if you ever pass this way don´t miss the chance to try 'tuna' sorbet. No, my Larium malaria tablets aren´t finally sending me out of my mind, 'tuna' in these parts is the unbelievably delicious fruit of the prickly pear cactus.

You reach Oaxaca from Mexico City by crossing some real mountains, something I´ve missed these past months. The town sits at the meeting place of the Sierra Madre ranges and in a sense is a gateway to true Central America. Moving onwards into the troubled state of Chiapas you push over 2000m passes to leave behind cactus forests and welcome the jungle. Chiapas is the land of the Maya, the area of Mexico least penetrated by the Spanish and a bastion of indigenuous Indian culture and beliefs. The Zapatista rebels seem to have quietened down of late, though this still remains the poorest and least developed area of the country. Perhaps surprisingly, therefore, the main centre at San Christobal de las Casas greets the visitor as a vibrant, cosmopolitan town, full of funky cafes and restaurants. It´s a solid, low-rise settlement of brightly coloured houses clustered tightly together as though seeking shelter from inclement weather, and as such it has something about it that reminds me a little of towns I saw in Tibet. Perhaps it is also the fact that the town sits at high altitude within a mountain valley and that the local people seem so predominantly Indian in their appearance and dress.

San Christobal is a great place to kick back for a couple of days and base oneself for visits out to local villages. In some of these settlements the ancient Mayan beliefs continue to hold sway to this day, seemingly barely touched by the hand of the Church, for all that you will find a church sitting proudly on every village square. The external vestiges of Christianity have simply been grafted on top of much older beliefs which continue to shape the world view of the villagers. At San Juan Chamula the cardinal points of the church symbolise the four points of the Mayan cosmos, with the fifth point the very centre of the church, and thus the centre of the World. Local women sacrifice chickens in the church to appease ancient gods that these days mascerade as statues of the saints, and the church is furnished to reflect a view of a world formed by opposite forces - light and dark, day and night, sun and moon, life and the underworld, male and female, etc. It's quite remarkable to see.

We've been in Oaxaca and San Christobal for the Easter celebrations and I'd forgotten just how much fun these tend to be in the Spanish speaking world. The last few days have been one long fiesta of fireworks, processions and musical performances in the plazas. I've seen my first ever street performance on massed xylophones and witnessed dozens of couples ballroom-dancing latino style under the stars to the accompaniment of roving bands. Mexico is superb. I haven´t yet bought myself a sombrero, but it can only be a matter of time...

Mexico City

2006-04-10T17:35:00.000Z

It might be the most populated and one of the most polluted cities in the World, but Mexico City is smart and cool with it. After the privations of West Africa it seems remarkably sophisticated, with sparkling shops, a superb public transport system and the dinkiest green and white VW Beetle taxis buzzing around everywhere. It also has more museums than I´ve seen in virtually the whole of the rest of the trip put together. Throw in a few margharita cocktails and guacamole filled tortillas and you have the makings of a real good times kind of a town. I´m loving it.

Mexico City was the capital of the Aztec Empire long before Hernan Cortes arrived with his army on conquistadores in 1521 to consign the Aztecs to history. Although the heart of the old city is remarkably Spanish and reminiscent of Madrid in terms of its architecture, it overlays the old Aztec sites. In fact there are Aztec traces wherever you look, not only in the faces of the people, but also in the cuisine, the names of Metro stations and some of the traditions of the street. Visiting the impressive Anthropological Museum you are really struck by the sophistication of pre-colombian societies in Central America, whether in terms of their mastery of astronomy and mathematics, or their ability to produce highly intricate and beautiful objects without the use of metal tools. You also get an insight into the cruelty of these cultures which organised themselves to fight war on a semi-permanent basis and which practiced widespread human sacrifice as an aspect of their religious beliefs. Tomorrow we head away from the museums to explore the ancient cities themselves, starting with Teotihuacan, whose Pyramids of the Sun and the Moon rival those on Ancient Egypt in scale.

Mexico City was also one of the great centres of Art Deco in the 1920s and 30s, and is home to a fabulous array of stylish buildings and interiors that would make it a perfect setting for an Agatha Cristie movie. Much of this movement was associated with the political left, with a school of muralists coming to prominence in the city who decorated the interiors of many public and government buildings with images associated with Zapata and the Mexican Revolution of 1910. The foremost of these artists, Diego Rivera, has really appealed to my imagination somehow, and I´ve been trailing around the city searching out his murals and paintings. As Chairman of the Mexican Communist Party he also arranged political asylum for Trotsky in the city in the late 1930s. You can still visit Trotsky´s house and see the study in which he has hacked to death with an icepick by an agent of Stalin´s in 1939. They´re a bloodthirsty lot these Mexicans.

Vive La Senegal

2006-03-23T14:59:00.000Z

My westward travels since Kathmandu have finally run up against the ocean. You can't get any further west than Dakar in Africa unless you take to the seas and visit the Cape Verde Islands. It seems an appropriate place in which to quit a continent that has occupied me since November and ready myself for the Americas.

West Africa has left me a little jaded and travel weary to be honest. The final section from the Niger Delta to the coast has seen us cover over 1000km of relentlessly flat Sahel scenery in gruelling temperatures. The nondescript town of Kayes en route is officially the hottest town in Africa with afternoon temperatures regularly in the high 40s at this time of year. These are not places in which to linger long, and in truth they offer meagre pickings in terms of their cultural interest when you have just come from the Dogon Country.

However, Senegal does reward the journey when you reach the coast. We holed up at a lovely beach resort for a few days for some much needed R&R, before braving the dire warnings of the guide books in order to head into Dakar, the uncrowned capital of West Africa and a city with an unenviable reputation for noise, pollution and daylight robbery. Well, the guidebooks can't always have it their way. This is an exciting and vibrant city, with a wealth of attractive French colonial architecture, a cosmopolitan feel and a fabulous location on the final pensinsula before Africa runs out and the Atlantic begins. The people are friendly and sophisticated and for once in West Africa seem well geared up for meeting the expectations of western tourists. This is a great city indeed.

Out in the bay of Dakar sits the picturesque Isle de Goree, with a tiny fortified town of crumbling, brightly painted colonial villas and administrative buildings. Goree was the original European base in sub-saharan Africa, settled as early as the 15th C by the Portuguese, and subsequently it was the centre of French power in the region. It survives a picture postcard place, more like a Cornish fishing village than a slice of modern Africa, though the weather is quite a bit better than in Cornwall. Grace and I finished up our trip here and we couldn't have dreamt up a more idyllic spot if we'd tried.

Heat and Dust

2006-03-13T10:52:00.000Z

Well, we made it out of Timbuktu alive, and after a gruelling two day drive on desert roads arrived back to some semblance of civilisation. Of course the truck broke down for several hours, a knackered suspension as opposed to the anticipated radiator collapse the cause, though we've still ended up replacing the radiator here in Bamako.

The rigours of overland travel in West Africa are beginning to take their toll on me and on my enthusiasm for the place. The scenery is relentlessly dull unless you particularly love endless flat expanses of scrubby trees and bush, dotting a brown earth baked hard like concrete by the merciless sun. The Sahel landscape is unvarying to quite an amazing degree over vast areas of West Africa, and seemingly empty of much life apart from goat herders and their flocks. We have a further solid five days of the stuff ahead of us as we depart Bamako for the Senegalese coast, with no sights to speak of en route. I'm craving hills and grass and something spectacular to see.

The highlight of the past days and in a sense of the whole trip has been a three day trek in the Dogon country in eastern Mali. The Dogon remained fiercely animist in the face of Moslem incursion into West Africa and retreated to defend their traditional beliefs to a spectacular escarpment landscape in the fourteenth century. The Bandiagara Escarpment truly is a landscape to make the heart sing. The wind eroded sandstone escarpment runs for about 150km with a fertile plateau behind where the Dogons cultivate onions, dropping magnificently 300m to a fertile plain below where many of the Dogon villages are picturesquely sited in the lee of the cliffs. There are gorges and dry river beds aplenty, with fabulously twisted boabob trees providing much needed shelter and shade from the heat and dust.

Dogon culture is quite fascinating and incorporates an important role for masked dancing. The masks are highly elaborate and in some cases astonishingly large. We were able to see a dance performed in one village which was really quite a sight to see. We also visited a cliff ledge painted with what could almost be taken for modernist abstract paintings in bold colours, where the Dogon boys are circumcised in an age old 15-day ceremony that marks their rite of passage into adulthood. The ubiquitous square thatched granary buildings raised on staddle stones are the signature buildings of Dogon villages, looking a little like the steeply gabled turrets of fairytale medieval castles. Every husband must provide a granary for each wife he takes, and it is these buildings which traditionally were sealed with the famous carved windows and doors of the Dogon. It was wonderful to be off the truck and on foot through this place, sleeping on roofs under the stars at night to recover from the rigours of a day's hiking.

In Timbuktu

2006-03-04T17:58:00.000Z

Greetings from Timbuktu! It feels rather grand to write it, though the town is quite underwhelming when you actually explore the place. Still the whole point of Timbuktu is in the getting here (and the getting out again alive). Even the early European explorers who finally fought their way across burning desert sands and through hostile tribes to reach this place were disappointed in what they found after all their efforts. Timbuktu is truly a city of the imagination, its fabled wealth that endowed it with mosques, madressahs and one of the greatest universities on Earth in the late Middle Ages, is all long gone with barely a trace to show it ever existed at all.

In 1325 the Emperor of Mali collapsed the global price of gold for over a decade by giving away such vast quantities of the stuff as he passed through Cairo on his return journey from a pilgrimmage to Mecca. When Ibn Battutah visited the city a few years later, traversing the Sahara from Morocco, the city was entering into its golden age. These days there is just one mud mosque surviving from the 14th century, the streets of a depleted town are encroached by sand, and the only precious metal to be seen is the debased silver used by the Tuareg, the dominant ethnic group here, to fashion crude, though lovely, jewellery items for sale to tourists.

Inevitably, getting to Timbuktu proved quite an adventure. We finally reached it after an epic three day boat trip up the Niger River from a place downstream from the bustling port of Mopti. Our boat ran out of fuel and then proceeded to bust its motor so we pretty much limped into our destination half a day late, jaded, and having run out of food. However, it was a beautiful and fascinating journey, with plenty of diversions along the way, so our spirits weren't entirely dashed. It's worth remembering that it was often the departing that the early explorers found most tricky about Timbuktu, carrying with it all the associated risks of getting yourself murdered on a lonely stretch of desert road. Although our truck made it here without us, it was at the expense of the radiator, our sole remaining radiator following the tribulations of Cameroon. So nobody's holding their breath on when we get to leave.

These days Mopti, which is situated on a most peculiar inland delta, is the economic hub of eastern Mali, a region effectively defined by the great northerly sweep of the river. Its harbour is the stuff of photographers' dreams, as is the equally lively Monday market in the neighbouring town of Djenne, with its fabulous maze of atmospheric medieval streets in mud brick, centring on the graceful Friday Mosque, the world's largest mud brick building. Together these towns seem to encapsulate everything Timbuktu ought to be but is not.

Bukina Faso

2006-02-25T15:05:00.000Z

I am in Bukina Faso, a land of improbably named towns. Today finds me in Bobo Dioulasso, an exceedingly laid back place where the locals youths lounge away the day, hiding from the burning sun and waiting for the cool of evening when the fun can start. The Bukinabe may be among the poorest people in the World according to UN poverty index criteria, but that doesn't seem to interfere with their credentials as party people once the music starts.

Just before this I was in the capital city of Ougadougou (or 'Waga', as its known amongst the tongue twisted), comparatively a rather more frenetic place as laid-back cities go. My unremittingly unsuccesful attempts to get things done there rather captured the essence of this friendly country.

Grace and I headed off to visit the National Museum, which turned out not to be where it was supposed to be, and not anywhere else that our aimable, perplexed taxi driver could find either. So, anxious not to risk our disappointment, he dumped us near another unrelated museum instead. Well, we abandoned the attempt to be cultural, which was fortunate, since we later heard that when some of the others finally discovered the site of the museum, by that stage a mission akin to discovering the source of the Nile, it proved to be just that - a site. They're still building it! We went to a restaurant which didn't serve food, several internet cafes without the internet, including one place, seemingly open for business, which didn't have computers. The confusion was also kind to my wallet, since the crafts shop I'd set my sights on visiting didn't exist either, at least not at its advertised address. We were supposed to buy food for cooking at the famous Grande Marche, but that had burned down some time ago, and as far as one could tell nobody was in a hurry to rebuild it. That left the supermarket, only that turned out to be shut for half the afternoon for a siesta. Exhausted we popped into a cafe to have a cafe au lait, of course without the lait, they'd run out.

Given that we achieved precisely nothing at all in Ougadougou, I came away with surprisingly fond memories. Perhaps it is the thought of our gallows humour as we paced streets that were anvils to the beating heat of the sun joking about what was about to go wrong next. I suspect however it might be because of a later discovery that evening. Whatever the distance to be travelled between aspirations and reality in this optimistically minded place, the Burkinabe aren't exaggerating when they claim to know how to party. Give me a great band playing infectious beats on a balmy evening, a shaded courtyard to eat one of the best meals of the entire trip so far, and a girlfriend returned from distant places to enjoy these things with - well, who cares about a little background chaos after all that?

Poverty and Tourism

2006-02-10T16:20:00.000Z

Poverty is endemic in West Africa, but it doesn't manifest itself quite in the way I had imagined. Instinctively I had an urban image of poverty in my mind, a picture of fetid shanty towns with open sewers and appalling air quality. No doubt such places exist here, in overcrowded cities such as Lagos, but its not the form in which I have encountered it on this trip. In fact West Africa can fool you. There is an impression of abundance here when you visit the lively and colourful markets. Houses are extremely modest but on the whole but do look permanent. Children are very neatly turned out in their school uniforms and it is noticeable how well dressed West African folk tend to be - I regularly find myself in situations where I feel myself to be inapporpriately scruffy in my travelling rags.

When you scratch a bit deeper though the problems emerge. Many people have several jobs and live a long way from their homes. A taxi driver I spoke to hadn't been able to get home to see his wife and kids in three months. Basic facilities such as piped water are not available in many places. The pharmacies may be well stocked but most people can't afford the medicines, hence the terrible plight of Aids sufferers over here. The reason you see so many people lolling around in the shade of their verandahs at all times of the day is because there are problems of massive unemployment throughout the region. The guys I talked to in Lome said that everyone in Togo was a craftsman because that was the only way you could make money. Governments regularly fail to pay wages to government employees, sometimes for months on end, a situation which explains the prevalence of corruption and a culture of bribes in so many of the region's police forces. Some countries do seem to be fairing better than others with Benin and Ghana relatively prosperous compared to Nigeria and Togo, and with Cameroon very much on the slide and in danger of freefall.

All of which can put you in an uncomfortable position as a tourist. White is assumed to mean wealthy and the request for 'cadeau', usually quite politely made, is relentless and at times insistent. Certain more touristy spots including the better known african crafts markets become places where you have to exhibit steely resolve to make it through without shouting at someone. If you go with the flow and adopt a local guide/protector it can be a lot of fun, but alone you are besieged.

However the aspect of being a tourist I've felt most uncomfortable about is the visits to culturally interesting communities. The coasts of Benin and Togo, for example, are unusual in that behind a virtually unbroken coastline of coconut palm fringed sandy beaches, there stretches a vast area of fresh water lagoons inhabited by large fishing communities living in stilt villages. You can take trips out to visit these villages in dug out canoe boats called pirogues which punt lazily across the water, occasionally raising a flimsy sail to take advantage of a warm gust of wind. The boatmen make a good living from the tourist trade. The local communities whose picturesque villages are the focus of all our camera lens may well not do so. The distribution of income isn't entirely clear, but as a sensitive tourist it is easy to feel rather exploitative floating around a place where, however nice the views, the people are obviously scratching out a living in highly insanitory conditions. It's a real African problem, and in a part of Africa where much of the tourist interest is focused around the traditions and cultures of the people, its a problem that you cannot avoid thinking about.

Voodoo Adventures

2006-02-10T14:12:00.000Z

Much as I enjoyed Nigeria, I'm coming to the conclusion that it's French speaking West Africa I like the best. After Abuja, we crossed over the most insubstantial of frontiers to spent a thoroughly enjoyable week in Benin. Only the change of language evident in the first village we encountered after the Nigerian passport 'hut' told the story that we'd actually arrived in Benin. Later, a short 24 hour dash across tiny Togo, just 56km wide on the coast, brought us to Ghana yesterday. I almost got myself arrested at the Ghanaian frontier by an irate soldier in a mix up over currency exchange, so it was an inauspicious arrival. Still, Grace flies in tonight to join me in Accra, so Ghana may well emerge as my favourite country yet. Anyway, it's the last chance to win out for the anglophone countries, as it's French all the way to Dakar hereafter.

Benin and Togo have a quite distinctive feel, much of that distinctiveness coming from the prevalence within local culture of voodoo, the worship of ancestor gods. It was from this region that voodoo was exported to Haiti, Brazil and other parts of the New World with the slave trade. In Ouidah, in Benin, a sleepy little town with a pretty Portuguese fort, you can follow a four kilometre walk to an undistinguished stretch of sandy beach from where over three million slaves were loaded into European slave ships to be transported across the Atlantic in appallingly inhumane conditions. And Ouidah was just one of scores of such ports of embarkation. Ghana alone has over 30 surviving European forts doted along its coast that were used as trading bases for the lucrative slave trade, some dating to as far back as the fifteenth century. Local beliefs held particular trees, especially the iroko tree, to be sacred. Along the 'Rue des Esclaves' at Ouidah you pass two sacred spots that illustrate the interplay of voodoo and the slave trade. The first is the tree of forgetting. Here the local chiefs responsible for selling the slaves would force the male slaves to circle the tree nine times, the female slaves seven times, in a ritual intended to enact the surrendering of their cultural roots. In this way they would relinquish their African identity and behave submissively towards their new white masters. The second tree a little further along was a tree of the spirit. Here the slaves would choose to circle the tree twice before proceeding to the beach in a ritual which they hoped and believed would enable their souls to return to Africa after they had died in distant captivity.

One of the less acknowledged aspects of the slave trade was the extent to which it relied upon warring African kingdoms to provide a steady flow of human captives for the trade. In Benin, you get a flavour of this local context visiting Abomey, the old capital of the Kings of Dahomey. This expansionist royal house was spectacularly successful in its pursuit of war against rival royal neighbours and came to control a large area of southern Benin before being snuffed out by the military superiority of the French in the 1890s. Two royal palaces survive in Abomey which give a wonderful flavour of the wealth and cultural richness of this kingdom, but also illustrate its cruelty. Human life was held cheap to an extent which surprised even this student of medieval history, and a dynastic commitment to almost perpetual warfare meant the kingdom had a ready supply of captive enemies to make it a big player in the slave trade.

The old kingdoms of Benin were without exception voodoo kingdoms, and indeed the last king of Porto Novo committed ritual suicide in 1976 having lost his honour when the latest in a line of post-independence military dictators decided to outlaw voodoo in the country. That ruling was relaxed more recently, and everywhere you go in the country you spy lumpy, rather odd looking fetishes on the edge of villages that protect their communities from various unwelcome misfortunes. Voodoo temples are orientated towards different deities, each with its select group of the 'initiated' who can enter inside and participate in the more sacred rites. There seems to be little personal choice about becoming initiated, if you are selected by an elder it is not politic to refuse. Still, it's clear that despite its penchant for human skulls and dried dead animals, voodoo here is not understood as a sinister or negative thing in the least. It has a vibrancy in its celebrations made patently evident when some of our group got invited along to an all singing and dancing get-together in Abomey which centred on the exorcising of a demon from a young boy. It's interesting to observe how easily these local beliefs sit alongside Christianity. I was told that quite a high proportion of religiously Christian Beninoise keep up voodoo practices as well as attending church because they believe that it is important to keep old traditions alive.

My final encounter to date with voodoo involved a trip to the fetish market in Lome, the capital of Togo. I rather liked Togo on a brief acquaintance and spent an enjoyable few hours there shopping for an african mask, before chilling out over lunch with a bunch of stall traders who told me all about the country's woes, how the President was a criminal, and how Togo's miraculous qualification for the World Cup was the only decent thing that had happened to the place recently. After such a friendly welcome, the fetish market came as something of a disappointment. Half demolished in a move to 'improve facilities', it now consists of a confusion of trestle tables exposed to the beating sun, which are laden with dried dead animals, bats and snakes being particualrly popular, assorted skins, quite a number of skulls, and various sculpted figurines that have been banged full of pins. I was led into a delapidated tin shed for some voodoo hard sell, with an aggressive trader acting as translater for an ancient and nattily dressed voodoo doctor who sported an expressionless face and pineapple nose beneath his trilby hat. Having identified a good luck charm as the item I wanted to buy, there was some protracted mumbo jumbo to be got through as we both uttered a series of prescribed mantras. The old man then tossed a set of cowrie shells on the sandy floor to determine the price. Unsurprisingly, the pattern revealed that the price was exorbitantly high. A firm refusal to pay such a hefty sum soon brought the price tumbling, and I eventually exited the shack wearing my charm having agreed a much more reasonable rate and no doubt picked up a hex from the decidedly disgruntled trader in the process. It doesn't matter what you believe in, there's always money to be made from religion.

White White White

2006-01-31T13:21:00.000Z

Every time you drive through a settlement in rural Cameroon you are greeted by hordes of children hurtling out of their houses and schools screaming 'white, white, white' at the truck as it trundles through. The waves, smiles, and sheer excitement on the faces of the kids is one of the most enchanting aspects of travelling in this part of the world. The kids in Nigeria are only slightly less restrained, perhaps the colonial legacy of British diffidence as compared to French bonhommie? Whatever the answer, it's clear that our presence is greeted as a rare and remarkable thing to behold.

The sheer number of children you see in the villages leaves you wondering whether these countries are going to be facing spiralling population problems in the years to come. Often you see them neatly turned out in brightly coloured school uniforms, the schools invariably being run by the churches. Religion is a big force in West Africa and the churches are well kept and bursting with activity. In Northern Nigeria the same is true of the mosques.

Religious slogans such as 'The Lord is my Saviour' abound on billboards and the back of lorries - possibly an optimistic sentiment to hold given the breathtaking disregard for road safety exhibited by your average Nigerian driver. The churches are also heavily involved in running the ubiquituous Aids Clinics you encounter in even the smallest villages. There seems to be a strong moral flavour to the way in which the disease is being tackled here perhaps emanating from the lead role being taken by the churches. I was interested to read in one of the lively Nigerian newspapers that the Government had responded to criticism of its policies by the Nobel Laureate Wole Solyinka by stating it would offer no comment, as it was impossible to have any meaningful discussion with somebody who doesn't believe in God.

Currently we're staying in the rat infested staff car park of the Sheraton Hotel in Abuja. Abuja is a strange modern capital city half build before the money ran out, leaving it as an odd jumble of showpiece buildings and empty lots. The compensation for the rats is access to our first proper shower in weeks, and the attractions of a large swimming pool.

In The Jungle

2006-01-31T12:32:00.000Z

The problem with jungles is that you don't actually see very much in them, apart from a lot of trees. In Cameroon we visited the Korup National Park which is the most biodiverse tract of rainforest in all Africa, sheltering everything from the weirdest insects through to elusive gorillas. And yet, trekking for two days in the depths of the rainforest my most exciting spot was a large millipede. It's a strange sensation to hear the proximity of animals but be unable to sight them in amongst all that foliage. I suppose this might be quite good news for the jungle and the survival chances of the endangered animals. But it means the sort of financial lifeline tourism provides for the safari countries of East Africa is never going to be as viable here. Though there's a hell of lot more wildlife in Cameroon than Kenya, the chances are you're not going to see all that much of it.

Korup is primary rainforest, but that doesn't necessarily mean all the trees are ancient and enormous as I had perhaps rather niavely imagined. To be honest, much of the forest has the feel of ancient woodland in the UK. The difference is in the scale of largest trees, the humidity, and the incessant background noise. Also, we don't have biting black ants in England. I had over fifty of the buggers running over my body when I stood too long in their pathway. The experience gave the expression 'to have ants in your pants' a whole new potency for me. I was ripping off my clothes like I'd just arrived at a nudist convention once they started sinking their teeth into me.

It is encouraging that work is taking place in both Cameroon and Nigeria to combat the threat of animal extinction. In Nigeria, we visited the Afi Mountain Drill Monkey Ranch, where we were able to get up close to one of the most endangered primates of them all, as well as observe chimpanzees rescued from cruel capitivity. The Drill Monkey sanctuary has something like 85% of all drill monkeys held in captivity and is conducting a very successful breeding programme whilst housing the monkeys in very close to natural conditions. We saw similar good work at Limbe in Cameroon, where a wide range of rescued primates included lowland gorillas. However, there is no doubt that habitats remain highly threatened and conservation work is being hampered by poverty, ignorance and corruption. Everywhere, in these countries you encounter examples of major investment having been made at a particular time and then nothing much happening afterwards. The existing tourist infrastructure at Korup is on its last legs, and at the Yankari National Park in Nigeria the Wikki Warm Springs Resort has that same down on its luck feel as your classic out of season English seaside town.

Yankari is an exceptional place to visit despite the warn out look of its central settlement. Sited in the savannah of northern central Nigeria, the park shelters large populations of quite a number of game animals. We got very close to a big herd of elepants, saw water and bush bucks, crocodiles and the telltale bubbles of a submerged gang of hippos. You can wind down from your safari in the most idyllic natural springs imaginable, a crystal clear stream of water heated naturally to 31C wends its way out of a leafy dell beneath a giant cliff. You can even get relatively cold beers, a rare find in this neck of the woods. Just remember to watch out that the baboons don't make off with your clothes, and try not to get into an argument with a warthog.

Road Building In the Rainforest

2006-01-28T09:32:00.000Z

I am beginning to come to terms with some of the challenges of travelling in West Africa. Once you leave the relative luxuries of the coast, you see an altogether more extreme side of life. Take driving for example.

In Cameroon, there are simply no surfaced roads except between the biggest centres, so a 60km drive to the Nigeria border from Mamfe turned into a three day epic on account of a little unseasonal rain during the dry season. The final stretch was the worst, with mud filled holes deeper than the truck which we traversed only with the greatest difficulty using a full set of sandmats under the wheels. The first big hole resulted in a flooded radiator which had to be changed on the roadside. The second was so deep and waterlogged that we couldn't contemplate attempting it at all, and instead had to get out the pickaxes and shovels to undertake a 50m road widening exercise, fortunately with the willing help of a couple of local guys who hacked away at the hardened mud as though 35C heat, high humidity and clouds of blackflies buzzing around your head were no more than the merest irritations. We got the truck 80% of the way across the gap before our new road began to give way and threaten to topple the truck over and into the water. Some neat driving by Pete limited the damage to a back axle buried in mud, which we had uncovered after a couple more hours digging. The third hole, just 500m further on was perhaps the most demoralising, as we despaired of getting the truck out of the depths of the hole as our mats failed us. We got out as darkness fell after gritting the mud with pepples, inverting the mats (which shreds the tyres, but we had to do something) and heaving with all our might. Camped up on the roadside, to face the same again the following day, culminating in me having my first and hopefully only experience of bailing several hundred gallons of liquid mud out of another deep hole to enable the truck to pass without ruining our last radiator fan. We patched up at the border when we finally got there, and crossed over onto the nice tarmaced roads of Nigeria like we were entering the Promised Land.

We All Like To Be Beside The Seaside

2006-01-17T09:54:00.000Z

Impressions of Cameroon seem to be bursting in on me from all directions. The past few days have been spent at the beach, first at the idyllic and undeveloped southern town of Kribi, and now at the Anglophone town of Limbé further north, nestling below the murky slopes of Mt. Cameroon, an active volcano and West Africa's highest peak at 4,095m. Here the sand is black from the action of the sea on millennia of lava flows. Just along the coast is the second rainiest place in the World, so we have been lucky to be undisturbed by showers, though it is the dry season. The climate is hot and humid with an afternoon breeze off the sea affording welcome relief when it arrives. Visibility is not the greatest due to the climatic conditions, so the mountain is a hazy presence at the best of times, though it has gifted the area a fabulous biodiversity that is obvious to see in the beautiful botanical gardens at Limbé and more generally in the lush vegetation that abounds allabouts.

Kribi is the Palm Beach of Cameroon with discrete villas belonging to government misiters tucked back from the beach. However, there are very few hotels and the town appears to operate like any other, though I notice there was church provision for tourists at one of the absolutely packed Sunday services I strolled past. Kribi is not the real Cameroon in the sense that it is overpriced and accesed via a proper paved road, but eseentially it serves an internal tourism function and it is absolutely unspoiled by beach commercialism in the Western sense. It's unquestionably the most beautiful beach destination I've ever visited.

I passed a couple of days walking along uninterrupted miles of pristine sand fringed by jungle, pausing to watch local kids playing footie at low tide, and knots of fisherman working in teams to make a catch directly off the beach. They do this by positioning a canoe-style fishing boat carved from a single tree trunk a couple of hundred metres offshore. A net runs in two lines from the boat to the shore with a team of men on each line slowly pulling the net in. Any catch is divided amongst the men, who might number as many as thirty in total, so pickings can be pretty thin at the end of a long day heaving on nets in 30°C sunshine. Yet this is a major form of employment hereabouts as witnessed by the large number of boats you encounter pulled up upon the sand. The sizzle and smell of frying fish is a welcome sound as you wander your way, and the crevettes and baracuda I tried at our campsite restaurant were quite superb.

A couple of kilometres down the coast we came upon the unusual sight of a river cascading into the Atlantic down a waterfall. We managed to hire a boat here to take us upriver to a pygmy village. The village turned out to be a bit bogus with several of the pygmies looking none too short at all and primitive seating area constructed for visiting tourists, but the boat trip through the jungle was spectacular. This was the type of jungle you get in Tarzan movies with great long creepers cascading down from gigantic trees, and the constant, but sightless, sound of activity in the undergrowth.

For all the beauty and abundance though, Cameroon is a poor country grappling with enormous corruption problems and the menace of violent crime fuelled by unemployment and extreme need. Douala did not feel like a safe town to go walking around as a tourist, and though the atmosphere is much more relaxed outside the city, you notice the presence of armed guards on a surprisingly wide range of buildings. People have told me that the infrastructure has been in decline for the past few years, so one wonders if things are going to get worse before they get better.

The biggest problem to development is the endemic corruption everywhere which seems to be bad even by West African stabdards. Public officials demand bribes because they don't get paid their salaries. The strength of the tribal system enables chiefs and bigwigs to syphon off all manner of funds from their communities. I talked to a western volunteer working for a foreign government sponsored aid programme who was facing an enormous ethical dilemma in working to promote community savings in agricultural microbanks, the idea being to encourage them to invest as a cushion against the tremendous uncertainties of subsistence life in this country. It was put to me in these terms - for the average person in a rural community, if you get sick, you either get better or you die. And yet, this volunteer was conscious that a good proportion of these savings were being embezzled by the bank directors, and the volunteer's position did not enable them to openly challenge the situation. Such a challenge would be construed as a political act, something that would directly contravene the terms under which the organisation works and can operate in the country.

People have no knowledge or experience on which to draw to sort out problems themselves. It tells you something that it's not uncommon to find that ancestral skulls are used as collatoral for bank loans here. Ironically, many of these loans go to pay for the elaborate funerals that are such a part of life here during the 'funeral season', when the rains stop and people can get around the place. These funerals might be held months or years after a person has died and involve the body being disinterred for the celebrations.

Still despite the problems and the crime it's hard to imagine a friendlier place or a more smilely people. It's intriguing.

Too Darn Hot

2006-01-12T15:06:00.000Z

They used to call West Africa the white man's grave, so I've come armed with enough mosquito repellant to fell an army of the pesky things and I'm popping pills which may induce psychosis in me as a second-best substitute for malaria. ...And guess what? So far I've not seen one of the little blighters. Maybe it's just too hot for them to handle here in Douala, because believe me, it's baking in Cameroon.

I've been poking my nose out into a city that is supposed to be renowned for muggings after dark, but couldn't be friendlier on first acquaintance. Actually, it hardly seems like a city at all, rather an overgrown provincial town, though it's the main metropolis in the country. The central square is an unremarkable patch of lush grass surrounded by low rise colonial era buildings in an advanced state of decay, and improbably, an array of outsize antique photocopiers lined up along the pavement awaiting business from the army of civil servants that work thereabouts. The fact that the Justice Minstry has reserved parking spaces for no less than ten Vice-Presidents leaves you wondering whether they might suffer from an over-inflation of bureacracy in this country. Certainly, I found changing money at the bank took the best part of an hour to achieve, though I've rarely seen a queuing public look in better spirits anywhere.

Since the trip officially commenced today we've decamped from the administrative heart of Douala to the Downtown area. We're staying at the Roman Catholic Mission, which incorporates a lovely little church with colourful stained glass windows and a very nice looking swimming pool! It's just off Douala's version of Knightsbridge, which though a little less grand than its London cousin, does sport a local fast food joint named 'Harrolds', all done up with a green awning emblazoned with the name of the place in the trademark style of London's most exclusive department store. We've been warned that Douala is very much at the sophisticated end of West Africa, so I can hardly wait to find out what lies ahead.

Back On the Road Again

2006-01-09T22:48:00.000Z

I've been having a little interlude in England refamiliarising myself with the way things work here. Its been a refreshing break from relentless travel and an enjoyable opportunity to catch up with family and friends, including seven of the gang who were with me in China. I got to play uncle quite a lot, have baths, and gorge myself on roast dinners, fish and chips, proper beer and most importantly, bacon, something that doesn't seem to exist at all in Asia as far as I can tell. I also finally got a chance to see all the thousands of slide photos I've taken over these many months, a process which was so laborious it prompted me to go out and buy a digital camera to use for the remainder of the trip.

On the other hand, I've been reminded what a fundamentally rude and unfriendly place England is compared to most of the countries I've visited. I've been ground down by the ever present grey wet murk that passes for a sky in this cold land and simply astonished at the sheer expense of doing virtually anything here. So the prospect of a little warmth and sunshine down Africa way grows more appealing by the minute. I've even been practicing my French in anticipation of getting into a bit of chat with the locals over the prospects of the Cameroonian team in the forthcoming African Nations Cup. I can hardly wait for the second half kick-off tomorrow.

Christmas At The End Of The Road

2005-12-27T13:07:00.000Z

When Ibn Battutah visited Tunis in 1325 he had barely set off on his epic journey from Morocco to virtually all corners of the known world. Arriving at what was then one of the greatest cities of the East, he had a sudden attack of feeling sorry for himself:

"So at last we reached the town of Tunis, and the townsfolk came out to welcome the travellers. On all sides they came forward with greetings and questions to one another, but not a soul said a word of greeting to me, since there was none of them that I knew. I felt so sad at heart on account of my loneliness that I could not restrain the tears that started to my eyes, and wept bitterly. But one of the pilgrims [he was travelling in company with Haj pilgrims to Mecca], realizing the cause of my distress, came up to me with a greeting and friendly welcome, and continued to comfort me with friendly talk until I entered the city..."

Although in better shape than old Ibn after more than seven months on the road, I could feel some sympathy for his plight passing Xmas away from family and friends in a place where there is barely a trace of festive spirit to be found. Its quite disorientating to find life so absolutely normal all around you at such a time.

Still, you make the best of things, and a trip to Tunis Cathedral to attend 'not quite midnight' mass at least offered up a passingly familiar rendition of Silent Night, sung in French in the company of a packed congregation of black africans immigrants and French tourists. We spent Xmas day itself visiting the magnificent Bardo Museum, with its superlative collection of Roman mosaics showing lively scenes of everyday life, and a fair collection of marble statues of nubile young gods such as Venus wearing not a lot of present wrapping. The big day was rounded off with a slap up Mrs Miggins meal at a fancy restaurant sporting a pint size Xmas tree (the first I have seen). It was all rather convivial and turned out to be quite an enjoyable day all factors considering.

Obiwan Outfits

2005-12-27T11:55:00.000Z

Travelling around Western Libya and Southern Tunisia its easy to imagine at times that you`ve been transported to the Planet Tatooine from Star Wars, which, incidentally, is named after a real Tunisian town named Tataouine. The first Star Wars movie was filmed here and in Matmata we stayed in a trogledyte hotel which was used as the set for a restaurant scene. It still has the original latex sci-fi fittings surrounding the windows and doors of the cave bar. Everywhere here you see men wearing traditional all-encompassing "burnouse" cloaks to keep out the cold, giving the impression of an Obiwan outfitters convention gone mad. If I catch sight of a Jedi knight I really will start to think I`m going mad.

The Berber culture bridges the boundaries between these two countries and there are many similarities one can see when you cross the frontier. Both have impressive medieval fortified granary structures in their hill country, enabling the Berbers to store their precious grain supplies safe from the raids of Arab tribesmen from the coastal plains. Some of these structures are still in use and I was shown grain that had been laid down in the 1960s and was still considered usable. Trogledyte houses are also a feature of both countries. However, the most incredible site of all is the wonderfully preserved desert caravan city of Ghadames in Libya. This mud built city at a remote oasis was once a major entrepot on the trans-saharan trade route, dealing in everything from gold and ivory to the importation of black african slaves. It is divided into several distinct quarters each pertaining to a different clan family of the city, with the whole area of habitation comprising a maze of covered streets, creating the impression of a subterranean city lit by skylights.

In other respects though, Libya and Tunisia seem a million miles apart. As you cross the frontier you leave behind the restrained, almost sleepy feel of Libya, to be confronted with a much more vibrant, and frankly European, experience in Tunisia. This is a country firmly located in the French speaking world, and in Tunis it has a capital city that replicates the grand boulevards and art deco architecture of Paris, as well as having patisserie shops to die for. Much as I loved the easy feel of Libya I was beginning to get tired of its restrictiveness and lack of buzz by the end, plus I was getting quite desperate for a beer. Our first taste of alcohol in three weeks was almost like a religious experience when the moment finally arrived!

Tea In The Sahara

2005-12-15T13:03:00.000Z

I've been drinking quite a lot of tea lately, generally of the green variety, brewed up in a knackered old pot on a stick fire in a vast expanse of sand. We've been traversing the deepest reaches of the Sahara for the best part of a week with our Toureg tribesman guides. They're a hell of a lot of fun, and do like a nice cuppa as often as possible, mostly I suspect because the extended ritual of the brewing process gives them every opportunity for a good old chinwag. Each thimblefull of the sugary liqueur is presented to you with a lovingly crafted foam head that will have taken a good twenty minutes of brewing and repeated pouring to create. In Libya, it is a criminal offence to drink alcohol, so you can't blame the people for making the most of those other more humble beverages that are available.

Libya has been a breath of fresh air after Egypt, though I have to admit that I had one of the most interesting and insightful encounters of the trip on my long bus journey to the Libyan border. If all Egyptians were like the chap I passed the hours with in deep conversation then it would be a very fine country indeed. Libya has unreservably been an amazing experience however, and much of this is because of the extremely friendly and good natured attitude of the people. In fact a customs official actually gave us money at the border to buy coffees because we'd not been able to change currency by that stage, something I couldn't quite imagine happening at Dover. I'm beginning to wonder if I'm getting a thing for totalitarian states as I haven't enjoyed a country this much since I left Syria!

I spent my birthday as sober as a judge wandering the spectacular ruins of Cyrene, an atmospheric ancient Greek city perched on a cliff overlooking the blue Mediterranean. It was rather overgrown a bit like Termessos in Turkey, but much more extensive and easier to work out. We had the place completely to ourselves which would be unimaginable in any of the other Mediterranran countries we've visited.

However, the highlight has been a week away from the world in the Sahara. It's easy to understand why people fall in love with the Sahara, it is breathtakingly beautiful in south-west Libya, everything you ever imagine a desert to be. Apart from our Toureg guides, we hardly saw another sole, local or tourist for the whole time we toured around. Early one morning I climbed a 200m dune and watched the dawn arrive. I could see for miles in every direction and there was nothing but sand dunes and solitude, framed by the fantastical wind sculpted pinacles of a distant mountain range upon the horizon. As the sun burnished the sand a blazing orange colour I thought to myself that this was perhaps the most beautiful place I had ever seen. A few days later we even managed to take a swim in a tiny lake tucked in the folds of an enveloping high dune, finding the water so salty one could simply float. The improbably of taking a dip in the middle of a desert amused me no end.

Not Exactly Ice Cold In Alex

2005-12-02T17:35:00.000Z

I'm in Alexandria for the evening. It's not quite the place I'd imagined it to be from reading Laurence Durrell's 'The Alexandria Quartet', though I suppose it does have a faded sort of charm despite the disappearance of virtually everything that made it one of the very greatest cities of the Ancient World. Michael Palin described it as like Cannes with acne, which strikes me as generous. To my mind it's more like a post apocalyse Bournemouth, only with a lot more sunshine and far fewer grannies. It's just an overnight stop really, as I have to catch a bus in the morning to the Libyan border, in order to catch up with my latest group who I mislaid a few days ago in Cairo.

I've just about managed not to tire of classical ruins in the past couple of weeks. This is something of an achievement as there really are rather a lot of them in Egypt. Our couple of days sailing down the Nile in feluccas provided a welcome respite in which to summon the energy to tackle Luxor, home of the superlative Karnak Temple, the Valley of the Kings and a whole bag of other Pharoanic bits and bobs which would simply astonish in isolation, but which can almost seem missable in this neck of the woods.

The shame in a way is that Egypt as a country does not live up to the splendour of its heritage. I've found the people and general atmosphere here among the least appealing of the entire trip. You are hassled constantly and in a much more unpleasant manner than in India, and you often encounter examples of flagrant deception where people backtrack on an agreed price in order to extract more money from you. Of course it's not a wealthy place and the people lead hard lives and are poorly paid. But the same is true in many of the places I have visited in the Middle East and elsewhere, and in these cases I have found the people more courteous and honourable in their dealings. All in all, I'm quite looking forward to escaping to Libya (which is probably not a statement you read very often).

Still the departure is tinged with sadness as well. In the past few weeks I've broken the habit of falling in love with the countries I've visited, by going for a fellow traveller instead. It's been the highlight of my trip around the Eastern Mediterranean, but the inevitable point of parting was reached after a final few days sojourn in Cairo, exploring the nooks and crannies of the Islamic and Coptic quarters. Still, we plan to meet for further travel in a few months time which is a very exciting prospect. I feel sure old Ibn Battutah would approve. He was quite a fan of Cairo and his Travels are full of references to his many medieval travel romances.

Life On The Nile

2005-11-21T15:02:00.000Z

Strangely, Egypt was never one of the anticipated highlights of this trip for me. The pharaohs had always left me a little cold and if anything it was the opportunity to explore the Islamic sites of Cairo that whet my appetite. After the Mongols sacked Baghdad in the thirteenth century, Cairo rose to prominence as the greatest city of the Islamic World, and even today is the largest city in the Middle East with over 16 million inhabitants.

All that rather changed for me when I took a flight earlier today down to Abu Simbel, the gigantic temple of the Pharaoh Ramesses II which was moved block by block in the 1960s to a new and higher site when the upper Nile valley was flooded to create the enormous Lake Nasser behind the Aswan Dam. It is the most breathtaking place. You are greeted by four monumental statues of Ramesses seated either side of the entrance portal, which you pass through to walk inside the mountain and explore the fabulously carved interior, replete with images of the Pharaoh fighting the Hittites from the back of a chariot, or making offerings to the falcon god Hora and all manner of other ancient Egyptian deities. Somehow, seeing this grand temple complex so perfectly preserved after 3500 years has unlocked a greater appreciation for all the other relics and monuments I have seen scattered higgledy-piggledy throughout the Egyptian Museum in Cairo, including the grisly remains of Ramesses himself, staring up at you from his partially unwrapped mummy.

This temple impressed me more than the sight of the Great Pyramids, where you are hassled to death by the most persistent local salesmen trying to bully you into buying their overpriced souvenir shite or clamber onto the back of a knackered looking camel. It's also a bit of a shock to see just how close Cairo is to the pyramids, literally just below them, though it doesn't seem to make it onto many of the classic postcard shots. Still, there is something to say for visiting a place that even the ancients regarded as one of the wonders of the world.

An overnight train journey following the verdant green strip that is the course of the Nile has taken us to Aswan, a lovely riverside town with great souks and picturesque scenes of felucca sailboats on the river. Tomorrow we commence a three day journey by felucca to Luxor, sleeping on deck, crapping over the side, and stopping off at ancient ruins along the way. I've even bought a local Nubian ankle length chemise and headscarf to wear on the boat. It might come in handy for covering my modesty when the urge to poo comes upon me. Otherwise, it could just make me look like a bit of a tit.

Bacardi Nights

2005-11-15T15:08:00.000Z

Not for the first time it's felt as though we've not had enough time on this trip. Our sprint through the Middle East has taken us to sensational sites and through spectacular landscapes, leaving you wishing you had more time to explore in depth, get a bit more off the beaten track and linger to absorb the atmosphere. There is simply so much to see and do here that the weeks could roll by without ever getting bored.

Our journey southwards in Jordan took us to Lawrence of Arabia country as we overnighted at a Bedouin camp in Wadi Rum. This is a magical desertscape with towering sandstone escarpments rising out of the wadi floor like abandoned ships in a dried up sea. The crags have been sculpted by the wind and sand into all manner of contortions and give the impression of pock marking where the rock surface has eroded. The red stone runs a gamut of colours as the sun descends in the evening offering you the full romance of the desert as depicted in countless movies, many of which have been filmed here. These days you tour around in 4WD jeeps, though when Lawrence was holed up here plotting his dramatic seizure of Aquaba during the Arab Revolt of 1917-18, it was camels which powered you around the place. That and the Hejez Railway which was the target of many sabotage actions, but which still cuts a swathe across the landscape on its long journey to Mecca and Medina. We had a riotuous night around the campfire winding down from an exhilarating day, and discovered that despite Islamic prohibitions on alcohol, the Bedouin are rather partial to Bacardi, and oddly, favour beer as their mixer of choice.

Aquaba was our point of departure for catching the ferry across to Egypt and the Sinai Peninsula. The Red Sea clearly isn't named for its colour, as I don't think I've seen a stretch of water quite so blue. The coral reefs give the inshore waters an acquamarine tinge which complements the stark yellow of the Saudi and Sinai mountains either side. Unfortunately we were not allowed on deck so had to content ourselves with porthole views of the world outside while munching on something with a passing resemblance to a cheeseburger. I celebrated my arrival by promptly cracking my head open on the lintel of the truck door while being inspected by customs, so have been touring around Sinai with my own elasticated bandage version of an Islamic headscarf, covered up as far as possible with a Yasser Arafat number which I purchased in Aleppo. Fortunately there is no permanent damage, other than to my image, which is now firmly established as reigning truck plonker.

Jordan

2005-11-12T14:28:00.000Z

My odyssey through the Middle East continues apace with Jordan the latest country on our itinerary. We've arrived here at an interesting and tragic juncture, with a series of terrorist bomb attacks taking place in Amman the night before we passed through the capital city. Such atrocities are a new and unwelcome experience for Jordan. Wherever we have talked to Jordanian people in the past couple of days the conversation has quickly turned to these events in Amman. A general sense of outrage and bewilderment that terrorists should target fellow muslims seems to be the recurrent theme.

As in Syria, so in Jordan we are encountering many examples of the famed hospitality of the Middle East. Invitations to take tea abound and today I hung out for a while with a group of Bedouin women in Petra who insisted I stopped to sample their Bedouin billy boiled tea. Not bad but for the intensity of the sugar hit. In Damascus a wrong turning en route to a restaurant led to an amazing encounter. Finding ourselves confronted with a front door at the end of a winding back alley, our small group of five was bundled into the house by the amiable pater familias before we had time to register what was going on. We emerged again an hour later replete with coffee, home-made cakes and the memory of faltering conversation in English conducted in translation via two young daughters amongst the veritable tribe of kids that greeted us excitedly inside as exotic commodities from far off lands.

In between all the bouts of tea drinking we've been visiting some spectacular sites, the most impressive of which has undoubtedly been Petra. This ancient city was home to the rather obscure Nabatean people. It is concealed in the depths of a canyoned river bed and must be approached along a 900m cliff bound passage called the Siq, which in places is no more than a metre wide. You emerge as if bursting out of a cocoon into a spacious plaza with the sublime carved facade of the Treasury Building looming down at you in a rich panolopy of red and brown hues. It is undoubtedly one of the finest vistas on earth. What I hadn't anticipated was the vast scale of Petra and the sheer number of rock cut facades that fill the twisting arms of the valley. Although this is Jordan's premier tourist attraction, it is surprisingly relaxed in feel and easy to escape the hustle and bustle of the main drag with an exploratory side trip. Quaint touches from less touristy times are still to be seen, such as shepherds herding their goats across the site and running the gauntlet of the tourist mules (touted as 'taxis') which ply a trade along the main routes. What also marks out Petra is the incredible contortions of its craggy landscape and the richness of the ever changing colours in the stone.

Jordan is also among the lands of the Bible. Though not of a religious turn of mind, it's nevertheless hard not to be moved in some way by the experience of standing atop the mountain on which Moses gazed down on the Promised Land knowing he could never enter this land of milk and honey. I felt some sympathy for old Moses. Our view from the summit of Mt. Nebo across the Dead Sea and the Jordan River enabled us to see faintly some buildings on the Mount of Olives above Jerusalem - the sacred city which was so near and yet so far away due to international borders and the currents of Middle Eastern politics. Still, we could at least take a dip in the Dead Sea, a fabulously peculiar experience as you bob around like a cork in a barrel trying to comprehend why you don't seem to be sinking.

The Road To Damascus

2005-11-08T15:26:00.000Z

Syria has quite bowled me over. I assumed it was going to be a more difficult country in which to travel. That I might run up against instances of anti-western hostility, religious extremism or simply a brooding police presence suspicious of visitors from Britain. We have been outspoken on Syria in recent times and doubtless there have been reasons for that, but then it has seemed all the more remarkable to reflect on the reception one receives here. This is an exceptionally friendly and hospitable place. You are greeted and treated as a friend, with courtesy and genuine interest in the places from which you hail and in your impressions of Syria. And for once one doesn't feel that the friendliness is a honeyed veneer to a hoped for sale.

Damascus is a cosmopolitan place and undoubtedly one of my favourite cities of the trip. It has a relaxed feel, more westernised and modern than you might imagine. Like the rest of Syria, and particularly Aleppo, it is also religiously very mixed. The Christian quarter is a fascinating maze of old alleys with a host of holy sites associated with the conversion of St Paul. Religious toleration is a cornerstone of Syrian life, not least because the ruling Assad family themselves belong to minority religious sect within Islam. Perhaps that toleration does not extend to Juduism, I'm not sure, but nonetheless the general atmosphere of rubbing along together well contrasts quite favourably with the situation you often see back home. To me it is epitomised in the fact that the superlative Umayyad Mosque, one of the architectural wonders of Islam, houses an elaborate shrine to St John the Baptist and is therefore also a holy place for the Christian community.

What you do notice is that Syrian society is very male in its public aspects. If you visit a restaurant or a bar you will invariably find it devoid of women, and though a western woman will be welcomed without hesitation she will certainly attract stares from some of the other clientele. The mystery of where all the women were hiding was revealed when I visited one of the many Damascene ice cream parlours. The delicious taste of creamy Syrian ice cream with crushed pistachios on top is reason enough alone to visit this country.

The other reason is the quite staggering richness of the architectural treasures that survive from ancient times. I had waited all my life for the chance to visit the crusader castle of Krak des Chevaliers, the very epitome of the medieval castle. It's interior was more ruinous than I had envisaged, but the scale, solidity and setting of the structure could not fail but to impress. However, it was the desert city of Palmyra that left the greatest impression. A beautiful limestone city in an exceptional state of preservation, Palmyra had briefly enjoyed a golden age under the fiery Queen Zenobia in which it vied to crush Rome. Alas, it wasn't long before the legions marched in under the command of Emperor Aurelian and consigned the city to historical memory and the enveloping sands.

Pushing The Boundaries

2005-11-01T14:39:00.000Z

At the start of this trip I made a promise to myself that I would take the opportunity to try all sorts of weird and wonderful activities I'd managed to sidestep in my life so far. I got off to a good start with ballooning and white water rafting, but then rather let myself down by backing out of a 160m bungy jump in Nepal, having talked up my intention to take the leap of faith after a few too many ales the night before.

In Öludeniz, on Turkey's Turquoise Coast, I had a chance to redeem myself with a spot of paragliding, the prospect of which frankly terrified me. At times like these it always helps to be travelling with gung-ho Kiwis who are up for adventure and whose enthusiasm can carry you through the most difficult spots. Öludeniz is reckoned to be one of the top three places in the World for paragliding due to the coming together in one place of high altitude, strong thermals, spectacular coastal scenery and the opportunity to land on a beach. Of course, throwing yourself off the top of a mountain twice as high as Ben Nevis is not an activity undertaken too lightly, as I had plenty of time to mull over on the long, hairpinned drive up to the summit.

Fortunately, I had little time to reconsider my options as we bundled out and peered over the sharp mountain edge at the distant sight of seashore 2000m below us. My pilot, if that's the term, comprised a fascinating mixture of Turkish street bravado and military discipline, all hiding behind an outrageously orange pair of shades. He had me suited up, clipped onto him and charging over the edge of the precipice before I remotely had time to formulate a face saving exit strategy. We were lucky, as the difficult conditions for take-off worsened in the following minutes and forced two of our party of five to abort their jumps altogether.

The worst moment was probably a few seconds after takeoff as we soared away over a deep valley and I heard my man shouting in my ear: 'What a fuck up!' Thankfully, it turned out he was bad mouthing the ground assistant's failure to help us get airborn a couple of minutes earlier, rather than our own imminent and inevitable doom. Still, it was a genuine moment of pure, unadulterated terror. After that, things improved considerably. Paragliding is a wonderfully peaceful experience akin to the sensation of ballooning in the sense that you feel yourself to be moving noiselessly and remarkably slowly through the air. Once you adjust to the idea of having nothing solid below your feet you simply have to sit back and enjoy the sensational views. The glide lasted around 30 minutes and took us down with remarkable accuracy for the softest of landings on the beach. Here my pilot proved his worth for an unusual wind condition forced a number of paragliders to dump a few metres out into the sea. I was so delighted I bought the video of my descent so I can relive the fear in the years to come.

In Amongst The Ruins

2005-11-01T13:04:00.000Z

Considering the debate that is ongoing over whether Turkey should be allowed to join the EU, it is instructive to reflect on the extent to which this place has helped shape our whole notion of western civilisation. The other day we visited the ruins of Ancient Troy, the setting of Homer's 'The Illiad', where Achilles battled it out with Hector to win back the enchanting Helen of Troy. Helen had been carried off by the Trojan prince Paris in the elopement of all time following a jealous tiff between a couple of the Greek gods. She came to be immortilised as 'the face that launched a thousand ships' when the Greek king Agememnon set in motion a rescue mission that would take ten years before tasting success. It's when hard gazing on these battered stones to envisage the setting for this timeless story.

Troy nowadays is a confusing jumble of stone walls dug up from nine different phases of the city's history. Yet, the story of Troy was seminal to the foundation myths of several countries anxious to assert that the pedigree of their particular nation was superior in antiquity and lineage to those of their rivals. In medieval times, the French made great play on the coincidence of the name Paris ocurring as the name of their capital city to assert that they were the true descendants of the Trojans. The English countered with an equally absurd story that England had been founded by Brutus, a Trojan prince who had escaped to Britain from the catastrophe that fell upon Troy when the Greeks infiltrated inside the city walls after ten long years of siege through the cunning devise of a wooden horse. Beware of Greeks bearing gifts as the old saying goes.

It is interesting to obverse how a story such as this one could have impressed itself on the landscape of the imagination down so many centuries and across so many cultures. Even Mehmet the Conquerer, the Ottoman Sultan who wrested Constantinople from the Byzantines, a man who had little call to busy himself with dusty tales from past times, nevertheless did bother to do so in the case of Troy.

More impressive and hardly less significant are the ruins of Ephesus, a vast expanse of predominantly Roman remains from a city which helped shape the future direction taken by Christianity at a key juncture in its emergence as a major religion. Here, in 431, in this city famously written to by St. Paul, the church took a momentous decision in asserting that Christ had two natures in one, being at once both human and divine. Henceforth, all those who strayed from this view were to be considered outside of the Church, and the long history of heresy, schism and internecine conflict that has characterised the Christian tradition got itself properly kick-started. We visited Ephesus on a foggy morning which lent much atmosphere to the columns and capitals that loomed out of the murk, even if it did make for some rather disappointing photos.

However, my favourite pile of old stones is a more modest affair. The ancient city of Termessos may have sent Alexander the Great on his way, but it was never a place to rival the splendours of Ephesus. Nonetheless, the setting of the city high in the mountains above Antalya preserved it from the pilfering hands of later builders on the lookout for cut stone, and perhaps more surprisingly, from intrusive examination by modern archaeologists. It remains today as it has been for centuries, an evocative ensemble of broken walls rearing up in higgledy-piggledy fashion from the enveloping undergrowth. It is almost as though the place were designed to be a set for an Indiana Jones movie, and somehow it seems all the better for that.

Altered Images

2005-10-24T14:06:00.000Z

Istanbul may be one of my favorite places on the planet, but it's rather surprised me coming back here for a second time. I seem to remember in June that the city greeted me as an exotic first taste of the Orient, a place that struck me as distinct and remote from the safe and familiar currents of European life. Oddly, I've had precisely the opposite impression on returning here from India. I've been quite overwhelmed by how very European it feels, even the Grand Bazaar which I remembered as seeming labyrinthine and faintly intimidating now strikes me as ordered, clean and remarkably polite. I bought a Fez hat earlier today, and when I firmly halved the price quoted to me by the shopkeeper he didn't even attempt to haggle further. I felt rather like the bloke in Monty Python's 'Life of Brian' - slightly cheated because nobody wanted to bargain me. Clearly, I've toughened my technique without realizing it through my various dealings with Indian taxi drivers and others of their ilk.

The past few days have been a welcome break from overlanding and it's been particularly nice having a friend pop out to see me for the weekend from England. I also got a progress report on the behaviour of my cats who seem to have been up to a fair bit of mischief in my absence. We did a couple of the big sights such as the Hagia Sophia, which always leaves me awestruck and capable of becoming deeply boring on its prime importance in the history of both Christian and Islamic architecture. Mostly though, we've been hanging out in fish restaurants, draining a fair few Efes beers, and generally poking around various obscure Byzantine churches in search of medieval mosaics. All rather fun really if you're into that kind of thing.

Tomorrow I head off to Gallipoli with a whole new bunch of fellow travelers, new drivers and even a new truck - this one's called Bentley. On first meeting the group seems noticeably older in average age than at any stage before, though it's too early to say whether that means I'm going to have to be on my best behaviour for the next few weeks. Let's hope not.

Bombay Mix

2005-10-18T11:49:00.000Z

One of the things I particularly like about Ibn Battutah compared to your average medieval travel writer is that he was unashameably interested in the good things in life. And there are few things he seems to have enjoyed more than a good old slap-up meal. This strikes a cord with me, not least in India, where the opportunity to get in among the curries has been a big part of the country's appeal. Faced with just half a day to explore the delights of Bombay, the culinary capital of the country, I decided to take the risk of sampling a fish curry, a treat I've been denying myself in this hot land for the same reasons I've been laying off the local turd-fed pork. Well, nothing ventured nothing gained, I can now say I've just eaten one of the best meals of my life at the Mahesh Lunch Home - a fabulous tandooried white salmon served with a spicy Mangolorean coconut based sauce. Old Ibn Battutah would be proud of me, and it's certainly brightened up a day otherwise filled with grinding train travel and irate arguments with taxi drivers.

Bombay was one of the only bits of the British Empire we didn't obtain through warfare, violent intimidation or post-victory peace treaty. It came as a marriage gift from the Portuguese in 1661, following the wedding of Charles II to Catherine of Braganza. As such, it was one of the longest held British possessions in India and of greater importance until the twentieth century than Delhi. Given that fact it's interesting to see that the old colonial Fort area of the city is fairly modest in scale. It's comparable to the town centre of a middling size English county town. There is some grandeur here, of course, particularly in the colossal Victoria Terminus railway station, which dominates the north end of the Fort with all the appearance of a neo-gothic cathedral of science and industry, a sort of V & A Museum for steam trains.

However, the building I made a bee-line for was the more modest and homely St Thomas' Cathedral. This simple church houses a fascinating set of memorials to the great and good of the East India Company and the British military services, primarily dating from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Among the countless memorials to young men who seem mostly to have died in violent circumstances or of sudden disease in their 20s and 30s, is one that particularly struck a cord. It is a cenotaph that remembers Lieut. Bertie Bowers of the Royal Indian Marine, who died on Capt. Scott's Antartic Expedition to the South Pole in 1912. Recently, I finished reading a book entitled 'The Worst Journey In the World' which is a memoir of the expedition written by one of the survivors. It's salutary to remember as you sashay through one country after another that the occasional irritations and difficulties encountered along the way are nothing compared to the hardships put up with by other travelers in different places and times.

Desert Rats

2005-10-17T05:59:00.000Z

The past few days have found me pootling around Western Rajastan and the Thar Desert. Wow this place is hot. Here is classic Rajput country. The handful of creamy sandstone towns that dot the desert are each dominated by a magnificent palace citadel where the wealth on display of the former maharajhas is simply staggering to see. It's not easy to comprehend from where that wealth derived (other than plunder and pillage), since the land here is exceedingly poor. In the villages you still see people living in thatched mud huts, and turbaned men out in the 'fields' using camel drawn ploughs to plough a soil that is vitually all sand.

The craftsmanship you see, especially in ornate exterior stone carving is quite astonishing. The palaces and old town houses are exuberant with finely carved latticework windows that ensured noblewomen in past times kept the 'purdah', hiding themselves away from the prying eyes of horny men. They could look out on the world below their window, but the outside world could not look in. I particularly liked Jaisalmer, a very highly atmospheric town with twisted, narrow streets and suprisingly few scars from modern tourism. Jodphur has a slightly more aggressive feel to it somehow, but it is undeniably a beautiful sight when viewed from the palace ramparts looking down at twilight on the blue-painted houses.

India has some strange sights to behold, but perhaps none stranger than the worship of rats at a Hindu temple close to Bikaner. The colony of rodents are held to be the reincarnations of dead storytellers and have a free run of the temple, where worshippers feed them milk and rice. It's held to be highly auspicious to have a rat run over your bare foot. Not exactly what you want to hear as you jostle your way through the entrance door with nowhere to run when the rats detect your good karma. Well, I headed inside having removed my shoes and crossed my fingers that it wasn't going to be my lucky day. It wasn't fortunately ...and unfortunately, as I discovered a little later that evening when I twisted my ankle falling down some steps after a few light ales.

Having made it to Jodphur, I've bid farewell to the group and am heading off by train to Mumbai, there to catch a plane to Istanbul. I will have been travelling for exactly 150 days overland to get this far. It really feels like cheating to clamber aboard a plane after more than 25,000 km travelling by road, rail and sea.

Earthquakes And Massacres

2005-10-10T08:25:00.000Z

All India has been gripped by the news of the tragic earthquake in Pakistan, or PAK (Pakistan Administered Kashmir), as the worst effected area is referred to here. Aside from the basic human tragedy in the event, one suspects that India's territorial claim to the area and people most effected lends the event some added piquancy. There has been much trumpeting of improving relations between the two nuclear powers in recent weeks and it would be nice to think that a natural disaster of this magnitude that effects both neighbours might provide an unlooked for opportunity to build important bridges.

I felt the earthquake while in bed in Shimla, initially mistaking the shaking of my room for vigorous shagging activity in the bedroom next door. It last just a few moments and I didn't feel the subsequent aftershocks. I'm now in Amritsar which has been more directly effected, though there is no discernable sign of damage to buildings as you roam the town and life is very much proceeding as normal in the streets.

It's rather poignant coming to Amritsar straight from Shimla. The old British summer capital is still redolent of the British Raj in its heyday, offering a vision in stone and wood of the civilising influences of a supposedly liberal Empire. Here in Amritsar you get the flip side of the British imperial hand. Walking through a peaceful shaded garden I watched countless ordinary Indians paying homage to the martyrs of one of the worst atrocities on the long road to independence. Here, in 1919, a pumped up British colonel ordered his troops to open fire on a gathering of 20,000 unarmed civilians who were protesting about a draconian new powers of arrest bill which had been introduced in the aftermath of World War One. Unable to escape because the troops had blocked the only exit, over 2,000 protesters where killed and wounded in a hail of gunfire that lasted barely ten minutes. Incredibly, the officer in charge was exonerated by the ruling authorities, but news of the event lit a torch for freedom in India which was not to be extinguished until independence was achieved almost thirty years later.

Of course, the main reason to come to Amritsar is to visit the Golden Temple, the holiest shrine of the Sikhs. It is an astonishingly beautiful sight. The golden roofed temple is contructed of translucent white marble, inlaid with the most delicate images and patterns done in enamel and coloured stone. The temple sits isolated in its own holy lake, which in turn is entirely surrounded by an elegant sequence of structures also faced in white marble. Alongside the Taj Mahal, this for me is the most beautiful place I have visited in India. The difference is that unlike the Taj the Golden Temple is a living place, a veritable hive of activity as Sikh pilgrims attired in brightly coloured turbans and saris perform their prayers and ablutions.

Echoes Of The British Raj

2005-10-08T13:00:00.000Z

Until you come to Shimla it's easy to forget that India was ruled by the British for such a long while. The colonial traces have seeped away in most places and even the signature buildings in New Delhi have acquired a particular Indian character of their own. But somehow Shimla seems to have retained a whiff of Empire about it which makes it an interesting antedote to the hustle and bustle of modern India.

This place was the summer capital of the Raj. The Viceroy and his minnions would escape here from the oppressive heat of Calcutta and Delhi to enjoy the cooler climate of the Himalayan foothills. From this small hilltop settlement decisions were taken that effected one fifth of all humanity at the time, including the momentous decision to partition India to create the state of Pakistan in 1947.

Given its significance as a seat of power, the architecture of Shimla is remarkably understated. It feels to me like an overgrown and somewhat delapidated version of Great Malvern, only situated on a rather more impressive escarpment that commands magnificent mountain views in all directions. The town has undoubtedly seen better days, but there is evidence of an effort at restoration ongoing, and in any case, I rather like the intrusion of a more Indian feel into this place. I suspect this might have been a stuffy old place to be cocooned in its Raj heyday. Still, it's noticeable that some of the givens of ordinary India do not apply here. There is no litter in the streets, the ubiquituous rickshaw is banished to the lower town, and most remarkably, there isn't a cow to be seen for love or money.

Little Israel

2005-10-06T07:08:00.000Z

One thing I hadn't banked on in coming to India was running into quite so many Israelis. There seems to be some sort of Jewish hippy trail in operation which means you bump into them at certain spots only, but then in very large numbers.

I met quite a few in Kathmandu, but really first became aware of the phenomenon at Pushkar in Eastern Rajastan. This is a Hindu holy city associated with Brahmin. It envelops a small holy lake with ghats cascading down to the water's edge on all sides. The town is strictly vegetarian and alcohol free, although religious prohibitions do not extend to marajuana, which is available in all shapes and forms including the uniquely Indian 'bang lassi'. It's a pretty spot but ultimately a little bit too phoney for my taste. There didn't seem to be a whole lot of pilgrims bathing in the waters when I took a stroll by the lake shore, but instead the whole town from the beggars through to the sadhus seemed to be in the business of fleecing tourists of their every last rupee. As I say, these tourists were predominantly a young and wealthy Israeli set bent on experimenting with long hair, ethnic clothing and large, pungent reefers. Inbetween puffs, they could avail themselves of just about every cosmic Indian cure-all going, from your basic fare of meditation and yoga through to a much advertised spiritual cure for Aids. It was an interesting place to see, but I was happy to escape the psuedo-hippy treadmill and the strong smell of bullshit to get back to a rather more real India.

Leaving Delhi the trip has entered an interesting new phase. We have lost all but five passengers and gained none for the short leg to Mumbai. Among the farewells was a sad one to Graeme, who was the last survivor of the original group who set out from Istanbul in June. This part of the trip replaces a planned visit to Iran, and with such a small group we've been given license to concoct our own itinerary. So after discussion we have opted to head north for the Himalaya and the old Raj hill stations. Hopefully Amritsar and the desert cities of Western Rajastan will also make it onto our bespoke tour.

Our first stop has been another Hindu holy town beautifully situated where the Ganges bursts out of the wooded foothills of the Himalaya. Laxman Jhula is a major centre for yoga and the place The Beatles came to in the 1960s in order to smoke a lot of joints and play the sitar. And you guessed it, it's also heaving with those very same Israeli tourists we kept meeting in Pushkar. So many in fact that people keep opening up conversations with me in Hebrew and the restaurants are falling over one another to offer Israeli menus.

Crapping All Over The World

2005-10-04T10:45:00.000Z

I was reading an article in the Hindustan Times earlier today comparing public lavatories in Delhi and London. Apart from thinking that the article was a bit over generous in asserting how pleasurable it is to visit a typical British WC, it put me in mind that I haven't yet mentioned toilets in this blog. This is undoubtedly an oversight which I need to rectify. Relieving oneself in the best available comfort is an issue that overlanders think about on a daily basis. It is as much a part of the travelling experience as the sights, the scenery and the ongoing war of attrition with mosquitos. After four months on the road I'm becoming quite a connoisseur of the Asian lavatory experience.

The first thing you need to master on the road is a stable stance for the squat toilet. You really don't want to go tumbling backwards into the hole in the floor, nor do you want to dump your doings into the pulled down seat of your pants. Once you've got this mastered, squatting can actually become quite enjoyable, particularly when you're out in the fresh air on bush camps. Tonka and Archie are amply supplied with 'shit shovels' to aid this process and ensure we're not littering the landscape. The idea is to dig yourself a hole in which to aim and then to fill it in afterwards with the piled up earth. A surprising number of people seem to experience early problems with their aim, but as with most things in life, practice makes perfect, and you get a lot of practice on a trip like this one. The 'dig your own hole' policy isn't one followed by many Indians, who merrily leave their turds to bake in the midday sun, whetting the appetite of the local pork life in the process. I've even heard that these pigs are actually owned by the Government and have been introduced expressly for the purpose of providing an organic solution to the human excrement problem. Certainly you tred warily in long grass in India.

I had imagined at the outset that India would offer the very worst in Asian toilet experiences. However, this was unfair. When you do find public loos, and they're not widespread, they really aren't all that bad in my experience. You need to bring your own paper of course, but surprisingly often you are welcomed by a proper western sit down loo. In fact the prize for worst toilets encountered in Asia goes unquestionably to China, though a renegade group of fellow travellers did put in a good word for an especially nasty pit toilet at the Turkmenbashi dockyard in Turkmenistan.

China has quite a social approach to the whole crapping thing. Though public lavatories are widespread compared to in India, they are universally holes in the ground other than in more expensive hotels. Furthermore, the sense of community living in China is sufficiently strong to discourage the building of actual cubicles in many places. Instead, you squat merrily alongside your fellow man enjoying a good old chinwag between strains, separated solely by a very low wall. No danger of accidentally opening the door on anyone else either, since there ain't no doors to open.

One thing you do learn is that full-on toilet horror is more a matter of smell than of sight. This was demonstrated at Everest Base Camp in Tibet where my journey to the drop zone literally involved picking my way through a minefield of desiccating human turds that stretched wall to wall all the way to the entrance, - and I mean the entrance to the building not the cubicle! However, altitude was my friend that day, so there was little in the way of aroma to accompany the visual devastation. Unfortunately, the same was not true of my all-time worst loo encounter which took place at a grotty little restaurant stop on the Karakorum Highway in western China. Battle hardened as I am, this was the one time in the trip where I actually gagged at twenty paces from the target, eventually having to abort my mission altogether, or at least divert it to the friendly cover of a hillside bush. Unfortunately I did get close enough to see a mountainous pile of steaming turds poking right up through the squat hole before I finally fled in terror. It was a sight I hope never to see again in my travels and the awful stench haunted me for days afterwards.

Catching Up With Ibn Battutah

2005-10-04T10:03:00.000Z

I've not mentioned my fourteenth-century travelling companion Ibn Battutah for a while. We parted company in Samarkand when I headed on eastwards through Kygyrstan into China, Tibet and Nepal. Meanwhile, he turned southward through Afghanistan and crossed the Kyber Pass into the province of Sind (now Pakistan), before entering Northern India. In Delhi I've been re-acquainting myself with my wandering muse. This is a city in which he hung up his boots for quite a number of years, obtaining a position of some authority under one of India's greatest and most tyrannical rulers, the Sultan Mohammed Tughlaq.

Back in 1333 the centre of Delhi was a good 15 km to the south of the present 'Old Delhi' and was focused around the magnificent Qutb Minar mosque complex. At the heart of this was a 73 metre minaret of surpassing beauty, already old at the time of Ibn Battutah's visit. He describes it as the most beautiful minaret in all of Islam, which is quite a statement coming from one who had travelled so extensively.

Finding myself with an inadequate amount of time to explore this fascinating city, I vowed that at least I would make a pilgrimage into the suburbs to see this one place that had so greatly impressed Ibn Battutah. I didn't regret the decision. The mosque, which is actually the oldest in India, is now ruinous and rather reminiscent in its gutted grandeur of some the great ruined abbeys of northern England. Yet the minaret still stands tall and proud as it has done since 1193, betraying a slight tilt as a small concession to its old age. It is simply gigantic. Ibn Battutah described it's internal staircase as being wide enough to ride an elephant up and suggested this was how the building materials were carried up to the top. The lower sections are constructed of red sandstone with a lovely fluted exterior that accentuates the effect of the minaret's taper. The top section is faced in translucent white marble which in the fourteenth century was surmounted with a golden ball.

Given that Delhi is a big and brash city that bears almost no resemblance whatsoever to its antecedent of the fourteenth century, I found it rather moving to be confronted with one building at least which would be instantly recognisable across seven long centuries.

Getting Into The Groove

2005-09-28T12:47:00.000Z

India seduces you. The harder you look the more you are rewarded, and perhaps more worryingly, the less you notice the daily horrors and irritations that confront you in amongst all the fascination.

Of course, the experience of India can drive you spare at times. At the exceptionally preserved, deserted, Moghul city of Fatehpur Sikri, I could have punched a shop-owner who despite every discouragement stuck to my shoulder like glue throughout the entirety of my visit to the the palace mosque, advising me with unalloyed enthusiasm and bugger all knowledge on how I should be taking my photographs. All of this done in the forlorn hope that I was afterwards going to buy some overpriced junk from his miserable little shop. The fact that everybody here wants a piece of you has the perverse effect of hardening you to the constant approaches, which are therefore rarely rewarded. Only occasionally now does it ever get to me.

Nonetheless, India always has the capacity to surprise. Yesterday, the most astonishing thing happened to a couple of friends and I when driving back to our hotel in Udaipur. Approaching the fortified city gate, we spied an elephant and rider emerging through the gate and leaned out of the motor rickshaw to take shots. The driver pulled up to assist us, and then as the elephant drew level it also stopped and began tapping the rickshaw windscreen with its trunk. "It wants payment for the photo", quipped our driver, which we all thought a very good joke. Only we soon realised that it wasn't meant as a joke at all. After some hasty rummaging in pockets Graeme laid a 10 rupee note on the end of the elephant's trunk which it promptly palmed with such accomplishment you felt it must have been grafting amongst tourists for years. It really does come to something when even the elephants are on the make in this country. It's bloody lucky they haven't been successful in getting the cows trained up or we really would be going home with empty pockets.

The compensation for the irritations is the fascination of the culture and the beauty of the country and its treasures. It seemed at times in the past few days that the senses were about to overload with yet another beautiful sight. The prize of course must go to the Taj Mahal, which defied every expectation on my part that such a familiar building must surely disappoint in the flesh. It is the most sublime building I have ever seen and simply takes the breath away. We went at dawn when there were very few visitors and I was transfixed by it, wandering around and around the mausoleum with my camera for a couple of hours, watching the white marble pass through a whole gamut of colour gradations with the changing quality of the light. Simply awesome. The amazing thing is that the Taj is just one of three stunningly elegant tombs in Agra, which served as the Mughal capital for much of the dynasty's heyday.

We have seen beautifully carved Hindu temples of the 10th century in Uttar Pradesh which depict a whole karma sutra of erotic images that somehow escaped prurient destruction by later Muslim rulers of Northern India. At Orchha we camped amongst the ruins of splendid palaces and monuments at a delightful riverside spot. In Rajastan I have seen more dramatic hilltop castles than I could ever wish to in a lifetime, and now I find myself in the fantastically romantic city of Udaipur, lazing beside the lake which has filled up for the first time in 9 years after the heavy monsoon experienced by India this year. This place was the home to the greatest of the Rajput Maharaja dynasties, who used their fabulous wealth to built palace upon palace in and around the picture postcard lake. We've been tremendously lucky to see it with the lake full, and the same can be said of a marshland bird sanctuary we visited where the heavy rains have attracted literally thousands of breeding birds of every shape, size and shade of colour. I never thought being a twitcher could be so easy.

The friendliness of the people and especially the children is also a delight. Away from the touts and the young men on the make, we've been welcomed wherever we've gone. The opportunity to travel by truck has taken us to some pretty out of the way villages where I suspect our unannounced visits will prove to be one of the most talked about events in their year. In one place the whole village got up before dawn just to come and watch us take our tents down.

So India is delivering a whole cocktail of impressions and I haven't even got bored with eating three curry meals a day yet either.

India

2005-09-18T10:48:00.000Z

Our new trip has departed Kathmandu under the aegis of a new leader Ben, who hails from Australia, and with a whole new set of passengers hailing from Brazil, Ireland, Mexico, Oz, Sweden, the UK and the US, thirteen of us in total. We also have a new truck named Archie, who is slightly smarter than Tonka, but essentially very similar. The first port of call was the Chitwan National Park where I got my introductory full-on wildlife experience of the trip, walking out into the jungle, helping to wash elephants in the river and getting close up to rhinos in the bush while riding on the back of an elephant.

Soon enough we were heading onwards to the Indian border which we crossed with astonishing informality compared to any other border crossing since Europe. Ben had advised us (or perhaps warned us) that in order to enjoy India you need to have patience, a sense of humour and be broad-minded. It was sound advice, as it's proved to be a country that hits you immediately and with full force right between the eyes.

The scenery here in Uttar Pradesh is unremarkable after what we have seen in Nepal, a rather relentless vista of a flat, green landscape dotted with trees that break up the small fields. However, it is the human and bovine dimensions of the place that jump out at you, quite literally a lot of the time. In this sense, India assaults your senses like no other place I've visited. It's noisy and crowded, it smells, and it thrusts sights before your eyes that challenge you deeply. Today, in Varanasi, looking out on a street scene from a motor rickshaw, I watched two street urchins crouched on a low wall crapping into the street below. Meanwhile, half a dozen pigs troughed away on a whole pile of excrement already deposited at the spot. I decided not to order pork for lunch.

Driving in Archie we are a constant focus of attention. No matter where we stop people will gather immediately, often in large numbers, simply to stand and stare at us. They are polite and friendly, and seemingly mesmorised by our presence. If you walk around the back of the truck to get something from a locker they simply follow you round, crowding in to get the best view of whatever is happening, but not seeking to interfere. Ben calls them the staring squads. Of course this lack of privacy or any developed sense of personal space in India can be a bit problematic if you've stopped for a roadside pee, and in the worst instances it's sometimes necessary to set up a locker-related diversion at the truck to allow one or two of us to slip away unnoticed behind the bushes. In the towns you tend to get pestered a lot more directly and more often by an endless stream of young men apparently convinced that the only thing getting in the way of you buying whatever tatty piece of junk they are shoving in your face is a mutual agreement on the right price. As a result they are not remotely fazed by you telling them that you're not in the least interested, and just persist in giving you the sales pitch. In the worst places it can get quite wearing and it's hard not to be rude.

Indian towns and villages are ramshackle with many decayed and dilapidated buildings, a profusion of low-slung electricity cables leaching power in all directions, and generally a busy shopping street lined with cheap food stalls selling tasty curry based meals for around 25p. The road quality is quite good for Asia, but when faced with an obstacle course of wandering and seated cows, local drivers are forced to take a fairly relaxed approach to staying in lane and the rules of overtaking. Everything travels relatively slowly as a result, and the intention to overtake another road user, whether it's a bus, a rickshaw or a cow, is announced by a deafening blast on the horn. Bicycles and bicycle rickshaws are ubiquitous, with motor rickshaws more evident in the cities. Cars are less of a sight, though there are some fabulous old fifties style vehicles still in service here as taxis in Varanasi. The roads are also fully used as a convenient spot to dump rubbish, go to the toilet, and in the case of poorer folk as a bed for the night. There seems to be a general attitude that with so many cows, goats, dogs and pigs wandering around that everything will get eaten in the end. It takes a bit of getting used to.

I particularly like watching the people (call it revenge) from the safety of the truck or a rickshaw. The women are often beautifully dressed, invariably in Indian clothing of sari or salwar kameez. The men generally wear western clothing and it's clear that the moustache still reigns supreme among Indian males. You also see some hilariously awful haircuts which, like the cars, seem to faintly mimic a fifties rock 'n' roll era image without quite pulling it off.

I think it's still too early to make up my mind about this place which is probably why this piece is a bit impressionistic in style. I'm loving the sights so far and find even the difficult stuff fascinating rather than simply tedious. Taking a dawn boat ride on the Ganges at Varanasi this morning to watch people bathing at the ghats and cremating the dead was very atmospheric and interesting to see. We'll see how the rest of the trip unfolds.

Dodging Maoists In The Mountains

2005-09-12T10:05:00.001Z

The second half of my stay in Nepal has been dominated by a nine-day trek in the Annapurna Region of the country. Graeme and I flew to Pokara which is a relaxed lakeside town nestling below the mountains and catering for a currently non-existent tourist industry centred around the most popular and spectacular trekking region in the World.

Our walk took us through fabulous mountain scenery from our start point at Naya Pul (1100m) to the top of the Thorung La Pass (5416m), the highest pass in the World. Technically we were following a trek known as the Jomsom Trek, which takes you to the joint Buddhist and Hindu temple complex at Mukinath, a pretty Tibetan village in the Lower Mustang region that juts northward of the Annapurna and is consequently a dry and arid region sitting above the monsoon belt. However, through hard and knackering walking we managed to get a day ahead ourselves to make an attempt on the Pass. Climbing from the western side is the difficult way to do it (though we didn't have a choice) and consists of a gruelling five and a half hour climb of over 1600m in increasingly thin air. We made it, though only after a lot of cursing and cussing on the way up, and posed for photos with jelly legs and mild headaches by the prayer flag decked sign at the top. This was quite honestly the hardest physical challenge I've ever undertaken, added to by the knee crushing impact of an immediate 1600m continuous descent straight back down to Mukinath.

Our party was actually comprised of three, as we were joined by a very chipper little dog who popped up out of nowhere beside the Mukinath Temple, and following a pat and coconut biscuit from Graeme, proceeded to accompany us all the way to the top and back down again. We named him 'Everest' in honour of this canine mountaineering expertise and he certainly looked a lot less bashed in by the experience than we did at the end. He mysteriously disappeared just as he had materialised outside the Temple. We wondered if he'd been some sort of guardian angel guiding us through snow and rain showers on the way up to enjoy the perfect sunshine and views at the top!

Earlier in the trek we had a close encounter with the Maoists who operate in the Annapurna Region, extracting 1200 rupee fees from trekkers to help fund their revolutionary activities. We were told they were very friendly provided you paid up, and would issue you with a receipt for you payment which was theoretically redeemable after the Revolution! A group of Maoists came into a village in which we were staying one evening, but we were out of sight upstairs in a teahouse hostel and they passed on unaware of our presence.

The Maoist problem is a symptom of a wider political malaise in Nepal which is all too apparent if you speak to the local people. In fact, the willingness and openess of the Nepalese in talking about the problems of their country has made my stay here all the more fascinating, and it contrasts greatly with the sealed lips of the people of Central Asia, China and Tibet on such matters. Essentially, there is very widespread and deep-seated resentment of the actions of a highly unpopular king who has revoked the constitution and imposed an autocratic form of Government in response to the heightening of tensions in the country. The Maoists, who have declared a unilateral three-month ceasefire in the past few days, represent only one wing of the opposition. A coalition of opposition parties clamouring for the restoration of multi-party democracy represent the voice of much of the people, and in Kathmandu there have been daily mass protests throughout the past week which have been met by a violent response from the riot police and many hundreds of arrests. It's not particularly effecting this Western tourist enclave of the city, but the papers are full of the stories, the locals complain bitterly of the king, and everywhere there are armed police and military checkpoints. There is some optimism here about the future thanks to the Maoist ceasefire, but the tragedy for Nepal is that the tourist industry which feeds so much of the economy is suffering catastrophically as a result of all this upheaval.

Kathmandu And Not Bust

2005-09-12T09:10:00.000Z

I've been a bit tardy with the blog of late as a number of readers have pointed out by e-mail. Life in Nepal has been a hectic round of activity, with all manner of new impressions and experiences mixing with the sadness of a whole round of goodbyes. Although this is halfway for me, the official Dragoman trip ended here on arrival in Kathmandu, so over the course of a week I found myself saying farewell to a whole host of old friends, new friends and ex-girlfriends. In many cases I think it will be farewell rather than goodbye, at least I hope so. Now there is just Graeme and I left to travel on to Delhi, and our leaders Claire and Riki who are stranded here battling with Nepalese bureaucracy in an attempt to get a permit to allow two parked up Drago trucks to depart the country for India.

Nepal is a remarkable country passing through a very troubled passage in its history. The first impression you get is of the extreme beauty of the landscape. Unlike Tibet, this is an intensely green and watered land. It also offers a more breathtaking view of the Himalaya, since the land literally rises from not much above sea level to the very roof of the World. Last week while trekking I walked through the deepest gorge in the World and could look up to either side at mountains rising 6000m above my head. In Tibet, the average height of the land is 5000m, so the mountains tend not to tower over you in quite the same way.

The people and culture are also markedly different. In fact there is a sizeable Tibetan community in Nepal, and trekking through Lower Mustang above the Himalayan rain belt you could kid yourself you were back in Tibet from the dusty, brown nature of the landscape and the wholly Tibetan communities you encounter inhabiting tiny hillside villages. Nonetheless, arriving in Kathmandu you are hit immediately by the bustle and noise of the Indian subcontinent, and the predominently Hindu rather than Buddhist feel of the culture. The Nepalese people look Indian in appearance and the influence of India is felt is a whole host of ways from a curry based cuisine to cows wandering into the middle of the roads. Kathmandu is also a city highly geared for Western tourism, which comes as rather a shock after most of the places we have passed through on this trip. The Thamel area in which we are staying is a mass of hotels, souvenir shops, restaurants serving Western food, all jumbled up with any number of hawkers and salesmen selling everything from rafting and terkking trips to bicycle rickshaw rides around the city's main sites. It's a cramped and atmospheric quarter of the old city, which is seductive in terms of its Western amenities and the ease with which one can meet fellow travellers, but it also builds in you the desire to escape to a more real Nepal.

We did get out during the first week here. Travelling around the Kathmandu Valley to visit a group of ancient Nepalese cities which have preserved remarkably intact central zones of temples and palaces, just as Kathmandu has done with its famous Durbar Square. Later the final remants of our group took a two-day white water rafting trip down the Tisuli River. I was a little apprehensive in advance about the idea of plunging headlong into 6ft raging waves in an inflatible raft, but the moment we went through the first rapid I became an addict. Aside from the adrenile rush of each soaking, the middle hills scenery was just spectacular. Nepal truly is the place to go rafting if you ever have the chance.

The Half A Mile High Club

2005-08-27T11:12:00.000Z

Among the more surreal experiences of my life I can now add the experience of posing nude for photographs at Everest Base Camp in Tibet. There were ten of us who lined up in the end, clasping a modley collection of rocks, juggling balls, whiskey bottles and national flags in a vague attempt to cover our modesty. It was surprisingly warm for half a mile high, though I don't think that exactly rationalised our actions from the perspective of the bemused local hawkers of Everest jewellery who came zooming up for a gawp on their motorbikes. It really was the most hilarious fun and we've been giggling about it ever since.

Of course the real purpose of our trip was to get a full frontal of Everest, not of each other. In this respect we were incredibly lucky to see a thick mist lift from the mountain as we walked the last 8km up to the camp, revealing the World's highest peak in all its glory. This was apparantly the best sighting in a couple of weeks, as the tail end of the monsoon season effects visibility in the high Himalaya at this time of year. We've certainly had our fair share of rain recently and the effects of this have at times slowed our journey from Lhasa to Kathmandu to a crawl. A large part of the problem is that the grandly titled 'Friendship Highway' linking the countries is actually little more than a dirt track the width of a single vehicle. All along we found ourselves caught up behind heavily overloaded Chinese lorries that were struggling along, and on one occasion had to pitch in to dig out a lorry stuck in the mud and get it moving again with the aid of sand tracks we carry on board. It was beginning to feel like the Tonka team was some sort of international rescue outfit rather than a bunch of tourists.

The compensation was the scenery and the opportunity to use Tonka's roof seats due to our low speed. West of Lhasa our route took us past a string of fascinating Tibetan towns and monasteries, before entering a much wilder and thinly populated area as we approached Shegar, the turn off for Everest. That final drive over a 5200m pass to get to the monastery below Everest was a feast for the eyes, and we took lunch with a panorama of four of the World's six highest mountains as our backdrop. Even the experience later that evening of the World's worst restaurant service at the Government Hotel beside the monastery (we stayed in the monastery guesthouse) didn't dampen the elation of being on the roof of the World. Still, it was odd having waited two and half hours for our food to arrive, to find myself exiting through a window in the dark because the front door was locked and barred with concrete blocks. Shades of 'Hotel California', only with thinner air.

Shangri-la

2005-08-17T11:17:00.000Z

Well, where to begin? Tibet has well and truly banished all memories of China and given us the lift we needed. It is the most remarkable and fascinating country I've ever visited and Lhasa the most mesmorising city. That is not to hide from the problems the country faces in terms of threats to its self-identity and culture, not least with the opening of a railway to Lhasa in the next couple of years (an astonishing engineering achievement that it is). Already Tibetans are outnumbered by Chinese in Lhasa, yet somehow the Tibetan feel of the place seems not to have been diminished, at least not in the old city, which is alive with burgundy robed monks, brightly dressed pilgrims ringing prayer bells, and the piney smell of incense. This is an intensely religious country and Buddhism provides the focus for nearly all facets of Tibetan life.

The great sites of Lhasa which are being brought back to life after much destruction during the Cultural Revolution are all religious in some way or another. Only the Potala Palace, which was the residence and seat of government of the Dalai Lamas, left me a little cold, feeling like a museum rather than a living place. By contrast, the three great monasteries which ring the city are very much alive, and the opportunity to wander at will and observe the monks in debate, in prayer and in relaxed mood has been a rare privilege. These places are like self-contained villages perched in spectacular settings; in the case of Ganden Monastery atop a mountain 1000m above the river valley that flows into Lhasa. Nonethesless, my favourite site has been the Jokang Temple in the heart of old Lhasa. This is the spiritual heart of Tibetan Buddhism, surrounded by a beautiful 'kora' or processional route called the Barkhor which pilgrims process around always in a clockwise direction. What makes it so special is that it's thonging with people from all walks of life, not simply the monks. It's a heaving crush of pilgrims in the dingy interior of Temple itself, a place in which the atmosphere hangs heavy with the smell of incense and the yak fat used for burning candles. Images of the Buddha in various incarnations abound within, and outside the Temple (though within the complex), a second kora route is entirely lined with prayer wheels which pilgrims spin with their hands as they walk past. Goodness knows how many rolls of film I got through there.

However, perhaps even more than the great architectural treasures of Tibet, it is the people themselves who provide the focus of our fascination. All of us on the trip have been madly snapping photographs of the people, who to a considerable extent continue to wear brightly embroidered traditional clothing, sport exotic headwear and jewellery, and who so often have the most appealing faces, frequently creased and lined from hard lives lived under an intense Himalayan sunlight. En route to Lhasa we stumbled by chance on a rural horse racing contest and were able to wander at will attempting to communicate with the local families as the only non-Tibetans present. Another amazing experience.

Where we have experienced some difficulties has been with altitude sickness. The three day journey from Golmud takes you over a series of passes between 4800 and 5100m (higher than Mont Blanc), and never drops below 4000m until you are literally about to arrive in Lhasa. Camping at such altitudes we all felt the effects of headaches, breathlessness at night, and in some cases nausea too.

For much of the way the landscape of the Tibetan Plateau is absolutely desolate. I've never seen a place where the absence of life is more apparent. Settlements are few and far between and the main sign of life is the occasional circling vulture, and the ever present sight of the new railway line. Even the hills seem low, so that apart from the altitude sickness symptoms it often doesn't feel that you are especially high. And then you cross the final 5100m pass half a day from Lhasa and everything changes. The mountains are suddenly soaring and snow-capped, the valleys are green and cultivated with barley crops, mud and stone built villages with flat-roofed houses dot the landscape, and herds of shaggy haired yaks are everywhere to be seen. It makes for a breathtaking scene, and those in the know tell us that things are only going to get more beautiful as we head out of Lhasa on the Friendship Highway towards Nepal.

...And I haven't even mentioned the cricket yet! It was another nail-biter for the English passengers, this time in Lhasa desperately checking our mobiles for text messages. At least we had a decent signal. Graeme, Andy and I are now so frustrated at missing the action that we're researching accommodation in Kathmandu with access to satellite television so we can finally get to see some of the Fourth Test. Surely the Nepalese are cricket lovers!

Almost Tibet

2005-08-10T11:56:00.000Z

What a difference a truck makes. You should have heard the cheer when Riki walked into John's Cafe Bar in Turpan after an 18 hour drive through the night to catch up with the group. As if by magic, he coincided his arrival with that of Andy, who having lost his passport on the Karakorum Highway had had to fly to Beijing from Kashgar to get another one. He got a big cheer too. However, the biggest cheer was saved for late the following day when the news came in that England had won the Second Test by a remarkable two run margin. We'd been getting updates by text every few minutes and when we'd heard the Aussies only needed five to win there was a nasty 'oh no, here we go again' moment that came over a few of us. It's amazing that you can be in one of the most desolate spots on Earth and get the result beamed in virtually the moment the match is over. Drank some beer that night.

The onwards journey from Turpan has not been without problem. We lost a morning because a crucial bridge had been washed out in the rain and had to execute a major detour to get through. That meant the following day's drive to Dunhuang turned into a 12-hour epic through unforgiving semi-desert and we lost the opportunity to spend time in the town. Nonethless, we did make sure the following morning to visit the nearby 1000 Buddha Caves, which contain the finest examples of Buddhist art in China dating from the 3rd to 14th centuries. There are more than 250 caves with paintings and statues, and the quality and condition of the surviving work is quite simply astonishing. I've never seen anything of the like before and am surprised they survived the Cultural Revolution, not to mention a visit from the pilfering British archaeolgist Sir Auriel Stein in 1907 (though he did make off with a significant cache of ancient documents). At last, this was a Chinese visit that exceeded expectation.

And now we are poised ready for Tibet, which for one and all is the holy grail of this part of the trip. Perhaps appropriately, we're staying in a Chinese mining town called Golmud which has the feel of the last town before the edge of the World. In a sense it is, for tomorrow we cross a mountain pass at almost 5000m to enter the Tibetan Plateau and what is geographically and historically (though not politically) Tibet. It's still a three day drive to get to Lhasa and the other great sites, but we have things to do en route and a lot of bushcamping to fit in, something we all enjoy infinitely more than staying in souless Chinese hotels. Can't wait!

A Hard Rains A Gonna Fall

2005-08-06T08:15:00.000Z

Here we are in Turpan, the hottest and one of the driest places in China, and it's pissing it down. This is only supposed to happen once every ten years, so I'm wondering if we have a rain god in our midst. Yesterday we visited an ancient abandoned Chinese city built of mud brick which has survived thus far due to minimal rain erosion opportunities in this part of the World. It may not be looking quite so sprightly today I suspect.

China continues to be a challenge to the spirit and morale of the group despite its many fascinating aspects, and there is no doubt that the journey along the Northern Silk Road from Kashgar to Turpan has been the least rewarding section of the entire trip. Of course this is the outermost reaches of China, and Xinxiang is a province which is economically backward and ethnically divided compared to other parts of the country. No doubt the Silk Road was always a challenge by this route; a long and arduous camel trek from oasis to oasis, crossing massive stretches of a waterless moonscape on a road squeezed up against the foot of the arid Tien Shan mountains by the forbidding mass of the Taklamakan Desert (which means 'Go in and don't come out'). We haven't really penetrated the desert ourselves, so it presents itself to us at its fringes as a shimmering, scrubby and utterly flat expanse of nothingness. My craving to get in amongst rolling sand dunes must wait until Dunhuang unfortunately. Instead, we've had long and hot days sitting on a Chinese bus, relieved only by a string of forgettable modern Chinese cities and interchangeable, souless hotels. Our guide has been a source of constant frustration though I'm pleased to say we're finally shot of him. I suspect things might have been different if we'd had Tonka and the freedom to bush camp, but the ridiculously long delay at the border continued right up until yesterday. Even now Riki is frantically driving across 1000km of China to catch up with us here, hopefully tomorrow.

Turpan is a place of statistical interest more than actual interest, though it's by far the best of our stopping off points since Kashgar. As well as being the hottest place in China, it is also situated near to the second lowest place on the Earth's surface, and is reputedly the city furthest away from the ocean. It hardly warrants city status to be honest, but it is certainly surrounded by a series of interesting ancient sites, and it is home to a 2000 year old subterranean irrigation system which the tourist board like to trumpet as one of the three wonders of ancient China. It did seem a little odd to be sitting under grape trellises for lunch yesterday in a lush and fertile valley in a place where it hardly ever rains.

Nevertheless, my favourite place in China remains Kashgar, which had a super relaxed atmosphere that fitted our mood well after the trials of the days before. The Sunday Market was impressive though most agreed it wasn't as sensational as all the guide book hype would suggest. The Chinese have broken it into two parts and introduced a level of organisation which has reduced the appealing chaos of old. Still, it remains a sight to see and I was in seventh heaven when I strolled into the hat section of the market, making off with a total of nine new ones for my collection from Kashgar!

The food in Xinxiang has been a highlight for me. It's become a bit of a joke that whatever I order it will end up involving green chilli peppers somewhere along the line, but actually it's been a pleasant change and surprise to have spicy food to eat. I even managed to get an excellent cup of coffee at a Chinese buffet restaurant we took by storm the other night. However, I've decided to draw the line at tasting the garden pea flavoured ice lollies they have for sale here.

Nightclubbing remains as amusing here as elsewhere in Central Asia. Last night a few of us ended up at 'The Mars Bar', where it quickly became clear that the local style of dancing involved proceeding in a stately fashion and in an anticlockwise direction around a circular dancefloor, preferably clutching a partner to keep you company. We had a lot of fun doing the conga against the tidal flow in a clockwise direction to the total mystification of the locals.

All Going Pear-Shaped

2005-07-30T11:17:00.000Z

It was about time something went wrong and in China our extended run of good luck finally gave out. I should have read the omen better when England lost the first Test while we were still in Bishkek, forcing Graeme and I to stand up in front of the whole new group at breakfast to sing Waltzing Matilda. We even conspired to lose the match early enough for Ron, our Aussie friend who won the said bet, to still be around to enjoy the show. All the same, it was sad to wave him and others off after a lot of fun together over the past couple of months. Bishkek was also where I found out I can't go to Iran in the autumn due to visa problems, a genuine blow.

Our journey into China was a gruelling 13 hour drive across a largely desolate mountain landscape with nothing but marmots to keep us company. It's quite a squeeze on Tonka these days with 25 of us aboard plus guides, though thankfully it's shaping up to be a great new group. At the final stage of the Chinese border (it's about 100km across with five checkpoints) we had to abandon Tonka which was impounded awaiting higher authority to proceed. Three days later it's still there with no hope of seeing it until at least Thursday (today is Saturday). In China, we have discovered to our cost, nobody can take an independent decision without deferring to the boss, which isn't great news when he's on holiday. Leaving Riki at the border, the rest of us rocked into Kashgar gone 11pm to be greeted incongriously by a band of dancing girls on the steps of the hotel and a team of receptionists who clapped us into the building.

The hotel is at least splendid and as the former Russion consulate played a key role in 'The Great Game'. This was a sort of proto cold war played out in the late 19th century between Britain and Russia; Britain ever fearful that Russian expansionism in Central Asia would lead them to the borders of British India and perhaps beyond, and the Russians more or less fearing the British would beat them to bagging the few remaining bits they hadn't conquered yet. As the westernmost outpost of a moribund Chinese Empire, Kashgar became a key outpost and listening station for both countries and a veritable hotbed of spies. It was also a base for many of the great expeditions to uncover the lost cities of the ancient Silk Road overwhelmed by the encroaching sands of the Taklamakan Dessert - the archaeological plunderings of Sir Aurel Stein and others that fill the rooms of the British Museum all came by this way.

Just as soon as we'd arrived in Kashgar we were off again (now in a coach) southwards down the Karakorum Highway towards Pakistan. This must be one of the most spectacular roads on earth taking you through and over the Pamir Mountains at over 4000m at our highest pass, with immense snow and glacier encrusted mountains either side rising to over 7500m. It was astonishingly beautiful in perfect sunshine with the clouds clearing off the peaks as we passed beneath. Unfortunately, the road itself was in appalling condition with frequent washed out sections and detours, so with a puncture to boot, a seven hour journey to Taxkorgan turned into a 12 hour epic. The destination, the Tajik centre in China, was anticlimatic, and several people were suffering the next day through sickness that might have been related to altitude (though it has to be admitted that the local beer was also rather stong). The return journey was a nightmare which turned into a farce when our guide refused to countenance a return direct to Kasgar rather than a stop-over at a total rip-off yurt encampment beside a famous mountain lake. Again inability to be flexible without reference to superiors was to blame, together with a typical unwillingness in this part of the World for local men to be able to deal with the concept of a woman leading our trip. Needless to say, Claire won out in the end after some lengthy negotiation and we found ourselves back in Kashgar thank goodness.

Interestingly, the transition to China has been much less abrupt in terms of the look and feel of places, than it has been in terms of rules and regulations. The people here are predominantly Uighar, with some Uzbek and Tajik, though an economic upturn in Kashgar is drawing ever more Han Chinese westwards. The look of the city and dress of the people is very Central Asian, though of course you notice the presence of Chinese Characters on buildings everywhere, and there is a distinctly Chinese flavour to much of the cuisine. Ordering food can be problemmatic since invariably only about 70% of what was ordered ever turns up, and what does arrive tends to arrive all at once regardless of any structuring of the menu in terms of courses. All rather amusing really. One thing I do like is the traffic lights and pedestrian crossings here which count down in seconds until you are allowed to proceed or cross. Surprisingly, people don't seem to give into the temptation to sit on the clutch as the green light beckons, especially not the donkey drawn carts!

Tomorrow we visit the famous Sunday market reckoned to be the best in Central Asia, and then onwards by coach along the northern Silk Road skirting the Taklamakan towards Turpan, the second lowest place on Earth at -156m and the hottest in China. Interested to see what goes tits up next.

Kyrgyzstan

2005-07-23T10:10:00.000Z

I've just got into Bishkek, capital of Kyrgyzstan, after a fortnight roaming beautiful and wild mountainscapes. My first destination on arrival was a camping shop (they're not easy to find) to upgrade my cold weather gear. Having been camping above 3000 metres in the past week, I've realised I'm not going to be warm enough with what I've currently got in the bag at 4000-5000 metres in the Himalaya.

Kyrgyzstan has been fabulous, the most beautiful country imaginable, and a welcome relief from the heat of Uzbekistan. We've really got into the sticks and I especially enjoyed our stay in yurt tents at Song-kul Lake which at 3100 metres is entirely ringed with mountains. It snowed overnight while we were there, so we woke to find snow on the mountains and peppering the camp, though it cleared sufficiently for a warming mountain walk in the morning. The locals also put on a game of headless goat polo for us which is popular pastime in these parts. It's a bit of a grizzly spectacle at first, though you soon get into it. However, I wasn't quite so keen to play tug of war with the carcass afterwards as one of our hosts suggested to me.

The Kyrgyz people are immensely friendly and believe strongly in the importance of hospitality to strangers. This can be problemmatic if you really don't feel in the mood for another glass of fermented horse's milk, though the opportunity to see inside yurts and eat with local families is a wonderful one to take. Fortunately, Russian beer is also a popular beverage in this neck of the woods, and indeed the group have grown so fond of 'Baltika 3' beer that the Icelandic girls got us to make a series of comedy video commercials for the beer one night. I've also been passing the time by writing a play of the trip, which is to be premiered this evening in our hotel car park as a farewell to good friends who leave us in Bishkek.

My Central Asian hat collection continues to grow. The material of choice in Kyrgyzstan is felt, and the national hat is a very odd looking thing which looks a little like a Robin Hood hat that has metaphorised into a pillar box. It's white in colour with a black trim and embroidery. Naturally I've bought one, along with a couple of slightly less ostentatious numbers which probably look equally as silly on me. I think I might celebrate my eventual return to England with a Central Asian hat party.

Something particularly appealing about Kyrgyzstan is the contrast between the snow-capped high mountains and the beach atmosphere of the massive Issyk-kul Lake. The day after walking in snow at Song-Kul I was sunbathing on the lakeside at Issyk-Kul with the mountains offering an eye-catching backdrop. Quite strange, though nothing compared to the strangeness of my latest clubbing experience at an ex-soviet beach chalet resort on the north side of the lake. Having gone through a military checkpoint to get into the place, we found ourselves dancing in the open air to dodgy Russian disco tunes with a bunch of 12 year olds ...until their parents turned up promply at midnight to take them all home. Hoping for better things in Bishkek tonight!

Strange Days in Tashkent

2005-07-09T13:22:00.000Z

If you want to take a taxi in Tashkent you stand at the side of the road and count to 10. Seemingly, everyone is a part-time taxi driver and we've had a fair bit of fun speeding around the city in the back seat of all sorts of vehicles (provided they're Ladas or Daewoos) chattering away in broken English with the locals. There is also a pretty impressive Soviet era underground system complete with monolithic murals and back-up gas lamp lighting installed in readiness for the day the US nukes came raining down.

The city is a grid of wide leafy boulevards lined with grim concrete lowrise buildings. It all seems a little empty of people and traffic, and relatively untouched by Western commercial enterprises - you can get anything you want provided you want the Russian version. This can be quite entertaining at times - last night fellow Englishman Graeme ordered a plate of egg and chips as a bit of light relief from the kebabs and was served a plate of 9 fried eggs with nothing on the side. Handy for soaking up the vodka but not quite what he'd expected. The only thing you don't seem to be able to get easily is the local currency for some reason. On the odd occasions you can, it comes in such small domination notes that when you change a $20 note you walk away with a wodge too thick to stuff in your pocket.

Had quite an eye opener last night when after a few beers the group decided to head downtown to a Russian strip club recommended in the guidebook as 'to be seen to be believed'. It was fairly hilarious to say the least and I've now developed a whole new respect for the athleticism required in professional pole dancing. Definitely a safety in numbers sort of an evening.

About to head off into the mountain wilderness of Kyrgzstan for a welcome break from the heat and culture. It may be some time before I'll have the chance to post again.

Samarkand

2005-07-08T12:16:00.000Z

Samarkand is one of those mysterious and fabled cities that encapsulates the pure romance of travel in its very name, let alone in its architectural treasures. For me it was perhaps the place I was most excited to visit at the outset, and part of the purpose of my going AWOL from the truck was to buy some extra time in the city.

These days Samarkand is a small and largely modern city, but throughout it are dotted the great buildings which have made it famous, centred on the astonishing Registan Square which must rate as one of the most beautiful public spaces in the World. In fact much of what you see is the result of intensive and at times rather dodgy soviet restoration work, which has brought many crumbling buildings back to life but has perhaps stolen some of the romance of the place at the same time. Nonetheless, when I bribed a guard to let me climb a minaret on one of the Registan medressahs at sunset to view the buildings in perfect evening light, the sight was really something to see.

My favourite visit was to a narrow street of tombs from the 14th and 15th centuries, all madly decorated in colbalt blue tiles and domes with intricate geometric patterns and Koranic script. The jumbled nature of the place and the relative lack of restoration gives it an especially appealing atmosphere which the showier sites perhaps lack.

This post finds me in Tashkent - something of a culture shock after what has come before. It's a big ugly Soviet era city with few sights of note, though I did manage to talk my way into a mosque that houses the Umar Koran, an enormous tome which is reputedly the original Koran written in his own hand in the mid-7th century by Umar, the third Caliph after the Prophet Mohammed. The librarian pointed out to me the blood of Umar stained on the book - a relic from when he was hacked to death while reading it. There don't seem to have been a lot of happy endings in Islamic history.

We heard last night about the bombings in London which came as a shock to one and all and brought a sombre atmosphere to the group - not a common occurance. It is strange to be heading into the Fergana Valley in the next couple of days, the area of Uzbekistan which has been the focus of religious unrest, and yet still feel safer here than at home.

Off Piste in Uzbekistan

2005-07-06T13:33:00.000Z

Cabin fever or curiosity? Perhaps a little of both. Anyway, after an interesting night staying in a yurt tent emcampment near Lake Aydarkol close to the Kazakstan border, I shook off an Uzbek vodka hangover and signed off the trip for a day or so. The purpose was to to make a flying visit with a couple of others to the town of Shakrisabz (not on our itinerary), a small place nestling on a plain beneath the snowcapped Pamir Mountains of Tajikistan, which was the birthplace of Tamerlane.

Tamerlane was perhaps the most successful warrier king of the later middle ages and was a premier league player when it came to a bit of mass murder along the way. His calling card in the countless cities of Asia he conquered was building a pyramid of skulls of his defeated enemies, and his victims have been estimated by some to have been in the tens of millions. Yet every meglomaniac has a few good qualities, and in Tamerlane's case he and his immediate successors (particulary his cultured grandson Uleg Beg) used the vast wealth they accumulated to endow the cities of Uzbekistan with some of the most breathtaking architecture on Earth. If you like a bit of blue tile work you're pretty much in Heaven in this neck of the woods.

Shakrisabz was intended to be the jewel in the crown, though it was quickly surpassed by Samarkand as the Timurid capital. Still it has it's share of lovely buildings that are less restored than the spectacles that greet the tourists in Samarkand. Interestingly, Tamerlane has been reinvented as the great hero of modern Uzbekistan and his bithplace is now adorned with a giant statue of the great man which appears somewhat bizarrely to be a Mecca for Uzbek wedding parties getting their photos done. I'm not sure I've mentioned before that it is highly fashionable in this country and also in Turkmenistan for women to get their teeth fixed with gold fronts - a sort of Turkic bling if you like. So my memory of Shakrisabz will forever be the golden smiles of the newly-weds cosying up to the image of a genocidal meglomaniac in front of his beautiful ruined palace.

I rejoined the group in Samarkand which is such an astonishing sight to behold that it needs a whole new entry of its own...

Juicy Melons

2005-07-02T10:22:00.000Z

I'm very excited to have made it to Bukhara, particularly as quite recenty it looked a little unlikely that we'd be able to visit Uzbekistan at all. This city along with Istanbul and Samarkand were the spurs that set me off thinking about my trip so many months ago. It's a place that English travellers have traditionally found it a little tricky to get to - and out of. Yesterday we saw the 'bug pit' in the local gaol where two Victorian adventurers were encarcerated by the Khan of Bukhara for four years before being publicly beheaded in the main square.

Bukhara was one of the great cities of the Silk Road and in the early medieval period a city famed for it's learning and religion - the home of Avicenna, whose work on medicine was the key text for European medical knowledge well into the early modern period. Then along came Genghis Khan in 1220 and obliterated the place, leaving only the Kaylon Minaret standing, reputedly because he was so awed by it's beauty and majesty. Having seen it I can understand his point of view, though these days it is the blue tiled portals and domes of the great mosques and madrassahs constructed in later era that first catch the eye. Ibn Battutah came here well over a century after Ghenghis and reported the city to be still largely ruinous and devoid of the intellectual vigour that had made it famous throughout the Moslem world. However, he thought the melons in Bukhara the finest he had encountered on all his travels, and went to great lengths when in India to procure dried melons from Bukhara that had been carried there by travellers along the Silk Road.

Like Khiva, Bukhara has a the feel of a city geared for tourism but lacking any tourists. I bought an Uzbek shirt from a lady who told me that this was her first sale in two weeks on account of a 'a little trouble we have had in Andijan'. Next week we pass through the Fergana Valley area and will see for ourselves, though so far in Uzbekistan there has been no sign of unrest and very little evidence of a police or army presence.

For a few days I have been afflicted by that great scourge of the traveller - the upset tummy. In a way it's a blessing as I was rapidly tiring of lamb kebabs in any case, though it would have been nice to road test the melons. Still, I seem to be over the worst which is good news as it's a long trudge with a trowel in the desert to find any privacy for decent crap in the sand. Once a day is definitely enough!

Reflections on Turkmenistan

2005-06-29T10:42:00.000Z

I'm staying in Uzbekistan at a place called Khiva which is a perfectly preserved mud coloured old city with exquisite blue tiled decoration everywhere you look. It looks like the film set for an Indiana Jones movie. Khiva has a pretty goulish history too. When under the control of the Khivan Khans and during the period of The Great Game in Central Asia, it was a place you were unlikely to get out of alive should you have been mad enough to try to visit it in the first place. Our guide lovingly described the favourite forms of execution as being public impalement on a spike, being thrown off the top of a minaret, and, this one exclusivly for women, being tied up in a sack with wild cats. Fortunately times changed after the Russians took control and these days Khiva is a much more welcoming place, though a little devoid of life in its ancient heart as the local authorities appear to have moved the majority of the inhabitants out of the centre as part of the restoration programme. Khiva has more of a touristy feel (though still pretty light touch) than anywhere we've been since Turkey, but there are no tourists to be seen. I'm unclear whether this is due to seasonal factors (it's about 45 C here at the moment) or whether tourists are staying away from the country presently.

Another bewilderingly empty city at its centre is Ashgabad in Turkmenistan, which I neglected to describe in my last post. Turkmenistan has been described as the North Korea of Central Asia and we had to be careful what we wrote and said when in the country as communications are monitored and the bugging of buildings is reputedly widespread. Turkmenistan is run by an eccentric President known universally by his self-appointed title of Turkmenbashi (Great Leader of Turkmen). He is particularly enamoured of putting giant busts and medallian portraits of himself just about everywhere they can conceivably go in the country, along with statutes of his personally penned history and culture of the Turkmen people called the 'Rukhama', which is apparantly set text reading in every school. However the real focus of his endeavours is Ashgabad which has been extensively rebuilt over the past dozen years with a whole load of utterly bonkers buildings and public monuments, many of them water guzzling fountains in a land that is three-quarters desert. The centrepiece is the monstrous Arch of Neutrality which looks like a giant 50 m high ray gun with a golden statute of the President on top which revolves through the course of the day so as always to face the sun. When I visited the Arch the golden leader was gazing in the direction of the rather Orwellian named Ministry of Fairness building.

Yet, if the architecture in Ashgabad is an overblown crime against asthetics, it can't be denied that it's also a fascinating sight to see. The Turkmen people are also the loveliest and friendliest we've met along the way and surprisingly at ease with Western tourists given how few people actually visit the country. We really got to see them close up at the famous Sunday market outside of the city where among other things I bought a traditional Turkman hat that looks like a giant 1970s black afro haircut and is made from sheep wool.

Leaving Turmenistan required a two day drive across the Karakam Desert, our first desert of the trip and a pretty bleak place it was too. All insect life seemed miraculously to treble in size which was a bit daunting at night.

Still enjoying the food on this trip though there has been a noticeable shift towards lamb kebabs in the Central Asian section - they're everywere. I did have the opportunity to have an 'Under Fur Salad' when in Baku but decided to save that for another visit. The 'Bolted Fish' was delicious however.

Bugs Everywhere

2005-06-25T11:56:00.000Z

Tumbling blearly eyed off the slowest ferry in the World to set foot in Turkmenistan, I felt I had finally arrived in Central Asia. The heat here is extreme and the landscape between the coast and Ashgabad unrelentingly arid, though not without a certain charm. The people look noticeably more Turkic than hitherto, and in fact the women in particular are very beautiful as the blokes on the trip were not slow to spot. They tend to be tall and slender in build and wear brightly patterned full length dresses and almost African style headscarves. The people are immensely friendly at every turn.

Ashgadad is a highly interesting experience for unusual reasons and I shall perhaps return to it again at a later date. However I shall reserve judgement for the time until the air is a little clearer for making comments if you know what I mean.

We are joined here by six new travellers, two Danish girls, an English/Kiwi couple, and two further English and Kiwi blokes. Not really had a chance to get to know them yet, but we're all hoping they fit in well to what has been a really close knit group so far. In many ways and despite the amazing sights en route, the highlight of this first leg has been the bush camping and cameraderie around the campfire and over a few beers. As we pull off the road, the truck turns into a hive of activity as tents are pulled off the roof and thrown up, cooking equipment and food crates come out of their lockers, wood is chopped for the fire and chairs set up. We cook in groups having taken responsibility for buying supplies ourselves in the local markets, so it's a busy time for the cooks while everyone else raids the fridge for beers. Riki doubles as a guitar man as well as a driver so there've been a few late nights of singing down the track, though usually everyone is on the local vodka by that stage. Increasingly with the heat I've been opting to sleep outside under the stars which is a real privilege.

No Cricket in Baku

2005-06-25T11:22:00.000Z

Posted in Ashgabad

Azerbaijan has proved to be a country of real contrasts. Crossing the border from Georgia you pass through a landscape of lush rolling hills with the soaring Caucausus mountains as a backdrop to enter into a flat, treeless moonscape of parched badlands alleviated only by the odd wrecked concrete building, before finally being confronted with the acquamarine expanse of the Caspian Sea. We did the journey in a couple of days, camping one night (illegally it transpired) at a spot surrounded by the most striking prehistoric petroglyph rock carvings, and close to an area of bubbling mud volcanoes, one of which our American friend Jason managed to fall into. The onwards drive to Baku confronts you with the powerful presence of the oil industry in this country, the source of Azerbaijan's wealth as well as its environmental problems. Nonetheless, the poisened hinterland of the city couldn't contrast more with the unexpected elegance of the city itself. Baku has a markedly Western feel to it and is full of ex-pat Brits out here working on the rigs, ably provided for by a plethora of English pubs, restaurants and shops in the new part of the city, as well as a healthy trade in prostitution by the look of things.

Despite these promising signs of links with Blighty, Ron, Graeme and I discovered as we traipsed from bar to bar that the game of cricket hasn't yet penetrated the country. Eventually at about the tenth attempt our search for a place showing the first England vs Australia one-dayer on the satellite tele was rewarded, only for us to sit there gobsmacked as the channel opted to switch its coverage to women's athletics just as Freddie Flintoft came in to bat. Ultimately we had to rely on text message updates from the UK, though it was good having Ron as a captive Aussie to bait when the good news finally got through to us.

Spending time in Baku waiting for our old tub of a ferry to take us across the Caspian to Turkmenistan was a lot of fun. The old town is really quite atmospheric and contains the loveliest 15th C palace of the local ruling Khans, which reminded me a little in its concept and scale of the Alhambra in Granada, though it's carvings are less intricate and exquisite.

Since my last post I've acquired a rather severe US naval marine style haircut (not entirely intentionally) and an Icelandic girlfriend with an unpronounceable name. These two developments are not directly connected I hasten to add. I'm having a blast!

Cheese Grater Bottle Openers

2005-06-15T11:47:00.000Z

Georgia is just the funkiest country. The cheese-grater bottle opener is one of its more interesting homegrown inventions and perfectly captures the mood of the place - good food and lots of alcohol are the twin heartbeats of the Georgian people, and the hospitality is legendary. Of course, everybody is shaped liked a barrel after the age of 30, unless they're very poor, and there is a lot of poverty to be seen here amongst all the abundance it must be said.

The country seems much more European than I had envisaged in terms of its look and feel, and it is markedly devout. Everywhere there are simple and very ancient churches which seem akin to romanesque in style. When you visit a church it is always a hive of activity, with little crowds largely made up of women gathered around bearded priests, and everywhere votive candles flickering. I lied about the medieval frescoes in my previous post by the way, they have them in spades here and I've checked out a fair few. The whole country is an early medieval architectural historian's wet dream.

After Batumi we travelled to a mountainous area in the south to stay in Bojomi, a fading spa town that is the source of the former Soviet Union's most famous mineral water. It's a touch salty but quite enjoyable. The homestay was a bit of a reality check in terms of facilities, but the cuisine was out of this world. I'm curently addicted to aubergines served in a walnut sauce, and I'm still just about managing to stay enthusiastic about the ubiquitous khachaeuri, a sort of cheesebread a bit like a pizza which turns up everywhere. They're pretty keen on cherries here too, and in fact the trips to the markets to buy fruit and veg are a whole lot of fun. Bojomi also witnessed my first major run-in with the local Georgian wine. The tradition is to drink it out of a ram's horn and to make a toast. Needless to say the wine must be downed in one and there is no set number of toasts. Our convivial host, egged on by us, soon had us introduced to the second local drinking tradition which involves downing horns while in a locked arm position with a fellow drinker, who you're supposed to kiss on either cheek afterwards (assuming you internal navigation system is still up to finding their cheek).

This message finds me in Tbilisi, which is a bit of a big grimy city, though with some hidden delights. En route we visited Stalin's birthplace museum at Gori. It was a bit unsettling to be honest, not least because they seemed to have left out all the bits about the gulags and mass purges. I had a sneaky lie down on his bed in his railway carriage and took some small satisfaction from that.

The nightclubbing tour of the Silk Route also continues apace. Tbilisi's offering was the Beatles Bar, a cheesy cellar place mocked up to be the Cavern Club in Liverpool. It had a particularly amusing food menu where you could order anything from a 'firm sandwich' though to 'frizzled chicken cooked in a clay pen'. We watched a blues band who's singer appeared to be wearing pyjamas, and who ended their set by playing the opening riff of 'Smoke on the Water' and then walking off without bothering to finish the song. It was priceless.

Greetings from Georgia

2005-06-10T07:46:00.000Z

Arrived here yesterday from Turkey and am staying in a coastal city on the Black Sea coast named Batumi, which oddly has the feel of a faded banana republic - wide tree lined streets with palms and lots of colonial style buildings that have seen somewhat better days, in amongst a fair number of soviet tower blocks. Stalin lived here for a while apparently, and they still haven't got around to removing his busts. Perhaps they're rather proud of him as a local lad? The town is very atmospheric and the countryside we have seen so far simply breathtaking, with snow-capped mountains tumbling down to a colbalt blue sea. The land is green and abundant, far more so than anywhere we saw in Turkey. Everywhere brown cows wander around and onto the roads which I suspect must impact on mortality rates in this country given the amount of vodka drinking that goes on here.

Last night night we did a little training on the vodka in preparation for a homestay later in the week where the vodka toasting is liable to get a bit scary. We had a meal at a fabulous old restaurant with wooden booths and a violinist playing mournful tunes before heading out for another comedy clubbing experience. Ordering drinks was very peculiar as the club barman didn't actually appear to have any beer behind the bar. Whenever one was ordered he left the building only to reappear a few minutes later clutching the bottles.

Tales from Anatolia

2005-06-06T10:45:00.000Z

Taking a couple of days in a weird and wonderful area of Anatolia called Cappadocia, where the wind has eroded a dusty landscape of volcanic spikes and pinnacles in the rock, and people in past times resorted to living in elaborate rock cut caves and even whole underground cities. I don't know whether this strange landscape does anything to encourage odd behaviour in the local people at all, but I'd certainly never encountered anyone out walking their pigeons in the early hours of the morning until arriving here. Today I got up at some god forsaken hour in order to go up in a balloon to look at the dawn landscape, and consequently found myself drinking champagne at 7am in the morning having successfully completed an exhilarating ride.

Friends will be relieved to learn that I've now bagged my requisite quota of medieval churches with frescoes for the trip having dragged my fellow travellers around a whole host of them in Cappadocia. This leaves more time to concentrate on some of the lighter sides of life. Fortunately, we have a good and lively crowd on Tonka, comprising three Kiwis, three Icelandic girls, a Norwegian chap, a couple of Americans, two other Brits and an Aussie.

In Istanbul I was enticed into a slightly surreal evening of Turkish night clubbing with the lure of a bellydancing show. The dancer, who doubled as the barmaid and thus created a bit of a backlog at the bar during her act, seemed to be very proficient at swinging her hips to the music, but wasn't exactly giving it much in the belly department given she lacked one to wobble. The local lads meanwhile seemed mostly enamoured of boy band style synchronised dancing to a techno beat. It was all rather odd. Shopping in the Bizarre is a lot of fun however, and the requirement to get fully involved with the cooking and other elements of the running of the trip create plenty of opportunities to get in lots of practice at the old bartering. My favourite purchase so far is a shocking pink mosque alarm clock which gives off a muezzin alarm call at high volume. Having a lot of fun planting it in other people's tents at the moment.

Istanbul or Constantinople?

2005-06-02T15:17:00.000Z

Istanbul is one of those rare and exciting cities that seem forever destined to generate more history than they can possibly hope to consume on their own. Sited at the intersection of both continents and cultures, it was the capital city of two successive empires that have both left their mark on its landscape, and it's been fought over by just about every wannabe Atilla the Hun of the last two thousand years, mostly without much success. It's also the place I get to pick up the trail of Ibn Battutah, who came here in 1332. In those days Istanbul was still Constantinople, the increasingly untenable capital of an empire hardly worthy of the name that was clinging on for dear life in the face on an unstoppable tide of Turkish expansion from Asia. Ibn Battutah travelled here from the Ukraine accompanying an Imperial Princess who'd been married off to the ruling Moslem Khan. She was making a home visit to mum and dad (and when she got to Constantinople refused to go back), and so our traveller got special dispensation as a moslem to accompany her into the city. It's the only time in the Travels when he describes visiting a Christian city. Unfortunately, as a moslem he wasn't allowed into the interior of the great church of the Hagia Sophia, which is a great shame as it remains spectacular even to this day. But he has struck by the great number of monsteries he encountered in the city, and rather shocked at the dirtiness of the bazaars and churches in the part of the city that belonged to the Italian merchants.

I've been meaning to visit Istanbul for years so arrival here yesterday was really exciting. After a memorable evening on the Croatian schnapps (it's very good) in Zagreb which left me a little green around the gills the following morning, the remainder of the journey was pleasant and relatively uneventful. Spent today visiting lots of the key sites in the city, and as you will gather, the Hagia Sophia was simply stunning among them. Hoping to get out on the Bosphorus tommorrow to see the city by water. I've also discovered a bit of a taste for a Turkish beer named Eefes, and today I enjoyed my first proper donner kabab. This is nothing if not a holistic introduction to Turkey.

Tomorrow we become a full team with the addition of the remaining nine people for the trip leg on to Ashgabat.

Into Eastern Europe

2005-05-29T16:54:00.000Z

Still we chug onwards through Europe and now into the Balkans. This post is from Zagreb where we've decamped in sweltering heat at a lovely hostel on the fringes of the city. There is a palpible change of feel with the transition to Eastern Europe, perhaps magnified by the almost casual affluence seemingly characterising the German and Austrian places we visited. It was striking passing through an 8KM tunnel to enter Slovenia earlier today to see the extent to which the width of a mountain can change the human elements in a landscape.

Like Austria, Slovenia is a very attractive country to gaze upon through Tonka's windows, not withstanding the predominance of Soviet era housing blocks over wooden Heidi houses in the settlements we passed. However, our only proper chance to get to grips with the Slovenes was over lunch at a roadside terrace bar. We had a truly excellent meal, though this was accompanied by what I can only describe as techno glockenspiel music that was being pumped out at high volume from a series of heavily caged and wall mounted speakers. Presumably the high security was in an attempt to prevent enraged clientele from ripping them off the walls.

At the Croatian frontier we almost ran into trouble when the authorities decided that Tonka was a truck, and accordingly was not allowed to be driven on a Sunday. Claire was quick to reassure them in her best Kiwi Croatian that our vehicle was in fact officially registered as a bus. So I guess that'll be the last time Ron and I get told off for calling her a bus then!

On the Road

2005-05-28T15:22:00.000Z

Probably the greatest sacrifice of making this trip has been resigning myself to miss the Ashes cricket series, just when we might actually win it for a change. So it´s especially gratifying to find that my fellow passenger Ron is from the land of Oz and is going all the way to Bishkek - just far enough to enjoy the first Test at Lords with me on the BBC World Service. Bring it on!

Our two crew members completing the team to Istanbul are Claire and Riki, who are both Kiwis and I would say have seen a bit of life, much of it from a bar stool. They´re a lot of fun but will keep us in good order and also on the road I´m quite sure. Together we´re travelling in Tonka, a converted grit truck which will be home for the next few months. She´s an elderly travelling companion who groans and gasps a fair bit on the old inclines, but she´s been built to withstand just about anything you might care to throw at her and I think I´m going to grow fond of her.

So far we´ve chugged across France and Germany to arrive today at Salzburg, a spectacular town perched on a mountain with incredible Alpine views. It feels like the trip has really begun at last.

Ibn Battutah Made It Into the Bag

2005-05-23T16:45:00.000Z

Well I couldn't exactly leave him behind could I? Still, baggage overload has been a bit of a feature of the past week and opinions are divided as to the root cause. My parents suspect it's my sensible book quota that's been exceeded. Personally, I think I've been a touch generous on the clothes count, but I then again, I really couldn't face the prospect of wearing the same two pairs of underpants for seven months solid. I once walked a 1000 miles across France and Spain with just a single change of socks, so I know about these things.

Not quite sure what I'm feeling as I reach the eve of departure for Dover. A heady mix of excitement and anticipation, laced with a fair amount of anxiety and the usual sadness of impending departure from family and friends. The anxiety is oddly focused when I think about it - which I try not to do too much. I should probably be worrying about the political situation in Uzbekistan or catching chicken flu in Tibet. That's what everyone else seems to be worrying about anyway. Instead, I find it's the everyday stuff that bothers me, such as how the other members of the group will turn out to be when I finally meet them (2 at Dover and a further 10 or so in Istanbul), and whether I'm going to regret not packing that second bottle of shampoo, etc. Hopefully, I'm heading for a serious reality check very very soon. But in the meantime, I shall enjoy my last evening at home by trying not to think about the trip at all.

Goodbye To All That

2005-05-16T16:24:00.000Z

The adventure has half begun. Last week was an extended round of goodbyes. I left my job on Tuesday with a lovely send off from friends and colleagues at work. On Thursday it was the turn of my cats, Hugo and Basil, to begin their vacation in Jesmond (they better not enjoy themselves too much), and finally on Saturday I packed my few remaining possessions that hadn't been stored into the back of the car and left my house and home village of Wylam for the last time. It was a glorious morning to imprint the beautiful landscape of Northumberland into my memory for the months ahead.

I'm now at my parents home in Cornwall for a few days before final departure. A chance to see the family one last time and practice packing my travel purchases into my rucksac. I have far too many books to take at the moment so need to take some tough decisions on what to leave behind - is there room for Ibn Battutah?

Why 'Wonders of Travel'?

2005-05-08T19:07:00.000Z

Every traveler needs an inspiration and a guide. My journey has evolved as an idea over many months and years. I've long been interested in history and spent a previous life studying the medieval period rather a lot for a PhD. I suppose I first became interested and aware of the fabulous and rich history of Islam and the East at that time, and more recently I've started to read about it and about the experiences of other travelers to these parts of the World. It made me want to see some places for myself. Life has it's ups and downs, but I tend to think the bad things that come along can create opportunities for having new and interesting experiences. In my case the break up of a relationship and a need to sell my house offered me the freedom and finance to contemplate undertaking my own journey of a lifetime. So I've quit my job, booked my trip and leave Newcastle next Saturday on the first leg of a seven month odyssey that will take me half way round the World by road and sea.

And the website address name? Well that comes from my most engaging muse and guide, Shams al-Din Abu Abdallah Muhammad ibn Abdallah ibn Muhammad ibn Ibrahim Ibn Battutah al-Lawati al-Tanji, known as Ibn Battutah for short. Ibn Battutah was a fourteenth-century traveler from Tangiers in Morocco, who spent 29 years traveling the length of the then known world and ended up dictating his memories and experiences on returning home. The resulting book is known for short as the 'Rihlah' or 'Travels' of Ibn Battutah, but the full name is 'The Precious Gift of Lookers into the Marvels of Cities and Wonders of Travel'. Ibn Battutah was the Islamic Marco Polo, only much more entertaining. I'll be sticking a copy of his Travels in my back pocket to keep me company on my own travels.