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In search of the snow leopard

Fri, 12 Feb 2010 -1:00:00 GMT

She wasn't visible at first. Then she moved, rippling silently down a gully of rocks and padding straight up to us. This was Uncia uncia, the snow leopard, one of the most endangered species on earth, and one of the most beautiful. She was certainly the most captivating creature I have ever seen: fur like mist or ghosts, pale jade eyes, the regal and remote air of a monarch whose realm is the roof of the world.

'When you are an old man, remember this moment,' I said to my companion, a six-year-old relative called Elliot.

'Why?' said Elliot, licking his ice lolly.

'Because when you are an old man the snow leopard will not exist.'

The snow leopard, Yasmin, pressed her nose to the glass wall of her enclosure and Elliot pretended to stroke it. In this moment I became obsessed with the desire to see such a star in its natural firmament.

However enlightened and well run, zoos are ersatz. But imagine seeing a snow leopard in the wild rather than in captivity! My heart thumped at the thought - it would be like having cocktails with Marilyn Monroe compared to watching a DVD of Some Like it Hot.

Our encounter with Yasmin the snow leopard took place at Marwell Zoo in Hampshire, on a sticky afternoon in August. Three months later I was standing high on a Himalayan mountain in a temperature of minus 10C. In front of me was a powerful telescope and it was focused on snow leopard tracks on a distant peak. Marilyn, I felt, was just powdering her nose. Any minute now she would sashay into view.

The truth is that you are scarcely more likely to spot a snow leopard in the wild than you are to see a unicorn, or indeed to shoot the breeze with a dead Hollywood star. They are extremely rare as well as shy, their camouflage is brilliant and their habitat is fabulously remote and inhospitable. So when I heard, shortly after my visit to Marwell Zoo, of a travel company offering the chance to 'track the elusive snow leopard on foot', I thought: pull the other one.

But the Cotswolds-based conservation and wildlife specialist, Steppes Discovery, is deadly serious. It has found an expert partner on the ground in the Indian Himalayas that credibly claims to offer a chance of sightings in the course of a week-long trek. The trackers are the same as the ones used by the BBC and other wildlife film makers. Oh, and a snow leopard was seen on the previous trip in March. It was a no-brainer.

The cat with the big tail (it doubles as a scarf) lives high in the mountains of Central Asia, from Mongolia in the north to Afghanistan in the west and China in the south and east. I headed for the former Buddhist kingdom of Ladakh in the Indian state of Jammu and Kashmir.

Ladakh is rapidly and proudly establishing itself as the Snow Leopard Capital of the World. Some thrilling film footage has been shot here and the enlightened way in which the authorities are trying to marry snow leopard conservation to the needs of local communities is a model of its kind.

It is also an appropriately otherworldly place to live out the dream of becoming one of just a handful of people on earth to have seen a wild snow leopard. Cradled in the Himalayas just an hour's flying time north of Delhi, this high-altitude desert of crag-top temples and fluttering prayer flags is a stronghold of Tibetan Buddhism, oracles who babble in tongues and kindly, contemplative people.

When our flight touched down on a mid-November morning the temperature was minus 17 Celsius. The waterpipes had frozen solid in our hotel in the Ladakhi capital, Leh, and hot water for washing was delivered to the room in steaming plastic buckets. For three days we gazed on a sunlit mountainscape from the south-facing windows of our rooms as we acclimatised to the altitude (Leh is 11,500 feet above sea level).

On the third day we were driven south-west for an hour to the very mountain range we had been gazing on. This is Hemis National Park, 1,300 square miles of prime snow leopard habitat. No one knows for sure how many snow leopard there are left in the wild. The figure could be as low as the hundreds but is probably between 3,500 and 7,000, with a further 700 or so in zoos around the world. In Hemis there are reckoned to be between 40 and 75.

They share these valleys, ridges and peaks with more than a thousand people, 4,300 head of livestock and hundreds of wild bharal, or blue sheep, the snow leopard's natural prey. The idea of coming at this time of year is that as the bharal seek warmth in the winter months by dropping into the valleys from those high peaks, so the snow leopard follow and make themselves more visible.

It's a good theory. Walking up from the park entrance to our first camp we passed an American sunning himself against a drystone wall as he waited for his lift back to Leh. He had been in the park for nine days and had not seen a sausage. 'I think they're up there laughing at me,' he said ruefully.

But we felt different, chosen. Obsession has this effect. We were a three-strong group of strangers brought together by the belief that the snow leopard would reveal itself to us. David was the retired MD of a trust company in the Cayman Islands and Gail was an engineer at a British nuclear power station. Here were, literally, Power and Money seeking something from life that is more precious than either of these things: a beautiful creature on the brink of extinction.

Our trek leader and main tracker was a pair of finely attuned eyes called Dorje Chitta, a 35-year-old snow leopard expert with many of the qualities of our quarry, being enigmatic, stealthy and short on unnecessary vocalisation.

'Now you can start looking,' he said, setting up one of the expedition's three powerful telescopes. 'On ridges, on ledges. He is sitting in the sun for hours, just looking around, thinking, 'Where is my dinner?''

We had just pitched camp at a confluence of valleys 12,000 feet above sea level. Our tents were huddled among a grove of leafless willow trees and a Buddhist shrine fluttering with prayer flags. The sheer mountain walls and fantastical rock formations that surrounded us climbed another 8,000 feet into a sky that was dazzling blue by day and electrified with stars at night, when the mercury headed south like a runaway lift.

I spotted the snow leopard tracks on a high peak almost a mile to the north, looking like a zip fastener in the deep snow. It was an extraordinary-shaped mountain, like an Elizabethan ruff, and Chitta pointed out the snow leopard's favoured route of descent, through the frills of the ruff. It had been at least a day since he passed that way, but it was a promising start.

And so the quest began. Each morning and afternoon we headed out from basecamp to a different valley, took up position on a new ridge, clambered high onto a fresh saddle. And looked. Bent to the scope, Chitta would pore for many minutes over a single section of mountainside - cover one eye, rub his eyes, corroborate what he had seen through binoculars, go back to the scope. Ten minutes would pass. Twenty. The mountain silence was so pure and profound it sang in one's ears.

Surely he had seen something? Then, before we knew it, he had lifted the scope and padded off silently through the snow.

Two days passed. Three. Then I spotted a soft, roundish object on a sunlit ledge half a mile above us. It was, I convinced myself, a snow leopard's head. Any second now it would move. Those vertical pupils would be locked on to us, far below. 'Hey Chitta!' I could hardly get the words out.

He crouched and looked. 'It's a bush,' he said.

On the fourth morning, having got no nearer to a sighting than old pug marks in the snow, I arrived in the mess tent with a thought that conveyed the scale of our task. 'You know what we're doing?' I said. 'We're looking for a cathedral-coloured beetle in a cathedral.' My fellow obsessives, David and Gail, barely looked up from their breakfast omelettes.

That morning our team of four guides and cooks (responsible, incidentally, for great grub in exacting circumstances) struck camp, loaded our gear on to mules and moved higher up the valley to a site at 12,500ft. This brought us near to the village of Rumbak, a neighbourhood rich in snow leopard where many researchers and film teams have stayed over the past 15 years.

This was a last throw of the dice. By now I was trying to adjust to the possibility of failure but, goodness knows, it was a hard thing to accept given that we were currently existing at the extremes of human endurance for the sake of just a flash of that ermine-like fur. The next day, like half-mad mystics, all three of us started beseeching the mountains to reveal their feline fugitives. 'Just once, dear God,' I found myself murmuring.

On the penultimate day Chitta found pug marks that were only a few hours old and beetled off across the valley like a bloodhound as we returned to camp in deep snow. But he lost the trail among rocks and returned with an expressionless face. That evening we drowned our disappointments with a bit of a knees-up in Rumbak village.

Over momos - spicy dumplings - and army-issue rum the villagers talked about snow leopard. In the winter, they explained, they bring their livestock down from the high pastures and corral them in front yards and in the ground floors of their flat-roofed, mudbrick houses. Last year, while a party was going on (there is little else to do in these ferocious winters), they had a visitor. And if you subscribe to the local conviction that the snow leopard is uncannily clever you will believe that his choice of evening to come down off the mountain and raid the village was not random.

'The leopard came inside the yard,' explained a leather-faced man, making stealthy swoops with his hand. 'He kill 12 out of 19 goats and sheep.'

Snow leopard, like foxes, have a predilection for committing what is known as 'surplus killing', especially in confined spaces: 'He drinks so much blood, he gets drunk,' said Chitta. The woman who owned the slaughtered livestock said the snow leopard had made its escape before the revellers discovered the bloodbath.

In times past the village would have made a trap for the snow leopard and stoned it to death. Now they contact the local wildlife department and register for compensation. The scheme is not perfect but this and other educative measures have changed the attitude of villagers to the cats on their doorsteps.

Slithering back to camp that night beneath steepling mountain walls and a waxing moon I knew that failure was my friend, that I was not yet ready to see the snow leopard. But my obsession burns as brightly as ever and I will return to the snow leopard's rocky domain. Meanwhile, one can dream. Bartender, another glass of Dom Perignon 53 for Miss Monroe.

Published in The Daily Telegraph on February 6, 2010

Arctic wilderness under threat

Wed, 30 Dec 2009 -1:00:00 GMT

In the autumn of 1921 a Norwegian trapper called Georg Nilsen went polar bear hunting on the island of Spitsbergen, high in the Arctic Circle. He promised he would be back for Christmas, but he was never seen alive again.

The mystery of Nilsen's fate persisted until 1965 when his skeletal remains were found along with his rifle, which had a cartridge jammed in the chamber. Betrayed by mechanical malfunction, the hunter had become the hunted. Nilsen was killed and eaten by a polar bear.

His jammed rifle - now on display in Svalbard Museum on Spitsbergen - is a powerful symbol of the hardship, danger and mystery of this forbidding place. I thought of Nilsen as I stood on Cape Linne, in the far west of the island, where a radio station was built in 1933 to link Spitsbergen with the rest of the world.

Behind me, dispersed across an icy tundra, was a collection of satellite dishes and radio masts. In front, on a promontory of frozen rock overlooking the Barents Sea, stood a bracket of weather-smoothed wood on legs that looked as if it could be some sort of feeding trough. 'Selvskudd ,' said my guide, Klaus Ryberg, a former soldier in the Danish army. ' 'Self-shot' in English. It's for killing polar bears.'

This device was made by a trapper called Henry Rudi, who has the dubious distinction of having killed in excess of 700 bears (well before a hunting ban was introduced in 1973). Klaus, who had a rifle slung over his shoulder in case of bear attack, indicated how Rudi would fix a loaded gun in one end of the bracket, bait the other end with seal meat, and rig a trip wire between bait and trigger. Henry Rudi was a contemporary of Georg Nilsen but, not surprisingly, lived a lot longer.

Like the Wild West, the Arctic North has attracted characters and deeds of mythic proportions. Spitsbergen is the main island of the archipelago of Svalbard, 24,000 square miles of rock and glacier lived on by 2,500 people - and considerably more polar bears. For centuries Svalbard belonged to every nation and none. Dutch, Russians, Scandinavians and British all came here to kill whales and bears for blubber and fur, dig for coal, and prove themselves equal to some of the most arduous living conditions on earth.

Since the Svalbard Treaty of 1920 the archipelago has officially belonged to Norway, but the 39 signatory nations - including the likes of Afghanistan and Venezuela as well as the major industrialised countries - have equal rights with Norway in terms of maritime, industrial and mining activities. And you can be sure that many have kept their finger in this particular frozen gateau.

In other words, Svalbard is still the Wild West - and a new frenzy of claim and counter-claim is about to break over its snowy head. As global warming melts the polar ice cap, competing nations are searching for oil beneath it - where an estimated quarter of the world's reserves are thought to lie - and shipping lanes through it. Foremost among them are the Russians, whose presence, very close to Cape Linne, was about to become as inescapable to us as a rampaging polar bear as Klaus and I continued our snowmobile journey across western Spitsbergen.

It was late February at this northern latitude of 78 degrees. Polar night - the three months of permanent darkness - had ended a couple of weeks before and the sun was now making up for its absence. Each day it rose 20 minutes earlier and set 20 minutes later than the day before, giving the strange illusion of time itself expanding. The snowscape it illuminated sparkled like a newly minted land, across which ours snowmobiles moved like blips on a screen.

We had set out from Svalbard's capital, Longyearbyen, two days before, and in the course of three days would cover nearly 250 miles. The communications station, called Isfjord Radio, on Cape Linne was our westernmost limit and we were now returning to Longyearbyen via a succession of fjords, valleys, mountains and glaciers.

These days, since a fibre-optic cable was laid beneath the Barents Sea, Isfjord Radio is largely redundant as a communications station. Instead it operates as a hotel, the dormitory-and-canteen feel having been mitigated by a startlingly chic make-over of pale textiles and low lighting that reflects the land- and seascapes beyond the windows.

Phil, the English chef from Bedford, had just provided us with enough central heating for the entire day in the form of a stonking cooked breakfast. As the wind howled, we clattered our vehicles across the icy tundra and headed east, following a shoreline of broken pack ice. And presently, in the eastern sky, there bloomed a black shape, like a filthy finger smudge on expensive white vellum. 'The Russians,' said Klaus.

To be precise, the black stain spreading above the far shore of Gronfjord was smoke from a chimney stack at the Russian coal mining settlement of Barentsburg. Russia has dug for coal here since it bought the mine from a Dutch company in 1932. Now little mining actually takes place, but a rump community of about 400 vodka-soused souls clings on in this Arctic limbo, and every Norwegian you meet will tell you why: for the same reason that two Russian mini-submarines planted a titanium Russian flag on the seabed beneath the North Pole in 2007. To stake a claim and cock a snook.

'A lot of Russians believe that Svalbard belongs to Russia,' said Klaus, making quote marks in the air with his mittened hands. ' 'Because we were here first'. And when it was given to Norway in 1920 this was a big fraud on the world.'

We sped across the frozen fjord and entered a time slip. Barentsburg is a Soviet town of the 1970s, with round-edged cuboid apartment blocks, propaganda murals of sturdy, happy workers, a futuristic wedge-shaped swimming pool decorated with Olympic rings - and a downtrodden air accentuated by the coal-blackened snow and sky.

To mix quadraped metaphors, Barentsburg is both white elephant and Trojan horse - the former because mining operations have all but ceased, and were in any case uneconomic; the latter because the Russians are here for the long haul. And should they find oil, that smudge of smoke that desecrates the vicinity of this Russian settlement will spread like contagion across the polar ice cap.

We gunned the snowmobile engines, shattering the silence of this moribund town, and headed east into a mountainous interior. This was a thrilling but testing way to travel. In the Arctic light and featureless snow, the eye often had trouble distinguishing between verticals and horizontals. I trusted Klaus, following his line as we slithered along sinuous valley bottoms as glassy as bobsleigh runs, and screamed full tilt to high bluffs, where views opened out of distant pale oceans and tangerine-washed skies.

There were no birds or trees or wind. Nothing moved and nearly everything was white. It was as if the world had inhaled and forgotten to breathe out.

Darkness was falling as we nosed down the Longyear Glacier and into Longyearbyen, the capital of Svalbard. Capital is a rather grandiose title for this former mining settlement, a straggle of highly insulated coloured boxes with a population of 1,500 and the semi-temporary air of a trailer home park.

A century ago, according to the excellent museum in town that charts Svalbard's history, a Klondyke-like atmosphere prevailed here. The fever was generated not by the prospect of gold but by the presence of coal. Between 1898 and 1920 - when the Svalbard Treaty was signed - the landscape was dotted with scores of rival ownership signs from all over the world. The town itself takes its name from an American mine owner.

The frontier feel persists but nowadays, besides coal mining, the principal activities on Spitsbergen are tourism and research. Last year, near Longyearbyen's airstrip, the Seed Vault opened, a repository of plant seeds from all over the world built deep into the Arctic permafrost so that in the event of environmental catastrophe no plant will fall extinct. As the planet continues to behave inadvisedly, the Seed Vault - dubbed the Doomsday Vault - is like the black box the world will leave behind.

The term 'research' covers a multitude. Besides the Seed Vault scientists, Svalbard attracts glaciologists, meteorologists, geophysicists, students of the aurora borealis and boffins of more shady purpose from nations big and small. They were liberally represented in the restaurant I ate in on my last night.

Huset, it was called - a barn-like building bathed in floodlights. It looked like the restaurant at the end of the universe, so it was all the more surreal to find that inside it was as stylish as anywhere you might find in Mayfair, with silver service and top-class food. 'Beef carpaccio served with homemade panzu sauce, cucumber relish, crispy onion and a celery and wasabi cr�me. Bon appetit,' intoned the maitre d' in American-accented English as he placed my first course in front of me.

Adrift in a sea of competing tongues I recalled Klaus's words as we walked around Barentsburg that morning: 'The big scare is that the Russians find oil. They are looking, and people know it's here somewhere. If they find it, it will be the death of Svalbard.'

Published in The Daily Telegraph on February 6, 2010

Trekking the high road in Nepal

Wed, 23 Sep 2009 -1:00:00 GMT

On July 13, 2008 a 34-year-old Frenchman called Olivier Glaise shouldered his backpack and walked out of the village of Jomsom, in the Annapurna region of the Nepalese Himalayas. He was sighted five days later on a high pass to the north but since then has not been seen. How could a person just disappear in one of the most popular outdoor destinations in the world, a place teeming with Western hikers and described by the Rough Guide to Nepal as the Costa del Trekking?

My mountain guide - a guide is a necessity Olivier Glaise could not afford or was not prepared to pay for - is familiar with the Frenchman's case. It follows the same pattern as several other disappearances over the years. To save money, Glaise had decided not to hire a guide, and he had ventured away from the main trekking route perhaps because he wished to avoid the new motor road.

'It is risky because they think, 'I can do, I am strong',' says Durga Katel, who is 30, from the Everest region of Nepal, and has been guiding for 11 years. 'But this is trekking in Himalaya, this is not the city.' And he enumerates the multiple dangers: AMS (acute mountain sickness), diarrhoea, broken leg, avalanche, fall, hypothermia.

We are standing in Jomsom's main street next to a poster bearing Glaise's photograph. And it strikes me that I am doing precisely what the Frenchman attempted - trying to get away from the crowds and in particular to avoid the new road that is blighting the trekking experience in this area. The difference is, I am in the safekeeping of a mountain expert who assuredly knows the difference between Chiswick High Road and the High Himalaya.

The new road - variously known as the 'motor road' and the 'jeep road' - has ignited great controversy. It runs for about 50 miles up the deepest river valley in the world, that of the Kali Gandaki, bringing rough terrain vehicles, fumes and dust to a string of villages previously only accessible on foot.

While undoubtedly beneficial to some (but by no means all) locals, it has debased the trekking experience, for the road is on the old trekking route and hikers are now obliged to walk in the slipstream of motor traffic. Many wear face masks to counter the choking dust that is thrown up. One German I met likened it to walking on the hard shoulder of an autobahn - an exaggeration, but you get the point.

The road, which has opened in stages over the past couple of years, has already caused a drop-off in the number of trekkers in the area. It follows the western semicircle of the Annapurna Circuit which is traditionally walked from the east, in an anti-clockwise direction. Some trekkers are getting as far as Jomsom, near the northernmost point of the road, and flying out from the airfield there, thus avoiding the road altogether.

But we have a better idea. Or at least the British trekking specialist, Mountain Kingdoms, does. The Cotswolds-based company, which has been running trekking trips to Nepal for more than 20 years, has forged a new route down the Kali Gandaki valley that has the virtue both of avoiding the motor road and of passing through villages that have barely seen Westerners.

Actually it is hardly a 'new' route - it simply strings together existing paths used by farmers and villagers. It is like a jazz riff on a familiar tune. But what a tune. For this is the cupped palm of the High Himalaya and as we follow its life line of footpaths we are encircled by the fingers of peaks in excess of 26,000 feet.

And what a riff. For five days, keeping the motor road a mile or two to the west as we trek south, we follow the river bed, crossing and re-crossing it on steel suspension bridges, scrambling over boulder fields and rocky mountainsides, crossing high desert pampas, mudflats and springy water meadows, and striding with noses high through fragrant glades of juniper and pine.

And the amazing thing is: we hardly see anyone else. That poster in Jomsom asking for information on the whereabouts of Olivier Glaise is pinned next to the police checkpoint, where trekkers have to show their permits and sign a ledger. The policeman on duty when we sign in says that 250 trekkers a day are passing through. But in five days' trekking, before the route diverges completely from the motor road, we see no more than half a dozen.

That's during the day. Evenings are a different matter. For at the end of each day's trek we have to drop down to the motor road and follow it into the next village, where we stay in 'teahouses' - lodges geared for trekkers - and take advantage of the myriad services, for 'international telephone', massage, book swaps, laundry, even boot repairs, that have grown up around the tourists. The narrow, paved village streets are thronged with Europeans, Israelis and North Americans and you understand where that 'Costa del Trekking' barb comes from.

At the Eagle Nest Guest House in Ghasa - which has a pretty terrace garden planted with marigolds, spotlessly clean rooms and the most efficient bathrooms and showers on the whole route - the son of the owner says the motor road is a disaster for people who make their living from trekking. But he admits that 'for rich people it is good' as landowners can now transport their produce of vegetables, apricots and apples down the valley and bring raw materials such as kerosene up in a matter of hours, rather than the several days it would take by mule train or porter.

The fact is that one can't stem the tide of 'progress' that the road represents - and who are we, in any case, to dictate that one of the poorest countries in the world should remain blissfully primitive just for our benefit? But as trekkers we can help to manage it in a sensitive manner. The new route that Durga leads me on, avoiding the dust, fumes and crowds of the motor road, is an opportunity for us to visit communities that still lead medieval lives of agrarian subsistence - and for those communities to benefit from our business.

Just a few hundred vertical feet above the trekking villages, there are hamlets where foreign faces still cause a buzz of curiosity. One such is Kunjo, tucked beneath the immense white wall of the Nilgiri mountain range. Here a group of carpenters making furniture eyeball us unblinkingly while a smiling woman ushers us into a new wooden building and brings tin plates of noodles and spinach, discs of freshly made bread smeared with local honey, and bottles of Coke (for 100 rupees - about 85 pence - each). On the walls there are posters of busty Bollywood babes such as Karishma and Bipasha alongside likenesses of the Buddha.

The head of the village - dressed incongruously in flipflops, shiny shellsuit trousers and the sort of checked shirt worn by Tory MPs at the weekend - comes to see the strangers. He tells us he is delighted with the prospect of trekkers passing through his village and perhaps stopping here for lunch, as we have.

He steeples his fingers together and says, 'Namaste', the traditional Nepali greeting. Then, to show he is au fait with Western ways, he shakes my hand firmly and says, 'Welcome'.

Published in The Daily Telegraph on September 26 2009

Hippo attack!

Sat, 11 Jul 2009 -1:00:00 GMT

Hilton - Hilts to his friends - thought it was a boulder. Then the boulder moved as he canoed across the top of it. A couple of tons of hippopotamus rose behind him, its gargantuan jaws yawning to reveal a pink mouth equipped with huge, razor-sharp teeth before snapping shut like the mechanism of a refuse truck.

In that split second Ryan, in the canoe behind, was convinced his drinking buddy was a goner. But the jaws had missed the man and hit the canoe. Screaming 'Hippo!', Hilts spilled into the water as the hippo dived. Ten feet to one side, I watched aghast as the seconds ticked by and Hilts struggled to get back in his boat before the hippo found him. Suddenly it felt absurdly hubristic to be here at all, on this latter-day River Styx amid such remote and dangerous wilderness. Was Hilts to be a sacrificial offering?

We were attempting to complete a pioneering canoe trail across the north-eastern corner of Botswana, one of the wildest tracts of southern Africa, where vast herds of elephant and buffalo roam, and hippos lurk like unexploded depth charges in river drop-offs. If we succeeded, it would be a feat not accomplished before in living memory.

The Kalahari desert covers almost the entirety of Botswana, but in the far north the Okavango River flows down from Angola, its channels and lagoons spreading into the ragged and fluent shape of a scarecrow's hand: the wildlife-rich Okavango Delta. Every 30 years or so (the last time was in the early 1980s) the waters that feed the Delta - and the Kwando River to the east - rise to such an extent that they flood a normally dry channel of grassland immediately to the north called the Selinda Spillway.

The Spillway, which reaches a width of 100 yards in some places but even at high water is seldom deeper than a man's height, snakes south-west to north-east for nearly 60 miles through the 300,000-acre Selinda private game reserve, a former trophy hunting concession now given over to high-end, eco-friendly tourism in a handful of safari camps.

The rising waters are a mysterious hydrological event in which faultlines in the earth's crust also play their part. And in the summer of 2009 - Botswana's winter - the waters have been flowing further and deeper than anyone can remember. As you read this the Spillway continues to fill up at both its western and eastern ends, the two channels separated by a daily diminishing section of dry land.

By canoeing this miraculous and temporary river we hoped to confer on ourselves a kind of immortality - not quite what Achilles' mother had in mind when she dipped him in the Styx, but a modest immortality nevertheless. As Hilts had said, 'We'll be among just a handful of people in the world who can say they have canoed the Selinda Spillway.'

Apart from the sheer hell if it, the purpose of the trip was to see how feasible it would be for tourists to do the same later in the season. It's a 'thumbsuck' - anyone's guess - how long the waters will last, but it should be possible to canoe at least part of the way well into October.

Given the rarity of the Spillway phenomenon, not to mention the intrepid nature of the undertaking, this can justifiably be called the most exclusive adventure in the world and it had attracted an appropriately exclusive bunch of white southern African adventurers (plus this white-kneed journo). Hardened bush hands who have dropped charging elephant at 20 paces, then gone back to sharpening their bowie knives on their chin stubble, were rendered dewy-eyed by the prospect of canoeing the Spillway.

They included Grant, our khaki-clad trail leader, and man-mountain Ryan, a former big-game hunter who now runs a wildlife camp in Tanzania. Round the fire at Motswiri bush camp on our first night, we nursed goblets of Famous Grouse as Grant delivered his briefing to a soundtrack of amphibian burps and blips from the encircling waters.

'The Spillway is quite confusing, I won't kid you,' he said. 'No one really knows the way. Generally you just go with the flow.' After advice on the necessity of wearing sunblock, keeping hydrated and watching out for V-shapes on the water's surface (indicating submerged obstacles), he broached the hippopotamus question: 'If the worst comes to the worst, and you do get dumped out of your canoe by a hippo, swim for the bank. The thing to keep in mind always is that they're more scared than you. They're cacking themselves.'

We appreciated the thought, but the fact is that hippos are responsible for more human deaths than any other African animal (apart, of course, from man himself). When the comical fatty with his pink undersides and bemused Oliver Hardy stare encounters hairless bipeds at close quarters, he tends to turn homicidal.

Who slept entirely free of doubts that night? Certainly not Hilts. The last thing he had said to his wife when he left his home in Durban, South Africa early that morning was that he had a thing about hippos.

At 8.30 the next morning our four two-berth fibreglass Canadian canoes, with bedrolls and baggage loaded between the seats to provide ballast, nosed off through tea-coloured water in which land grasses waved like Ophelia's tresses. Ahead of us went the camp hands and cook with tents, equipment and food, to set up lunch and evening camp in suitably shady spots on the river bank.

The Spillway was very shallow at first. No chance here of lurking hippo. The water coiled lazily back on itself, while the flooded vehicle road ran through the coils like the perpendicular lines through a dollar symbol. At one point we paddled past a sign that said: 'Restricted road. Authorised entry only.'

Grant has driven the vehicle road countless times. He knows this territory like the back of his hand. But seeing it from water was different, like re-reading a familiar novel in a foreign language. For the animals, too, it was an unknown quantity. 'They're still learning that they've got water,' he said. This probably accounted for so few sightings of big game on the first day - just a lone bull hippo, 100 yards away on the far bank, nursing a wound in his back and manifestly no threat to us.

We relaxed, lulled by the splash and rhythm of the paddles and the tickle of paddle-drip on our bare legs. Dead trees with branches the shape of forked lightning, lined the banks, A flock of pygmy geese flapped across our bows. Pied kingfisher hovered and dived. 'Red-billed wood hoopoe,' said Grant, cocking an ear. 'The Zulu call it 'cackling woman'.'

In the afternoon we canoed over the intact skeleton of an elephant resting on the Spillway bottom, and circled back over it, mesmerised by the sight of the huge skull, both noble and sad. As the evening light turned the surface of the Spillway pearlescent shades of blue and lilac, Grant and Ryan caught bream which we cooked over the camp fire that night. And no fears troubled our sleep.

It was after lunch on the second day that fear raised its head and flashed its jaws. We had snoozed on the river bank and were now paddling gently through apparently shallow waters. But below us, in a sandy hollow, slept a one-eared hippo (the other ear he had almost certainly lost to a lion).

When Hilton's canoe brushed the top of him, he rose from the water in a reflex of anger and fear and bit hard. Later, studying the teeth marks on the back of the canoe, we realised that he had missed Hilton's back by no more than the span of a hand.

But the danger was not over. The hippo had managed to tilt Hilts into the water. As he scrambled to get back in the canoe, he revealed later that a thought had flashed through his mind: what would it be like to spend the rest of your life without legs? After what seemed like minutes, but was probably no more than five seconds, Hilton managed to haul himself back into his waterlogged canoe.

He paddled furiously to the bank, where we joined him to assess the damage and relive the moment. When he saw just how deep and wide were the teeth marks in the back of the canoe - and how close they were to where he had been sitting - the colour drained from his face and his jaw went slack.

'I saw him come right out the water,' said Ryan, holding his hands wide apart to mime those colossal jaws opening and snapping shut. 'In my mind he'd got you, Hilton.' Twenty yards away, in the middle of the Spillway, old one-ear continued to watch us balefully.

Hilts fumbled to light a cigarette - his lighter had got wet - then, in a state of shock, did a strange thing: he handed out his business card to everyone. By a grim irony, the hippo had chosen to nearly kill the Sales, Marketing and Public Relations Manager of one of southern Africa's foremost safari and conservation companies. My first thought was: Does publicity get any worse than this?

Unwittingly Grant had an immediate retort, in the form of his own rhetorical question. 'I tell you what,' he said, 'this is an adventure, eh? Why do people love Africa? Because it's safe?'

And he was right. Statistically what had just happened is extremely rare - hippo will almost always move out of the way if they hear or see you coming - but the African bush is not bound by the legislation of the Health & Safety Executive. Having stepped straight from my highly regulated, risk-averse Western culture, I was feeling uniquely alive to be sharing a habitat with huge, intriguing animals that could as easily kill me as scratch themselves. Or, as Ryan said laconically , chewing a blade of grass, 'Africa is not for sissies.'

It was time to get back on the bike. But the mood of the group had changed. In place of the banter, and the eager spotting of animals and birds, we canoed through pools of reflective silence broken only by the splashing of paddles - and the warning drum of those paddles on the sides of our canoes whenever we saw darker, deeper water. 'Everyone is contemplating the hippo,' said Grant quietly.

Over the camp fire and the scotch that evening the incident was gone over as obsessively as if we each had handsets with which to replay and freeze it at different moments. Filthy jokes followed, then thrillingly gruesome near-death stories of the bush: of a man who had half his face eaten by hyenas and another who now wears a corset after being disembowelled - by a hippo. We were exorcising our fear.

On the third day we walked nearly nine miles across the dry middle section of the Spillway to reach the eastern channel. On this eastern side floodplains spread from the Spillway's banks. Sedge grew high at the water's edge, blocking our view, making us nervous. 'Ambush alley,' said Grant, indicating the gaps in the sedge. 'There are a load of hippo here. A lot.'

Before reaching the end of the trail - the luxurious Selinda Camp, a five-star treat after the grunginess of three nights of fly-camping on the river bank - we saw a breeding herd of elephant at the water's edge, and in golden afternoon light a bull crossed the Spillway right in front of us. We also stopped to inspect the carcass of a buffalo, killed by lion within the previous 48 hours. The putrefying skeleton, still red with blood and fringed with membrane, buzzed with flies. 'He's nice eh?' murmured Ryan affectionately. 'A beautiful old boy.'

But it was another hippo that bade us bon voyage on our historic paddle. On one of the Spillway's final bends, as we were dreaming of hot showers and cold beers, he rose, snorted and displayed his fearsome dental weaponry. 'A big bull,' said Grant. 'He's cranky for sure. Howzit boy?'

'Dammit,' said Hilts, 'my heart can't take much more of this.'

Published in The Daily Telegraph on July 11 2009

'The Tutankhamun of the Americas'

Wed, 24 Jun 2009 -1:00:00 GMT

Nine years ago a discovery was made about a place called Caral in northern Peru that transformed the understanding of human history in the Americas. To get to Caral you take the Panamerican Highway north from Lima for 112 miles, then turn east along a dirt road. The signpost was so small I missed it though my guide, Alejandra Cabieses, assured me it had been there. 'If you don't know the way it is very difficult,' she admitted.

Further on there was a yellow arrow painted on a rock. Then, before bumping through a battery chicken farm, our minibus had to be sprayed with disinfectant. One hour, and 15 miles, after leaving the highway we reached the site of one of the oldest civilisations in the world. No one appeared to be at home.

We got out and looked around. A vast desert plain bordering a fertile river valley was dotted with flat-topped pyramids and ringed by the foothills of the Andes. A wind moaned. Those mountains brewed an atmosphere of mystery and loneliness that reminded me of Castlerigg Stone Circle in the English Lake District.

During the 20th century Caral remained unexplored, just one among many ancient sites dotting the coastal strip between Lima and Peru's border with Ecuador in the north. From the pyramids of the Moche people to Chan Chan, the vast adobe city of the Chimu empire which immediately predated the Incas, succeeding city states had evolved and dissolved. All were fascinating but none were regarded as pre-eminent.

Then, as the 21st century dawned, Caral took centre-stage. In 2000, carbon dating of a bag woven from plant fibres proved that the 163-acre site had been built between 3000 and 2100BC, making it the oldest civilisation on the continent of the Americas and contemporaneous with the pyramids of Giza in Egypt. At a stroke, Caral was rocketed into the archaeological superleague.

This lonely place quickly became a source of national pride - 'La civilizacion mas antigua de America' - and excavations and restoration began in earnest. Pyramids, circular plazas, a round altar and strange monoliths have been revealed. The greatest find so far has been a set of 32 flutes made of pelican and condor bones and decorated with images of supernatural beings.

But on this overcast morning Caral's celebrity status was hardly in evidence. As we waited by the empty ticket desk, Alejandra, a tour guide based in Lima, told me I was the first visitor she had brought to Caral this year, and it was already June. 'Everything about Peru is Inca, Inca,' she said. 'Everyone goes to Machu Picchu. They don't stay long enough to come up here.'

She was right. In a week spent among fragments of dead civilisations, haunted by fantasmagoric deities, we met just a handful of tourists. The shape of the trip was neatly chronological, starting with Caral and ending in the city of Cajamarca where the last Inca king was killed by the Spanish in 1532 - and ancient Peru, in its successive manifestations and outlandish beliefs, was made extinct.

The exciting thing about these old cultures is that archaeology is in its infancy in Peru and there is so much still to discover. At Caral, where more than 3,000 people are thought to have lived - fishing and trading, worshipping gods and observing the stars - they are still looking for the cemetery. We, meanwhile, were looking for the ticket seller. When he finally showed up he produced a megaphone and hailed someone to show us round.

Dino Augurto appeared walking briskly from a far pyramid he had been working on. He used to labour in the fields near Caral for about US$3 a day. Now he earns $200 a month as an 'excavation technician'. And when tourists turn up he becomes an 'orientator', walking them round and explaining things.

'My life changed when I came to work here,' he said. 'Before I was a 'chunco' [roughly, 'miserable git']. I didn't want to talk to anyone and didn't know how to. Now in my own small way I can share the patrinomio of my country with you.'

Across an area as big as a small town, Dino led us among the remains of the principal monumental buildings. We felt awed by the scale and sophistication of these stepped pyramids, temples and public spaces. Who were the people who built them? We will never really know. 'Our history is in the ruins but the ruins are without history,' said Dino Augurto.

He meant that no written records have been left. The key fact about the Andean peoples before the coming of the Spanish is that they were illiterate, but that didn't mean they were primitive - they simply channelled their creative energies in other ways, often with astonishing eloquence.

The next day I experienced the full power of this eloquence - in the unlikeliest of places. In the neat colonial city of Trujillo, a few miles north of Caral, we stopped at a Repsol garage sited on a busy intersection. Opening a door in a building on the edge of the forecourt, we were invited to descend some basement steps until we were, literally, standing underneath the gas pumps.

A young man then unlocked a door to reveal a room crammed floor to ceiling with priceless objects. The Museo Cassinelli, named after the owner of the garage, Jose Cassinelli, is a collection of 2,000 pieces of pre-Colombian pottery (with a further 4,000 in storage) dating from 1500BC to the Inca period. Acquired from huaqueros - looters - over more than 50 years, every piece is original and exquisite, speaking powerfully of the culture it comes from.

The most compelling pieces belong to the Moche culture (1st to 8th century AD), which was centred on two vast mud-brick pyramids, now called the Huacas del Sol y de la Luna (Temples of the Sun and Moon), just south of Trujillo. The Mochica, as they were known, were the only ancient people who made realistic portraits of themselves, showing a brutal candour that connects across the millennia.

Stacked on Sr Cassinelli's chipboard shelving are ceramic representations of conjoined twins, a man with an eaten-away nose due to leishmaniasis, another with a cleft palate, a victim of Down's syndrome, someone with bulging thyroid eyes, another who looks zoned out on hallucinogens, an amputee with no arms or feet, a sufferer from elephantiasis, a series of three studies of the same face showing the onset of blindness - and much more, including lots of realistic sex.

The canny Sr Cassinelli, now in his late eighties, put in an appearance while we were there. 'There is no writing here,' he said, pointing at the ceramics, 'but in each piece there is a message.' One possible, intriguing message, given the Mochicas' evident fascination with physical imperfection, is that they revered people who were different, rather than stigmatising them.

The sheer volume and quality of Sr Cassinelli's collection were so dazzling as to make me momentarily forget how he acquired it. The fact is that while looting and trafficking in antiquities are serious criminal offences, collecting them is legal - and through this benign double-standard much of Peru's priceless patrinomio has been enabled to remain in the country rather than disappearing abroad.

It was the huaqueros of this region who made one of the greatest archaeological discoveries of the late 20th century. In 1987, at a place called Sipan, villagers became rich overnight after plundering gold and jewels from a Moche burial site. When the authorities got wind, they unearthed funeral treasures so plentiful and exotic that these funeral tombs of the so-called Lords of Sipan inevitably became known as 'The Tutankhamun of the Americas'.

Wandering the site, we gazed 20ft down into the burial pits, where replicas of the finds have been placed - a tomb guardian with amputated feet, a sacrificed llama, the skeletons, the treasures. All around, the mesa-like, flat-topped hills overlooking the Sipan Valley are actually temples made of mud-bricks, troves of untold treasure awaiting exploration. 'And nobody comes here,' said Alejandra, shaking her head. 'Everybody goes to ....'

'Machu Picchu,' I supplied.

The actual treasures are on display in a dramatically lit museum 20 miles away in Lambayeque. If it seems perverse that the museum is so far from the site, the pieces themselves live up to the King Tut billing. In the most lavish grave, the Lord of Sipan was found with 451 ornaments: gold and turquoise earrings, pectorals made of seashells, half-moon nose clips of gilded copper, gold and silver nose rings depicting sun and moon and a mesmerisingly weird necklace of 10 gold peanuts and 10 silver ones.

You could say that it was gold and silver which destroyed the last of the pre-Colombian civilisations. To visit the place where the old, preliterate Peru died we left the sea-fogs and fish-meal factories of the coastal desert and turned east off the Panamerican, climbing through irrigated foothills alongside the foaming green Chillete river.

Past rice terraces rising in semicircular steps, we reached the ceja de selva, 'eyebrow of the jungle', the altitude at which mangoes, bananas, castor oil plants and sugarcane grow, and the hallucinogenic San Pedro cacti stand like stubble on the jutting jawlines of the Andean headlands.

Cajamarca is a colonial town of wooden balconies, huge doors and deep eaves, sprawled across a high mountain plain at an altitude of 9,000ft - high enough to put the squeeze on unacclimatised lungs. The native population lend it a palpably remote and exotic feel. The women wear brightly coloured blouses, lots of petticoats instead of underwear, and marvellous stovepipe hats made of palm leaf with brims with turned-up edges like the Victoria amazonica lily pad.

Ironically, given the treacherous role of gold in the city's history, a vast gold mine - the biggest in Latin America - was discovered nearby in the early 1990s. Along with some prosperity, the Yanacocha mine has brought bribery, corruption and even murder to this peaceable place. In such ways does history repeat itself.

In 1532 the Inca king, Atahualpa was captured in Cajamarca by the Spaniard, Francisco Pizarro. The circumstances, in which many thousand Inca warriors were massacred in a matter of hours by 200 of Pizarro's men, are still a source of pain to the indigenous people. Atahualpa himself was imprisoned in a room in his own palace.

All that remains of the palace is that room of the last Inca's confinement, in a side street off the main square. Of classic Inca design, it is the size of a double garage and consists of large blocks of stone with trapezoid niches set in the walls. It is known as the Cuarto del Rescate, the Room of Ransom, because it was here that Atahualpa reached his hand above his head, indicating a line on the wall, and promised to fill the room with gold and silver up to that line in return for his freedom. A red line 'marks the limit of the ransom'.

Atahualpa kept his word, his subjects bringing vast quantities of precious objects which were melted into coins and taken back to Spain. Pizarro executed him. 'It should be called the Room of Deception rather than the Room of Ransom,' said the guide, Jorge.

For the first time in Peru's history, there were words to tell the story. Pizarro wrote that Atahualpa was 'a handsome man with an imposing stare'. The vision of him stretching up to summon untold treasures with his hand, while his adversary kept treachery in his heart, came easily in this place of cold stones. In that moment, said Jorge, pointing at the line on the wall, 'one culture died and another was born'.

Published in The Daily Telegraph on June 27 2009

Starkey on Henry

Fri, 17 Apr 2009 -1:00:00 GMT

When, in the course of our conversation, Dr David Starkey uses the phrase 'prodigious accumulation' he is not referring to Henry VIII's acquisition of wives, nor indeed to the quantity and variety of publicity Starkey himself has succeeded in garnering in this 500th anniversary year of Henry's accession to the throne of England. He is talking about a rather neglected aspect of Henry's reign: the number of houses and palaces he owned.

'He was the most 'overhoused' monarch,' says Dr Starkey. 'He had 55 palaces by the end, having started with 12 or 13. It was a prodigious accumulation.'

The academic turned celebrity has his digits in various Henry-flavoured pies this month [ie April] - the exhibition he has curated at the British Library, a series on Channel Four and a new edition of his Henry biography. But he finds time to chat to me on the subject of Henry's various retreats and pieds a terre - and how visiting them can shed intriguing light on his reign.

Starkey has described Henry VIII as 'the axis round which English history turns', and though his time may have been half a millennium ago it seems extraordinarily recent in some ways. Tudor houses are the earliest surviving form of domestic architecture, so we know where and how Henry and his subjects lived. 'And you must remember that the Tudors were the first people we can actually recognise,' says Starkey. 'It was the beginning of modern portraiture. We know what Henry looked like.'

After suggesting that we bone up on Tudor history by looking at the portraiture in the National Portrait Gallery, Starkey improvises a brilliant itinerary for tracing Henry's life through his residences. It is, he admits, a 'very south-east story' - Henry ventured to other parts of England only twice in his life. 'You should begin with Greenwich, and if you can, arrive by water,' he says.

The son of Henry VII and Elizabeth of York was born at Greenwich, some five miles east of central London, on June 28, 1491. The River Thames was 'the great highway of Tudor London' - kings and bigwigs were forever sailing up and down it in gaily coloured barges - hence the recommended mode of arrival.

The palace in which the king was born was demolished in the 17th century (the Old Royal Naval College occupies the site) but the surrounding parkland and the tree line are pretty much as they were - 'at least until the Olympics bugger them up.' Although Henry retained a soft spot for the royal palace at Greenwich, which was known as Placentia or 'Pleasure', his idyllic childhood was spent a little way inland at Eltham.

Here, too, the original palace has gone but 'the Great Hall is absolutely intact. You can stand on the dais - if you're allowed to [you are] - and you're standing on the spot where Henry was introduced by Thomas More to Erasmus. It was like a David Frost show of 1499.'

Desiderius Erasmus, the great Dutch humanist, recorded the occasion: 'When we came to the hall, all the retinue was assembled... In the midst stood Henry, aged nine, already with a certain royal demeanour; I mean a dignity of mind combined with a remarkable courtesy.'

His childhood officially ended on April 24, 1509 when - two months short of his 18th birthday - he was proclaimed King Henry VIII. On the same day he took up residence in the Tower of London, which was both palace and prison as well as being the main arsenal of the kingdom.

The slogan promoting the current exhibition there - 'Henry VIII: Dressed to Kill' - says it all, says Dr Starkey. Henry had a lifelong interest in fortifications, armour and ordnance and his was a 'killing culture'. The Tudor weapons on display were 'instruments of death but also things of extraordinary beauty.'

Next we head further upriver to Hampton Court where this year they are using the permanent collections to tell the story of the young Henry VIII. 'This man is not the 'fat freak' [of popular imagination] but enjoys Obama-like adulation,' says Starkey. 'He is young, handsome and educated, the 'great white hope'.'

Though Hampton Court is most closely associated with Henry, another Tudor Palace, Knole in Kent, gives more of a sense of the period and for that reason is 'an absolute must,' he says. This rather gloomy pile pleased Henry so much that he instructed its owner, Thomas Cranmer, to give it to him.

Henry was 'ultra fashionable' and his palaces were the most stylish in northern Europe - if you like silver and gilt furniture and relentless ornamentation. Little remains in any of his houses of the original furnishings, bar tapestries, but Knole is the closest you get to the oppressiveness of the style - one Starkey admits he doesn't care for.

Elsewhere in Kent is the most beautiful of the great houses that Henry acquired and rebuilt, Leeds Castle, that fairytale vision built on islands in a lake. 'As far as I can say he spends three days there.,' says Dr Starkey. 'I call it a glorified b and b on the way to Dover.'

For a real sense of how the Tudors lived, he recommends a detour to Portsmouth. 'Henry is fascinated by shipbuilding so an absolute must is the Mary Rose. There are literally tens of thousands of artefacts from shoes to nit combs. The whole kit of a Tudor surgeon, including a dreadful thing for the administration of mercury up a chap's urethra. ... This is our English Herculaneum - a whole life frozen in sudden death.'

That sense of the past brought tantalisingly close to the present is what makes Ightham Mote, a moated manor house also in Kent, Dr Starkey's favourite Tudor property. For part of Henry's reign it was owned by one of his courtiers, Sir Richard Clement, and much of the Tudor fabric and atmosphere survives. 'The interior there will take you nearer to a senior gentlemen's house in the Tudor period that anywhere else you will find,' reckons Starkey.

And so he extemporises, thinking of more and more places - Hever, for example (inevitably, also in Kent) with its 'magical' exterior - until he arrives at a thought that tickles him. 'You can actually go to the place where he was conceived,' he chuckles.

Henry was conceived at the home of the second Duke of Suffolk at Ewelme, near Wallingford, in Oxfordshire, when his parents spent a month there in the autumn of 1490. The manor house is long gone, but the old church is still there, and some almshouses, and a profound air of old, unchanging England: 'A place,' says Dr Starkey, 'where you really do feel, 'What's 500 years?' '

Published in The Daily Telegraph on April 18 2009

A hobbity des res

Sun, 5 Apr 2009 -1:00:00 GMT

The shrubs in the gardens of the hotel were swaddled in plastic and sacking against the cold. Freezing fog swirled like ectoplasm as my boots crumped up steep, snow-bound steps. There was a valley below and a hillside above but due to the fog I could only imagine what they looked like. Then, by a door in a rock, the bellboy put down my bag and produced a key.

He opened the door and, kicking off our snowy boots, we walked into the hollowed-out middle of the rock. Hobbits and their habitats are liberally and usually lazily invoked by writers. All I can say is that we were standing in a place that came pretty close to Tolkien's description of a hobbity des res at the opening of The Hobbit - 'a tube-shaped hall like a tunnel ... going fairly but not quite straight into the side of the hill' - though admittedly the door had been neither circular nor green.

The heated tiled floor was warm as pitta bread fresh from the oven and there was a flatscreen TV in the corner. When I clicked the remote it bloomed to noisy, vivid life: Aston Villa versus Newcastle, live from Villa Park.

This probably isn't the strangest hotel in the world. To claim as much would no doubt be to invite a barrage of readers' letters detailing ocean-floor auberges or pensiones run by penguins. But the Kandovan International Rocky Hotel, in the province of East Azerbaijan in north-western Iran, is unusual in itself - not least because the receptionist quoted chunks of Coleridge's Kubla Khan at me as I checked out - and fascinating in terms of its location.

The hotel, which opened in 2007, is on the edge of the mountain village of Kandovan, 27 miles south of the city of Tabriz. The village is known for its cave houses - a population of about 700 live in hollowed-out rocks the shape of witches' hats, like the famous 'fairy chimney' formations of Cappadocia in Turkey. Until the hotel opened, it was possible only to pay a day visit to Kandovan, where the inhabitants speak a Turkish dialect and are known for the frosty reception they give to outsiders.

Incorporated into caves that climb across the hillside, the hotel has 10 rooms so far, with another 30 planned, and a large restaurant. All the rooms have underfloor heating and some have whirlpool baths. There are Persian rungs on the floor and recessed wall lighting. The decor is stylishly minimalist, using plenty of tiles and letting the rough rock sides do the talking.

The opportunity to stay overnight - to try to get to know the village a little better than a day trip would allow - had been too good to pass up. Still, it was dead of winter, a perverse time to come. Temperatures were well below zero and when we arrived, on a Saturday afternoon, the freezing, swirling fog blanked everything out.

Tempting as it was to stay in and watch the footie I set off for the village with my guide, Mr Sassan from Tehran. It was a five-minute trudge through a snowscape in which crows cawed among leafless walnut trees. 'In September you see the men up these trees, calling in the walnuts,' said Mr Sassan, 'and the ladies below, catching them with the corners of their chadors.'

Somewhere over to our right, beneath a blanket of snow, lay the frozen river which is locally famous for its health-giving waters. Fruit and nut trees grow in profusion along its banks and their produce is exported around Iran. 'The apples here are like the cheeks of young girls,' said Mr Sassan wistfully.

Above the invisible river and the trees, Kandovan's extraordinary snaggle-teeth houses came into view, dotted across the gummy hillside. Their windows looked sketchy and random, as if they had been prodded through Plasticine with the end of a crayon.

Kandovan means 'Land of the Unknown Carvers'. No one knows how long people have lived here, nor who first had the idea of carving the soft rock, known as tuff, into houses. Some say the houses date from the 12th century, others that they pre-date Islam (7th century). There is even a theory that the surrounding region is the Biblical Land of Nod, where Cain was condemned to wander after murdering his brother Abel.

It remains a conservative and closed community. On the main street we passed a group of men - all bearded and wearing thin anoraks and baggy trousers - who watched us expressionlessly. Mr Sassan pointed out a sign in Farsi: 'Dear Tourists. Please do not enter the people's houses. It is strictly forbidden. Your behaviour is the sign of your character.'

A young bearded man wearing an astrakhan hat approached us. 'Hello, goodbye,' he said in English, adding in Turkish: 'This is all the English I know.' He introduced himself as Musa Kiani, said he was 22, and gestured us to his open-fronted shop where nylon sacks and cardboard boxes were brimming with almonds, walnuts, dried fruit and medicinal herbs.

Musa extolled the properties of various herbs and Mr Sassan leered. 'This is for if you want to have a good night with the wife,' he translated, pointing at some dried green stuff. Almost everything, it turned out, was for if you want to have a good night with the wife.

Mr Sassan negotiated a price with Musa for a bag of walnuts. The next day, in Tabriz, Mr Sassan would compare the quality and price of walnuts and realise he had been diddled, but for now everyone was happy and we pulled off a coup - Musa agreed to show us his family cave house. As we climbed the muddy cobbled path of Haji Alley he hailed a man bottlefeeding a goat on his front doorstep and explained that people brought their animals indoors for winter.

Musa unlocked a green-and-white door (more promisingly hobbity, this) and invited us into a warm whitewashed chamber. The floor was covered in rugs. A fridge, a telephone and a television were all hidden primly beneath squares of embroidered material, as if modernity was faintly indecent. A sink had been hewn from the rock itself. The kerosene heater was hardly required, Musa said, as once the house had heated up it stayed warm till the spring.

It's true, this rock made of compressed volcanic ash is superbly impervious to the cold. It reached minus 20 C that night but back in my burrow-like hotel room, with the lights turned low and the snow falling outside, I felt as snug and smug as a fictional creature in a popular fable.

Published in The Daily Telegraph on April 4 2009

Gabba gabba hey! A rock-n-roll tour of the East Village

Wed, 25 Mar 2009 -1:00:00 GMT

Alphabet City, it's known as: the bit of New York's East Village, east of 1st Avenue, in which the north-south streets are named A, B, C and D. When I stayed around here in the mid-1980s it wasn't advisable to enter Alphabet City without a crash helmet. Bobby Pinn has similar memories. 'I renamed the streets Assault, Battery, Crime and Death,' he said cheerily. 'But it's quite different today.'

Bobby Pinn's real name is Ron Colinear but, like his heroes the Ramones and Iggy Pop, he has reinvented himself - at least for the two-hour duration of the rock-n-roll tours he conducts of the East Village. The closure in 2006 of CBGBs, the legendary venue which spawned the New York punk scene, was a final encore for the neighbourhood's role as begetter of innovative, in-your-face rock music.

The East Village, you might say, is now too posh to pogo. The gentrification that has taken place in the past decade - the influx of what Bobby called 'the new Wall Streeters' - is bad news for penniless musicians looking for cheap rents and big spaces but a definite plus if you appreciate sitting on a park bench without getting a syringe in your backside; or indeed if you fancy strolling its no-longer-mean streets on a rock nostalgia kick.

The end of CBGBs - marked by a farewell thrash from Patti Smith - was the cue for Bobby, who's in his 40s, to turn the grungy creativity generated in the East Village over his lifetime into rock-n-roll history. Though the Velvet Underground, the Ramones, and the cavalcade of rock deities who played the Fillmore East will not be returning any time soon, this grid of streets remains one of the most vibrant of New York's neighbourhoods, and Bobby's music-focused tours are an excellent way of making sense of it.

Today there were eight of us taking the tour, from the Mid West, Ireland, Scandinavia - and London (me). We met Bobby on the south-west corner of East 9th and 3rd Avenue. Across the street is the St Mark apartment building where Joey Ramone lived for 21 years, till his death in 2001. Bobby has a passion for the guys from Queens who in the 1970s punched holes in hell with their two-minute, three-chord pop blitzkriegs.

'The Ramones didn't have a van, man,' he said admiringly as we waited for the stragglers to show. 'They took the train to gigs. They didn't even have guitar cases.' He produced a ringbinder and flicked to a photograph of Dee Dee, Joey, Tommy and Johnny sitting on a subway train with uncased guitars. 'This is how they got back and forth from Queens to CBGBs.'

A former music business executive, Bobby started the tours as a Saturday morning hobby but quit the day job when he realised his informative street gigs could pull in an audience four or five days a week. It's a concentrated pill of modern history he's delivering here.

In just a few hundred square yards, from the Bowery in the west to Alphabet City in the east, from 10th St in the north to Houston in the south, a certain kind of angry, urban, groundbreaking sound burst forth from the mid-1960s onwards that had a lasting influence on rock music.

Many of the low income housing units that were typical of the neighbourhood have been converted into multi-million-dollar condos but the buildings themselves, the brownstones and tenements, are still there, albeit spruced up. And though many of the venues have gone - the Fillmore East, on 2nd Ave between 6th and 7th, is now the Emigrant Savings Bank - Bobby can conjure those nights of sweat and spit, and other excretions, because he was there, man.

Case in point: January 1993, Iggy Pop played a club called the Continental on 3rd Avenue. It held about 150 people, max, 'but I'd swear they let in about 500 people that night,' recalled Bobby. 'It was kind of insane. Iggy's pants were unbuckled. His butt was hanging out. The New York Fire Department was called. They got on stage to try to cut the show but Iggy just got more enraged. The band kept playing and Iggy kept singing.'

Bobby led us into St Mark's Place, a three-block stretch of stores and street characters so achingly urban and hip that even stepping around the corner into 2nd Ave 'feels like you're in the country'. But when Andy Warhol scouted it out for gallery and performance space in 1965 it was so unfashionable he was initially put off.

In the end Warhol put St Mark's Place at the very epicentre of counter-cultural cool when he opened a club called the Dom (the building is now occupied by the Mexican Grill, a punk clothing store and a hairdresser's). Here, in 1966, he put on the Velvet Underground and Nico in his Exploding Plastic Inevitable show with the audience zoned out on drugs and amazement.

Bobby said that on one of his recent tours he had been surprised to have an old lady show up with her grandson. 'Turns out she had booked it because she was at the Warhol happenings here in 1966 - but couldn't remember what happened.'

And so the tour continued, taking in the tenement building on the cover of Led Zeppelin's Physical Graffiti album (also on St Mark's Place), a mural of the late Joe Strummer that faces Tompkins Square Park, the former homes of Charlie Parker and Iggy Pop on Avenue B, and Madonna's first apartment in New York City, number 4A, 234 East 4th St.

'Whether you like it or not, it's a cool story,' he said of Madge's rise. 'She turned up with a suitcase and 30 dollars and she did it, man.'

We ended where punk began - on the Bowery, 'the street of lost souls', where a club intended to showcase 'Country, Blue Grass and Blues' (hence CBGBs) unwittingly gave birth to a very different kind of sound. Bobby told the story of how, in 1973, Tom Verlaine blagged a gig here by claiming that his band, Television, 'dabbled in bluegrass'. The Ramones followed and punk pogo-ed into being. Gabba gabba hey! as the guys used to say.

Published in The Daily Telegraph on March 28 2009

Darwin and the earthworms

Sun, 15 Feb 2009 -1:00:00 GMT

In 1880 Charles Darwin published a book called The Formation of Vegetable Mould Through the Action of Worms in which he asserted that 'Worms have played a more important part in the history of the world than most persons would at first suppose.' This book, his last, did not make quite the impact of The Origin of Species but it says just as much about the man and his methods - not to mention his sense of mischief.

Darwin studied worms, as he studied the origin and meaning of life itself, in his house in Kent. For 40 years Down House and its gardens and greenhouse were Darwin's laboratory in which he pored over the minuscule in order to understand the infinite.

This arc of thought is at the heart of the museum that Down House has become. Two hundred years after his birth it has been reopened by English Heritage following a three-month renovation to mark the Darwin bicentenary and the 150th anniversary of the publication of The Origin.

New exhibits bring to life his life-changing five-year voyage aboard HMS Beagle, there are child-friendly spaces and interactive consoles explaining his theory of natural selection, and some personal belongings are being displayed for the first time, including his wife's wedding ring and manuscript pages of The Origin. 'Visitors said they needed more information about his theory and his working practices,' explained the curator, Cathy Power, 'so that's what the new material addresses.'

Darwin moved into Down House, near Biggin Hill, in 1842. He had been married three years - to his first cousin, Emma, of the Wedgwood pottery family - and had two children, with another on the way. The house was a rather boxy Georgian villa - he called it 'ugly' - but its location and extensive gardens won them over and Darwin remained here till his death in 1882.

The ground floor rooms were reassembled with the original furniture more than a decade ago when English Heritage took the house over. Here you imagine Darwin the man and father, scooting about his study in his wheeled armchair, sprawling on the blue couch in the drawing room while Emma plays her grand piano (with 'vigour and spirit, but not passion,' recalled their daughter Henrietta), and taking on his sons at billiards.

Upstairs, in what used to be the bedrooms, nursery and schoolroom, Darwin's working life is illustrated in a series of new installations of which the most significant is a life-size reconstruction of his cabin aboard the Beagle. As a young and keen naturalist Darwin was invited to join the survey ship HMS Beagle at the end of 1831 for a voyage around the world.

In the next five years he observed and collected specimens and creatures - most famously on the Galapagos Islands - that transformed his way of thinking. And each night he would sit in his cabin recording what he had seen and firing off letters home as breathless as any gap year email (through page-turning software you can read his Beagle Journal.)

His cabin is low and dark, speared by the trunk of a mast and dominated by a huge chart table. 'The sources [for how the cabin looked] are two plans plus the odd contemporary account,' said Cathy Power. In the background an audiotape of seagulls and groaning timbers adds atmosphere but complete authenticity has been eschewed - there are no sound effects bearing out Cathy's observation that 'he was miserably seasick, he never got his sea legs.'

On the cabin table are artefacts he took on that voyage, such as his microscope, map dividers, specimen boxes, hydrometer and pistol, and the Panama hat he bought while he was out there... And behind them, rather startlingly, is the man himself, with a shaggy black beard - or rather film of an actor projected on to an invisible glass screen, such that he appears to be sitting on the far side of the chart table taking a pinch of snuff from a box on the table.

Six years after completing the Beagle voyage Darwin moved into Down House where he worked on his theory of evolution by natural selection, using data gathered on his voyage of discovery and experiments carried out at Down. By 1844 he had finished a book-length draft of his theory but didn't publish it. Instead he spent the next 15 years gathering evidence to make it watertight.

He also spent them dithering and worrying himself sick. In the room next to the reconstruction of the cabin, an information panel tells us that Darwin was 'one of the most famous invalids of the Victorian era', suffering from an unspecified stomach complaint and plagued by thoughts of his own death.

One explanation for his ill health is that in South America he had been bitten by a Benchuca bug - a specimen is on display - which gave him Chagas disease, a parasitic disease of the intestine. 'The other explanation is that the illness is psychosomatic,' said Cathy.

Darwin knew that when he went public with his theory of evolution, it would be swamped in a tidal wave of scorn and horror. Indeed, when The Origin of Species was finally published in 1859 he described the experience as 'like confessing a murder'.

He feared a pincer movement of criticism - from one side by organised science, from the other by organised religion. And there was real personal anguish involved. As he worked on his theory of evolution during the 1840s, he grew progressively more doubtful of the existence of God - and realised that Emma, a devout believer, was deeply distressed by this. Now wonder, then, that he took shelter: in his billiards room, in studying the minutiae of barnacle and pigeon varieties - and in bouts of hypochondria.

Then, in 1851, his daughter Annie died at the age of 10. 'We have lost the joy of the household, and the solace of our old age,' he wrote. On display is Annie's writing box, which Emma kept till her death in 1896, containing her brooches, a sewing kit, a lock of her hair, and the detailed notes her father kept on her final illness.

Annie's death was a shattering emotional blow - but it was also intellectually liberating. Now when he looked at the natural world he knew beyond doubt that he did not see harmony, which Christianity claimed to see, but struggle and suffering. After Annie's death he stopped attending the village church - and ploughed on with his theory.

When The Origin was first published it was in a modest print-run of 1,250 copies, which sold out immediately. One of those first editions is displayed, with an inscription from Darwin to his close friend, the geologist Charles Lyell.

Reprints swiftly followed, and Charles Darwin achieved fame on a huge scale. Satirists may have delighted in portraying him as an ape but enlightened commentators acknowledged that he had done nothing less than unlock the secret of life. Another 19th century genius, Karl Marx, sent him a copy of the first volume of Das Kapital, signed from 'his sincere admirer'.

The Origin was published in 10 European languages during his lifetime and the famous photograph of Darwin as an austere eminence grise, with a long white beard, went around the world. But the image that visitors to Down House are likely to take away with them is altogether more human and playful than that.

It is of an eccentric figure who was never happier than when obsessing over, and delighting in, apparently insignificant plants and creatures - often abetted by his children. His son Francis recalled 'an air of simpleness, make-shift, and oddness' around his homemade instruments and improvised experiments.

The new exhibition includes the device his son Horace made for measuring the movements of the so-called 'worm stone', a stone disc on the lawn (it's still there) that was raised and lowered by the excavations of worms beneath it. Darwin's investigations into earthworms did not end there.

He kept them in pots in his study where he shone coloured lights on them at night, and he tested their hearing by having his family serenade them - Emma on piano, their children on penny whistle, bassoon and vocal chords (the worms evinced no reaction but, hey, he tried). As he wrote at the end of The Origin of Species, 'There is grandeur in this view of life ... from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved.'

Published in The Daily Telegraph on February 14 2009

Dylan's Village

Wed, 7 Jan 2009 -1:00:00 GMT

We stand on the spot and Terre Grilli holds up a photocopy to compare the scene with the present-day. 'One thing I notice are the trees,' she says. 'There are no trees on the block in '63.' And in place of the blue VW campervan parked on the left is an SUV with blacked-out windows.

It was a snowy day in February, 1963, in the heart of Greenwich Village, New York City. The photographer, Don Hunstein, set up on West 4th Street and shot plum down Jones Street as Bob Dylan and his then girlfriend, Suze Rotolo, walked up the middle of Jones towards the camera. Bob thrust his hands deep in his jeans pockets, Suze clung on to his arm - and the result is one of rock music's most famous album covers.

The photograph on the front of Dylan's second LP, The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan, encapsulates a remarkable time and place. For a period nearly half a century ago this grid of streets, barely a couple of square miles in total, generated a buzz of creative energy that forged Dylan's artistic sensibility. 'The air was bitter cold, always below zero, but the fire in my mind was never out,' he recalls in his memoir, Chronicles.

Greenwich Village - or just The Village - is a different place today and Dylan went west long ago. But the architectural mix of classic tenements and grander, Federal-style townhouses is largely intact. And the spirit of the 'original vagabond' who fetched up here in January 1961, and whose words and music shaped new ways of looking at the modern world, still clings to its fire escapes, and backstreet cobbles, and more outre street characters.

Terre Grilli, a 52-year-old folk music enthusiast, runs guided tours aimed at invoking that spirit. The tours are arranged privately and pretty laid-back, very much in the freewheelin' spirit of those 60s Village days. 'It's kind of a labour of love,' she says. 'We don't advertise. It's for fans.' We meet on Hudson St at West 11th, across the street from the White Horse Tavern. This old longshoremen's dive (the Hudson River is just three blocks west) has an impeccable bohemian pedigree: in the 1950s Dylan Thomas, as well as having his name filched by a young kid in Minnesota called Robert Zimmerman, drank his last at the bar before dying a few days later; Norman Mailer supposedly conceived the radical Village Voice newspaper here; and it was a Beat poet hangout. It was also where Dylan listened to the Clancy Brothers singing 'rousing rebel songs that would lift the roof'.

The White Horse is still gratifyingly grungy, its walls covered in pictures and mementoes of Dylan Thomas. A couple of doors up, a shop sells Dolce and Gabbana handbags for many hundreds of dollars, while a realtor's window on the other side of Hudson St advertises a one-bedroom flat - sorry, 'stunning prewar condo' - for well over a million. The cheap rents and edginess that made the Village a magnet for chancers and dreamers like Dylan disappeared long ago.

It was his former lover, Joan Baez, who called him a vagabond. The word captures the way in which he just turned up in 'the city that would come to shape my destiny' with a readymade back catalogue of tall stories about himself and, in his own assessment, a mind that 'was strong like a trap'.

'You would come to town and try to establish yourself and sleep on floors,' says Terre, leading me round to one of his crash pads, in Perry St. 'You had no money for an apartment.' At 129 Perry - dingy brick, green fire escape - he slept on the floor of Carla Rotolo, Suze's elder sister. Here, as well as meeting Suze, he would plunder Carla's extensive folk record collection for ideas for his first album. 'Carla really big-sistered Bob,' says Terre.

The folk singer Dave Van Ronk, whom Dylan described as 'king of the street', lived several blocks north-east on Waverly Place. Terre indicates number 190, a grey tenement building with a bright orange door. 'Bob has talked about staying on the couch here,' she says. 'Tom Paxton used to come by. And who's observing all this?'

Terre jerks her thumb over her shoulder. 'Behind us at 191 lived [the journalist] Bob Shelton. He was responsible for the New York Times review that catapulted Bob's career.' She opens her ringbinder and flicks to a copy of the review, of a set Bob played at the famous venue, Gerde's Folk City, in September 1961 ('20-year-old singer is bright new face,' runs the headline).

Gerde's no longer exists but plenty of venues from those days do, many of them 'basket houses' where performers passed round a hat. Principal among them is Cafe Wha? on Macdougal St, which Dylan sought out when he first arrived in New York. Here, to an audience of 'lunch-hour secretaries, sailors and tourists' he played harmonica for Freddy Neil, who later wrote Everybody's Talkin', popularised in the film Midnight Cowboy.

'You have to remember,' says Terre, 'the whole of Macdougal was lined with coffeehouses.' At 116, in the basement, was The Gaslight, now a lounge bar called Alibi. 'Hard to believe but this was a premier place to play,' she says.

The Gaslight didn't have a drinks licence so after and inbetween sets they would all pile next door to the Kettle of Fish. The bar is now called the Esperanto Cafe. The hipster geeks sitting at its window tables with their skinny lattes and mint-thin laptops look the same age, 21, as Bob would have been when, in the sweaty basement next door, he first performed A Hard Rain's A-Gonna Fall.

Terre's tour is exhaustive and fascinating - the former Commons coffeehouse in Minetta St where he wrote Blowin' in the Wind; the former residential Hotel Earle where he lived for a while and which Joan Baez, in her bittersweet love song about Dylan, Diamonds and Rust, refers to as 'that crummy hotel over Washington Square'; the magical spot on West 4th where he freewheeled with Suze Rotolo in the snow.

Twelve months after that album cover was shot Dylan had found fame and bust up with Suze, who inspired Tomorrow Is a Long Time. Those halcyon coffeehouse days were over.

He has left no tangible mark on the Village - no plaques, statues or stores selling memorabilia - but that's in keeping with the man. 'Everything was always new, always changing,' he wrote in Chronicles. 'It was never the same crowd upon the streets.'

Published in The Daily Telegraph on January 10 2009

Black America - the invisible story

Sat, 30 Aug 2008 -1:00:00 GMT

It was raining so hard in Savannah, Georgia, that the patrolmen of the Chatham County Sheriff's Department wore plastic covers on their wide-brimmed hats. Noisy cones of white water geysered from sawn-off drainpipes, turning trousers into litmus paper, and the horse-drawn carriages remained stabled all day.

With its 18th-century squares and disconcerting air of England - an England twice filtered, through time and climate, into a tropical Georgiana - Savannah is one of the finest American cities to walk round. Finest cities anywhere to see on foot, come to that. But not today. Today was for indoors.

Off Martin Luther King Jr Boulevard we stumbled into the Ralph Mark Gilbert Civil Rights Museum, shook down our raincoats and requested the restrooms (all that rain). But the WCs weren't marked 'Men' and 'Women'.

The history of black America - for white people at least - has always run on parallel, all-but-invisible tracks to the history promulgated in guidebooks and mainstream museums. Sure, we've heard of Dr King. But when white people come to beautiful Savannah and its Grace Kelly-like sister, Charleston, across the state line in South Carolina, they look for, and are fed, the history and achievements of white people.

These are embodied in the architecture, which is older and better preserved than most British cities. Savannah and Charleston are two of the oldest settlements in the US, founded in 1733 and 1670 respectively. The adventurers who made fortunes here - in many cases on the back of slavery - built big and bold, borrowing from Europe and sticking knobs on: sweeping steps, deep porches, wrought-iron scrollwork and pillars like the Parthenon. There are knot gardens - the one at the Davenport House in Savannah was designed by Penelope Hobhouse - and magnolias, and climate completes the heady effect by draping swooning arms of Spanish moss from branch and balcony.

We loved walking Savannah (the rain let up the next day) and Charleston, spotting, through tropical tangle, the ghostly cousins of a Chelsea mews or a Brighton seafront terrace, reading heritage plaques on re-conditioned facades and visitors' books in hallways that smelled of floor polish. (In the 1980s, at the Green-Meldrin House in Savannah, Mrs Thatcher had signed herself, with uncharacteristic wit, 'A representative of the former colonial power'.)

It's just that in a part of the US with a significant black population, and in a year when the American people may just elect their first African-American as president, it felt timely to discover some neglected narratives and points of view. In the institutionally racist days of the Deep South, for example, when every aspect of life was segregated, from shops to drinking fountains, Savannah had 'one of the most significant and effective civil rights movements in the US,' according to the curator in the civil rights museum, Heru Iman.

'It was the youth here in the 60s who integrated Savannah - sitting in at the lunch counters, demonstrating, kneeling outside white churches praying to be let in,' he told us. Activists fanned out from the basement of the First African Baptist Church in Montgomery Street carrying out 'wade-ins' at whites-only beaches and boycotting racist stores. The civil rights museum features a re-creation of the lunch counter at Levy's department store - a particular target for protestors - in which a white waitress advises a black customer, 'We don't serve your kind here'.

The nerve centre of these protests, the First African Baptist Church, claims to have the oldest black congregation in North America, dating from 1775. The present church was completed in 1859 (having been built at night because during the day the men had to work in the cotton plantations). Our 'conductor' on a tour was a shy and proud young man called Johnnie McDonald.

'Martin Luther King, Jesse Jackson and Coretta Scott King [Dr King's widow] have all preached in that pulpit,' he said. In the balcony he pointed out scratch marks on the ends of some old pews which were built by slaves in the late 1700s. For many years these marks were a puzzle, but it is now thought they may be cursive Hebrew. 'The slaves who came from [West] Africa knew that language,' said Johnnie.

In the basement of the church he indicated a series of holes in the wooden floor and explained that they were part of the 'underground railroad', the network of routes by which runaway slaves were spirited to freedom. 'These are air holes, so they could breathe,' he said. 'There's only four feet of crawling space. You'd crawl from here and exit by the Savannah River [a quarter-mile away].'

There are 36 sets of these holes and they are configured in the same pattern, a combination of cross and diamond which Johnnie described as a 'Congo cosmogram' - another link with the West African ancestry of Savannah's slaves.

That ancestry has survived to a surprising extent in the marshy maze of islands and causeways known as the Lowcountry which separates Savannah from Charleston, 100 miles up the coast. Here many descendants of West African slaves and plantation labourers continue to speak Gullah, which is a mix of English and West African words (the word Gullah is also used to mean the culture of the people who speak it).

On St Helena Island, in the heart of the Lowcountry, is the Penn Center Historic District, a campus of former school buildings where freed slaves once studied and which Martin Luther King used as a retreat in the 1960s. Nearby we ate lunch in a plain shack called Gullah Grub, which serves authentic Lowcountry food - catfish, crab, shrimp - using old African-influenced recipes.

Shrimp gumbo - knocked back with 'swampwater', homemade lemonade served in jam jars - hit the spot and we were soon back on Highway 17 and barrelling into the antique Manhattan that is the Charleston historic district, squeezed between the Cooper and Ashley Rivers.

The rain had passed, leaving bright Fall sunshine on stucco facades and weatherboard porches. The suits of wedding revellers - there were many - left mothball whiffs on the humid air.

It is a beautiful and affluent city even now, but in the 1700s, its golden age of commerce, Charleston was the richest city in the US. It was also the country's biggest slave port and the city's wealthy white merchants used their slaves to copy the imagined lifestyles of English aristocrats.

One of the architectural highlights of Charleston is the Aiken-Rhett House, a vast antebellum confection of pillared porches that was once the home of William Aiken, a rice planter. The house has scarcely changed since 1858, which means that the slave quarters, a handful of cubicle rooms situated above kitchen and stables, are intact.

The family owned 800 slaves, of whom between ten and 20 worked and lived in the house (these included one Dorcas Richardson, her husband and five children). In the vast living rooms of the house, there were ciphers of bygone ways of thinking and behaving: a leatherbound set of Sir Walter Scott's Waverley novels in the library; a harp standing in the middle of the old ballroom, whose red fabric wallpaper had faded to the colour of dried blood.

These southern ways were not to last. 'Blacks knew that once the [civil] war started, they were on their way to freedom,' said Al Miller into the microphone of his minibus. Al, smartly turned out in checked linen trousers and white shirt, runs Sites and Insights Tours around the Charleston area, acquainting black visitors with the often invisible history of their people. As the only whites on his minibus tour, we were swept up in this different perspective.

First he drove us south-west, off the historic peninsula, to James Island. 'During slavery there were over 20 plantations here,' he said. We passed the Macleod Plantation where the wooden, white-painted slave quarters, standing on brick stilts, have been preserved. Here slaves grew sea-island cotton, indigo, okra and sweet potatoes and lived on grits, shrimp and gravy.

'It was the black people's dish, the poor people's dish,' said Al. 'You ever paid and arm and a leg for it?' The rest of the bus shook their heads and laughed in agreement.

In the early 1930s George Gershwin spent time on James Island, absorbing a history and atmosphere that inspired him to write Porgy and Bess. His folk opera, featuring Summertime and It Ain't Necessarily So, was based on the novel Porgy by the Charleston writer, DuBose Heyward.

Driving past the old plantations - avenues of live oak trees mark where the driveways were - Al got the bus rocking and clapping by enacting the Porgy and Bess story in a kind of baritone rap: 'Here comes Bess/ a slut in a red dress/ She was selling holy dust which was like cocaine/ She kept it in her girdle, she kept her money in her bosom/ She was not well liked...'

We got off the bus at James Island Presbyterian Church, where there are two cemeteries - one for black folk, one for white - separated by shrubbery. 'It's like day and night,' said Al. In the black section is the grave of Samuel Smalls, 'the goat man', upon whom DuBose Heyward based the character of Porgy. In honour of Gershwin's Jewishness, visitors had placed stones on the top of Smalls's headstone.

'A lot of Gullah cheechee [people] are superstitious when it comes to cemeteries,' said Al. 'If you point your finger at a tombstone, it will rot off. Don't bring cemetery dirt into your car on your shoes. Where did these things come from? Africa.'

Back on the historic peninsula, we cruised the golden streets. But Al screened out the antebellum and Greek revival mansions, the city's architectural setpieces, pointing out instead the alleys, lanes and courts once lived in by poor blacks. We passed 78 Church St, where Heyward was living when he wrote Porgy, and Catfish Row, which features in the novel and opera and would now fit seamlessly into a discreet corner of Knightsbridge.

'Once this was a rundown slum area,' said Al. 'Catfish Row was a black tenement. Especially when Porgy was written. Not any more.'

As he drove, Al told us things that white people would rather not hear or think about. 'The average black man sold for between 800 and 1,200 dollars, which was a lot of money,' he said. 'Women were made to have 10 or 15 children. They were made to have sex blindfold by the slave owners and had multiple partners.'

One of our last ports of call was in Franklin Street where we paused outside the site of the Jenkins Orphanage. Here, in the 1920s, the resident band drew on Gullah rhythms and dance steps to invent the ragtime tune and dance craze that became known as The Charleston.

A plaque on the wall marks the site of the orphanage but doesn't mention The Charleston, let alone make Al Miller's point that 'they started it here. The white folk just stole it from us.'

Published in The Daily Telegraph on August 27 2008

Eco-lodge versus loggers

Fri, 15 Aug 2008 -1:00:00 GMT

The viewing tower pierced the rainforest canopy. Standing foursquare on its wobbly top deck, some 30 feet above the billowing florets, I felt as if I was clinging to a rock in a milky-green ocean. From all around came the suggestive whistles of canopy birds: circular saws, beery whoops, novelty ringtones, life-support machines, and an infectious rippling murmur like funeral ululations. Fabiano Oliveira, a 27-year-old Brazilian biologist, tapped his ear.

'An Amazonian pygmy owl is calling right now,' he whispered. He listened again: 'A yellow-rumped cacique and it is mimicking the voices of several other birds'. Then he fixed his scope on a red dot among the motionless green waves and invited me to look. 'Red-fan parrot. A unique species. No relatives.'

The 150ft-high galvanised steel tower is in the forest reserve surrounding Cristalino Jungle Lodge in the Brazilian state of Mato Grosso. Cristalino is a modestly-sized ecotourism project with an international reputation. More than five hundred bird species have been spotted here (and new ones are being discovered all the time, most recently a type of hermit hummingbird), making it 'the number one place in the whole of the Brazilian Amazon for birdwatching,' according to Fabiano.

As dusk fell, the sky was turning the palest lilac, the trees were becoming silhouettes. The soundscape - cicadas and distant river rapids as well as bird calls - seemed infinite, all-enveloping. There was no man-made noise (bar appreciative sighs and gasps from our five-strong group of English and Italians). No cars, planes, sirens, i-Pod hiss. The oceanic rainforest canopy looked and felt as if it went on forever. But that was an illusion.

'From here to the north, the Amazon is in pretty good shape,' said Fabiano, whose cheery demeanour disguised great passion for the rainforest. 'But to the south...' He pointed the other way across the darkening treetops. 'This is the 'arc of deforestation'. Here in Mato Grosso you are in the place that cuts the most trees on the whole planet.' He shook his head at the continuing destruction of so much primary rainforest by ranchers, loggers and soya bean growers

Visitors to Cristalino - almost exclusively Europeans and Americans - witness the extent of the destruction for themselves in the course of journeys here that entail several flights, 50 minutes by road and a half-hour boat trip (the irony of burning so much fuel in order to support eco-tourism projects such as this was a topic of uneasy conversation among guests).

On the second of two domestic flights from the Brazilian capital, Sao Paulo, I flew over many thousand acres of denuded rainforest, the land looking like scooped and scraped avocado skin. Some logging is deemed 'properly sustainable' and thus legal; much isn't. But in any case, the lines between the two are fluid and corruptible.

From the frontier town of Alta Floresta (next stop Amazonia), where hoardings advertise hardwood flooring and decking, the Cristalino minibus slalomed along red-dirt roads, past timber yards and sawmills and freshly cleared forest, the ravaged earth pimpled with termite mounds. At one point we were almost driven off the road by a gigantic Mercedes truck hauling a load of freshly cut logs.

The symbolism of this encounter was inescapable. As one Brazil-based conservationist, who wished to remain anonymous, said to me, 'A soy farmer [or logger] controlling as much land is probably making 20 times what an eco-lodge can make.'

The announcement in August 2008 that the Brazilian government is inviting foreign states to contribute to a conservation fund for the Amazon is a welcome but belated acknowledgement of the acuity of the problem. The goal is to raise more than �10 billion by 2021 to promote alternatives to cutting down trees and planting crops for biofuels.

Cristalino has been valiantly fighting this battle for more than a decade. It is the property, and brainchild, of Vitoria Da Riva Carvalho, who has dedicated her life to saving her own neck of the woods. 'Cristalino Lodge started [in 1997] all this movement of conservation in the area,' she told me. 'I feel very proud of that. We were like a candle in the dark, as I like to say.'

As the President of the Cristalino Ecological Foundation she is campaigning 'to form a corridor of protected areas' across the southern side of the Brazilian Amazon. The plan is to link her lands with tracts owned by indigenous peoples and the military to create a buffer zone of millions of acres of untouchable rainforest, thus halting the northward spread of deforestation. 'If we don't have this corridor we will not have success,' she said simply.

Cristalino Jungle Lodge occupies just 1,730 acres of primary rainforest (that is to say, the trees have never been felled) in a bend of the Rio Cristalino, whose waters find their way, via various other rivers, 600 miles north to the mighty Amazon itself. Set amid palms and banana groves are 12 bungalows - built of sustainable hardwood, to a chic spec - which attract an international crowd of dedicated birders and eco-tourists.

During my visit these included Bob and Nancy, from Florida ('We live on a bayou. A manatee gave birth to twins right next to our dock'), Stefano and Arianna from Florence, and Tracey and Richard from Hampshire.

Over a buffet lunch of baked aubergine and rice in the communal dining room we acknowledged the thumping carbon footprints we had made in getting here. 'Do I feel guilty?' said Tracey. 'Not really. At home we look after our own back yard, so when we're on holiday we like to look at other people's back yards.'

Tracey's husband, Richard, is a warden on a nature reserve. At weekends he and Tracey do volunteer conservation work or lead birdwatching trips around Britain. At Cristalino they were very generous with both their knowledge and their binoculars, acting as auxiliary guides on various rainforest and river excursions with the excellent Fabiano on which we spotted tapir, capybara and caiman as well as enjoying the astonishing biodiversity of birds.

Each day we started at dawn to beat the enervating daytime heat. On the first morning we walked the Brazil Nut Trail, named after the 150ft-high Brazil nut trees that are found here. The light is flat, impassive, on the rainforest floor - except for the dazzling play of sunlight. The morning sun filtered down in random blobs and streaks, burnishing branch and frond and leaf litter as if the tree canopy had been cropsprayed with saffron. Every so often, a cannonball-sized brazil nut crashed to the ground, splintering the undergrowth as it fell.

A vibration by my ear: I turned in time to see a hummingbird stop-starting through the air like a tiny, iridescently besuited spaceman propelled by a jetpack. Every second of the way there was something like this, something marvellous.

The syncopated flight patterns of butterflies had something in common with freeform jazz. Seedpods shaped like dugout canoes were miracles of micro-engineering, containing circular seeds with transparent wings. From aerodynamic seeds to giant trees, the fragile interrelatedness of things within primary rainforest struck me with an almost religious force. It was only then, standing in that strange submarine light, that I grasped just how vandalistic and undoable deforestation is.

It was on the final evening that we climbed the viewing tower. Watching dusk fall over the Amazon was an enchanting experience, until the conversation turned to the future. Trying to sound positive, Fabiano pointed out that despite continuing deforestation 84 per cent of the Amazonian rainforest in Brazil remains intact. 'And in 2006 the rate of deforestation reduced for the first time in six years.'

So was he optimistic? Brazil has in place 'highly sophisticated wildlife and environmental laws,' he said. 'But in developed countries you have no idea of the problems we have. Change takes time.'

At this point, with the dying sun slipping from view in the dry-season haze while a threequarter moon climbed the eastern sky, there was a squall of activity in the rainforest canopy below our feet. Starfish limbs, a compact, irate face peering up. It was a male spider monkey, checking out the trespassers in his back yard.

Published in The Daily Telegraph on August 15 2008

Walking with the Bedouin

Sat, 17 May 2008 -1:00:00 GMT

Carolyn, from Clapham, south London, had the decorators in. 'Blinds, not shutters,' she said firmly into her mobile, 'it's most important.' Then she folded her phone - the last time it would receive a signal for several days - and raised her eyes to the encircling pink mountains.

One of these peaks is the Biblical Mount Horeb (now called Mount Sinai), where Moses received the Ten Commandments. We had travelled to the heart of the high mountain area of South Sinai in Egypt and were about to trek up on to its giddy trails. It is exhilarating terrain: summits of more than 6,000ft, bone-dry river gullies, blinding sun and chilling shadow.

And it struck me then, as I slipped my Motorola to the bottom of the rucksack and slapped on the factor 50, that we were merely doing what hermits and mystics have done here since the 4th century AD: forgo the known for the unknown. In the case of this group of seven women - plus four ancillary males, counting me - the known happened to be the posher postcodes of SW London.

Aged mid-40s to mid-50s, this loose grouping of girlfriends included a physiotherapist, a business consultant, a charity fundraiser and an interior designer. For the next five days they would be swapping school runs and competitive theatre-going for that unique blend of physical exhaustion and interesting mental perspectives that only mountain trekking can bring on.

Guiding our way through this wilderness were two English-speaking Bedouin from the local tribe, 27-year-old Salama - smart and funny, with 'eyelashes to die for' (observed Tess) - and the laconic and dependable Hosein, in his early 40s. Seven Bedouin tribes - some 7,000 people - live in or near this region of the South Sinai, which was designated a 'protectorate' in 1996. Salama and Hosein belong to the 3,000-strong Jebaliya tribe, who live in and around the mountain village of St Katherine where we were now stamping our booted feet.

The Jebaliya are, or at least were, 'pastoral nomadics' - every summer they would take off for the high pastures with their animals, moving from valley to valley. But for many years they have been rooted in St Katherine eking a living from tourism and and living in stone houses.

These treks with Westerners are a chance for the Bedouin guides to rehearse their old ways and rhythms, and they were to be closely observed by the third man in the group. Steffen Strohmenger is an Arabic-speaking anthropologist from Berlin University currently living in Cairo and studying the Bedouin. He is also the representative of the small travel company through which the group had booked the trek in the UK.

Bedouin Paths - which was set up by an Englishman, Mark Knutton, in September 2007 - diverts a fifth of the cost of these treks to projects that benefit the Bedouin (at the moment the money is paying for an English teacher who has 40 pupils aged from six to 16). Our base in St Katherine was the camp owned by Sheikh Mousa and his son, Sala, who organise all the trekking in this area. As we waited to move on that first morning Sala said, 'When I walk in the mountains I feel like I clean my mind,' and made a scrubbing motion of his skull. The idea of Bedouin Paths is that while benefitting from this psychic detox we give something back to the people who make it possible.

So, after valedictory visits to a proper toilet, our crocodile of breathable fabrics pulled out of town and up into a landscape that repaid careful reading. At first the mountains seemed merely pink and dusty, like an old lady's face powder. Light glittered harshly from oblique planes of rock. But soon the eye saw other colours, and pattern - black lava fields, green seams of copper ore, custard-yellow cliffs honeycombed by ancient seas and daily winds. Silver quartz bulged like pie filling from a terracotta boulder.

Ominously, the trail was scattered with the severed legs and bleached bones of donkeys and goats, which seemed to emphasise just how lifeless and alien this arid environment is. Another illusion: for then we noticed the shoots on an apparently dead shrub, came across a blossoming tree in the midst of seeming barrenness, its roots foraging far for water. And the secret of the mountains, and the people who call them home, was finally revealed: orchard gardens.

The Jebaliya tribe claims a unique descent, from 200 families sent here by the Roman Emperor Justianian in the sixth century AD from Alexandria and Macedonia. Their job was to serve and defend St Katherine's Monastery, which still stands near modern-day St Katherine on the spot where Moses was addressed by the Burning Bush. From the monks of the monastery, the Jebaliya learned how to cultivate mountain gardens.

Dotted through the ravines and crevasses surrounding St Katherine are walled splashes of green and - in March, when we visited - frothy almond and fruit blossom. The increasingly precious commodity of water is drawn from deep wells and brought down from mountain springs in plastic pipes to irrigate orchards of peaches, apricots, mulberries, almonds, figs, quince, and a dispensary of herbs.

'These gardens have been here hundreds of years,' a visiting charity worker called Susie Drummond told me. I met her at our lunch stop on the first day: the orchard of Salama's uncle, Oda, which appeared miraculously through the rocks. Susie works for the Makhad Trust, based in Cheltenham, which is helping to restore these mountain gardens by extending the depth of wells to keep pace with the rapidly dropping water table.

'The older men grew up in the gardens and they feel terrible when the trees die,' she said as we ate almonds and drank oregano and mint tea amid a nimbus of blossom. 'They feel exhausted with the struggle to get water.' Alongside us, Oda, in his tribal lavender headdress, crouched happily over a smoke-blackened kettle perched on the fire.

We all loved these garden lunches, with their lashings of delicious oily houmous and feta, fire-baked bread and gallons of herb tea from those bottomless kettles. In fact the entire group, men and women, gelled effortlessly and no one complained about the hardships of the trail, even though we walked a good nine hours a day and some of the boulder-scrambling was challenging to both fingernails and geometry (one passage involved ascending through a corkscrew-shaped rock chimney).

Over the days the group's conversations ranged across reading groups, children's gap year adventures, good schools, bad yoga teachers, why women wear bowler hats in Peru and the formula for prolonging the wearability of knickers ('Inside! Outside! Back to front!'). Just occasionally the mix would be salted with the darker subjects of betrayal and divorce.

And sometimes Salama (rallying catchphrase: 'Good, very good. Number one!') would command us to three minutes' silence in order to appreciate a vista of rocky summits, or the snowy white sandfalls that flow like glaciers from the red-rock ravines. In these moments I always expected to hear voices from the valley below, or goatbells. But there was only ever the wind, or a trickle of water. Once I watched a small lizard pass soundlessly by my dusty boots.

Camp was just a garden, where we chose our own sandy shelf on which to throw a sleeping bag and the Bedouin guys - the camel drivers whose beasts transported our gear, as well as Salama and Hosein - were at their happiest, sitting round the fire drinking tea, cooking chicken and rice and making bread under the stars.

Just once we slept indoors, at the Al Karm Eco-Lodge, a minimalistically stylish place in a remote valley, designed by a French architect and built on the ruins of an old Bedouin settlement. It opened in 2003 and receives a mere 150 tourists a year, a scandalous waste of a beautiful place.

Here, sitting around the camp fire, Salama pointed to the starry night sky: 'Small Bear. Seven Sisters. You see? The Bedouin used to tell the month by Seven Sisters. Some months it doesn't appear till two or three o'clock in the morning.' And that set Hosein off talking of the good old summer days, when the men and boys took off to the high mountain valleys with their camels.

The last time had been 30 years ago, when he was 12. They drank camel's milk, which tasted nothing like camel's milk today: it was lent a fragrance by all the mountain herbs they ate. And this got him on to potatoes, how you could once smell a spud from 10 metres but now you have to bring them right up to your nose to smell anything at all. (Hosein, I realised, is a Grumpy Old Man.)

This trek was as much about people as about landscape. One evening Steffen asked me if I found the Bedouin 'near or far away'. It was an interestingly phrased question, and by the end of the trek - actually before the end - I had my answer: 'Near'. For the strange thing about this coming together of such disparate groupings - affluent, urban Westerners and materially poor mountain nomads - was that the barrier between us was flimsy.

The Bedouin, reckoned Steffen the anthropologist, were not like 'the Egyptians', who tend to have a confused attitude to Westerners. Salama and Hosein did not begrudge us our salaries or lifestyles. 'For me,' said Steffen, 'the most relaxing thing is to meet people who are not restless and confused. They want to be nothing else but what they are.'

This is not easy in present-day Egypt, where the Bedouin are looked down upon by the rest of the population, and routinely persecuted by the authorities, who accuse them of drug-running and general criminality. When I asked Salama how the Bedouin differ from 'Egyptians' he said, 'We have more tenderness.'

They even kiss their camels, and are considerate to the mountains' other life forms. It was Hosein's soft-heartedness that was responsible for the most dramatic moment of the trek, when we were awoken in the middle of the night by a bloodcurdling racket of snarling and howling and in our padded sacks felt as vulnerable as Moses in his basket.

Hyenas, we speculated over morning tea, or wolves. Or even leopard (there have been unconfirmed sightings). 'Foxes,' said Hosein matter-of-factly. 'I put out the chicken bones for them.'

'Foxes?' said Carolyn, burrowing out of her sleeping bag. 'We have those in Clapham.'

Published in The Daily Telegraph on May 17, 2008

Unmasking the Ripper myth

Sat, 17 May 2008 -1:00:00 GMT

It is a repulsive and fascinating item and true obsessives will make a beeline for it. 'This is the original 'Dear Boss' letter,' confirmed Julia Hoffbrand, the curator of a new exhibition dedicated to Jack the Ripper. The letter marks the point in the Ripper story at which reality turned into myth.

It was sent to the head of a London news agency on September 25, 1888 following the murders of three women in a month in the East End. Written in red ink, it starts 'Dear Boss', warns that 'I am down on whores and I shunt [sic] quit ripping them till I do get buckled' and is signed, 'Yours truly, Jack the Ripper'.

This was the first time the name had been used and it was swiftly adopted and ascribed to the unidentified serial killer who committed savage murders of women (the exact number remains, like so much, a matter of speculation) in Whitechapel and Spitalfelds a decade or so before the turn of the 20th century. Since then the name and his deeds have developed into a bloated myth which this excellent exhibition at Museum Docklands - barely a hansom cab ride from the Ripper's killing fields - aims to expose and dissect.

It seems amazing, given the continuing and frenzied industry in books and films about Jack the Ripper, that this should be the first ever serious exhibition on the subject. But, discounting waxworks and other horror tableaux, it is indeed the first time that Ripper-related artefacts - more than 200, many original and not seen by the public before - have been brought together in a rigorous context.

Scrupulously avoiding any whiff of sensationalism (even if some of the marketing is of questionable taste), the exhibition steers a consistently thought-provoking line. 'What's different here is that we are looking beyond the murders to the world in which they took place,' said Julia Hoffbrand. 'What they can tell us about London and life at the time.' She and her team are also anxious to give the story back to its rightful owners - the women who were murdered.

'Usually they are bandied around as foils to Jack the Ripper himself,' she said. 'In the exhibition we've always referred to the murdered women by their names.'

The bare facts are that between April, 1888 and February, 1891, 11 murders were investigated that may or may not have been committed by one man, Jack the Ripper. Within those 11, five are regarded by 'Ripperologists' - the fanatics who continue to speculate on the Ripper's identity and to fuel the myth - as 'canonical'.

By this they mean that these murders in particular bear unmistakable Ripper hallmarks, but Julia Hoffbrand finds the word canonical distasteful. 'It is not historically appropriate,' she said. Neither is she impressed by the undoubted 'iconic' status of the red-ink letter in which the name Jack the Ripper was first used - and not just because it could well have been a hoax.

'The 'Dear Boss' letter is iconic,' she conceded. 'Whereas the police reports aren't as sought-after. But for me as a curator, when you read the documents it becomes real. It wasn't a game - which Jack the Ripper has turned into. A game, a myth.'

The exhibition debunks that myth, relating the story murder by murder and placing it in a series of contexts. By a coincidence that no doubt boosted the myth, the Ripper killings happened at a time of growing public interest in both the criminal mind and the possible means of understanding and thwarting it.

In 1887, the year before the killings started, the first Sherlock Holmes story had been published, and during 1888, when most of the murders took place, a stage adaptation of RL Stevenson's Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde was playing in the West End. The exhibition features a double-exposure photograph of the actor Richard Mansfield, playing both the good doctor and his malevolent alter ego.

At the same time social reformers and journalists were beginning to realise that the land that lay immediately to the east of the great City of London was an affront to the world's most powerful nation. The publicity surrounding the Ripper case was to expose once and for all the reality of one of Britain's darkest corners..

The few square miles of Whitechapel and Spitalfields in which the killings took place were a maze of back alleys, courtyards and common lodging houses haunted by the desperately poor and vulnerable. The infant mortality rate was 20 per cent and alcoholism and prostitution - all the Ripper's victims were alcoholics and prostitutes - were a way of life.

One of the highlights of the exhibition is the 'poverty map' of London - compiled by the social scientist, Charles Booth, and first published in 1889 - on which streets and neighbourhoods are coloured according to the wealth of the people who lived there. 'It goes from yellow, which is very wealthy' - Julia pointed to the West End - 'to dark blue and black, the very poorest.'

And now her finger hovered over the dark shaded areas to the north and south of Whitechapel Road, representing what she called 'the abyss'. Its denizens are captured in a series of photographs never seen before. Retrieved from the archives of the Museum of London - of which Museum Docklands is an offshoot - they show streets and back alleys peopled by defiant, proud, sometimes downtrodden looking women in threadbare bonnets and shawls. 'Somebody could have murdered any one of these women,' said Julia.

The press cut its red-top teeth on the Ripper murders, revelling in details that today's tabloids would not be allowed to publish. The Birmingham Daily Post reporting on the killing of Mary Ann Nichols, gloated that 'The throat was gashed in two cuts, penetrating from the front of the neck to the vertebrae.'

The original police reports, written in black ink on yellowing official forms, are no less chilling for being drily written. Detailing the death of Mary Ann, Inspector John Spratling noted that '[the doctor] arrived quickly and pronounced life to be extinct ... she had been disembowelled.'

The final part of the exhibition consists of an oval gallery with white walls into which are recessed a series of postcard-sized photographs. A notice warns that the images are of 'a distressing nature'. Here, finally, we see photographs of the women murdered by the man known as Jack the Ripper. Needless to say, no one took these women's photographs while they were alive. These are police pictures taken in death.

'When you see these images, you see what this is about,' said Julia. 'These are real women and their lives were cut short and this is what's important. There's nothing glamorous about Jack the Ripper and there's nothing glamorous about what happened. I hope people will leave contemplating that.'

My route home from this brilliant exhibition took me through Whitechapel so I decided to visit Mitre Square, where the body of Catherine Eddowes was found in the early hours of September 30, 1888 with a pawnbroker's ticket in her pocket. The old buildings have been replaced by modern offices but the square is still cobbled, and towering over it is the glass skin of the office block known as The Gherkin.

I sat on a bench and studied a copy of the original police map of the murder, trying to orientate myself. And a shudder ran through me as I worked out I was sitting on the very spot where Catherine was found.

Published in The Daily Telegraph on May 17, 2008

Iran through the needle's eye

Sun, 6 Apr 2008 -1:00:00 GMT

The flight landed in Tehran early in the morning. Those first few hours were fluidly dream-like, setting the tone for the rest of the trip. I slid through immigration, with a stamp for my passport and a smile for me, then Mr Sassan - my fixer, minder and joker on this ten-day journey through Iran - scooped me up and tore me round his sprawling, honking, snow-bound capital.

Mr Sassan had the craggy good looks of a veteran film actor and wore a New York Yankees beanie hat he said he had found somewhere. In the National Museum, in front of a wall-mounted, papier mache model of Iran, he used a pointer like a snooker cue to indicate regions and give a potted history lesson. 'The English play devil face,' he said with a twinkle in reference to some suave political sleight committed by my colonial forebears. As we drove past the British embassy he said cheerily, 'This is where we throw friendly stones. For instance, when your queen knighted Salman Rushdie.'

Mid-morning, our feet touched ground in Naderi Cafe 'where the intellectuals and freedom thinkers come.' The pot of tea came with a slice each of fruit cake, daintily served with a miniature fork and spoon. 'Shall I be the mother?' said Mr Sassan, pouring the tea. Then he noticed a man with extravagantly quiffed hair sharing a joke with a waiter. 'See that man with the dead cat on his head?' he whispered, and launched into a story, the first of many. This is the story of a journey laid end to end with stories.

The biggest of all is the story we think we know about Iran: hotbed of religious zealotry, hater of the west, sponsor of terrorism, and so on. This precis prevents more than about 5,000 British tourists going there each year but it bears little relation to the reality. What I found, on a winter journey that took me from the sweet orange blossom of the south to the frozen waterfalls of the north, was a subtle and improbable place, with a hatful of world-class historical and architectural sites and politely curious people. Though the authorities keep an eye on foreigners at all times - which can feel uncomfortable - I felt completely safe, which is more than I feel on an English high street on a Friday night.

In my backpack - and frequently cross-referenced - were the accounts of two previous English visitors to Iran: The Road to Oxiana by Robert Byron (early 1930s) and Mirrors of the Unseen by Jason Elliot, first published last year and surely destined to be as highly regarded as the Byron.

Mr Sassan, in addition to his fund of stories, carried with him a bottomless supply of analogies. 'We are flying from Paris to Nice,' he said over tea. 'Nine hundred kilometers.' He meant Tehran to Shiraz. And leaving the intellectuals and the stuntman - the one with the hair - to it we dashed for the domestic airport for the afternoon flight to the desert south, forsaking smog and snow for brilliant winter sunshine.

Every town in Iran is known for something: for making mullahs' robes, or tents, or mattresses, for growing pomegranates, or sweet lemons the size of cricket balls; or, apocryphally, for dishonesty, sexual potency or, even, in the case of the northern city of Qazvin, for homosexuality ('Don't bend over,' Mr Sassan warned me, with a lot of camp mugging, when we arrived there later in the trip). Shiraz is the city of poetry.

Born in Shiraz in the 14th century, the poet known as Hafez is the Shakespeare of Iran, his work quoted and consulted, in soothsaying fashion. His tomb in Shiraz is a site of pilgrimage. At the entrance gate, amid a crush of vehicles, an albino man sold me a card bearing a Hofez homily in Farsi which Mr Sassan translated: 'Some people are very jealous of you. Please pray for them.'

Inside, I found a spectacle for which I had no ready comparison in my own culture. The gardens surrounding the marble-topped tomb swirled with mooning youths in multicoloured scarves clutching volumes of Hofez's works. 'They close their eyes and make a wish,' said Mr Sassan. And having made the wish, they open a page at random and read from it, divining the future in Hofez's words. Mr Sassan grabbed a book from one young man - who smiled at such affrontery - and read out, 'I am a patient looking for the medicine. And you are the medicine.'

The following morning our estimable driver, Morteza, drove us north-east from Shiraz to Persepolis, the showcase and soul of the First Persian Empire. Mr Sassan's history briefs were succinct and memorable. 'Triple five BC we establish an empire,' he said, meaning that of the Achaemenid dynasty. 'Triple three, it was gone' - at the hands of Alexander the Great, who burned Persepolis to the ground.

For the next 2,300 years its pillars, friezes and fantastical stone carvings, spread over a stone platform the size of several mainline railway termini, remained silted up with sand. 'They used to call it City of the Minarets,' said Mr Sassan, 'because all you could see were the pillars.'

Twentieth-century excavations unearthed the full scale and beauty of the place - and a taxonomy of exotic stone creatures, from the two-headed gryphon (used for the logo of Iran Air) to the pair of composite animals guarding the entrance gate which have the body of a bull, the wings of an eagle and the head of a bearded man.

Bar a trickle of tourists from Hong Kong, who took photographs and left, and a narrow-skulled white cat, I had Persepolis to myself; passed alone and unremarked among the forests of pillars which invite the eye to pole-vault into the blue; was sole observer of the eternal struggle between lion and bull, depicted time and again on friezes throughout the sacked and humbled city.

Humanity breathes from the old stones of Persepolis. Fifty miles north-east along Highway 65, there is an ancient site that exudes only desolation. Pasargadae was built before Persepolis by Cyrus the Great, the most revered of Persia's ancient kings. Its straggling ruins stand on a vast plain surrounded by an inner circle of hills, and an outer embrace of snowy mountain peaks.

The gardens and lakes which made this a paradise on earth have turned to rust-coloured scrub. The wind moans through telegraph wires. On the king's tomb, covered in scaffolding when I was there, the inscription reads: 'Oh man, I am Cyrus who founded the empire of the Persians and was the king of Asia. Grudge me therefore not this monument.'

On the far side of the tomb are the remains of a concrete platform where, in 1971, the last Shah of Persia, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, made a hubristic speech comparing himself to the great king. 'Cyrus the Great you are asleep,' declaimed Mr Sassan, imitating the Shah. 'I am your son and I am awake.' (Later, in a pizza parlour in Esfahan, a man repeated this story and linked it to an obscene, unrepeatable joke about Ayatollah Khomeini, the cleric who returned from exile eight years later to replace the ousted Shah.)

'Bale,' said Mr Sassan - 'Fine, good': a version of the Spanish Vale - and invited me to return to the little silver Peugeot, for we had yet a long journey that day, past pisctachio orchards and through lilac-pale snowy mountains, to the city of Yazd.

It was in Yazd - with its strange wind towers and subterranean water courses, designed to neutralise the fierce desert climate - that I made a discovery about Mr Sassan. He knows everyone in Iran. For everywhere we went he ran into a long-lost friend and they would proceed to embrace, swap (doubtless) ribald banter and roar with laughter.

Iranian streets are not like our streets, where we ignore strangers, and hurry, and are often fearful. Here people stop and talk, often to strangers, and a Western face was sufficient of a novelty that if I stood still a friendly crowd would gather, full of questions.

On a street in Yazd a passing soldier spoke to me from the corner of his mouth: 'Welcome to Iran mister.' And in the Yazd Cotton Scarf and Shawl shop, next to the mosque, I had an unusual encounter with a young woman.

In public women are unlikely to even look a male foreigner in the eye, let alone shake their hand - though in private it is '180 degrees different,' as a Tehrani friend put it. In that shop in Yazd a fashion student called Safieh sold me two scarves and told me she would like to go to London but, being single, has had difficulty getting a visa.

'Do you have a solution?' she said, batting her eyelashes. And when I asked if I could take her photograph (usually another strict no-no), she replied archly, 'On one condition...', before posing for my camera.

Despite such spontaneity and friendliness, Westerners are watched - the authorities would say, for their own safety - and there is no ignoring the fact that one is in a country ruled by a repressive theocracy: giant billboards of Khomeini, Khamenei and 'the martyrs of the revolution' - meaning those who died in the Iran-Iraq War - are everywhere. Television channels are clogged with dreary propaganda and English language newspapers have headlines of the 'Iran breaks oil output record' variety.

This version of the country was at odds with the way it felt at street level. My friend in the Esfahani pizza parlour - who had earlier asked if one million dollars would be sufficient to secure citizenship of the UK - summed up this duality with a gnomic utterance (or I think he did). 'This is why we call Iran the country of the needle-hole and the gate,' he said. 'Sometimes it is easy to go through the needle-hole. Sometimes it is hard to go through the gate.'

The eye of the needle is always the more interesting portal. On my first afternoon in Esfahan, a streetwise-looking guy homed in on me outside the Iman Mosque in Iman Square and asked me where I was from. When I told him he said, 'Do you know Jason Elliot?'

I laughed, producing Elliot's book as if it were a white rabbit from my backpack, and the man said, 'I am in it. Page 302. I am Zizou.' He was indeed the 'wiry, keen-eyed young man from Luristan' with whom Elliot discusses the geometry and asymmetry of Iman Square, one of the most beautiful public spaces in the world.

The pedestrianised square, with its pools and fountains, picknicking families and excitable school groups, is graced by some of the Islamic world's finest architecture of which the greatest is the small, exquisite Sheikh Lotfollah Mosque on the eastern side. 'I have never encountered splendour of this kind before,' wrote Robert Byron in The Road to Oxiana before declaring this early 17th-century building to be even more splendid than Versailles, the Doge's Palace in Venice or St Peter's in Rome.

When I walked in under the tiled and shimmering dome I realised what he meant. The space is lanced with light pouring from the lacy windows, seems buoyed up and half-built with the stuff. The play of light on tile swirls and mesmerises. After gazing for many minutes I realised, when I saw my breath condensing, that it was freezing in here. I hadn't noticed.

My last day in Iran coincided with the annual commemoration of the Islamic Revolution which brought Khomeini to power in 1979. Many thousands, perhaps a million or more, people took to the streets of Tehran. Others, up in the affluent north of the city, ignored the occasion, choosing instead to go hiking in the mountains or to picnic in the snowbound parks.

I did both, starting with the demo. 'Nuclear power is our right!' they chanted in Farsi. 'Down with USA, down with Israel!' and, 'Oh Muslims reunited, it is a shame to be oppressed!' There was a holiday atmosphere. I was handed free tea and a slice of cake. A woman tapped me on the arm and invited me to take a photograph of her daughter, whose face was made up to look like pussycat and who carried a poster of Ayatollah Khomeini. As we returned to the car an old lady with a walking stick eyed me shrewdly and then spoke - with a smile, not remotely hectoring. Mr Sassan translated: 'She says, 'Go and tell your nation what is happening here'.' I nodded that I would.

Published in The Daily Telegraph on April 12, 2008

Civil war and civil rights

Fri, 28 Mar 2008 -1:00:00 GMT

The concierge in the Sheraton Hotel in Atlanta, Georgia, wasn't happy about us walking to Auburn Avenue, less than a mile away. 'It's not a nice area,' he said, recommending a taxi. Under the Atlanta Expressway we hurried, and were duly accosted - by a tiny old lady in sunhat and popsocks, sitting at a bus stop. 'Good mornin',' she said. 'Y'all have a great day now.'

Not a nice area? This eastern neighbourhood of Downtown Atlanta, known as the Old Fourth Ward, just happens to have produced two of the great figures of modern American history. Born in 1900, Margaret Mitchell, the author of Gone With the Wind, grew up at 179 Jackson Street. In 1929, round the corner in Auburn Avenue, Dr Martin Luther King Jr was born at number 501, his father shouting 'Hallelujah!' as he came into the world.

It feels incongruous to put them in the same paragraph: the black civil rights activist who was assassinated by a white racist in 1968, and the white author of a novel in which black Americans are depicted in ways that make us wince today. You would be forgiven for thinking their association begins and ends with an accident of birthplace, but you would be wrong. The lives of Dr King and Margaret Mitchell were to intersect most improbably and controversially.

The Auburn Avenue area, now known as the Martin Luther King Jr National Historic Site or, more succinctly, 'Sweet Auburn', consists principally of a visitor centre, Dr King's tomb and his 'birth home'. Back in the early 1930s it was a respectable, deeply religious black neighbourhood in which crime was low and folk relaxed in wicker swings on the porch as they chatted with nextdoor neighbours.

Now the restored 'shotgun' houses - rooms arranged in a line from front porch to back yard - privet hedges and well-tended lawns have a sleepy, museum-like air. Residents of a nursing home were taking the morning sun out front. Outside the new Ebenezer Baptist Church a sign wished Happy Birthday to Dr King's sister, Christine King Farris.

The house, wooden and shuttered, in which King was born and grew up is painted cream and brown and surrounded by tidy low hedging. As our guide, John Roberts, led us past a succession of railed-off rooms he told stories of King's childhood. 'Blacks were only allowed to stay in certain hotel rooms in the city,' he said. 'When these were full up word got around: just go to 501. There were so many cots on the landing they had to put up a partition.'

Inspired by his upbringing in this house, King was to evolve and inspire a brand of peaceful protest which succeeded in throwing off what he called the 'manacles of segregation and the chains of discrimination'.

Sweet Auburn is a place that inspires contemplation. Back on Auburn Avenue Roberts recalled that Gerry Adams had spent 'three or four hours' here. 'You got prime ministers and stuff coming from China. Because they want to make a difference.' Then he pointed across the street. 'That sign there on the grass ['No trespassing'] is where the white man had his store.'

This was a reference to a life-changing experience King had when he was six years old and best friends with the son of the white man who owned a shop on Auburn Avenue. The friendship was ended by the shop-owner because he didn't want his son to associate with a black boy - King's first experience of racism.

At the time of this incident, in a basement apartment a couple of miles north in the Midtown area of Atlanta, Margaret Mitchell was bashing away day and night on a 1923 Remington portable. Mitchell, a former society debutante and newspaper reporter, was completing the manuscript of a sprawling novel about the Civil War and its devastating effect on the Deep South which came to be known as Gone With the Wind.

The apartment where she wrote it, which she called affectionately 'The Dump', is now part of a museum called the Margaret Mitchell House which is dedicated to the writer, her book and the film. The companionable and witty Russell Caldwell made an appropriate guide to the museum, being related to Mitchell's first husband, Berrien Upshaw, known as 'Red'.

'He was a bootlegger,' said Caldwell. 'As they say, you can't choose your relatives.' He was also, more than likely, the model for Rhett Butler. The story goes that when their marriage failed Margaret asked Upshaw what she should do, and he replied, 'Frankly my dear...'

The apartment is small, with a pea-green settee and a small desk and chair. 'Margaret sat here,' said Caldwell, indicating the desk and typewriter, 'and basically wrote the novel in three years. She didn't want people to know she was writing it. She had a towel on the back of the chair that she would drape over the desk when people came round.'

Gone With the Wind was published in 1936, to immediate, dramatic success. 'My grandmother said that you couldn't swing a cat on 10th Street for people carrying copies of the book,' said Caldwell. The film, starring Vivien Leigh as Scarlett O'Hara and Clark Gable as Rhett Butler, was completed three years later.

The Margaret Mitchell House has fascinating memorabilia from the film. 'That's the doorway to Tara from the movie set,' Caldwell pointed out. 'And that's the portrait [of Scarlett O'Hara] that he [Rhett Butler] threw the whisky glass at.' The exhibition also notes that 'Images from both the novel and the film continue to prompt questions about gender, race, war and memory in the South.'

Certainly, the use of the N word and the portrayal of African-Americans, which seems patronising to modern sensibilities, make uncomfortable reading and viewing today. And it seems grotesque that when the film received its premiere in Atlanta in December 1939 the two principal black actresses, Hattie McDaniel and Butterfly McQueen, were barred from attending due to the segregation laws. But someone else was notable by his presence during those three days of celebrations: the 10-year-old Martin Luther King Jr.

The movie was first shown on December 15 at Loew's Grand Theater. The evening before there had been a celebratory ball in which the choir of the Ebenezer Baptist Church on Auburn Avenue performed. A photograph in the Margaret Mitchell House captures the occasion. Dr King's father, the pastor of the church, is holding a guitar. Martin Jr wears a white hat. The amazing thing is that they are all dressed as plantation slaves. 'There was a big backlash in the black community,' explained Caldwell. 'But Martin Luther King Sr said that not everything we do is political.'

Margaret Mitchell said of Gone With the Wind - which still sells a quarter of a million copies each year - 'The one thing I've always wanted to avoid is the stirring up of old hates and prejudices, because I wrote my book with no hate and no prejudice.' What has come to light only recently is the covert support she gave to black people in Atlanta with the proceeds from the novel.

'She gave a lot of money and time to the black community which was highly irregular at the time, her being a prominent Southern white woman,' said Caldwell. 'She gave money anonymously to set up a clinic and 50 scholarships to Morehouse College [which Dr King attended]. It was all done under the radar.'

Margaret Mitchell died on August 16, 1949 in Atlanta after being hit by a car. One likes to think that, had she lived, she would have lent her support to her fellow Atlantan, Dr Martin Luther King Jr, in his struggles and triumphs of the next two decades.

On April 4 1968 Dr King was shot dead in Memphis. In the words of the exhibition at Sweet Auburn dedicated to his life, he 'pitched his voice into that mysterious chamber of light and dark, the soul. The response he got transformed America.'

'Sweet Auburn' and 'The Dump' The Martin Luther King Jr National Historic Site (001 404 331 5190, www.nps.gov/malu) is at 450 Auburn Ave NE: open daily, 9am-5pm in winter, to 6pm in summer (register in the visitor centre for the birth home tour); admission free. The Margaret Mitchell House and Museum (001 404 249 7015, www.gwtw.org) is at 990 Peachtree St (corner of Peachtree and 10th): open Mon-Sat 9.30am-5pm, Sun noon-5pm; admission $12. 'Road to Freedom', an exhibition of photographs of the civil rights movement, is at Atlanta's High Museum of Art (www.high.org; 1280 Peachtree St NE) from June 7 to Oct 12.

Published in The Daily Telegraph on March 29

Jaguar tracking and the alpha male

Tue, 22 Jan 2008 -1:00:00 GMT

The walkie-talkie crackles. The boatman kills the engine and our own wash rocks the speedboat gently as Charles Munn listens in. 'They have two jaguars at the mouth of the Three Brothers,' he announces. 'A male and a female. Hold on to your hats.'

We turn round and zip back the way we have come. To left and right the boilerplate backs of caiman slip into the water as we pass. Beneath my binoculars my heart is racing in my chest - the jaguar is one of the world's most elusive animals and I may be on the verge of my first sighting. 'The male is the one the brain surgeon threw the piranha to,' shouts Charlie, referring to a jaguar yarn he had told the previous evening over high-octane rum cocktails called caipirinhas.

Bouncing across the corrugated waters of the Three Brothers River, we are in the heart of one of the wildest landscapes on the planet. Hard against the border with Bolivia, in the bull's eye of South America, is the region of Brazil known as the Pantanal -150,000 square kilometres of rivers and streams, seasonally flooded grasslands, riverine forests and bumpy airstrips, the runways marked out with the top halves of old tyres painted white.

The Pantanal is home to between 4,000 and 7,000 jaguar. The presence of these amber-eyed, luxuriantly liveried creatures lends romance to a primordial landscape already brimming with biodiversity. The pull of the jaguar is a powerful thing. In the northern Pantanal it has proved irresistible both to masters of the universe - a ranch was bought recently by the American owner of a Bolivian silver mine - and saviours of the planet. Charlie Munn, despite being the scion of one of America's elite families, is firmly in the latter camp.

His grandfather may have been known as 'Mister Palm Beach' but Charlie is happy to be called 'The Real Macaw', being a world famous bird biologist and conservationist who has spent much of the last 25 years in the Peruvian and Brazilian jungles studying those big-beaked canopy clowns and generally trying to stop bad people burning, killing and corrupting planet earth to hell. A persuasive, charismatic 52-year-old who loves to talk in movie analogies, he believes that 'saving the world isn't heavy weather. It should be fun. That's the premise.'

Now he has turned his attention to 'jag-wahs' because they make the perfect flagship species around which to rally conservation support. Panthera onca, to use the scientific name of the world's third biggest cat, is listed in Appendix 1 of the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species (CITES), which means it is among the most threatened creatures on the planet (there are thought to be only 50,000 mature breeding cats left).

Through tourism he plans to demonstrate to the ranchers, farmers and loggers who continue to erode the jaguar habitat and have them killed that they are worth more alive than dead. 'If you give the jaguar a bully pulpit they can do some heavy lifting here,' he says.

In the summer of 2007 Charlie and his German-Peruvian wife, Mariana Valqui, set up the Jaguar Research Centre near the meeting point of the Cuiaba and Three Brothers Rivers (visitors divide their stay between a tented camp in a forest clearing and an air-conditioned houseboat, the Pira Miuna). He admits that 'jaguar tourism' is untested but, like the Kevin Costner character in the baseball allegory, Field of Dreams, he believes that 'if you build it they will come'.

Describing this new set-up as 'the world's first and only guaranteed destination' for jaguars, he claims that from July to mid-October you stand a 97 per cent probability, over three days, of viewing the largest cat in the Americas. And the end-of-season figures look promising - 125 sightings in the course of 81 days of searching.

On the first morning, as we head back to the mouth of the river, there's more radio activity. 'Francisco has them again,' says Charlie. 'This time they're lying down on the river bank.' Charlie's team of trackers are former jaguar hunters - that simple but brilliant trick of recycling poachers as gamekeepers.

We reach the scout boat driven by Francisco and he and Charlie consult. The male cat has gone but the female remains. 'He says she's underneath the tree with the vines coming down...,' reports Charlie, scoping the bank with powerful binoculars. The boatman turns off the engine and we drift slowly downstream towards the spot. '... And he's right,' he whispers.

He points. I stare through binoculars. Deep cover but no movement. I can't see a thing. But it's as if your mind, as well as your eyes, has to focus. Suddenly I am looking at my first ever jaguar. On the ridge of the bank, in the dappled under-tree light, a pale disc of head with triangular eye sockets and an interrogator's stare, relaxed but penetrating. She doesn't move.

We are not very close, maybe 18 metres away. But I feel an immediate, involuntary frisson of excitement and a desire to remember every moment. It is like finding yourself in a lift with someone both famous and attractive. Charlie reckons it's down to species respect.

'The jaguar is a very beautiful animal but there's a lot more to it than that,' he tells me later. 'I think we [humans] instinctively know we're both top of the pyramid. It's like two gang leaders facing off.' Soon, too soon, the capo di tutti capi of the Latin American animal kingdom is gone, melting back in to the green and black.

That evening on the houseboat - over more caipirinha cocktails, bowls of excellent Peruvian squash soup made by Maria from Lima, and a decent Argentinian red - we discuss my first sighting. How near did we get? How long did we stay? Did you see her eyes? Already I'm spinning stories, succumbing to that grip on the human imagination exerted by jaguars that Charlie likens to gold fever. 'You know that movie, The Treasure of the Sierra Madre?' he says. 'It brings out some of the best but alot of the worst in human nature, this jaguar searching.'

He's right. My ambition had simply been to set eyes on a jaguar - a privilege in itself as Charlie says he'd be surprised if a thousand people per year manage to see one. But already I'm feeling dissatisfied. I want a better view. I also want quantity. By coincidence someone I know was here three weeks ago and he saw seven. It's an unprecedented number in a two-day trip but I mean to better it. And I have an extra day.

Things are starting well. Our conversation that evening is interrupted by the crackle of two-way radio. Two jaguars on the Three Brothers River again. It is after supper and fully dark but we mobilise a speedboat and scud upriver in an icy wind tunnel, Charlie strafing the riverbanks with spotlight.

When the engine is cut we drift to within about 15 metres of where the cats lie in long grass next to a small tree. One soon slinks right and drops from view but the other stays. Partly hidden by stalks of grass, and by its own markings, the jaguar's face looks grainy and monochrome in the spotlight. Directly above it, as if mindful of symmetry, a full moon hangs in the Southern Hemisphere sky. A spectacled owl hoots. It is a mesmerising encounter.

One day, three sightings. Like Bogart in Mexico, I'm feeling lucky. The next morning dawns beautiful. Our houseboat is moored on the west bank of the Cuiaba River. Water hyacinths float downriver in clumps. Amazon parrots are squawking on the far river bank. A red-capped cardinal, bandbox smart in his military policeman's uniform, lands on the breakfast table of the open deck and pecks at chocolate-cake crumbs. Apart from Charlie, the crew, Isabel and Patty from Peru, and my partner Miren, there is not another human being for many miles.

I run through the photographs I have taken on my digital camera, reflecting on the wildlife of the Pantanal that the jaguar has all but blotted from my mind - the birds, from comically huge jabiru storks to iridescent hummingbirds little bigger than bumblebees, snaggle-toothed caimans which look like nursery-rhyme villains, blunt-snouted capybaras snoozing on the sandy beaches of the Three Brothers River, rare giant otters 'like aquatic Keystone Kops' (says Charlie). Improbable and beautiful creatures all.

Then the walkie-talkie burps and everyone looks expectantly at Charlie. Half an hour ago, at 7am, we sent a scout boat up the Three Brothers. The scout is calling to say he's found fresh jaguar tracks on one of the beaches. Charles shrugs. 'Tracks are a dime a dozen,' he says, and the tension breaks.

There are estimated to be between six and nine jaguars per square 100km and Charlie's boats patrol an area two or three times that size. 'I guess we are dealing with a population of 17 to 25,' he reckons, 'but there are five or six we see more regularly than others.' Their prey are capybaras and caiman - on a trail near the tented camp we find a jaguar killing field with a couple of caiman skulls lying in the leaf litter. They have been known to kill humans, and are certainly partial to human flesh. Traps of white sand are laid across paths into the camp to show if jaguars are on the prowl.

Later that morning, while we are out in the speedboat, we get another call. The driver, Jinho, reports that four jaguars have been sighted in a narrow channel off the main Cuiaba River. He bellows 'Yee-haa!' in cowboy fashion as we set off and I literally have to hold on to my hat. Forty minutes later, when we reach the spot, the jaguars have vanished.

In the afternoon we cruise downriver to the settlement of Porto Jofre to talk to the fishermen who fish these waters for catfish. 'We're bored stiff of seeing jaguars,' says Nelio, standing at the rail of his boat Cruzeiro do Sol (Southern Cross). As he translates Nelio's swift Portuguese, Charlie throws back his head and laughs at the irony.

'We're nauesous, we're so bored,' Charlie amplifies. It seems that jaguars are attracted by fishing boats. The fishermen throw the guts of the fish they catch on to the river banks rather than into the water, so they won't attract piranha. The jaguars wait while the vultures feast then move in to polish off the gills, the only bit the vultures can't manage.

There will be no sightings today - a salutary reminder that this is not a theme park, that Charlie can't turn the jaguars on as if they were what he would call a faucet. In any case their absence is like withheld love. It feeds the fever. According to Charlie no visitor so far - bar possibly the Englishwoman who insisted on leaving the camp early so she could wash her hair properly - has been immune to this fever.

He speaks entertainingly of alpha male types who are used to be being in control: the Nobel laureate, the neurosurgeon and the man with 'issues of competitiveness' for whom failure to see a jaguar would have been insupportable (when he did see one his joyous bellows scared it away). 'The jaguar is king,' Charlie says and sends us to our bunks with the tantalising prospect of finding the rare one who is replete and relaxed and will remain in the same place for hours while you watch. He calls it 'the golden jag-wah'.

At 10.15 the following morning, while cruising the Three Brothers, we receive a report of a 'massive male' sleeping near where the four were spotted yesterday. As we make tracks, Charlie is in ebullient mood. 'Ramming speed, captain,' he shouts as the boat slices through a thick patch of water hyacinth. And to the caimans which thrash away on either side: 'You guys are all jag-wah bait.'

It takes us nearly an hour. The huge male is still there but is scarcely visible - the merest blur of cream and orange. After failing to coax him out we move on. The atmosphere in the boat is suddenly flat. I'm thinking that was probably my last chance of a jaguar sighting. I check the pictures I just took. Hopeless. And that, when we think hope is lost, is when we see her: the golden jaguar.

At first she is behind a screen of vines set back from the river bank and she seems relaxed and even mildly animated. She stretches her paws out in front and flicks her tail, watching us languidly. Then Jinho, the boatman, whistles and the jag stands. Gasps from the boat. Her black-and-gold flank ripples along the ridge of the bank; she glances sideways with each whistle, until she is on the river's edge, staring at us, less than 6m away.

Silence, bar the lizard-blinks of digital cameras. It is hard to discern respect in the jaguar's reaction to the cargo of furless, breathless creatures staring back at her in all-weather leisure wear. We mean roughly nothing to her. And I suddenly understand: in the terror of this realisation lies the thrill we have been seeking.

Published in The Daily Telegraph on January 19 2008

The landscape of pity

Mon, 14 Jan 2008 -1:00:00 GMT

The actor starts to speak and our group of 22 hears the deadly patter of enfilade fire. Some of us may even flinch inwardly, imagining the impact and the toppling back. Something thrilling and incongruous is happening in this copse in northern France. A poem is being re-connected to the moment of its birth 91 years ago.

No sun today, just sombre September clouds, but the hell is recoverable. For we are gathered where, on July 1 1916, Sassoon was supplementing his bully beef rations with Vitamin C while modern Europe slouched into being. To either side of us are grassy shell holes. The actor, John Aston, stands on the ivy-covered spit between them and recites Attack, by the fox-hunting toff who became the war's most coldly eloquent critic.

It is about going over the top at dawn: 'With bombs and guns and shovels and battle-gear,/Men jostle and climb to meet the bristling fire.' In the rat-a-tat rhythm of bullet-hail, Sassoon evokes the sunlit, hellish events he witnessed here. As John reaches the final anguished phrase, 'O Jesus, make it stop!', one of our group stoops to pick a souvenir from the wound that never quite heals: the drive-band of an artillery shell.

People are avid for the Great War. As it recedes into history - literally so: there are now only a handful of men alive who were there - it exerts fresh fascination, fuelled by the online genealogy craze. The lanes of this corner of Picardie are full of cars with GB stickers, driven by peering families with ancestors buried somewhere close.

Any number of outfits - from the reputable to the cynical - offer tours. The tour we're on is different, unique even. It is not about regiments or events or dead relatives - or even war, per se. It is about poetry. Sassoon, Wilfred Owen, Rudyard Kipling and many others used the brevity and heightened emotion of poems to distil the 'pity' (Owen's choice of word) of this most particularly dreadful war.

The idea of returning the poetry - familiar from syllabuses and armchair contemplation - to the fields where it was forged belongs to Andrew Spooner, a 52-year-old former fireman who has been leading bespoke tours here for nearly 20 years. 'I see it all, superimposed on the landscape,' he says as our coach trundles through hamlets with blooming hydrangeas and ominous names: Serre, Beaumont Hamel, Mametz. 'I see the wire. I see the shrapnel bursting.'

Over four days we too will see these things as Andrew sets the scene and John, the actor, brings it to life in the extemporised language of trench slang, military nomenclature and sheer, bug-eyed horror that became characteristic of Great War poetry.

The landscape is imbued with poetry, as a matter of fact. Men were buried where they dropped so the cemeteries of Portland stone headstones scattered so starkly white against the green mark the progress of the fighting. They contain many graves of unidentified bodies, each of which bears the inscription written by Kipling: 'A soldier of the Great War/Known unto God'.

In Serre No.1 Cemetery John reads Two Fusiliers by Robert Graves, about friends who died together: 'Show me the two so closely bound/As we, by the wet bond of blood...'

'I have chosen this poem in particular to match an event on a battlefield,' says Andrew after a reflective silence. He points to a single headstone marking the joint grave of the French-Canadian Destrube brothers, Charles and Paul, who enlisted in the Royal Fusiliers and were killed here on February 17, 1917.

'In those last moments they crawled to one another, they embraced one another, and died,' he says. 'They were found arm in arm. How could you part those men for burial when they were found together?' There is no evidence that Robert Graves knew, or knew of, the Destrube brothers. The connection is Andrew's.

This is how he works. In his cargo pants, linen shirt and sunhat he is part-squaddie part-troubadour, cajoling landscape and poetry into a kind of psychic alignment: what you might call the landscape of pity. Along the road from Serre No.1 Cemetery he asks Len, the driver, to stop the coach and we stumble onto the edge of a newly ploughed field looking quizzically at one another. There is nothing here. But there was.

From battlefield records Andrew has worked out the precise location of the 'old Boche dug-out' which features in Wilfred Owen's The Sentry. The hole has been filled in and ploughed over, but we are standing at the spot in No Man's Land where, in January 1917, Owen and 24 others spent '50 hours of extreme hell,' according to Andrew. As John reads the lines about the sentry who was blinded - 'Eyeballs, huge-bulged like squids',/Watch my dreams still' - I pick something from the soil: a ceramic fragment that, Andrew tells me later, is probably part of the insulator of a field telephone.

We are all hopeful of finding a memento. The group - including a Knight of the Realm, an eminent physician and a female Master of Wine - has some unexpected, oblique connections to the Great War. One woman knows the son of Field-Marshall Haig, another the grandddaughter of the poet Robert Frost, friend and mentor to Edward Thomas. One man is the great great grandson of the Sassoon family doctor.

At the end of each reading by John there is silence that no one wants to be the first to break. At Hamel Military Cemetery at the bottom of 'Jacob's Ladder', the notorious communication trench where many were killed, the reading is preceded by a piece of theatre. Andrew holds up a green bottle. 'Here's the villain,' he says with a flourish. 'Fortunately it's empty now but it would have contained mustard gas.'

John then turns to Owen's Dulce et Decorum Est. While he reads those searing lines about a gas attack - 'Dim through the misty panes and thick green light,/As under a green sea , I saw him drowning' - I look up and to the south-east, visible above Thiepval Wood, is the top of Lutyens's monument to 'The Missing of the Somme' - 73,000 men, a virtual full house at Old Trafford, whose bodies were never identified.

'And if you want to know why I've chosen this spot for the Owen poem...,' says Andrew, and gestures at the headstone of Private T Grimsey of the Essex Regiment who died on August 16 1916. His epitaph is 'Dulce et Decorum Est Pro Patria Mori.' Fiona, from East Lothian - the friend of Haig's son - gazes at the inscription, then looks away. 'He was 18!' she exclaims. 'When will we ever learn? As Marlene said.'

A poem comparing the River Wye with the River Ancre, which wound through No Man's Land; lines scribbled on scraps found in dead men's pockets; poems knowing oblivion was coming; excellent poignant stuff written by people you've probably never heard of, who died pitifully young. In our four days, all are given back to the place they came from.

We end the tour at La Boiselle where, at 7.30am on the first day of the Battle of the Somme, 'the 34th Division rose as one' and the earth turned red. More than 6,000 fell dead or wounded in the first two hours, most in the first 30 minutes. Still, today, bodies are unearthed at an average of five a year.

'I have found fragments of skull and jaw here, a complete hand and, a few weeks ago, a shinbone,' says Andrew (if you are wondering what he does with such human remains: he throws them back to the soil). Feeling both horrified and guilty, we scan the chocolate clods with bowed heads as John reads Wilfred Owen's Anthem for Doomed Youth: 'What passing bells for those who die as cattle?/ Only the monstrous anger of the guns...'

After a longer-than-usual pause, Andrew says: 'Men tucked their chins into their chests and walked into the fire as if it was lashing rain.' And we look at each other, lost for words.

Published in The Daily Telegraph on January 12 2008

Secrets of the tomb dwellers

Sun, 25 Nov 2007 -1:00:00 GMT

To see the excellent photographs by Eduardo Martino which accompanied this article in The Sunday Times Magazine, visit www.eduardomartino.com/qurna/index.html

We are standing in the interconnecting tombs beneath Mohammed Ismail’s old house when he mentions the mummies, as one knew he would. The story of how the Abd el-Rassoul brothers discovered the “cachette” (everyone uses the French word) of bandaged pharaohs and flogged them off, confounding the authorities, is the defining narrative of this singular and roguish community: “They are clever, they not tell anybody they find,” says Mohammed admiringly. “Forty mummies, necklaces, gold.”

Mohammed Ismail, a congenial gent in a grey galabiyya and white headdress, and his neighbours are the last of a unique breed. They live in a village called Qurna, just a donkey dash from the Valley of the Kings in Egypt. Their houses are pharaonic tombs and they once traded in stolen antiquities and were experts in the manufacture of fake treasures. Under cover of more legitimate touristic pursuits - the village receives a steady stream of Westerners visiting the 3,000-year-old Tombs of the Nobles, which are interspersed among Qurna’s houses - some still cling to such practices, as I would discover.

The Egyptian government has wished them gone for a century or more so it can properly excavate the archaeology of the site. Now it has finally decided to put an end to their anachronistic way of life by destroying their bizarre habitat and frogmarching them into the 21st century. To some commentators, both in Egypt and abroad, the eviction is not before time as beautiful tombs and priceless treasures may be awaiting discovery. To others the destruction of Qurna village and its unique way of life is nothing short of a tragedy. This is the story of the last of the tomb raiders, and it reaches surprisingly close to home.

By the time you read this, almost the entire village of Qurna will have been razed to the ground by bulldozers and earth-movers and the villagers moved to an estate of brand-new bungalows four kilometres away on the edge of the Sahara Desert which has cost US$20 million to build and service.

The houses they are leaving are strange, ramshackle affairs, sprouting from ancient tombs in agglomerations of mud-brick that barnacle the mountainside in shades of ochre and aquamarine. The houses they are going to are laid out in geometrical lines and have every modern amenity - notably running water, a right denied the old village because piped water would have damaged the tombs.

Some villagers are ready to leave their ancestral homes - one woman gives the thumbs-up sign and says that, “Inshallah”, in five days’ time her house will be flattened and she will be re-housed in “New” Qurna - but many are unhappy about the deal they have been offered. They say the new houses are not big enough for their extended families (Mohammed Ismail has to shoehorn nine people into his two-bedroom bungalow), and they claim their livelihoods, which are rooted here in alabaster workshops, guesthouses and cafes (not to mention antiquities, both fake and real), are being taken away. Those with most to lose - such as the memorably named Mohammed Snake, who runs a 12-room guesthouse and restaurant - are preparing to stay until physically removed.

The descendants of Bedouin nomads have lived in Qurna for hundreds of years, developing a complicated relationship with the burial sites and treasures which abound. Their tomb houses have evolved by a principle known as bait hajr, literally “stone house” in Arabic. It is a template of human civilisation itself: nomads use caves/tombs for shelter from heat and sandstorms, eventually settle in one place, establish a relationship with the land around them, build permanent structures above their holes in the ground, and form a community.

Picking our way through the rubble of smashed houses, the photographer and I find a woman who is undergoing this civilising process in reverse. Being unmarried, 63-year-old Zeinab is not entitled to a house of her own. She emerges from a gash in the debris and leads us down into a compartmentalised hole. It is the tomb that was colonised by her ancestors and she has lived in it alone since the extended family home that stood above it was destroyed three weeks ago and 30 of her relatives were rehoused.

In the dark back chamber is a wickerwork divan covered in a rough blanket, an old wooden radio covered with a cloth, a photograph of her on the wall as a young woman, in plaits. Oranges in a tin bowl seem to glow in the sepulchre-gloom. “If you’re poor they don’t help,” she says. “Why? We don’t know why.”

A short clamber up the hill over piles of smashed mud-bricks, Mohammed Ismail’s house has also gone. It was a two-storey dwelling with eight rooms for his nine family members, “When it fell down, it is like me falling down,” he says. His brother’s, to which his was attached, is still standing. Feeling cramped and purposeless in his two-bedroom bungalow in “New” Qurna, Mohammed, who is 53, returns each day to his brother’s house and gazes on the rubble to which his birthplace has been reduced. He says he ran a “small bazar” from his house. “I know everyone here. I know every tomb. But there.” He gestures into a vague distance, meaning the new village in the desert. “Nothing.”

Running beneath both houses, the burial chambers are intact. The first ones Mohammed shows us are small and unexceptional - the oblong cellar which served as his kitchen, the storeroom where he kept ducks. Now he pushes at an ancient wooden door with a wooden lock, flicks a light switch and takes a cursory look inside. He is about to close the door when I poke my nose through.

This is my Howard Carter moment. Where I had expected a broom cupboard, there is a passageway about 10 metres long and 3m high. With eyes adjusting to the puny light from two bare bulbs I tiptoe over white feathers and bird droppings (Mohammed kept his pigeons here until the move) to a chamber 6m square with a niche in the back wall containing a damaged statue. The weight of history makes me feel momentarily giddy - this is a classic pharaonic tomb design of courtyard, transverse hall, passageway, chamber and niche.

The floor is littered with polystyrene packaging, a tea strainer, a broom head. The stucco, and any cartouches or paintings that would have been applied to it, disappeared long ago, leaving bare, jaggedly hewn limestone blackened by fires and oil lamps. “My grandfather lived here,” says Mohammed. He indicates the back wall of the niche, which is hung with a flouncy pelmet of cobwebs. “I think maybe it is bricked up, and there are more tombs there behind.”

Pharaonic tombs, and the undreamt-of treasure they may contain behind false walls, are the key to this stand-off between the people and the government. Qurna is situated on the West Bank of the Nile in Upper Egypt, facing the tourist town of Luxor across the river. It is plum in the middle of the Theban Necropolis, so-called because the ancient city of Thebes, on the site of modern-day Luxor, buried its dead here - and did so with a flamboyance and ingenuity unmatched by any civilisation before or since.
These barren limestone terraces and ridges are honeycombed with thousands of tombs. The Valley of the Kings - site of the royal burials - contains the most spectacular and famous, from that of Tutankhamun to the astonishing plunging chamber of Seti I. A kilometre south across the mountain ridge, there is another concentration below the 2,500 houses, spread across seven settlements, that make up the village of Qurna. At least 600 or 700 tombs on the site have never been explored, according to Dr Mansour Boreik, the General Director of Southern Upper Egypt for the Supreme Council of Antiquities (others put the figure even higher). “Every one of these houses has a tomb underneath it,” Dr Boreik tells me. “It is one of the major archaeological sites in the world.”

For the SCA’s Secretary General, the internationally famous archaeologist and “latter-day Indiana Jones” (see press profiles, passim), Dr Zahi Hawass, “The fact that archaeology is re-gaining its rights here is the dream of my life.” He is convinced “hidden treasures” will be found.

This is the justification for the eviction of the Qurna villagers and the destruction of their houses. “We need to finish emptying the mountain of people, then we will put in place the masterplan for the site management,” Dr Boreik says. He talks of “modifying” and preserving some 60 houses (without the people) “so you can see how they were living, how they were sleeping. How they did harmony by the tomb and the house.” There will be a walkway, a visitor centre, cafes.

A 25-year-old Belgian egyptologist, Pierre Coussement, who has been visiting the village for eight years, is cynical about the motives. “For the government, archaeology is a small thing, tourism is a big thing - and the people are nothing,” he tells me. He believes Qurna is being turned into a sanitised open-air museum for the benefit of tourists and the financial advantage of the government, and he points out that the bulk of the funding has come not from the Ministry of Culture (of which the SCA is a part) but from the Ministries of Tourism and of Housing.

This is not the first time the government has tried to evict the villagers. In 1948 an architect called Hassan Fathi created a “model village” for them some two kilometres south, using traditional materials. Some moved, but many stayed or drifted back to the only place they have known. A decade ago another attempt was aborted when four villagers were killed resisting eviction. Now the government means to finish the job.

The widespread belief is that the people of Qurna are being removed as one would remove a thorn from one’s side. They are bandits who have made a fool of the authorities for centuries, and now they are paying for it. Few in positions of authority are prepared to say any of this publicly - one man appeared to be terrified when I spoke to him - but somebody who can be said to know what he is talking about described the end of Qurna village as a “catastrophe”.

Nobody has been more successful at making monkeys of the powers that be than the Abd el-Rassouls. The story of the cachette, which brings a glint to Mohammed Ismail’s eye in the half-light of his old mausoleum-house, has a Whisky Galore! air to it. In the 1870s two Abd el-Rassoul brothers discovered a stash of mummies and other objects hidden at the bottom of a vertical shaft between Qurna village and the Temple of Queen Hatshepsut.

Mohammed Ismail offers to take us there. In the punishing midday heat, the braying of a donkey and the plaintive call of the muezzin are the only indications of life amid the rubble of the half-destroyed village. We cross a bleached valley, climb a rocky hillside and stop at the jagged lip of a smooth-sided shaft. It’s impossible to see the bottom without running the risk of overbalancing, but this hole - the famous cachette - is said to be 10 to 12m deep, with side chambers running off horizontally from its base. “Forty mummies here,” Mohammed repeats. “Gold.” He opens his arms and grins. “Everything.”

The Abd el-Rassouls managed to keep their find a secret for several years while cannily slow-releasing pieces on to the antiquities market. Among the mummies eventually rescued from the cachette in 1881 were the remains of some of Ancient Egypt’s greatest rulers from the XIX Dynasty (c1300-1200BC): Ramses I, Ramses II and Seti I. Along with other artefacts, they had been removed from their tombs in the Valley of the Kings by priests some 3,000 years ago and hidden here - ironically, so they wouldn’t be stolen by tomb robbers.

Such a tale may seem to belong in the pages of Rider Haggard, but tomb robbing, the trafficking of stolen antiquities and the passing off of fakes remain hugely lucrative activities involving individuals and syndicates all over the world, including Britain. Recently a pharaonic statue said to be 4,000 years old, for which Bolton Museum had paid nearly £440,000, was found to be bogus and a couple in their 80s were charged with conspiracy to defraud.

One theory is that the razing of Qurna may even lead to an upsurge in tomb robbing, as villagers plunder the newly uncovered tombs and take what they can as a final act of defiance. The week before our visit, a German national was arrested at Luxor airport with a suitcase containing more than 100 pieces. “He was found with some objects from Qurna,” confirms Dr Boreik. “He didn’t say where from.” If convicted, the man faces a stiff jail sentence.

Mohammed Ismail bats away questions about illegal booty with a practised air: “If I find, I am rich now,” he points out. So we go to the horse’s mouth - a member of the Abd el-Rassoul family. Mahmoud Abd el-Rassoul’s great-grandfather and great-uncle, Mohammed and Ahmed, were the two who found the cachette. His father, Hosain, was present as a 13-year-old boy when Howard Carter discovered the Tomb of Tutankhamun.

Mahmoud, plump and expressionless, offers us sweet tea but precious little else as he fiddles with a bag of medicines on the table in front of him. No, he has no stories about the cachette. No, his father never talked about the King Tut discovery. And no, the house near his which has just been knocked down, revealing what the site inspector called “an important model of a XXVI Dynasty tomb with some intact inscriptions” and a sealed burial chamber, did not belong to an Abd el-Rassoul family member (this is untrue).

Another villager is more forthcoming. After rather theatrically checking that the window shutters are properly closed (“The government man is very clever. He come and check in every house”), this man leaves the room, with its whitewashed ceiling and swishing fan, and reappears with bundles of newspaper. From these he produces scores of objects, from a medicine jar with a handle in the form of Anubis, the jackal-headed god of the dead, to shabti figurines (left in the tombs to perform the bidding of the deceased). He spreads the items on the table where they mingle incongruously with bottles of Fanta and Sprite and a packet of Cleopatra cigarettes.

These are almost certainly fakes, but 19th-century ones - works of art in their own right, with asking prices to match (scores of US dollars). When we start to make our excuses and leave, the man says, “Also I have a friend who has wooden things. Very old. I show you.”

In another house in the village, the man with the wooden things offers tea then he leaves the room and returns with a black plastic bucket covered in an old purple cloth. Like a conjurer’s, his hand delves beneath the cloth to produce object after object which he lays out on the green plastic tablecloth. He is emphatic that they are not fakes. His patter is good too. He claims a stone head with exquisitely wrought ears was found in the Asasif Tombs, between Qurna and Hatshepsut’s Temple. It would cost me “one thousand U.S.” For a ram’s head which he says was found at the Ramesseum, the mortuary temple of Ramses II, he wants US$800.

The man brings more and more objects: a monkey figure with an enormous phallus and fragments of mummy shroud attached, from the Tomb of Ay (US$300); a limestone hippopotamus “from the time of Amenophis III” (c1400BC). But his most precious piece - for today anyway - is a superb 50cm high wooden statue of Queen Hatshepsut, with her comical long beard. It can be mine for “two thousand American”.

And in case we are worried about getting the stuff out of the country, he has reassuring news. The authorities, he says, “only look for Egyptian people. Tourists no problem.” He sweeps his hand over the table, offers the use of a magnifying glass. “All pharaonic,” he assures us. “You see if you are interested after tea.”

Ever since the tombs were built, the temptation their treasures have exerted over anyone with both access and opportunity has created kleptomaniacs of the best of us. Tomb robbing started with the men who built and decorated the tombs - and thus knew where the best stuff was. Sheikh Hosain Abd el-Rasoul, the one present at the discovery of Tutankhamun’s tomb in 1922, recalled that Howard Carter’s patron, Lord Carnarvon “took a little something” for himself.

But the heyday of pharaonic filching was in the first half of the 19th century.

Some 200m south-east of the village, across the tarmac road that carries endless tourist buses to the Valley of the Kings, stands the temple known as the Ramesseum. It contains the fallen red-granite colossus of Ramses II which inspired Percy Bysshe Shelley’s sonnet, Ozymandias (‘Half sunk, a shattered visage lies...’).

It also reflects Europe’s industrial-scale involvement in tomb-robbing and temple-stripping. Europe’s collectors and its beau monde had been avid for pharaonic exotica since Napoleon’s invasion of Egypt in 1798 had prised open the country and and its astonishing ancient culture. White adventurers (Dr Boreik calls them “hunters”) went out to ancient Thebes in droves to supply the demand.

The names of some of them are carved - with evident disdain for the cartouches they were effacing - on the stones of the Ramesseum. Prominent among them is “Belzoni 1816” written vertically in capital letters. Giovanni Battista Belzoni, a former circus strongman known as “The Patagonian Samson”, shipped many antiquities from Egypt to London. These include the alabaster sarcophagus of Seti I (Seti’s mummified remains, removed from the sarcophagus and hidden in the cachette, would later find themselves in the safekeeping of the crafty Abd el-Rassoul brothers). Sir John Soane, the architect and collector, snapped up Seti’s sarcophagus in 1824 when the British Museum baulked at Belzoni’s asking price of £2,000 and it still lies in the crypt of Sir John Soane’s house in Lincoln’s Inn Fields in London.

But Belzoni’s biggest prize was the bust of Ramses II - known as The Younger Memnon, weighing more than seven tons and standing 2.7m tall - which he retrieved from the Ramesseum in 1816 with the considerable help of the villagers of Qurna. It caused a sensation when it was first shown at the British Museum, and the “egyptomania” it generated inspired Shelley, who never set foot in Egypt, to write Ozymandias.

Facilitated by the muscle power and local knowledge of the people of Qurna, Giovanni Belzoni made a killing but he remained ungrateful to the villagers. He called them “the most unruly people in Egypt” and criticised them for being lazy and neglecting agriculture. “They would never take a spade in their hands, except when they go to dig for mummies,” he wrote, somehow overlooking his own motive for being there.

Across nearly 200 years, Belzoni’s views on Qurna are echoed in some of the comments of Dr Mansour Boreik of the SCA. Our interview is conducted at the office of the Antiquities General Inspectorate near Qurna with four of his colleagues sitting in silent, unsmiling attendance. At one point Dr Boreik, a dapper 46-year-old in pressed jeans and a striped shirt, uses an adjective to describe the villagers which he hastily adds is not for publication. He accuses critics of the eviction of spreading disinformation and says some villagers are trying to hoodwink the authorities by pretending to still live in Qurna, thus having a right to a new house, when they actually live elsewhere.

He also dismisses concerns about their livelihoods. “Think about New Qurna, then think about the poor place they are living with the snakes and the scorpions,” he says. “The business they are doing with the tourists is a dirty business.” He means unhygienic. Perhaps he also means nefarious. He looks momentarily disgusted, at any rate.

In this place of legends and hiding places it is sometimes hard to know what is true. But one thing is clear: in conserving a dead civilisation Egypt has destroyed a living one. Out on the edge of the village, an artist called Sid Ahmet works in the long shadows of late afternoon. “I have six child,” he says. “If I go there [to the new bungalow development] what do they do? Do they eat stones?” Of plans for Qurna he says drily, “It will be a good museum. But let me eat.”

For 17 years Sid Ahmet worked as a conservator in the Valley of the Kings, before the acetone used to clean and preserve the tomb inscriptions damaged his health. Now he makes skilled replicas of tomb objects. He also makes fakes. He shows us how, dipping a wooden priest-figure in a solution of “ammonium”, “carbon sodium” and stewed tea, then turning it across the floor of the workshop till it is furred with dust.

Now comes Ingredient X. He produces a black plastic bag and folds down the top to reveal what looks like a jumble of old nylon tights: mummy shrouds, which are still found on the mountain. He rubs the dusty figure vigorously with a piece of shroud. “This gives me the blood of the pharaoh,” he says. “It makes old.” As his fingers move he recites a line of poetry I remember from a classroom far away: “Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!” Then he grins and shakes his head in mock-disbelief: “It is a story from Ozymandias,” he says.

The photographs were taken by the photojournalist Eduardo Martino – see http://www.documentography.com/feature_view.php?arid=172&phid= for more pictures.

Published in the Sunday Times Magazine on June 3 2007

Where Skellig really lived

Sun, 25 Nov 2007 -1:00:00 GMT

The author of Skellig, that magical tale of rebirth, is driving me over the Tyne Bridge in his Volvo. Below us are the totems of his home city's reinvention as a vibrant metropolis: The Baltic art gallery, The Sage concert hall, the arc of the Millennium Bridge which soars across the Tyne to fuse Newcastle with its non-identical twin, Gateshead.

'It's such a vast change,' says David Almond. 'But I love physical change. Things being broken down, turned to dust, and new things being built on top.'

It's kind of how his books work: a breaking through darkness and decay into beauty and light. So successful have his novels been since the publication of Skellig in 1998 that Almond has become something of a totem himself, part of the cultural regeneration that parallels the post-industrial transformation of this city built on shipbuilding and coalmining.

'When I was a kid most people worked in industry,' says Almond. 'Workers' buses everywhere and people walking back from shifts. And all the stone was black from smoke.'

Now they work in call centres and shop in Gateshead's Metrocentre, and the stone is pristine, especially down on the Quayside where it combines with stainless steel and glass to create an architect's paragon of riverside redevelopment. Still, Almond, who is in his fifties, tends to set his novels either well before or just on the cusp of this regeneration.

In Heaven Eyes three kids escape from an orphanage by sailing a raft down the Tyne, which 'stank of oil and something rotten'. They fetch up in a derelict warehouse where 'Moonlight poured in wedges through the shattered skylights'.

The day before meeting Almond I had heard a serendipitous tale about this fictional warehouse from a woman called Mary Briggs. She is the chief executive of a new visitor attraction in Newcastle called Seven Stories dedicated to children's literature - the only such resource in the country.

The centre is housed in a converted mill and former print works alongside the Ouseburn, a sludgy river gully that snakes into the Tyne just east of the Quayside. Writing Heaven Eyes some six years before Seven Stories was opened, Almond had had that very building in mind. Unwittingly he had sailed his raft right into the place that would become, in Mary's words, 'the heart of a network of children's writers and illustrators.'

The centre is the brainchild of Mary and of Elizabeth Hammill, children's book enthusiasts who grew dismayed that so much original material by British authors and illustrators was disappearing abroad. 'This was part of our heritage,' Mary told me, 'so we decided to do something about it.'

Seven Stories is the result - a bustling shrine to the magic of books as well as a collection of original manuscripts and artwork. It's called Seven Stories for two reasons: because its storytelling spaces (complete with fairytale-ish chairs for authors to read from), exhibition galleries, reading areas, cafe and bookshop occupy seven floors; and because there are said to be just seven basic story lines in literature.

One of them is 'rags to riches', which you could say is exemplified by the story of the project itself. 'We opened a joint bank account with �10 each and our turnover is now one and a half million,' Mary had told me proudly. Theirs is 'an amazing achievement,' according to Almond.

Other prototypical story lines include 'voyage and return' and 'quest', both of which I'm embarking upon on this bright winter's morning in David Almond's reassuring Swedish estate car. Crossing the Tyne on the famous green girder bridge, we head away from the beauty and light of the new riverfront developments towards a grittier reality.

On the south side of the bridge we turn left into Sunderland Road. 'This is Felling now we're just coming into,' he murmurs. Felling-on-Tyne is a hillside sprawl of housing estates reaching from the south bank of the Tyne to a wild open area at the top called Windy Nook. During his childhood in the fifties and sixties Almond lived in four different houses here.

When he started writing he toyed with more grandiose locations and themes than those of his own back yard. Then he realised: 'This is what I can write about. This can actually be quite exotic.'

So Felling pours out in a jumble in his books, true events and people mingling with made-up ones. His alchemy is in the way he transmutes it all into something astonishing - the sphere of angels, monsters and magic - just as the painter Stanley Spencer exalted the sleepy Thames Valley town of Cookham.

'This was our church. St Patrick's,' he says. 'It was a massive influence. I was an altar boy like Davie in Clay.' His latest novel features an astonishing passage in which the hero, Davie, leads a monster made of clay through these very streets at night:

'He plods beside me like a massive faithful pet ... I find my voice, a simple stupid voice.

'This is Felling,' I say ...'

And now I am the thing made of clay, being shaped by David/Davie's life here. 'This is Felling High Street, which Davie walks with Clay,' says Almond, echoing the novel. 'There's Dragone's Coffee Shop.' We pass the faded signboard of May's Fashions, with the word 'Men'swear' just legible. 'It has the most spectacular apostrophe,' he says. 'That sign's been there since I was a teenager.'

We kerbcrawl around Rectory Road ('Where my grandparents lived. My uncle Maurice still lives there'), Chilside Road ('We were always on this street, seeing friends and relations'), Watermill Lane: 'Down here is where Clay happens. I imagine Crazy Mary living in one of these houses.'

We reach the heights of Windy Nook, 'A sense of wilderness on the edge of civilization'. The views to the North Sea are spectacular on this day of scudding clouds. 'Felling's a small place but there's a sense of immensity around it,' he says. 'You could see the shipyards going all the way to to the sea. You can see the Cheviots from further up here.'

Back down the hill, in the graveyard of St Mary's, Heworth, is the memorial to the victims of the Felling Colliery disaster of 1812 which features in Kit's Wilderness. The names of the 91 dead, recorded on brass plaques, include 'Thomas Gordon 8' and George Reay and Thomas Craggs, both nine years old.

'We used to play here, scare each other dancing around it,' says Almond. 'Then when you start writing you realise what you were dancing round.' I ask him about the spectres of illness and death which haunt his books and he tells me that his mother was chronically ill during his childhood. 'She had arthritis, just like Skellig,' he says. 'But she had this amazing strength.'

Then he drives us to a grid of streets named after Cumbrian lakes. 'That pebbledashed one on the right. It's the house where my sister died.' A red Fiesta is parked in the drive. 'It's always been a powerful force,' he muses. 'The image of her in the window, sitting in her pram.'

It all seems so ordinary - ordinary and suddenly terrible. 'If there's going to be an evil force, then it has to be in an ordinary place,' he says. 'Felling-on-Tyne.'

And with that he drives me back towards the light, deftly resting on the steering wheel to sign my copy of Skellig as the traffic lights change to green on the Tyne Bridge.

Published in The Daily Telegraph, April 14 2007

How transport shaped London

Sun, 25 Nov 2007 -1:00:00 GMT

A disgruntled commuter from Kent sent a letter to The Times complaining of the cancellations and delays he and his fellow passengers endured on their train service into London. 'Do, please, let our cry be heard in the columns of your all-powerful journal, so that we may have at least some hope of help,' he wrote, signing himself anonymously, 'Ill-used traveller'.

The letter was written in 1864. Twenty years later the first terrorist attacks on the London Underground took place when Irish Nationalists planted three bombs on the Inner Circle line, one of which injured more than 60 passengers.

Angry commuters and terrorist outrages are nothing new on London's maddening and glorious transport network - like trains on the Circle Line, they just come round again. Such disclosures are part of the fascinating story of the development of transport in the capital, as analysed and celebrated in the revamped London Transport Museum.

The museum, which has re-opened following a 'major transformation' that took two years and cost £22 million, still occupies the former flower market on Covent Garden Piazza - 'essentially a cast-iron and glass greenhouse,' in the words of the museum's director, Sam Mullins. But the number of exhibits has tripled, from 400 to more than 1200. 'We've also made a lot more use of film and multimedia,' said Mullins.

I never visited the old museum, assuming it to be just a bunch of buses. By all accounts that view wasn't far off the mark, and indeed the buses - and trams and trains - are still there. But these venerable old vehicles are now complemented by dazzling computer-generated projections, child-friendly touch-screen displays, Tube train simulators that kids will love, and ingenious installations that border on conceptual art. Buses can be cool.

All this clever stuff, besides looking great, is making a serious point - that transport in London has been a defining social and cultural force. As Sam Mullins said, 'Transport creates the identity of cities.' And nowhere is this more true than London, home of the world's first underground railway.

The exhibition opens with a giant installation, featuring plenty of red neon, on world cities which, said Mullins, 'pushes the viewfinder back from London' to show the common experience of metropolitan travel, incorporating video clips 'harvested from Facebook' of commuters in cities such as Paris and Shanghai.

From here you ascend a ramp to a contemporary photograph of Blackfriar's Bridge. 'Now we get in the lift here,' said Mullins, and when we get out we'll see the same view but 200 years earlier.' As the lift drops one floor, the digital display counts back to 1800 and the lift doors open to reveal a blown-up print of Blackfriar's Bridge in 1798, when there was no public transport and most people had to walk everywhere.

Over the next 100 years, developments in transport - principally, the invention of the railway - transformed London and the lives of its people. An illustration from 1836 shows the construction of the London and Birmingham Railway through Camden - the cutting as wide as a motorway, the houses on its brink, the swarming navvies. By 1900 London had 15 mainline railway termini and at least 100,000, mostly poor, people had had their homes destroyed in the process.

As these mainline stations were on the edge of town, means had to be found of transporting people into the heart of London. Various schemes were proposed - there are diagrams of elevated railways and subterranean roads which look like the work of a mad professor- but the plan decided upon dictacted both the shape and the spirit of modern London. In order to avoid the wholesale demolition of buildings, passengers would travel on underground railways.

At this point we descended another floor. 'The idea is you go down into the world's first underground railway, which was started in 1861,' explained Mullins. That railway was the Metropolitan which linked Paddington in the west with the City in the east - and remains in use as the Metropolitan Line.

Amid the rolling stock and noise of that first venture below ground, an original list of fares shows that from Praed Street (Paddington) to King's Cross it cost sixpence in First Class, fourpence in Second and threepence in Third, with a special low fare on 'workmen's' trains of tuppence ha'penny. An exquisitely detailed scale model shows the shallow, 'cut and cover' method of tunnel building that was used.

The first deep-level Tube was the Circle Line, built in the 1880s using improved tunnelling technology. 'A journey from King's Cross to Baker Street is a form of mild torture,' reckoned The Times. Certainly, train carriages were primitive. Sam Mullins and I sat among mannequins (one modelled on himself) in an upholstered carriage from 1890 that ran on the City and South London Railway. He calls it 'the padded cell'. It put me in mind of a communal coffin. The windows are mere slits, but earlier versions had no windows at all.

The fledgling underground network was not a commercial success. 'The three Tube lines built in the Edwardian period didn't make money,' said Mullins, 'so they developed a map to pull it all together. They also needed to encourage off-peak travel, which is where the posters came from.'

This 'branding' of transport coincided with, and encouraged, population spread into the countryside. I had always wondered why the Tube (unlike, say, the Gas Board) has been so closely associated with a consistency of striking and elegant design, from the famous roundel - copied the world over - to those lovely posters.

It stemmed from the need to encourage more people onto trains but was carried to improbable heights by the genius of one man, Frank Pick, whose job was to advertise the Underground. 'He created an identity by inspired commissioning,' said Mullins. 'Everything is very considered, from the moquette [upholstery fabric] on the seats to the light fittings.'

By now we were standing in what Mullins considers 'the crown jewels' of the museum - the space dedicated to design. Here - besides lots of roundels projected onto the floor in a dizzying swirl - are the earliest versions of one of the world's greatest works of design, the London Underground map.

Its creator, Harry Beck, rendered the Tube network topologically, sacrificing scale, distance and direction to mathematical clarity. 'That's the little presentation drawing he did for the publicity department [in 1931], for which he was paid five guineas,' Mullins said, pointing at a small, neat - and immediately familiar - handpainted diagram.

Nearby is a beautiful poster by the surrealist artist, Man Ray, from 1938 which shows the famous roundel as an icy white planet, spinning through space. The museum's poster collection is one of the finest in the world. Once they were plastered along Tube platforms, extolling the virtues of 'Metroland' - that Arcadia stretching out into the Chilterns along the Metropolitan Line - of 'Theatreland', and of wholesome hikers on country walks. Now they stand in their own right as pieces of period art.

The size of the main hall comes as shock after the intimacy of the gallery spaces. Dominating it is the exhibit called Connections, a giant, shield-like scale model of Central London made of white plastic on to which are projected moving coloured lines marking the journeys to work of real Londoners.

As it pulsed to life, London looked bizarrely like a jellyfish with glowing multicoloured arteries. Round the back of the exhibit - beneath the surface of the city, as it were - I studied the tube lines in their convoluted reality, shorn of Beck's topological simplifications.

Ten minutes later I was on one of those lines, the Piccadilly at Holborn, waiting to go west.The platform loudspeaker crackled to barely audible life in order to say there were 'delays', and this ill-used traveller of the 21st century smiled inwardly, feeling kinship with the disgruntled commuter of 1864. As this dynamic new exhibition demonstrates, London may have changed dramatically since the advent of mass public transport, but its spirit is immutable.

Published in The Daily Telegraph on November 24 2007

Libya for beginners

Sun, 11 Nov 2007 -1:00:00 GMT

Maybe it was because he hadn't had a drink in a month, but the English oil worker at Tripoli airport was not encouraging about Libya: "You haven't come here on holiday have you?" he asked incredulously. "What is there to see? Apart from that old ruin up the road."

That old ruin is the Roman site of Leptis Magna, a vast acreage of sand-locked fragments that was once second only to Rome in its power and cultivated decadence. Leptis alone is worth a visit because no one can fail to be moved by the way in which glory turns to old stone.

But Libya - the West's erstwhile favourite state that we love to hate - has just embarked on the reverse journey. Having offloaded its guilt for Lockerbie and the murder of WPC Yvonne Fletcher, along with its nuclear weapons programme, it is bidding farewell to ruin, and salam to riches.

That's the idea, and as the rapprochement with Western governments and companies is effected, tourism is one of the ripest areas for development - not just because of Leptis and the several other world-class ancient sites, but also the climate, flying time - three and a half hours from London - and small matter of endless white-sand beaches lapped by the Mediterranean.

It's this sense of possibility and renewal in Tripoli's balmy spring air that makes the Socialist People's Libyan Arab Jamahiriya , to give it its official title, one of the most weirdly fascinating countries you can hope to visit at the moment. Even if you can't get a cold beer.

And even if you can't move about freely. Foreigners may only visit Libya in groups of three or more, on organised and escorted tours (for the protection of whom is a moot point). And so, at Tripoli airport, a group of nine strangers climbed aboard a minibus with a Juventus flag and a kitsch bas-relief of galloping wild horses fixed above the driver's seat. Hair resting on headrests was mostly giveaway white, and the air was soon murmurous with English accents from RP to Estuary via Patricia Routledge.

From Cornwall we came, and Kent and Derbyshire and the Wirral. We studied our Lonely Planet and Footprint guidebooks between stops and wore shoes that were sensible for hotfooting around ruins and we were uncomplaining and ever so discreet, in that English way, about our private lives. Which is why you won't find a real name used in this article.

But picture it. The core of the group is four ladies over 70, three of them ex-teachers, all rather pedagogic and frighteningly well travelled in interesting places (Lebanon, Syria, Yemen). And all have a knack for saying very funny things without meaning to. Indeed, the aper�us of these indomitable dames often sound like lines scripted by Alan Bennett for his Talking Heads TV series. I can't help it, I start writing them down.

"Whenever I see toothpicks, I think of the Imperial Hotel, Llandudno."

After a night's rest in the brand-new, identikit five-star Corinthia Bab Africa Hotel in Tripoli - where, according to the oil worker I met, there are plans to open Libya's first proper bar - our Bennettian caravan trundled west to Sabratha.

Tripoli means "three cities" and takes its name from the three settlements established by the Phoenicians and developed by the Romans in what is now north-western Libya. Sabratha, to the west of Tripoli, was one; Oea, on the site of the present capital, another; Leptis Magna, to the east, the third.

�The road to Sabratha threaded through 50 miles of coastal concrete sprawl. Ironically, for a culture resting on so many layers of civilisation, there is little of the past on view; three decades of revolution have seen to that. Every old building has been replaced by breeze-block and concrete boxes painted in shades of terracotta, sprouting satellite dishes and with holes in the exterior walls where the air-conditioning unit should be.

"Oh look, it's a roundabout."

And not a billboard for Gap or Nike in sight - but plenty of "The Leader of the Revolution", Muammar Gaddafi. The cranky colonel's likeness pops up in a variety of camp poses and guises, of which the most common is the one with him in blue-tinted sunglasses and flamboyant headdress (think Tony Blair dressed as Boy George). Accompanying his image there is often a slogan from The Green Book, Gaddafi's equivalent of Mao's Little Red Book. A common one - it even appears on bottles of mineral water - is "Partners not wage-workers".

There was hardly a soul at Sabratha. This sandstone city of temples, basilicas and baths lies razed and sleeping by the deep blue sea. There were scarcely any explanatory signs - in Arabic let alone English - no proscription to keep off the stones, no security guards, no hawkers of postcards and plastic Punic mausoleums, and only the most perfunctory of kiosks catering for tourists (though well stocked in copies of The Green Book in a variety of languages).

"I don't think I'll bother going up there. I'll be a bit dithery coming down."

To reach the amphitheatre we had to clamber across a dumping ground of rubble and rusted tin cans. To me these cockpits of valour and cruelty - where both gladiatoral combat and the rather more one-sided lion-human face-offs took place - are the most atmospheric of Roman structures, as if blood and noise still linger in the stones.

There was an unexpected postscript to the experience of standing high on the crumbling terracing at Sabratha. On the way back to Tripoli we stopped at Janzur, where a Roman tomb has been unearthed in a superb state of preservation.

I ducked beneath a low lintel into a blister-shaped chamber with depressions either side for two coffins. The walls were whitewashed and on them were paintings: of angels, of a man leading a bear on a chain, of a man holding a slain figure, of a boatman rowing two figures (across the Styx?).

I was standing - stooping, rather - in the tomb of a man who had fought both wild animals and other men in the amphitheatre at Sabratha.

Back in Tripoli we wandered the labyrinthine lanes of the old city, built more or less on top of the Roman city of Oea. There's nothing to see of old Rome except for the vast arch of Marcus Aurelius and the odd remnant such as the Roman pillars re-used in the walls at a crossroads.

One alley was devoted to craftsmen who were beating copper panels into jammour, the half-moon pinnacles surmounting the tops of mosques. A gaggle of freshly made, 7ft-tall jammour stood around like a decommissioned dalek.

Stallholders were guardedly friendly. "From England? Welcome." The exotic robes and faces haunting the shadows were a reminder that oil-rich Libya is a land of opportunity for immigrants from the impossibly poor countries immediately south: Chad, Sudan, Mali and Niger. Across Libya, in main squares and outside mosques, you see them hawking their labour with paint roller or stone mallet in hand.

"There's the sign for WC in Arabic. That might be useful."

The next day we endured a 12-hour, 380-mile drive south-west to Ghadames on the edge of the Sahara, an epic haul in a cramped minibus with poor legroom but a doddle if you've been through a world war. On the way we stopped at some Berber qasrs, astonishing structures that some of the group regarded as the highlight of the trip.

A qasr is a fortified granary, built by the Berber people in deep history to store and protect their grain and crops of olive oil and fruit. Some are still partially used and all have been suspended in time by the desert climate. The walls of Qasr al Haj rose like a piece of hastily worked Plasticine, a thousand years of desert winds having smoothed all edges to seamless bevels. Reaching high across the walls, its myriad storage chambers looked as if they had been prodded out by the end of a giant Biro.

"Where are the other four? Have they found a ladies' loo?"

After 12 hours on the road, as the sun was setting in a mother-of-pearl sky, we followed the electricity pylons into Ghadames. A map of this whitewashed city of windowless houses and mosques is shaped like a bunch of grapes. The city's many miles of intricate and arbitrarily configured passageways provided protection from hot, cold, nomads and sandstorms. They also had strangers hopelessly lost within a couple of minutes. Which was the idea.

"We should have brought a ball of string."

Only once has the city been breached, and that was from the air. In 1943 French pilots in American bombers killed 40 people, destroyed 70 buildings - and missed their target, the Italian garrison, completely.

Twenty years ago the 6,000 citizens gave up a way of life unchanged for millennia when they were moved from the old city, with its dry latrines and basic hygiene, to a new town comprising concrete apartment blocks. But they keep going back, especially in high summer when their new apartments turn into ovens.

"We, the generation who grew up here, if we miss the old city we are missing a great part of our identity," said Mahmoud, our guide. "Myself, daily, whether there are tourists or not, I come to spend time in the old city." After our guided tour in the morning, I waited till afternoon siesta time and crept back on my own, wishing I had that ball of string. No one was about save me and the ghosts. As I ventured deeper in, I fixed landmarks in my mind - where a wall has been built round the trunk of a palm tree, a faded green door.

I ducked beneath an archway to see a watercourse running between barley-sugar Roman columns - a shaft of sunlight played on the cool green water, giving it the appearance of the back of a snake. In a distant courtyard, an inverted cone of dust pirhouetted in the sunlight. Ghadames is a Unesco World Heritage site. Imagine having Stonehenge completely to yourself.

That night a strange thing happened. A taxi pulled up outside the hotel as I took the evening air with another group member. Out popped a man who said he was from Algeria, his name was Mohammad and he worked for the Algerian Consulate General in Tripoli.

"English? Let's walk and talk," he said, looking over his shoulder. He proceeded to complain bitterly of how closed, suspicious and prying Libyan society is. "Everywhere is police," he said, stooping to peer in a parked car. "And even if they are not police, they think like police. They even ask if you sleep with your wife. Meeting you is like oxygen to me. Just to talk."

I was grateful, in a way, to Mohammad for having raised an issue that had been bugging me. After decades of pariah status, sanctions and internal repression, Libya is a closed and moribund society. And that sense impinges on your experience of it. Why, for instance, did we have to have a "tourist policeman" - who never took off his three-quarter-length leather coat - accompanying us for the entire trip? Why was our guide, who definitely knew his archaeology and spoke English well, so unforthcoming that asking questions seemed an impertinence?

"Ooo, I could knock his block off."

And so to Leptis Magna. In the visitors' book the previous party, of Italians, had written: Bello bello! Stupendo. Sublime. Che bello! Our group, me not included, was a bit more reserved. They thought that Leptis might not be quite as remarkable as ancient sites they had visited in Tunisia or Lebanon or Syria.

Togas to that. Leptis, built of limestone and faced with marble, must have been a big show-off of a city in its day. Partial reconstruction by Italian archaeologists - notably of the entrance arch of Septimus Severus - has sketched in enough detail to enable the visitor to revivify the ruins for himself.

Thus the fallen city, scattered over low hills backing the coast, still oozes a gorgeous decadence. The bathhouse complex, called the Hadrianic Baths, is huge, showing where the priorities lay in this little piece of Mediterranean-side heaven.

A goldfinch hovered and flitted above the waters of the frigidarium. A shepherd rested his elbow on the 25ft-long fallen architrave of the arch of Marcus Aurelius. Wild flowers grew in the cracks.

"This is oxalis that we saw a lot in Crete. It's related to wood anemones."

The site was so big that even with a couple of other tour groups going round, you felt you had it to yourself. On the floor of the amphitheatre I whistled O Sole Mio and lifted a fragment of pure white marble, wanting to take something of Leptis home with me. I hung on to it for a minute before casting it back where it belonged, with the humbled architraves, and the bumblebees, and the wild moggy with a U-bend tail.

And then I listened. Nothing but the rushing of the wind. Soon there will be another rushing sound, of tourists and money coming in. A huge step forward for Libya and a wonderful new sphere opened up for travellers. But something will have been lost, too. A kind of innocence. A clich�, perhaps, but I'll say it: hurry or you'll miss something remarkable.

Published in The Daily Telegraph on April 10 2004

A desert blooming with stories

Sat, 10 Nov 2007 -1:00:00 GMT

There's a baby in swaddling clothes, its skull wearing what looks like a tiny judge's wig. One man is buried in an urn, his blackened skin peeled back on the cranium to reveal scrupulously clean bone. But the show-stealer - the person we've come to see - has a pathos all her own.

Joven atacamena, says the label on the glass cabinet - 'Young Atacameno girl'. We know her better as 'Miss Chile'. Miss Chile sits with her knees drawn up to her chin. Her lustrous black hair is parted dead centre and hangs in thick bunches either side of her desiccated, chalky face. Surrounded by bowls, she looks like a smack addict begging in a doorway. You fancy that, inside her glass box, she is screaming.

The Museo Arqueologico in San Pedro de Atacama, northern Chile, is world-famous principally as a result of its unabashed displays of human remains dating from between 5,000 and 400 years ago. They were disinterred from pre-Columbian burial sites in the surrounding desert by a Belgian Jesuit priest, Padre Le Paige, who founded the museum in 1950.

After standing dumbstruck in front of Miss Chile - the flippant epithet is not mine, but one favoured by guidebooks - I wandered to the end of San Pedro's sandy main street where I found an open-air workshop.

Perhaps Miss Chile had willed me there, for Fernando Alfaro was about to put me straight on a few things. Fernando replicas of the ancient pottery we'd just seen in the museum - bowls, musical heads, and tabletas de inhalacion, for the convenient snorting of powdered hallucinogens. I asked him what he thought of Le Paige's museum.

'A big variety of things to see,' he said non-committally.

'Yes,' I agreed. 'But what do the locals really think of it?'

Fernando - with Miss Chile over his broad shoulder - let me have it. 'That man Le Paige called himself a priest,' he spluttered, 'and he dug the dead out of the ground where they were at peace with the gods and put them on display. Would he want his family members treated like that?'

In fact Miss Chile is now a replica - the actual remains were removed in deference to local feelings. But those feeling still run high - they are the worm in the apple of this dusty old oasis town.

The worm has been there since the day in 1540 when the Spanish Conquerors arrived from across the Andes, looking for gold. Tipped off by the Incas that the white man was on his way, the Atacamenos had fortified a hilltop called Pukara Quitor, a couple of miles out of town next to a bend in the San Pedro River.

Pukara Quitor is now little more than a hill flecked with boulders. I stood where the defenders had stood, facing east towards Bolivia. To the north, the flat green river cuts a motorway's width through the red rock. Below, oasis trees - algarrobos, chanar - grow in louche profusion. In the little museum there are fragments of sandals, a necklace, obsidian arrowheads. Nothing to suggest the enormity of what happened.

Thirty Spanish arrived on horseback. Never having seen horses, the one thousand defenders of Pukara Quitor believed the Spanish were human quadrapeds. Brought to their knees with terror, they were massacred and 20 of their leaders decapitated. 'The Spanish were into the fear factor,' said our guide, Rodolfo Herranz. 'They put the Atacamenos' heads on sticks and said, 'We are in charge now'.'

Many believe the white man is still in charge. How else would someone have the right to dig up their ancestors, stick 'em in glass cabinets, and charge strangers like me to gawp at them?

This hill where blood once ran in rivers seemed a peaceful place on that morning of dazzling sunlight. But Maria Angelica Vergara, the manager of the chic Hotel Altiplanico where we stayed, said she finds the atmosphere at Pukara Quitor unbearably sad. 'I can never stay very long,' she said. 'I have to leave.'

Like Fernando Alfaro and Rodolfo Herranz - indeed, like 90 per cent of the shopkeepers, tourist guides and hoteliers in San Pedro - Maria is not an Atacameno but an Hispanic from elsewhere in Chile. Still, her expansive earth-mother persona has embraced El Grande Norte, as the desert is known.

'San Pedro is a funny place,' she told me. 'It either opens to you completely, or closes completely. I've known people who've spent months trying to find somewhere to live. Other people get off a bus and they find somewhere straight away.'

I know what she means. Twelve years before - when I came to San Pedro for the first time on unmade roads, and there was only one hotel - the desert and its stories opened to me like an illuminated book of spells. Ever since, through monochrome London winters, I had dreamed of going back. When I told Francisco - a Chilean friend from London, now living back in Santiago - that I had finally fixed a return trip, he laughed and said, 'Why? There's nothing there.'

'Precisely,' I said.

I meant, it looks as if there's nothing there, but there are rich layers of stories beneath the rock and sand. In the Atacama you don't need those tabletas de inhalacion and what went in them to feel permanently intoxicated and euphoric.

Imagine this: we were 60 miles south of San Pedro, driving through the Andean foothills in a Toyota Hilux, Rodolfo, Ivan the driver and Miren, my partner, when Ivan killed the engine on a downward slope and put on the handbrake. By rights, when Ivan then put the gear stick in neutral and let off the handbrake, our loaded pick-up should have rolled forward. But we went backwards, uphill, in apparent defiance of laws of motion and gravity.

I raised my eyebrows at Rodolfo, assuming a trick. 'Remember the hill four kilometres back?' he said. He meant Cass Hill, an extrusion of scalloped red rock that had looked like Ayer's Rock in miniature. Rodolfo told us it was a sacred hill in Atacameno folklore. A goldmine was said to be in its heart.

'What I didn't tell you,' said Rodolfo, 'was that it's magnetised. It's a giant magnet and it's pulling us back right now.'

As well as stories, the desert is replete with minerals. Copper of course, which is Chile's cash cow and responsible for the biggest man-made hole in the world, the Chuquicamata open-cast mine. And in the Salar de Atacama - the 60-mile-long Atacama Saltpan, where we had been before Ivan's magnetic demonstration - 40 per cent of the world's lithium is mined, to the detriment of happy breeding by flamingos.

Lithium is put in batteries but it is also put in the heads of manic-depressives to keep them in balance. It makes sense that having a little bit of the Atacama permanently in your head would chill a person right out.

Ivan gunned the engine and we continued into the altiplano - the high plain - to a soundtrack of pan pipes on the stereo. The desert is not visually boring, as people think. Below 10,000 feet the sand and rock are enlivened by scrubby desert bushes, paja brava, which look like green-and-ginger fright wigs.

Now, as the road rose steadily towards Argentina, we drove through a jumble of pink rock and detonations of vivid colour: porcupoid cacti known as mother-in-law's pillow, the red fruit of rica rica, plants resembling lime-green pin cushions, and the mint-like cadi bushes, which have hallucinogenic properties and llamas sometimes eat by mistake - their sure footing goes to pot.

We breasted the brow of a hill and there before us were the blue cogwheels of Lagunas Miscanti and Miniques - like the Siamese twins of Buttermere and Crummock Water but on a vastly more majestic scale. Standing on the shore of Lake Miscanti, we were dots in the palm of the Andes' hand. To north and south the snow-capped cones of Volcanos Miscanti and Miniques rise above 19,000ft. The light has a poetic clarity, the colours of sky and snow and water seem saturated, fathomless.

Taking our cue from Rodolfo we breathed deeply. Here is his favourite place. 'It is so peaceful, so calm,' he said. 'The air is so fresh.'

Actually we weren't alone. Three minibuses had parked alongside our pick-up. Hushed in awe, a dozen Europeans were walking down to the shore on a path mapped by boulders. But it's hardly mass tourism and - now that the Atacamenos are managing their ancestral lands - popular sights such as this are being policed with great respect for the environment.

The most famous place is the Valle de la Luna, the Valley of the Moon. A minibus-hop from San Pedro, it is a sort of safari park of extraordinary rock formations and colossal sand dunes that look like toned skin in the evening light. Tour guides take their groups there to climb the highest dune and watch the sun set, marvelling at how, in the east, it paints the cone of Volcano Licancabur lilac while slipping behind the cordillera in the west.

Twelve years ago, when I slogged up the 'sunset dune', the only other people there were two Israelis who'd arrived on motorbikes. Now there's an entrance gate to the valley, a fee is payable, and I counted 24 vehicles in the car park. The cold and dark drop quickly after sunset. As we slomo-ed back down the dune, the waxing moonlight shining on the circular saltpan in front looked like a cone of light cast by an anglepoise. Back in San Pedro, while we showered in our adobe room, feline dogs were clambering across the low roof tops and howling at the moon.

That evening the electricity failed. A party of 40 elderly Americans fumbled through the Adobe restaurant on the main street, Caracoles, their white tennis socks shining through the gloom. 'Happens all the time,' shrugged our waiter, struggling to light a tea light in the breeze that blew around the open courtyard.

San Pedro is on ancient trade routes across the Andes. A few miles south, a metal cross in the scrubby desert marks where the Inca Trail intersects with the Tropic of Capricorn. The town is considered expensive and crowded these days but it retains an easy style - the dirt track of a main street, the nautical way you step down off that street into restaurants and bars - and that indefinable mood that some places have, of being somewhere you both lose and find yourself. Joni Mitchell hasn't - but might have - written a song about it.

By tea light and the flames of an open fire we ate lomo a lo pobre that night, 'poor man's meat': rump steak as soft as Camembert, with chips, onions and two fried eggs. Adding quesadillas for starters, a pisco sour and a bottle of Errazuriz Chilean Sauvignon, the bill for two was 30 quid.

The town has pulled off a rare trick, to my mind. It's expanded hugely in a decade - from one hotel to 25 or so - yet retained its dusty charm. Plenty of money-changers but just one small bank, one ATM, one hermetically sealed hotel, the Explora, for the tennis-sock brigade. Otherwise, it's still barefoot as you go. But don't delay your visit too long, as San Pedro seems to be reaching optimum ripeness.

Four hundred years ago gold was the elusive, fought-over commodity. Now it's water. 'The town is so small and resources, especially water, are so limited that I think it is getting too big,' said Maria Angelica Vergara, gerente of the Hotel Altiplanico. 'San Pedro can only cope with maybe two or three more hotels.'

Water is also at the heart of an alarming threat to the famous El Tatio geyser field to the north of San Pedro, where daily at dawn, across a valley of four square miles, plumes of steam erupt up to 100ft into the freezing air. The government plans to divert the water that feeds El Tatio to a copper mine. 'This area will return to desert,' reckoned Fernando Alfaro, the good ceramicist.

In the Hotel Altiplanico I arranged to meet the vice-president of the Atacama People's Council, Rosa Ramos. Diminuitive, chic and fiery, Rosa reminded me of Shami Chakrabati, the director of the UK human rights organisation, Liberty. Rosa has been campaigning hard against the government's plans for El Tatio. 'The effect will be disastrous,' she said. 'How can they sell my Tatio, my land, and we don't get anything back?'

Old angers burn on, finding new fuel. Rosa confirmed that a few years ago some local hotheads tried to torch the church and the archaeological museum. 'You have to understand, we had our language and our customs taken away in the 16th century,' said Rosa.

'The massacre of 1540; baptising people, making them change their names. The pain comes from those 400 years.'

She flashed a dark smile and strode off through the hotel lobby in her elegant peach-coloured pumps - the vision of a revivified Miss Chile smashing her way out of the glass box.

Published in The Daily Telegraph on September 16 2006

The town called terror

Sat, 10 Nov 2007 -1:00:00 GMT

It was the afternoon of April 26, 1937, a market day in Gernika. The town's population of 6,000, already swollen by refugees and soldiers, was further boosted by farmers and villagers from the green hills all around. A single anti-aircraft gun provided the only defence in case of air attack.

The bombing of the town which started at 4.30pm on that fateful afternoon made the name Guernica - Gernika is the Basque spelling - known throughout the world, principally thanks to Picasso's painting of the carnage (a ceramic reproduction decorates one wall in the town).

It was the most infamous event of the Spanish Civil War. The death toll may have been relatively small, but the name of this unassuming town will forever be freighted with a terrible significance. Gernika was the first time in Europe that a defenceless civilian population had been deliberately targeted. It became the modern era's first victim of terrorism.

Nowhere deserves such a burden but Gernika has embraced it with a quiet dignity. It is still a small town, with a population of just 16,000, lying at the base of an estuary in the Basque province of Vizcaya, some eight miles south of the coast and 15 miles east of Bilbao.

Surrounding it are lush pastures and steep forested hills, while the nearby coastline is reminiscent of Cornwall. But Gernika no longer has the picturesque narrow streets and old buildings of its neighbouring towns and fishing ports. The picturesqueness was bombed out of it, leaving unremarkable post-war architecture and an undertow of sadness.

My guide to the events of that day, Itxaso Mendieta, led me to a small road bridge in the east of the town. Pointing to the forested hilltops to the north and the estuary they enclose, she made a sweeping motion with her hand. 'This is where the planes attacked from,' she said.

The market had wrapped up and people were waiting for the pelota games to start when the first aircraft came in. 'The bombing lasted more or less three hours,' said Itxaso. 'Seventy per cent of the town was destroyed.'

Some key sites were missed - possibly deliberately - including the Assembly House and the Tree of Gernika, an oak tree regarded as a universal symbol of the Basque culture (its successor still stands). Also unscathed was the Renteria Bridge on which Itxaso and I now stood, gazing northward.

It was hard to conjure images of terror on this bustling, workaday Monday (which is still market day in Gernika). I needed the help of the fuzzy old photographs in the museum dedicated to the bombing, the Bakearen Museoa (Peace Museum). They show scenes of destruction reminiscent of those horrific images of atom-bomb apocalypse in Japan.

Gernika calls itself Bakearen Hiria, which means Town of Peace in Basque. The museum, opposite the town hall, won a Unesco Prize for Peace in 2004. Here the events of April 26, 1937, are brought cleverly and movingly to life through the life of a fictitious woman called Begona.

Itxaso and I sat on a bench in 'Begona's front room' with its grandfather clock and a half-made pair of espadrilles on the table. The back wall of the room is a mirror in which we could see ourselves. In this way we became part of the room: we also lived in Gernika in 1937.

Begona's voice (the English version, for my benefit) recalled a life of playing cards and dancing as well as hard work. Then the room went black. A spotlight picked out the tear-off calendar on the wall showing the date: April 26 1937. The bombs dropped and the mirror turned into a window, behind which lay the jumble of rubble that the room had become.

The planes which pulverised Gernika belonged to the Condor Legion of the German Luftwaffe and to the Italian air force. Hitler and Mussolini were helping out their fellow fascist, General Franco, as well as using the Spanish Civil War as a testing ground for their concept of 'total war', by which they meant bombing civilians out of their houses, then machinegunning them.

The only protection the population had were seven air raid shelters, built since the bombing of the town of Durango the month before. Itxaso took me to see one that remains - part of it is now a gents' toilet in a community centre for old people. 'Imagine 60 to 80 people in here, with the lack of air. It is very damp. They licked the walls.'

Franco never admitted authorising or even knowing about the bombing. 'But he must have known,' said Itxaso. Afterwards he ordered a cover-up. The museum shows a staged photograph of the half-destroyed Iglesia de San Juan with petrol cans outside it - supposedly evidence of arson by the 'heathen' Basques.

'Franco said, 'Catholics don't burn churches. Reds burn churches. It was propaganda,' said Itxaso. 'For many years the rest of Spain thought there was no bombing of Gernika, only fire.'

The rest of the world had the first-hand testimony of an English journalist, George Steer, whose report on the bombing appeared in the London Times and the New York Times on April 28. Steer is commemorated in Gernika by a bust in Barrenkalea street.

Nevertheless, due to the fog of war and the sheer enormity of the event, nobody can be sure exactly what happened. 'Some people remember real facts. For some it is just fear and terror,' said Itxaso.

The commonest misconception is over numbers killed. General Franco claimed at the time that only 12 died. A frequently quoted figure is 1,600. A qualified tourist guide I met in San Sebastian, another Basque town, told me, 'They say about 2,000 died, but I reckon it was a lot more than that.'

Itxaso gave me as definitive an answer as one is likely to get. 'Not so many were killed as people think,' she said. 'Between 250 and 400. I've told many people this and they say, 'That's impossible. Only 200 people?' But that's not the point.

'Gernika is not significant because of numbers killed. It is a representation of all the people who suffered and died.' And of those who continue to do so.

Published in The Daily Telegraph on March 17 2007

Threat to the glory of Hampi

Sat, 10 Nov 2007 -1:00:00 GMT

One thing I've learned while travelling in Third World countries: don't give money - or pens, or anything - to begging children. Almost certainly they are bunking off school in order to stare up at you with those beseeching eyes. But I broke my own rule when it came to monkey boy.

He was a blur of colour as he darted from behind a boulder. I leapt back in alarm at what confronted me: a mythical creature with a yellow face and a green tail, brandishing a club. I was in such a dream-like landscape that anything seemed possible, and for a split-second this creature seemed real to me. Then I got a grip. It was just a kid in a costume, I told myself.

Hampi is the common name of this extraordinary place. Its historic name is Vijayanagara and it is one of the glories of ancient India - a city once fabled for its wealth and beauty, now toppled to a state of picturesque ruination amid coconut palms and surreal rock formations in the southern state of Karnataka. My guide, Krishna, and I were standing on Hemakuta Hill at the edge of the old city. According to legend this hill features in the epic Hindu poem, the Ramayana. 'Rama [the seventh of Vishnu's incarnations] met here Hanuman, the monkey god of this place,' Krishna was explaining. 'If you ask local people, these rocks are brought by Hanuman. They will tell you.'

Hampi's pink granite rocks - stretching for as far as I could see - are mindbogglingly weird and fantastical. Some are big as houses, few could be shifted by fewer than one hundred men, all have a wonderful shape. They are sponge fingers, sugared eggs, walruses.

Krishna, a 34-year-old Hindu who wore immaculately pressed shirts and had a vivid way with English, produced a wonderful phrase to describe them: 'Self-imagination!' I didn't quite know what he meant by this - maybe that the rocks have imagined their own shapes? - but it felt right. Then, quick as a gecko, Hanuman appeared from behind one and struck a war-like pose.

Krishna admonished the fierce monkey god, and he turned into a shy nine-year-old boy. He too was called Krishna. He came from a gypsy family who perform religious dramas at festivals and he promised he would go to school in the afternoon. I couldn't resist it. I gave him five rupees to be Hanuman again for my camera.

I'd been wanting to come to Hampi for years, since a friend compared it to Pompeii and Machu Picchu (Krishna used the same comparisons and threw in Ancient Rome, too). Now I'm glad I came when I did because Hampi is about to undergo revolutionary change, almost certainly for the worse.

By coincidence I'd first got wind of this the day before I arrived there. The announcement merited only a down-page story on page 7 of The Times of India. 'Now, fly to Hampi' was the headline. I read the article twice while the implications sank in. The very thing that preserved the integrity of the place - its remoteness - was about to vaporise in the slipstreams of daily passenger jets.

I had been flicking through the newspaper as I travelled by chauffeured car towards Hampi. My driver, Ganesh, had picked me up at 7am from my hotel in Hyderabad. It would take us all day to cover the 410kms. Yet if I'd waited a week, till the new Air Deccan service started up from Bangalore or Goa, I could have done it in one hour.

In 2005, Hampi received 200,000 foreign tourists, and more than twice as many Indians, both pilgrims and tourists (in comparison, more than three million people visit the Taj Mahal each year). Now you can reach it from a major centre of population in a tenth of the time previously taken, it follows that visitor numbers will rise, especially as the air fares are at no-frills prices.

At present there's a limited choice of accommodation, between basic guesthouses in Hampi itself or the Hotel Malligi (where I stayed), a well-run Indian hotel in a town called Hospet some 15 kms to the south. This lack of infrastructure has meant that visiting Hampi has been a charming, low-key experience. But in the wake of more and more visitors will come hotels to suit sensitive Western expectations. Though these cannot be built in Hampi itself, due to its protected status as a Unesco World Heritage Site, they will still contribute to a change in atmosphere as the entire area grows more commercial.

Wandering the bazaar on my first day I ran into three women from London who were just glad to be stretching their legs after enduring a 12-hour overnight train ride from Goa. They were typical of many visitors - in their 20s, on a budget, looking for something vaguely spiritual.

In the past Hampi has had a druggy reputation, but that's changed recently. 'Since three years we have less hippies because the government abandoned full moon parties and acid parties,' said Krishna. I certainly spotted no drug taking and the only antisocial behaviour I witnessed was perpetrated by some Muslim youths (more of that later).

What I did find was an intensely atmospheric place in which man-made beauties of art and architecture have blended so seamlessly with nature it is hard to tell one from the other. And over Hampi's core site, covering 40 square kilometres, of temples and rocks and glassy river tributaries there lingers a sense of melancholy, as if the stone itself is imbued with the tragic fate that befell the city in 1565.

'It was one of the biggest empires in medieval history,' said Krishna sadly. 'It was just moving into the golden era.' The city kingdom of Vijayanagara was established around 1336 and ruled by successive Hindu dynasties. 'The most dynamic ruler', said Krishna, was his namesake, Krishna Devaraya, who ruled from 1509 to 1529.

Known as 'Lord of the three seas and of the land', Devaraya held sway over the dagger tip of the subcontinent, from the Bay of Bengal to the Indian Ocean and the Arabian Sea. Under his control were 300 ports, trading with Europe and China in spices and jewels.

'Hampi was a cosmopolitan city where precious things were sold,' said Krishna. 'A lot of travellers came.' One of them was a Portuguese, Domingo Paes, who stayed from 1520 to 1522. 'What I saw seemed as large as Rome, and very beautiful to the sight,' Paes wrote. Another Portuguese trader, Ludovico de Varthem, called it 'a second paradise'. Krishna painted a seductive picture: 'People were very happy at that time. It was rich and peaceful. The king was a poet.'

Less than half a century later Hampi had been razed by a combined Muslim force from elsewhere in the Deccan, as southern India was known: its people massacred, its riches plundered, its beautiful buildings reduced to rubble.

'They destroyed the city in six months,' said Krishna. 'They took the wealth and they went back [to their own cities].'

He looked momentarily grief-stricken, as if this tragedy had happened in his lifetime. 'I feel very bad. If the conquerors could have stayed and ruled from here the city would still exist.'

Krishna took me lovingly through the temples and groves where his ancestors walked. The sacred heart of Hampi is the Temple of Virupaksha, where the keeper of the gate is an 18-year-old female elephant called Lakshmi with strange pigmentations, like leopardskin, on her trunk.

I offered her a one-rupee piece which she snaffled and passed to her master, before 'blessing' me by placing the nozzle of her trunk gently on the crown of my head. 'Undoubtedly she is beautiful,' said an elderly Indian tourist wonderingly.

The temple's features include a ceiling dating from 1509, painted in vegetable dyes and depicting the ten incarnations of Vishnu. But what amazed me - and is not mentioned in tourist literature - was the shadowy shape projected on to the wall of the sanctum, a structure dating from the seventh century. 'This is known as pinhole camera technology system,' said Krishna casually.

The V-shape you see on the wall is the inverted outline of the main 52-metre high gopura, or temple tower. An aperture in the wall of the sanctum is aligned with the gopura and operates precisely as a pinhole camera, throwing an upside-down image of the tower on the far wall.

Krishna suggested vaguely it may simply have been a happy accident. Nevertheless, the age of the temple means this example of the camera obscura is roughly contemporaneous with Leonardo Da Vinci's experiments with the same phenomenon. Was Hampi a lost paradise of learning and enlightenment? Seeing such things, it is easy to believe so.

There is more evidence for this notion of lost learning at Vitthala Temple, further east along the River Tungabhadra. Here there is a hall of pillars which 'sing' - emit musical notes when struck. 'We have no written evidence,' admitted Krishna, 'this [the notion that the pillars were made deliberately to produce music] is just interpretation.' But, given the friezes of dancing girls and musicians which decorate the hall of pillars, the interpretation seems reasonable.

Krishna demonstrated on a set of four pillars. The resulting sound brought back memories, with more clarity than I would have wished, of Mike Oldfield's Tubular Bells. One pillar was snapped off. 'Broken by Britishers for testing a long time ago,' he said. 'People thought they were hollow but they are solid.'

An air of mystery still pervades Hampi. In the bazaar - the area where the majority of Hampi's 3,000 permanent residents live, running guesthouses, cafes and shops - we encountered a cloaked mendicant with leprosy who looked like the Reaper himself. Sadhus - holy men in orange robes - crouched in the crevices between rocks.

As the wind howled eerily, we followed a path of soft sand which wound between pink boulders and frangipani trees. A spiky cactus was festooned with offerings left by women wishing to conceive - 'cradles' of plastic or cloth tied like hammocks between the cactus spikes and containing pebble-babies. We stopped to buy a coconut for 5 rupees (less than ten pence). 'Good for belly,' said the coconut man, removing one end with a machete and handing us straws to drink the water. No one else was here. Palm fronds rustled discreetly, like hymnbooks at compline.

The site of Hampi was well chosen: the rocks offered protection and building materials, while the River Tungabhadra gave life. On its banks we paid a boatman 150 rupees (about �2) to take us downstream in his coracle. At water level the river has gouged eye-socket shapes in the rock so you feel you are being watched by impassive stone lizards as you pass. In the rocky valley sides, the pillared temples look pharaonic.

Coracles - made of bamboo, polythene and tar - still do a brisk trade on the river despite the existence of a road bridge. This is because the bridge, as well as being disgracefully ugly and out of keeping, is incomplete. Its story should serve as a warning of what could happen elsewhere in Hampi as commercial pressures increase.

It is said to have been initiated by a corrupt local government official who wished for better access to his restaurant on the south side of the river. Unesco, Hampi's official protector, objected on both aesthetic and environmental grounds, and after much wrangling building work was stopped. Now the two halves of the bridge jut across the water like cursed lovers, blighting the landscape, while coracles laden with motorbikes and chattering women turn in the currents below.

The spirit of the old city feels strongest in the northern part of the site alongside the Tungabhadra. This is where the temples are clustered and where visitors come to be alone with the kingfishers. The following day we took the ferry across to the north bank of the river, where young travellers - many of them Israelis - stay for months in cheap guesthouses. Signs offer 'Rooms for rent', 'Round the clock internet', 'German bakery', 'Tuna baguet' and 'Bicycles'.

Krishna and I bagged a couple of boneshakers and wobbled off in to what Krishna declared 'a green paradise' of rice paddies, low hills and fantastical boneyards of rocks. We visited a sacred lake where a toothless crone sold me a string of seed-pod beads, we puffed our way high among the rocks to the ruins of a 13th century palace, Durga Fort, which is now a cemetery picked over by goats. Their bells were the only sound.

This was a marvellously wild and untouched place. A couple of miles south across the Tungabhadra River, the process of taming the wildereness surrounding the archaeological sites has deadened the spirit of the place - so far as this lover of ruins is concerned, at least. Here lie the royal palaces, barracks and administrative quarters of old Vijayanagara. Many buildings have been restored and now sit amid immaculate lawns and flowerbeds. The elephant stables, for instance - 11 vast domed chambers each as big as a hotel lobby - face what looks like an Oxbridge quad. The effect is to kill the magic, to reduce the buildings to lifeless monuments to a dead civilisation. Eventually, such 'prettification' will extend across the entire site - another reason to go as soon as possible.

For Krishna, a man in love with his heritage, the old city still breathes and ancient history is very much alive. This was illustrated by a strange encounter in the small Hazara Rama temple. We were admiring a charming carving of a woman talking to a 'papagay' - parrot - when we were interrupted by a group of youths yelling and jostling. 'They are Muslims,' muttered Krishna. 'They do not know how to behave in the temple.'

He continued the conversation as we climbed a large boulder for an overview of a city that once teemed with millions and now lies still and empty. 'There is jealousy between these cultures even today,' he said, rather understating the often murderous enmity that still exists between Hindu and Muslim in India. Then he looked into the distance. More than a thousand temples were dotted across the surrounding hills, their colonnades lending geometry to the rocky chaos.

'It would have been the greatest city,' he said. 'Only the Britishers came afterwards, and they did not destroy culture. They only wanted to rule. Creating is difficult. Destroying is easy.'

There is an archaeological museum at Hampi. It contains a scale model (1in to 50ft) of Vijayanagara which is worth studying as it helps you make sense of the site. It also contains several carvings and statues of Hanuman, the monkey god. Looking at them I realised how accurate had been the costume and pose of the young boy who had startled me so at the beginning of my visit. Krishna the monkey boy might not have been at school, but he had evidently done his homework.

Published in The Daily Telegraph on October 13 2007

From Mumbai slums to hermetically sealed luxury

Sat, 10 Nov 2007 -1:00:00 GMT

A railway station in the Indian state of Rajasthan, on a steamy monsoon morning. A man approaches the window of a stationary train and, using it as a mirror, brushes sweat from his eyebrows and cheeks.

On the other side of the train window I am sprawled on a bed with a golden quilt, close enough to touch the man. I stare at him and he stares back, but cultural exchange is not taking place. The window is two-way, allowing me to see out while preventing anyone seeing in. Then: 'Cccchhhhukk!' The man hawks lustily, and turns away.

It strikes me as a good metaphor, this window, for the way in which many Western tourists experience India. In temperature-controlled cocoons: hotels, tour buses, vetted restaurants, emporiums of extortion otherwise known as gift & export shops. And now this, the ultimate cocoon: the luxury private train. One footplate up from the Orient Express, this is the Deccan Odyssey.

Its 18 coaches give a shudder of anticipation, the driver honks his horn with the exuberant pointlessness of a Bombay cabbie, and we continue on our journey of more than 2,000 miles across the subcontinent, from Mumbai in the west to Kolkata in the east via some of India's - nay, the world's - finest cultural sites.

The Deccan Odyssey has been chartered from the state of Maharashtra and renamed 'The Viceroy of India Darjeeling Mail' for the two-week duration of the voyage. Luxury train travel is not new to India, but until now it has been confined to individual states. It is the achievement of Tim Littler's GW Travel to have bodyswerved through the massed ranks of local, national and corporate bureaucracy in order to inaugurate this first-ever trans-India service.

Along for the ride are some serious train nuts, many of them veterans of previous GW Travel trips, such as the Trans-Siberian Express. All share an enthusiasm for trains that will sometimes leave me feeling like an agnostic at a revivalist meeting.

Jim, a retired railroad administrator from Norfolk, Virginia, went misty-eyed last night at the mention of Doncaster (possibly a first) because The Flying Scotsman was built there. Jane, a designer of hotel interiors who lives in Oxfordshire, told me she spent her childhood travelling to alpine ski holidays in her own wagon-lit compartment. 'I have to say, when I saw that train standing on the platform in Bombay, I came out in goose bumps. It's sooo exciting.'

My wistful window-gazing, on that first morning, is interrupted by Javed, my cabin steward, knocking diffidently on my door. 'Breakfast ready sir.' Javed, who wears a burgundy kurta and a red turban, attends to needs. On my return from sweaty excursions in non-air-conditioned reality, he will pass me a cooling face towel, followed by a glass of iced mint tea. He folds the end of my toilet paper into a point and reminds me when to eat. There are 34 Javeds to 34 passengers, the Everest of staff-client ratios.

In the breakfast car I nod at the Californian vintner I was naming that tune with in the bar last night and address a plate of papaya, pineapple and watermelon, followed by mango yoghurt. Shall I have brioches, croissants or muffins? Pondering this ineffable question, I gaze out of the window at a landscape ripened to tangled profusion by the rains.

Through the yellow filter on the glass, the morning sun has the crazed intensity of The Fighting Temeraire. There are two other notable things about the windows, besides their being two-way: they cannot be opened and they have anti-glare tints, variously blue or yellow, which cast the outside world in an unreal hue (GW Travel has plans for a new, custom-built train in which the latter problem will be solved by canopies).

All in all, I'm feeling a bit like a boy in a fun-coloured bubble. I've been to India plenty of times but I've never seen it like this. It's delightful, but it ain't quite real. I'm suffering the cultural equivalent of jet-lag.

This is why. Twenty-four hours ago, before The Viceroy of India Darjeeling Mail started its epic eastward flight and I was still a private-train virgin, I was stepping over open drains in one of India's most notorious slums. The drains run down the middle of the alleyways, as they did in medieval London. A Pepys, hoiking up his coat tails, would find familiarity in the dirt, noise, press of bodies and cellular industry of the shanty town of Dharavi in the far north of Mumbai.

Six months ago no tourist in their right mind would have considered visiting Dharavi. This 432-acre sprawl of tin-roofed shacks and capillary-like alleyways, in which more than a million people live and work, had a similar reputation to Soweto in South Africa.

'When I came to Mumbai from Karnataka in 1993 I was scared of Dharavi,' my guide, Krishna Pujari, had told me. 'People said, 'Don't go there, it is dangerous, it is full of rubbish and poverty'.' It wasn't until last year that he plucked up courage to go. What he saw confounded and uplifted him. Since then he has gone into partnership with an Englishman, Chris Way, to offer tours of what they call 'the biggest slum in Asia'.

The tours are conducted with exemplary sensitivity, and the cooperation of the residents, and 80 per cent of profits are donated to local charities. As I would discover, Dharavi is closer to home than you may think in this global economy of ours.

The tour started when my latter-day Virgil stopped our vehicle on a busy street and led me on foot down a narrow alley. Head-high juts of metal, raindrops in the tangled power lines, men on missions in lunghis and headscarves. This is the recycling area, covering 10 or so acres, in which alchemy takes place: old ink vats, cooking-oil containers and paint tins returned to gleaming perfection, confetti of trashed plastic converted to pristine pellets, aluminium to ingots.

The extent and ingenuity of the recycling was humbling to this profligate Western consumer - sounding unwittingly like a Hindu mystic, Krishna described the process as, 'The beginning and the end, the end and the beginning' - but the main industry of Dharavi is manufacturing. The annual turnover of the myriad enterprises based here is US$665 million. In the past week you probably wore or used something made here, or somewhere very like it.

Sitting in his first-floor office off Dharavi's main street an exporter of luxury leather jackets to the West told me, 'The top designers in Europe are coming to Dharavi and showing us what they want. All they have to do is put the garment on a hanger and put it into the store.' He declined to tell me how many people he employs (on piece-work basis) nor how much they are paid.

The truth is, these tours of Dharavi are controversial. The week before I arrived in Mumbai, a television programme had run a critical story accusing Chris and Krishna of 'poverty tourism'. Following the programme, a government tourism minister threatened to have the tours shut down, although they are run perfectly legally, with the blessing of the local police as well as residents.

Whether you're on a luxury train or in a slum, India, it seems, is full of umcomfortable realities that some people would rather you didn't see - such as the three young men making belt buckles in a striplit cell in Dharavi. They sat on the ground ladling molten metal into moulds, holding the moulds steady with their bare feet. It looked as casual as pouring stock onto risotto rice but there was no margin for error. For this expert, highly dangerous work they are paid daily the same as the price of a beer on the Deccan Odyssey.

Then there were the women and children making popadoms in a sunny courtyard - strictly no photos here as the company which employs them does not wish the public to know the conditions in which they work, nor the pay they receive. I was told that the popadom-makers receive 16 rupees (about 20p) per kilo of popadoms.

These truths may be uncomfortable all-round. But touring a place like Dharavi is an informative experience for anyone wishing to understand India and our relationship with it. It was also hugely enjoyable. The sledgehammer smells - animal hides, burning plastic, paraffin - were periodically sweetened by the miraculous waft of freshly baked bread. The density of humanity, far from being oppressive, was exhilarating.

A youth with Harry Potter specs whizzed through the throng on a sit-up-and-beg bike, clanking his bell. A boy knelt on a packing case, submitting to a haircut. Blue-uniformed schoolgirls chattered past, with ribbons in their hair. Through a doorway I caught a glimpse of a doctor wearing a stethoscope, seated at a formica-topped table.

In four hours no one begged from me, no one asked, 'Where from sir?', no one tried to sell me miniature backgammon sets or take me to his brother's 'good price' shop. Nor did anyone question or visibly resent my presence. In truth, they were busy and I was irrelevant. There may have been no two-way window between us but I was still all but invisible.

On the edge of Dharavi Krishna handed me on to Shirin Juwaley, the communications manager of a charitable organisation called Magic Bus. With Shirin were 40 excited Dharavi kids awaiting the arrival of the eponymous vehicle. Presently, to a soundtrack of Hindi Bollywood music, we headed off to a playing field in a leafy area.

The brainchild of an Englishman, Matthew Spacie, Magic Bus aims to socialise Mumbai's slum and street kids - of which there are an estimated two-and-a-half million - through organised physical activity. 'It is all about getting them out of their communities to expose them to other cultures,' said Shirin as we watched the Dharavi kids playing football and running relay races.

There is, I discovered, an unlikely connection between Magic Bus and luxury train. Spacie worked for the specialist India travel company, Cox & Kings, as its chief operating officer in India before leaving to set up Magic Bus. Cox and Kings continues to support the project, encouraging its clients to take an interest. Cox and Kings is also responsible for all excursions from The Viceroy of India Darjeeling Mail - those unpredicatable moments when real life is likely to get stuck to the bottom of one's shoe.

After breakfast on that first morning on the train - and with memories of Dharavai and Magic Bus seeming to me increasingly like a dream - we venture from our gilded cage for the first time to see the sights of Jaipur in Rajasthan. The Cox and Kings guides are expert chaperones, but even they can't, Cnut-like, stem the tide of hawkers that rolls towards our party as we descend from our tour bus within the ancient walls of the 'Pink City'.

The brilliant thing about the Dharavi tour was that it showed the poverty and populousness of India in a positive light. Shorn of such context, India can seem brutal and alien, especially to first-timers. And this is the first experience of the subcontinent for more than half the passengers. Zurich it ain't, to the mortification of a Swiss woman.

'We've been here two weeks already,' she tells me. 'If it wasn't for the train trip we'd have probably gone home by now. Quite frankly, the dirt has been terrible.' A glamorous Californian woman philanthropises like mad, dispensing 500-rupee tips at the drop of a solar topi. At the end of each excursion - marshalled be the stentorian tones of Marina from GW Travel - there is a palpable sense of relief when we return to the mother ship ('Ah, most kind, Javed').

The train seems to me as unreal and glamorous as a stage set - wood panelled cabins, art deco uplighters, velvet curtain swags - and the dramatis personae of the passenger manifest is pretty entertaining too. There are ladies of a certain age and hauteur and men who made their fortunes in 'precision optics' or 'agri-business'. One describes his profession as 'dodging bullets' - of the boardroom variety, presumably.

The role of indomitable oldies is played to perfection by the husband-and-wife team of JC ('That's Jefferson Charles, but everybody jus' call me Jay Cee') and Widgie (no idea) from Miss'ssippi, who whiz up and down ruins with the stamina of mountain goats. Widgie sends herself up - 'Here comes the Southern belle, y'all' - and does a fine impression of a poker-up-the-backside English accent.

The unique achievement of The Darjeeling Mail is that it opens up practically the entire jewel box of India's finest destinations in just two weeks - Mumbai, Jaipur, The Taj Mahal and Agra Fort, Delhi New and Old, the holy city of Varanasi, the old Raj hill station of Darjeeling (with optional helicopter ride into the Himalayan state of Sikkim), and Kolkata, formerly Calcutta.

All this in the lap of luxury: food (choice of Western or Indian) and service, as provided by Taj Hotels, are superb. There's also a doctor on board, her services being called upon surprisngly often in the first few days. Many of the passengers are getting on and appreciate this comfort and security - I overheard one person saying, 'I'm getting pretty bad arthritis in my hands and now my knees. And I thought I should do things while I can.'

Is it enjoyable? Enormously. Is it the best way to experience India while spending this kind of money? Probably not. Given the size of the group, excursions are often perfunctory, and - at least in the four days I was on board before jumping ship in Delhi - we are steered well away from street bazars in favour of expensive shops where the sell may be more subtle but is just as hard.

Interestingly, the one concerted attempt to see a bit of 'real life' ends in confusion and embarrassment. On our first night in Agra we are bussed to a restaurant where, our guide tells us, 'the locals like to eat'. Actually, the place contains only tourists but the Kingfisher is cold and the kebabs tender. However, Tim Littler, a self-confessed perfectionist, decides half-way through the meal that the service and food are not up to scratch, and we are obliged to stage a walk-out.

Despite being told we are going to the upmarket Oberoi hotel, we end up in the garishly-lit Hilton for a bland buffet. By the end of the evening, mild mutiny is in the air. 'Too much bussing and rushing,' says one.

It takes the world's most beautiful building to melt the barriers between Us and India. On a blisteringly hot afternoon, with shirts varnished to our torsos, we gaze on the Taj Mahal with humility and awe along with thousands of other, mostly Indian, tourists.

What does the group think of that?

'Speechless.'

'Yes yes yes.'

Seated on a bench in the shade, Widgie slaps JC's knee. 'Well, was it worth it, hon'?'

'I guess,' replies JC, looking suddenly 70 years younger than his real age.

Published in The Daily Telegraph on October 14 2006

The melancholy of Istanbul

Sat, 10 Nov 2007 -1:00:00 GMT

Each weekday, near the law courts in Istanbul, a man sets up a folding table with a battered manual typewriter on it and waits for passing trade. He's a scribe! How quaint and charming. But our tourist guide, Ersin Ozdemir, seemed embarrasssed when I mentioned him. If scribes exist, so do illiterates and Istanbullus, as natives of the city are known, are sick of being shown up by the West.

Ersin, a graduate in classical archaeology, was giving us a tour of the soul of old Istanbul, called Sultanahmet. This blunt peninsula is where Byzantium, Constantinople and the Ottoman Empire all shone as if forever before turning to dust.

Its most famous relics - the pleasure complex known as the Topkapi Palace, and the domes and minarets of Ayia Sofia and the Blue Mosque, which square up to each other like mutant arachnids across Sultanahmet Park - are among the greatest buildings in Europe. And we are in Europe - just. To the east, barely a mile across the Sea of Marmara, is Asia.

Ersin started the tour in the Basilica Cistern, an underground reservoir built in the 6th century AD. The 336 marble columns which support the roof were recycled from disused Roman temples, which is why this gloomy underground chamber has the fantastical and sinister air of a place for the worship of things that shouldn't see the light - creatures of the subconscious perhaps.

The atmosphere is emphasised by orange uplighters. In just two instances the bulbs are purple, not orange. These eerie purple lights pick out two recycled plinths carved into Medusa faces. Scarily goggle-eyed, one is turned upside down, the other is sideways on, in order to negate Medusa's mythic power to turn whomsoever looks at her to stone. 'Alot of the things you see are related to old beliefs,' said Ersin. 'You can't stop one religion one day and start another the next.'

This is a city that has shed many skins. Ayia Sofia, its greatest building, retains but camouflages its original epidermis. This vast and soaring dome was built as a church by the Emperor Justinian in the 6th century AD and converted to a mosque by the Muslim conquerors of Constantinople in 1453. In the 1930s it was made a museum - a smart move which has prevented the sort of bloody religious wrangling that has beset such bi-religious buildings elsewhere in the world.

Ayia Sofia's greatest glory was the gold-leaf mosaics that adorned the interior, but their Christian iconography made them inappropriate for a mosque. They were not destroyed, however, but plastered and painted over - most recently in a queasy shade of ochre. In patches and corners some have been revealed, but standing beneath that dome one can imagine that the original interior must have looked like a thumbnail of heaven itself.

It was as we left the colossal portals of Ayia Sofia, by its 2nd-century bronze door, that I mentioned the scribe with his old typewriter - and Ersin looked momentarily uncomfortable. All around us as we strolled in the winter sunshine were reminders of the city's glorious past - innumerable antique fragments as well as the monumental domes and towers.

According to the greatest living Istanbullu, the novelist and Nobel Laureate, Orhan Pamuk, 'these ruins are reminders that the present city is so poor and confused that it can never again dream of rising to the same heights of wealth, power and culture.' And these reminders, says Pamuk in his memoir Istanbul: Memories of a City, 'inflict heartache on all those who live among them.'

There's a Turkish word for this sadness 'that is unique to Istanbul, and that binds its people together': huzun, which roughly translates as 'melancholy'. Pamuk sees huzun in many things: 'I am speaking of ...the wooden buildings whose every board creaked even when they were pashas' mansions, ... of ships' horns booming through the fog; of the crowds of men fishing from the sides of Galata Bridge...'

Of scribes with battered typewriters, he might have added; or other strange sights that struck me in their not-quite-Westernness: the young children and old men sitting behind bathroom scales on street corners, offering to tell your weight; gents in threadbare overcoats selling prayer beads, wristwatches and computer software out of briefcases in the courtyards of mosques; men hawking power drills at traffic lights.

Like most Istanbullus, Ersin, our guide, prefers to look forward, to the city's forthcoming tenure of European Capital of Culture, in 2010, to future EU membership, and to Turkey playing a pivotal part in the regional and global stand-off between East and West. 'I am European, yes. I am also Asian, yes. Because I come from here,' he said as we strode towards the Blue Mosque. 'Europe wants to take a role in this part of the world. But without Turkey it doesn't work.'

But visitors can't help looking the other way, at the glorious ruins, and being pleasantly infected with Pamuk's spirit of huzun as they explore the alleys and crannies of this most walkable city. That first evening, after Ersin's tour, we followed a recommendation and ate at a fish restaurant in Sultanahmet called Balikci Sabahattin.

To get there you drop away from ritzy tourist streets full of kilim shops and turn a corner by the railway line into a street of picturesque decrepitude. The wooden houses look as if they've been cobbled together from driftwood from the Sea of Marmara and would succumb to the first breath of the proverbial wolf. From across the railway line floated the plangent wail of a muezzin.

The restaurant itself, one should say, is very spick and span. The jam of expensive limousines outside testified to its popularity with the city's rich. Inside, the clientele was intriguing and varied enough to invite our muttered speculation: how exactly did the chap with the bare, bulging biceps and trophy peroxide blonde make his money? Isn't that guy in the stripy shirt George Davies, the UK fashion retailer? (Answer: yes.)

The food and service were first-class - even if the waiter was familiar enough at one point to pop the last piece of squid into my mouth so he could take the plate away - but what I really liked were the surroundings: the wood panelled ceilings, antique chandeliers, old photographs, linen tablecloths, and general air of being in the kind of room that granny used only for best. The huzun of the place, in other words.

The following day we followed a walking itinerary, in the excellent Lonely Planet guide to Istanbul by Virginia Maxwell, that squeezed us through the capillaries of the covered Grand Bazaar. Like a medieval city it has its neighbourhoods - for leather, jewellery, books or carpets - and its permanent twilit state is seductively out of time, like Las Vegas.

We popped out the other side, walked down to the waterway called the Golden Horn, and crossed Galata Bridge, where Pamuk's fishermen were out in force and the smells of frying fish and roasting chestnuts competed most deliciously. On the other side of the bridge is the district that embodies modern Istanbul.

Beyoglu is where the Europeans lived at the time of the Ottoman Empire. The main street at the top of the hill, Istiklal Caddesi, is a broad throughfare of cafes and department stores and, set back behind railings, foreign federations and consulates. In a maze of streets near the British Consulate is an astonishing jam of pavement restaurants that heave like a football crowd on Saturday nights.

We know - we got snagged in its human gridlock after the taxi driver dropped us off in the wrong place that evening. We eventually made it it to our restaurant, a guidebook recommendation called Sofyali 9, where we ate delicious cold and hot mezze - butter beans, anchovies, Albanian liver - in authentically melancholy surroundings (antique lamps, old wireless sets), and the waiter draped a wrap over my partner's chilling shoulders.

Next morning we sailed the Bosphorus, the wide waterway that twists 30km north to the Black Sea. 'If the city speaks of defeat, destruction, deprivation, melancholy and poverty,' wrote Orhan Pamuk, 'the Bosphorus sings of life, pleasure and happiness.' As he pointed out, the beauty of the Bosphorus is that you are simultaneously travelling through the middle of a great city - Europe on one side, Asia on the other - and feeling 'the freedom of the open sea'.

Crammed with tourists, the M/S Istanbul chugs under two high road bridges and past countless palaces, mosques, crumbling villas and sumptuous waterfront apartments. This is where the great Ottoman families of the 18th and 19th centuries retreated from the summer heat of the city, and modern-day Istanbulllus still like to play on Sundays. We hopped off the ferry at Sariyer and took a bus back towards Beyoglu - only to get snarled in an immovable jam as cars jockeyed to park near the waterfront restaurants (plan your Bosphorus trip for any day but Sunday).

We broke this frustrating journey at a village called Ortakoy in the shadow of the Bosphorus Bridge. Ersin, our guide on the first day, had suggested we stop here. Nowhere, he said, better embodied the city's spirit of diversity and tolerance than this little place with its mosque, church (Greek Orthodox) and synagogue all happily co-existing.

A man pushing a bicycle emerged from the gate to the church. Open? 'Closed,' he growled. The entrance to the medieval synagogue - not easy to find - is a pale green steel door set in an ancient wall, opposite the Sheerwood Bar. There was an intercom system and a second steel door, before we emerged in a room with two security mirrors and a metal detector lying on a table.

A figure in a tie was faintly visible behind the two-way mirror. Silence as we felt ourselves perused, then a disembodied voice crackled: 'Closed.' In 2003, 27 people died in attacks on two synagogues in Istanbul by Islamic militants. Even Istanbul, with its unique location and its track record of assimilation, has not been immune to the hateful lunacies afflicting the world.

We ended the day - and the trip - in a blissed-out mood, watching dervishes whirl at the Galata Mevlevi Temple at the southern end of Istiklal Caddesi. These human spinning tops are at the mystical end of the gentle Islamic offshoot of Sufism. They believe that the trance they fall into while whirling brings them closer to God.

About a hundred tourists - and a handful of adherents - packed into the octagonal wooden temple with its polished sprung floor. I had the whole thing down as a tourist rip-off - at nearly a tenner a ticket it was certainly a money-maker for them. Waiting for the ceremony to start, I wrote in my notebook: 'cross between morris dancing and freemasons???'.

There were eight men and seven women. They span, anti-clockwise, as if on spindles, with the perfection of figures atop a clockwork music box. As they hit maximum speed I tried to count their revolutions against the second hand of my watch but they were too quick. Their weighted skirts spread like lily pads on water, generating a breeze which wafted over the faces of the audience.

They whirled for 40 minutes, over a series of four dances, and didn't appear to break sweat or show any discomfort. In fact, with their heavily lidded eyes and tilted heads they looked intoxicated. When they finally stopped I realised I wanted them to go on and on, and felt a pang of huzun.

Afterwards, in the temple courtyard, I talked to a young dancer called Ece. Didn't she get dizzy when she whirled? 'No because you don't think about worldly things. With each turn you say, 'Allah, Allah', to yourself, and the drum keeps the rhythm.'

How many revolutions could she do in a minute? 'I don't know, we do not have meters,' she said, her expression betraying what she thought of my stupid Western question.

Published in The Daily Telegraph on September 15 2007

Trial and terror in Kafka's Prague

Sat, 10 Nov 2007 -1:00:00 GMT

Katerina Demelova told me her father is horrified by what has happened to a cafe called Malostranska, in the Mala Strana district of Prague. 'He remembers the marble-topped tables and the smoky atmosphere,' she said. 'The food wasn't very good but it was where people met and talked.'

People had been meeting and talking in the Malostranska forever - Prague's most famous literary figure, Franz Kafka, was putting the world to rights there a century ago - and even in the communist era its cafe society flourished. Then it was bought and refurbished by a new, Scandinavian owner with a chain of restaurants in the city. 'Everyone expected it to be a central European, Viennese style cafe when it reopened,' said Katerina, pulling a face. 'Quite a lot of people were furious that they have allowed these places to change.'

Katerina was my guide on this, my first visit to Prague and we were talking over lunch in a traditional Czech pub packed out with a coach party of tourists. I had eaten at the Cafe Malostranska - now called 'Square' - the day before, knowing of its Kafka connection. The food was pan-European - tapas, pasta, fish and chips - and mine was very good. But the spirit of Franz K was definitely absent. I could have been in Barcelona or Newcastle upon Tyne.

Prague, an architectural showcase and the most visitor-friendly of European cities, has certainly shrugged off its post-communist, pork-and-dumplings image. The previous evening I had eaten spicy prawns at a branch of Havana's famous Bodeguita del Media, which Hemingway reckoned served the best mojitos in the world. Prague also has a branch of Tesco, and at least one moron who drives a Hummer with tinted windows. But is something being lost in this process of modernisation and accessibility?

I set out to find a parallel Prague - where, metaphorically speaking, Kafka's troubled spirit still hovers - and I started in another recent addition to the city's burgeoning tourist attractions: the Franz Kafka Museum (you can't miss it - the 'water feature' outside it, a statue of two men urinating complete with moving parts, attracts gaggles of giggling youth). Kafka barely used real place names in his nightmarish stories and novels, but the city of his birth had him by the throat. 'This old crone has claws,' he said of Prague. 'We must yield or set fire to it'.

The Kafka Museum claims parallels between physical Prague - its onion layers of Romanesque, Renaissance and Baroque architecture, its mazy medieval street patterns, its confusion of courtyards and cut-throughs - and the labyrinths and trapdoors of Kafka's writing. The exhibition is a bit pretentious - why are photographs displayed lying in tanks of water in the floor? - but the picture reels of early-20th-century Prague, played through a distorting lens, and the clever way in which the writer's doodles have been brought to life are strange and inspiring.

Kafka lived and wrote, for almost his entire life, in a handful of streets clustered around Old Town Square, Staromestske Namesti, which is now the tourist hub of Prague. His birthplace in the north-west corner - it has just been renamed Franz Kafka Square - is a disgraceful tourist rip-off but many of the other sites remain plaque-less and unheeded by the ambling hordes.

Tracking them down involved following a leaflet available in the museum shop and the excellent Lonely Planet guide to the city. Not that the two always agreed, which led to a pleasing, mystery-preserving confusion, evolving into what Katerina Demelova described as one of Prague's greatest pleasures: 'Having the time and the inclination to wander off the beaten track, to let your feet take you where they take you. To look up, at all the turrets and roofs. To stop, and turn round, and look back.'

The third-floor apartment on the corner of Parizska - Paris Street - and Old Town Square, above the Cartier jewellery shop, is worth cricking your neck to get a proper look at for this is the setting for Kafka's famous novella, Metamorphosis, in which Gregor Samsa awakes to find himself transformed into an insect. It appears to be a huge apartment, easily big enough for a giant cockroach happily to co-exist with a human family.

Paris Street is an opulent boulevard of art nouveau mansions bisecting the site of the old Jewish ghetto, which was cleared and reconstructed between 1896 and 1912, in Kafka's lifetime. A remarkable paper model of Prague, made in the early 19th century by Antonin Langweil and now on display in the City of Prague Museum, shows the old ghetto to have been a maze of densely packed streets and houses. All that remain are some synagogues and the Old Jewish Cemetery, which together form the Jewish Museum in Prague.

Of the 118,000 Jews living in the Czech lands in 1939, 26,000 managed to emigrate. Of the remainder, 80,000 were murdered by the Nazis including members of Kafka's family, his friends and fellow artists. In Pinkas Synagogue the names of these Holocaust victims cover the interior walls, written so densely, in red and black, that the walls resemble newsprint.

An exhibition in the Spanish Synagogue celebrates the 'Prague Circle' of Jewish writers that included Kafka, Max Brod, Oskar Baum and Franz Werfel, and tells the tragic story of the city's Jewish community, from emancipation to annihilation. The display includes a document of monstrous pettiness - an edict issued in Prague ordering Jews to hand over skiing equipment, gramophones and records - and a postcard sent from a holding camp by a young man called Otto to his 'Liebster bruder' (Dearest brother). It ends with this PS: 'Uncle Sadlo is dead'.

It is highly possible that Kafka would have suffered the same fate, had he lived (he would have been 56 at the outbreak of war). Near his gravestone in the New Jewish Cemetery, on the outskirts of the city, is a plaque, in English, 'To the memory of the outstanding creative artists tortured to death in Nazi concentration camps'. But Kafka died of tuberculosis in 1924.

His writing, though, gained new resonance as the 20th century progressed, for it presaged the lunacies that would overtake his country in the form of first Nazism, then Communism, the legacies of which are to be found all over Prague. The brutal German occupation, besides resulting in the near-extinction of the Jewish population, was the occasion of one of the Czech nation's greatest acts of heroism which is commemorated in one of the city's most unusual and moving museums.

On May 27 1942, SS Obergruppenfuhrer Reinhard Heydrich - known as the 'Hangman of Prague' and one of the architects of the Holocaust - was attacked in his car, dying of his wounds a week later. His assassins were led by two agents, Jan Kubis and Josef Gabcik, who had been trained in Britain and dropped by parachute into the occupied Czech lands. After the attack they and five accomplices hid in the crypt of the Church of St Cyril and St Methodius in the New Town until betrayed by a traitor, Karel Curda (he would be hanged for this treachery in 1947).

On June 18 1942, the church was surrounded by 750 Nazis. Kubis and his band refused to surrender, fighting for several hours before committing suicide rather than being taken alive. The crypt where they fought and died is a shrine to their bravery, known as the National Memorial to the Heroes of the Heydrich Terror. The walls are pocked with bullet holes and there is a gash in the wall facing onto the street which marks their final, futile attempt to escape as the enemy closed in by tunnelling into the sewage system.

The defeat of Nazism resulted only in the tyranny of the Soviet Union, which is re-created 'in all its dreariness and puffed-up glory' in the Museum of Communism. Located, ironically enough, between a casino and a branch of McDonald's, this small collection was, when I was there, thronged by Czechs revelling in the passing of the ghastly Soviet era.

It is all here - the socialist-realist school of propaganda painting (heroic soldiery, noble peasanthood), a shop full of tins of the same thing, the statues in all their vainglorious stupidity - especially that of Stalin in Prague's Letna Park. This hideous monument lasted for seven years until the genocidal Uncle Joe was declared an un-person, and visitors were particularly enjoying the photographs of it being blown up in 1962.

There's also an irresistibly Kafkaesque display: a mock-up of an interrogation room with a telephone which rings intermittently, a ledger, a pair of glasses, a side table with a typewriter for the taking down of confessions, a photo of Stalin and a bust of Lenin. Between 1948 and 1954 more than 100,000 Czech citizens were denounced, interrogated and imprisoned - often, like Josef K in The Trial, for activities of which they were ignorant or innocent.

In 1968, 90 protesters were killed in the Soviet invasion to put down the popular uprising known as the Prague Spring. The following year two students, Jan Palach and Jan Zajic, immolated themselves at the foot of the National Museum in Wenceslas Square in protest at the continuing Soviet occupation. A cross in the cobbles connects two mounds representing the two Jans. Amid the fast-food joints and grandiose architecture of this vast square, the single flower laid on the cross seemed particularly poignant and defiant.

Kafka's first place of work still stands on Wenceslas Square. A century ago this year, he started as an insurance clerk at the offices of Assicurazioni Generali, which occupied number 19. The building is still there, a voluptuous art nouveau palace in jade, ochre and gold, with the name still above the entrance arch, though a variety of multinational companies now occupy the building.

He hated office work and the strain of trying to combine it with the creative business of writing. 'It is a horrible double life from which there is probably no escape but insanity,' he wrote. I pictured a lugubrious figure trudging west at the end of a dreary day, in search of mental stimulation at Cafe Slavia. Opposite the National Theatre by Legion Bridge, this is another of Kafka's old haunts. But unlike Malostranska it has been lovingly restored to its full belle epoque elegance of curves and wood and industrial-chic light fittings.

The evening sun was flooding onto a packed going-home crowd. A pianist played jazz while solitary drinkers chose from a selection of newspapers and magazines spread on his piano lid. Beyond the panoramic, river-facing windows the passing red-and-cream trams seemed close enough to write your name in their grime.

I was just imagining Kafka, hunched here like the figure in his doodles, when I saw a familiar face in the throng: a literary figure who created hope and freedom from the kind of double life that Kafka couldn't stand. He looked younger than his years, dapper in suit and spectacles, and was drinking white wine with a blonde who I was later assured is his wife: Vaclav Havel, poet and politician, and the architect of his country's escape from its 20th century, Kafkaesque nightmares.

Published in The Daily Telegraph on September 22 2007

Time-warp Transylvania

Sat, 10 Nov 2007 -1:00:00 GMT

Plock! Another may bug splatters on the windscreen, and this time the windscreen washer fluid has run out. I stop the car, douse the windscreen with mineral water, then I stop and listen. It's not silence I hear, it's better than silence: crickets and a cuckoo. There is no other traffic in either direction.

A mile or so across a meadow of dandelion clocks and fruit trees I can see a village, its red roofs and conical church towers shimmering through the mid-morning heat haze. Behind the village, a range of jagged, snow-dusted mountain peaks rears into the cloudless blue sky. Gazing on this unimprovably peaceful scene I want to hold the moment. But you never can stand still, as Romania is having to learn fast.

The newest member to be admitted to the EU club has some of the emptiest, most untouched countryside in Europe, and I am driving through the middle of it. In this remote and desperately poor corner of Transylvania there are few cars, no tractors, definitely no combine harvesters or vast prairies of wheat, just glorious green hills and forests, backed in the south by the 8,000ft-high Fagaras Mountains.

People rattle through this landscape in horse-drawn wooden carts, shaped like troughs, with pneumatic tyres. Shepherds and goatherds tend small flocks at the side of the road. Things have changed little over centuries, but an exodus of local people and prospective EU regulations and subsidies, not to mention an influx of tourists, are poised to distort the picture. Rural Romania has reached what one American anthropologist I met there called its 'tipping point'.

Time to drive on. I pass through wide village streets still strung with Christmas lights from last year - or possibly the year before that. The men and women tending their smallholdings on this spring Sunday morning are wearing Hobbity clothes and using hoe-like tools that we would associate with museums of 19th-century rural life.

At a village called Apold I spot a man in a blue boiler suit emerging from the church. Will he let me have a look? He nods, unlocks the gatehouse door with an ancient spindle-like key and ushers me through a fortified entrance and into the church precinct. Using my very limited German, I mutter, 'Sehr schon,' Very nice, and the man nods. 'Da, da. Schon,' he agrees.

We speak German because the man is a Romanian Saxon, the descendant of medieval settlers, and his village's church is a uniquely Saxon building, combining mystical simplicity with military defence. Dating from the 16th century, Apold's church is ringed by double circular defensive walls with five bastions on the outer wall. In the nave there are painted wooden balconies and backless benches to accommodate the bulky costumes worn by women on Sundays.

There are scores of such churches and settlements in the triangle defined by the towns of Brasov, Sibiu and Sighisoara, which are spaced roughly 60 miles apart in this south-eastern corner of Transylvania. When Hungarian kings ruled the region this flank of their empire was particularly vulnerable to attack from Tartars and Turks, so they invited Saxons - mainly from what is now western Germany and Luxembourg - to settle here and defend the territory.

These Saxons brought with them a language, a way of life and an architecture that has survived down the centuries. 'My ancestors were here from 1142,' a woman in one village told me. 'They came from Luxembourg, and we still speak a Luxembourg dialect. It is important to find your roots. Because we have it here but you [in the rest of Europe] have lost it.'

Those roots, however, are planted in increasingly thin soil. Following the fall of Nicolae Ceausescu and the end of Communist rule in 1989, Romanian Saxons were invited to return to their ancestral land by the German government. Some 200,000 - nine-tenths - did so, leaving the Saxon villages of Transylvania moribund and near-derelict.

In the village of Hermatt, near Brasov, there are just 117 Saxons left, of a population of 4,500. The proportion is similar in neighbouring Prejmer. 'You need heart to hold on to something like this,' says Kristina (she won't give her second name), a blonde woman in her 40s who is custodian of Prejmer church and its small museum. 'For how long it goes on I don't know. The Germans are dying, then what will happen?'

Prejmer is one of the finest examples of the fortified churches peculiar to this region. Its defensive wall is nearly half a mile long and threaded through it at a height of 30ft is a raised defensive gallery known as a 'circumvallation'. This is punctuated with frequent chutes for tipping boiling pitch on to the heads of attackers; some of these chutes have been installed with lavatory seats, for firing another type of ammunition.

On the inside of the defensive wall are 270 rooms for refuge and storage. In times of attack the villagers would withdraw, in the manner of a tortoise's head, into the fortified church and live here until the danger had passed. Kristina remembers that villagers continued to use the storage rooms right up until the 1960s. 'Today it is empty, it is nothing,' she says. 'Even the church. Yes, today it is still in use. But in the next years it will be just a museum.'

In another village, called Viscri, an infinitely more optimistic Saxon woman is adamant that this won't happen. 'I don't want a village museum here,' says a dark-haired, blue-eyed ball of energy called Caroline Fernolend. 'I want a living village.' And what Caroline wants, she usually gets - including HRH The Prince of Wales.

Caroline collared Prince Charles when he visited Romania a few years ago and persuaded him to come to her village to see the progress they have made there. He was so impressed by what he saw that he bought a house in Viscri - in order to conserve and restore it - and is now the principal patron of a trust, Mihai-Eminescu, dedicated to the preservation of the Saxon villages of Transylvania.

Caroline and I meet in a barn in the middle of Viscri that serves as a restaurant for the 5,000 visitors who make it here each year. It's remote, this place - only two roads in, both unmade - and it really feels it. The only noise is of cocks crowing, dogs barking, and birdsong. It seems improbable that 48 hours earlier, Caroline was in Clarence House meeting Prince Charles.

She tells the story of the meeting over a delicious lunch, all of whose ingredients originate a few yards from where we are sitting - potatoes, salad, sausages, tuica (plum brandy), wine made from Isabella grapes. She says she requested the meeting with Charles in order to iron out a slight problem in the way his house in the village is being converted, ie not authentically. Caroline says that when he asked her, 'How are you?', she took a deep breath and told the truth: 'Not very well.'

She blushes, remembering the moment. 'People say it is the worst thing you can say to an English person, but Prince Charles was very good. I am fighting for the authentic Saxon culture and HRH understood.'

One upshot of the meeting is that Prince Charles has agreed to allow his house to be let as guesthouse accommodation through the Mihai-Eminescu Trust. There are presently ten families in Viscri who run guesthouses, and plenty more in other villages. In the simple, spotless bedrooms there are truckle beds, wooden ceilings and lace curtains - and, in one house, an old swallow's nest barnacled to a roof beam.

'The first things I tell people is we have a very bad road,' says Caroline. 'And second thing is, most houses have outside loos. These are the bad things. I never say more than what I have, because I don't want to disappoint people.'

Viscri has a population of 400 of whom just 29 are Saxons now, the majority of the rest being gypsies. Each homestead is laid out in traditional fashion. The house itself, with hipped roof, is typically aligned end-on to the street. Facing it across the yard is the 'summer kitchen', behind that the veg patch and orchard, and, lengthways at the back, the barn.

The wide, unmade main street has grassy margins threaded with a stream and planted with pear trees, and it's here that I run into a gaggle of anthropology students from Ball State University, Muncie, Indiana, who are on a study trip. Their professor, Jim Nyce, says that for some it's the first time they've been beyond the borders of the US.

'One of the most interesting things my students learn here is that there's a 'time depth' to a nation,' he tells me. And of the initiative to bring tourists here he says, 'This is a very interesting experiment in how you blend the traditional and the modern in such a way that both win.'

Up in the high pasture a couple of miles from the village, Damian, his wife Agurita and their two sons are settling into their sheepfold for the summer. They had come up three days before, on May 7, and expect to stay till at least mid-October, guarding the village's 2,400-strong flock of sheep with the help of fierce, highly trained sheepdogs. 'Last year I saw a bear there.' She points up into the hills. 'Then once my husband said, 'What is that?' And it was a wolf. At 10 o'clock in the morning.'

Agurita, who is 38, has been coming up to this corral of wooden huts every year since she was 21, except for when she was having her children. 'I could not live without my animals,' she says. 'There is a very strong connection to the land.'

She slices glistening snowballs of freshly made cheese and says she is worried about the EU 'because they destroy what is natural. They want you to have tiles on the floor and running water.' The traditional way of making their sheep's cheese is under threat because under EU rules it's deemed unsanitary. And, in this still massively corrupt country, there is talk of greedy town hall officials pocketing agricultural subsidies before they reach the farmers.

Brussels and bureaucrats seems a long way away as Agurita leads us up the hillside to show us the cusca - the moveable lookout - where somebody sleeps every night. It is a bed on runners, rather like a sleigh, which can be pulled through the long grass. It is insulated with sheepskin and has an oilskin flap to be pulled down in case of bed weather. Otherwise the lookout sleeps open to the elements, with one eye on the flock.

'It is peaceful up here,' she says, gazing on a vista of wild flowers and rolling green hills. 'The city is too much noise, people are too agitated.' She points at the lookout-bed. 'I lie here and listen to the crickets.'

Published in The Daily Telegraph on July 7 2007

Basque heart and soul

Sat, 10 Nov 2007 -1:00:00 GMT

Txakoli is a slightly fizzy white wine from the Spanish Basque Country. They glug it ice-cold with seafood. Juan-Mari sniffs, tastes, pulls a face. This one, he says, is triste - sad. He is mortified that his English guest should taste such rubbish. Time to move on.

We pile out into Bilbao's famous siete calles - seven streets of bars and cheerful mayhem in the city's Casco Viejo or old quarter. A Saturday mid-afternoon and the place is packed and popping with a happiness that is devoid of menace.

We pass a shop called Gorostiaga which sells authentic Basque berets, and turn into Plaza Nueva, where a window display is devoted to ornamentos de iglesia - religious vestments and icons. Juan-Mari quickens his step towards Casa Victor Montes, an invitingly dark and glittering bar on the east side of the square. A grievous wrong is about to be righted. The Englishman will drink well.

Juan-Mari is the cousin of my partner, Miren. This bar-crawl through his home town, in the company of other family members, is a privilege for me - a rehearsal of an effortlessly civilised way of life that leaves our British eating and drinking habits wanting in comparison.

We wedge our shoulders into the throng. Juan-Mari orders pintxos - the Basque equivalent of tapas - and hands me a glass of txakoli, then tastes his own. It passes muster. 'With lobster this is very good,' he says, holding his glass to the light. 'But the tortilla is not good.' He frowns. 'Too cold.' He perks up again. 'But there is very good bacalau [salt cod] here. And next door.'

'He's food-obsessed,' hisses Miren in my ear.

Juan-Mari hands me another glass. 'Typical is to have four or five before eating,' he says cheerfully (his wife raises her eyebrows). 'This is the whole thing of the Casco. Take your time. You are at home.'

I felt it, too. Call me biased but I believe the Basque Autonomous Community of Spain, to use its official title, is one of the finest places in Europe for a touring holiday. It has two sparkling cities, outstanding coastal and mountain scenery, and wonderful food. The bit I'm thinking of comprises the provinces of Vizcaya and Guipuzcoa which border the Bay of Biscay and is bookended by Bilbao in the west and San Sebastian, some 60 miles to the east.

These two, very different cities are worth a visit in their own right. Bilbao, besides the charm of the Casco Viejo, has that explosion in a tin-can factory otherwise known as the Guggenheim Museum, futuristic trams and metro, and a general post-industrial gentrification that, again, makes too many of our own cities look ugly and tired by comparison. San Sebastian, built around a bay in the shape of an elastic C, is elegant and snooty (with a largely hidden, ETA-supporting radicalism).

But it is the campo - the countryside - in between that captivates me. On this trip I stayed in a charming little hotel, the Atalaya, in a fishing village called Mundaka, while Miren lodged up the road in the tuna port of Bermeo with her curmudgeonly nonogenarian aunt, Adela. This arrangement left me free to spend days exploring along the coast and back into the mountains.

But first I acclimatised to my temporary home. Mundaka is an exquisite example of the fishing ports that dot this coast all the way east to San Sebastian. Each has an atalaya, a seafront eminence shaded by trees where lookouts once scanned the horizon for whales and squalls. Now, in that southern European way, they serve as open-air salons.

Mundaka's has whitewashed benches shaped like rolltop desks, shared, incongruously enough, by old ladies in pearls and surf dudes in half-peeled wetsuits. The dudes come from all over the world - the breakfast room of the hotel was filled with Aussie and Californian English - because the river estuary on which Mundaka is situated simmers up some of the best surf waves in Europe.

On the recommendation of another family member, Alasne, I ate in the casino, a beautiful belle epoque harbourfront building with a dramatically jettied first-floor dining-room. Inside, the lights were high and bright, the wooden floors worn, the atmosphere a bit barn-like.

I was beginning to question Alasne's judgement when the food arrived - peppers stuffed with crabmeat, followed by txipirones en su tinta, cuttlefish in its own ink. These are typical dishes that make the Basques' maritime cuisine unimprovable, to my taste buds, and the little critters were in ecstasy on this occasion.

The next morning I drove south through Gernika, headed back up towards the coast and eventually found (no thanks to the poor signposting) the Caves of Santimamine. Up till then I hadn't gone a bundle on holes in the ground, but these caves are extraordinary: so huge, highly coloured in reds and greens, labyrinthine and sculptural that I felt like a flea crawling round a bombed cathedral. In the dark.

They are also an important location for Basques proud of their distinct genetic ancestry (many share an unusual blood group). Paleolithic paintings - mostly of bison - found on the cave walls indicate man was living here 20,000 years ago, well before the rest of Spain was inhabited. They may not have been wearing berets and playing pelota, but these earliest inhabitants of the Iberian peninsula were ancestors of the Basques.

A fitting piece of graffiti has been daubed on a building near the entrance of the cave: 'Turist remember you are baske Qountry.' Actually it is difficult to forget where you are, and not only because all the roadsigns are in Basque rather than Spanish (Gernika, for instance, rather than Guernica). There is a kind of innocence here that is unusual for this part of Europe: as if, having scarcely looked in a mirror, the Basque Country has no idea how charming and unusual it is.

Put another way, it is so uncommercialised, for a region of such varied natural beauty, it gives every impression of not expecting visitors. This spirit of innocence is nowhere better felt than in the fishing port of Lekeitio. Tall, thin houses with glazed galleries line the harbour, where hundreds of boats were bobbing on the rainy October Sunday I blew in.

One boat, the Playa de Ondarzabal, is a 26-metre long, wooden former tuna trawler. It looks romantically primitive, a vessel from a bygone era, but it was in service until 2001. Now it is a museum, a monument to a way of life that is disappearing. Huddled in the cabin, Fernando, the guide, beckoned me aboard.

'The important space is for the fish, not for the people,' he said. He lifted the lid of the hold, which could hold 36 tonnes of fish. 'It still smells very bad and it's five years since it doesn't work.' The crew slept in the fo'c'sle. 'It is small like a cemetery. Here, 14 people lived for 20 days at sea.'

Twenty years ago there were 16 fishing boats like this one operating out of Lekeitio. Now there are only three. Fernando pointed them out in their disctinctive green, red and blue livery. 'It was a fishing village,' he said. 'Now they want to become a tourist village.'

Already Lekeitio's population of 6,000 swells more than threefold in the summer months. Visitors - mostly Basque - come for the three glorious sandy beaches as well as the restaurants and bars on the harbourside. But it seemed to me that Lekeitio's heart still belongs at sea.

Astonishingly for such a simple and lovely fishing village - with its caged songbirds and strings of garlic hanging in the windows, and its steep cobbled alleys - there are no shops selling postcards and beach jellies. The one trap for tourists' euros - a boutique selling earrings and handbags - is next door to a chandler's. The 100 or so boats in the harbour are mostly small fishing craft, with only a handful of pleasure yachts.

How come a place like Lekeitio isn't better known? Why doesn't a single British tour operator have a dedicated programme to this region? There is one possible explanation. On the beach wall at Lekeitio a painted slogan in Basque says: ' Basque prisoners to the Basque Country' - a plea for ETA prisoners to serve their time in their homeland rather than elsewhere in Spain.

Pro-ETA banners and slogans abound throughout the region and are even stencilled on wheelie bins. Perhaps a reputation for militancy has scared people off over the years, but the truth is that, though ETA recently broke its ceasefire - and Basque separatism is undoubtedly a popular cause here - such things do not impinge on the visitor.

Another doubtful reputation is more deserved - for rain. My visit to San Sebastian the following day was all but ruined by a real scowler of a storm that camped over Guipuzcoa until late afternoon. Cristina, my guide, took me to an umbrella shop in the Parte Vieja, the old quarter, before we drank coffee in a bar called La Cepa, surrounded by hanging hams and bullfighting posters.

As we dripped water on the floor she explained how the climate has affected the fortunes of her home city. 'San Sebastian for almost a century was the most elegant, I should say snobbish resort in Spain,' she said. 'But the people were very rich, they could afford to stay three months. If it rained one week it would be nicer the next. Now people do not have so much time, the very wealthy ones go to Marbella, the more modest ones go to the east. Alicante, Benidorm.'

Stranded on the shores of fashion, San Sebastian is a belle epoque relic - the ensanche Cortazar, the 'romantic area', is a grid of gorgeous sandstone apartment blocks with balconies and bow windows - which just happens to have the highest concentration of high-class restaurants in Spain, if not Europe.

The rain failed to let up so we toured the city by car, ending up on top of Monte Igeldo at the western end of the bay. Down below, the Playa de la Concha, the 'conch shell', described a perfect sandy curve: the finest urban beach in Europe. We gazed seaward, into a white-out. 'When it's a good day you can see Biarritz,' said Cristina glumly.

I had driven from Mundaka to San Sebastian by the A8 motorway, which runs inland. Cristina insisted I drive back on the N634, which is what the motorway replaced. It's a cracking road rising and plunging along dramatic sea cliffs to provide the most exhilarating drive I've had since doing California's Highway 1 (the N634 turns inland just beyond Deba - continue along the coast on minor roads).

On Juan-Mari's recommendation I broke for a late lunch at Getaria, another lovely (but very much working) fishing port. Sitting on the terrace of the Mayflower restaurant - it was warm enough to be outside despite the rain - I ate six langostinos a la plancha, grilled to a rare state of juicy crunchiness on an open-air charcoal broiler. With a copa of txakoli of course.

A Basque separatist flag - red, green and white - fluttered from a pole on the dockside. Bands of rain pulsed across the anvil-shaped rock behind the harbour. I looked at my watch, gestured for the bill, then thought of Juan-Mari. 'Another txakoli please,' I said as the waitress approached.

Published in The Daily Telegraph on May 12 2007

The ice in the heart of Venice

Sat, 10 Nov 2007 -1:00:00 GMT

It is like stepping through the looking glass in which Venice habitually admired itself. The 'Secret Itineraries' tour of the Palazzo Ducale whisks you from the outrageous opulence of the Golden Staircase straight into the austere corridors where the real power lay.

Concealed behind disguised doors, these secret parts of the Doge's Palace were the headquarters of state security: the sliver of ice in the heart of this most beautiful of earthly cities. Here, for half a millennium, shuffled the functionaries of a security apparatus every bit as clandestine and paranoid as our our own.

The recent film Casanova, with Heath Ledger and Sienna Miller, got one thing right about Venice in the 18th century - it was quivering with police and spies. But, far from being hapless Inspector Clouseau types, they created a climate of constant suspicion and fear.

'Secrecy was always a problem in Venice because there was freedom and it was an international city,' said Cinzia, our diminuitive and enthusiastic guide. 'The state had spy agents everywhere.'

Before we entered the hidden quarters, she lead our group of 15 along the first-floor arcade on the eastern side of the palace and paused in front of a letterbox in the form of a gurning grotesque wearing a knotted turban.

'A 'Mouth of Truth', ' said Cinzia. Once, such letterboxes were all over the city (one remains on the promenade known as the Zattere) for these were where Venetians were encouraged to post denunications of their fellow citizens - much like our current government's 'Rat On A Rat' and 'Name And Shame' campaigns. There was even a witness protection programme available for reluctant ratters.

All sorts of checks and balances were built into the power structures of Venice and, in theory, the justice system, though implacable, was incorruptible. Citizens who made use of the postboxes had to sign their accusations and anonymous denunciations had to be destroyed by law. 'But there were exceptions...,' said Cinzia with a knowing nod.

Apart from the usual - murder, treason, heresy - major no-nos in this city built on water were polluting the waterways and poisoning the wells. 'If someone contaminated the wells,' said Cinzia, 'it was like a declaration of war.'

From the first-floor arcade Cinzia led us up the Scala d'Oro, the Golden Staircase, its ceiling of 24-carat gold leaf designed to dazzle and intimidate visiting ambassadors and dignitaries. At the top of the staircase we turned left through a plain wooden door - and found ourselves in a place of both banality and terror.

The banality first: the door opens on to a warren of low-ceilinged, wood panelled rooms like ship's cabins. 'You are now in the core of power,' said Cinzia. 'But you see the modesty of this place. It is because they believed nobody should be exalted in private.'

The storey we were on now was cut in half in the 16th century to accommodate the secret chambers, creating two mezzanines, or half-floors, though on the outside the original windows disguise the fact. Here was the nerve-centre of a city state that once held sway over half the Mediterranean. In these shadowy rooms an army of penpushers compiled information, in Latin and Venetian, on everything from the movements of armies to the sex lives of gondoliers.

This information was then preserved in the Secret Archive, a wood-panelled room with the air of an Edwardian library situated vertically between the Golden Staircase and the palace roof. 'A life of centuries and centuries in words,' Cinzia called it.

It was also an example of a surveillance culture before the days of spy drones, CCTV and phone taps, though today the voluminous records occupying 50 crested wall cabinets would be held in a microchip smaller than a Doge's beauty spot.

Now the terror: the secret chambers were also the seat of internal security, presided over by the sinister sounding Council of Ten who, with the Doge, ruled Venice from 1310 to the end of empire in 1797. Council members served for one year only - another anti-corruption safeguard. The grand public chamber in which they grilled suspects (no legal defence permitted) is connected to the secret parts of the palace by a door disguised as a wall panel.

If it wasn't your lucky day, you would be led away through the secret door to the Office of the Three Heads of the Council of Ten, the Room of the State Inquisitors and - as if you weren't already a nervous wreck - the Torture Chamber. 'A scary place in the past,' said Cinzia.

It still is. Imagine the stage set for a bleak modern play. Where the audience would sit is a long table, behind which sat three inquisitors. In front of them the stage: wooden cells with thick iron grilles, stacked either side of a 20ft drop where a rope dangles.

'The prisoner was lifted up by the rope and suspended for a while with his hands behind his back,' said Cinzia. 'The arms came out of their sockets. The ribcage could even break.'

Torture took place at night, in darkness, over three days. 'Look up,' said Cinzia, indicating the prison cells. 'This was another kind of torture, very eloquent. The new prisoners could watch and hear what was waiting for them. Claustrophobia and anguish did the rest.'

The prisoner's ordeal was not over. As the bells of the basilicia sounded the hour, we climbed a staircase to the piombi, the prison cells, so called because they were immediately beneath the roof leads. The real Giacomo Casanova was imprisoned here in 1755, at the age of 30. 'He was a gambler and a charlatan, he had intercourses [sic] with nuns,' said Cinzia. 'For his blasphemies he was sentenced to five years in jail.'

There are seven piombi, with doors of thick wood and colossal iron hinges. We ducked our heads through the low doorway as we entered the first cell Casanova occupied. 'He touched the ceiling with his head,' said Cinzia. 'When he complained of the cramped conditions he was given furniture from his own apartment.'

After blackmailing his guard he was moved to a cell on the other side, overlooking the lagoon, from where he escaped - according to his own, self-serving account, with the help of a file hidden in a bible and covered with a plate of gnocchi. When the palace doors were opened in the morning Casanova and a fellow prisoner strode to freedom, bold as you like, down the Golden Staircase.

We followed Casanova's escape route, back through the mirror and into the gilt-framed beauty of the Piazzetta San Marco - where public executions were carried out. Sunlight glittered on the waters of the lagoon and an icy wind fingered our necks. Venice looked as beautiful as ever, but felt just a bit chillier.

Published in The Daily Telegraph on September 30 2006

See Venice and dine

Sat, 10 Nov 2007 -1:00:00 GMT

That's her! No it isn't, nothing like. We - my partner Miren and I - are looking out for a woman we met for five minutes six months ago. It's an autumn day of gauzy sunlight and we are sitting outside an osteria called Naranzaria in the heart of the Rialto Market area of Venice. Behind us the waters of the Grand Canal are lapping over the ancient, soap-smooth stones of the canalside.

At this stylish watering hole - where the herbs, fruit and vegetables were once stored for the market - we have arranged to meet a 41-year-old Venetian called Gloria Beggiato. We ran into Gloria at the beginning of February, in a restaurant called Il Nuovo Galeon on the other side of the city.

'This is one of the best fish restaurants in Venice,' she had said in perfect English, 'but not many tourists come here.' She'd looked impressed that we had made it as far east as the workaday thoroughfare of the Via Garibaldi, with its greengrocers and flapping washing lines.

Gloria had also told us, casually, that she owned the Metropole Hotel, on the glorious promenade of the Riva degli Schiavoni overlooking the Bacino San Marco. 'It is the only hotel in Venice with a Michelin-starred restaurant,' she added, nailing us for foodies. 'If you'd like me to book you a table, here's my card.'

And so, the following day, we ate at The Met restaurant amid red velvet and antique mirrors. It was a romantic, theatrical evening in complete contrast to our usual eating experience in Venice, of simple food (usually fish) in unfussy trattorie.

The trademark creation of The Met's chef, Corrado Fasolato, is 'fettuccine' (the inverted commas are important) di seppie alla carbonara, in which the cuttlefish is shredded into 2mm ribbons to stand in for the pasta. And as its exquisite flavours faded on my tongue, an idea was forming in my pleasantly befuddled head.

As the woman responsible for one of the best restaurants in Venice, Gloria obviously knew her food. So why didn't I ask her where else she ate, apart from Il Nuovo Galeon and her own restaurant: those unimagined places tucked among the city's crossword grid of calles and sotoportegi? Then I could come back (hurrah!) to get lost, sample her suggestions and write about it.

Back in London, and over the course of several emails, I firmed up the plan. Gloria sent me a list of places where she and her friends like to drink, have lunch and dine, and I fixed the return trip for October, booking two nights at the Metropole and one - the first night - at the Bauer, where I planned to kick off this culinary mystery tour with a guaranteed high-class eating experience.

The Bauer, you see, has the only hotel restaurant in Venice to rival the Metropole's. In fact in the week we were there, De Pisis, as it's called, had just been voted the best restaurant in Venice by the well respected L'Espresso guide to eating out in Italy.

On a warm, velvety evening, with stars shining above the terrace of De Pisis, we ate cuttlefish, spidercrab, turbot and veal liver, and wondered whether there could be anywhere more spine-shiveringly perfect for dinner that this spot where the Grand Canal meets the Bacino San Marco. Nyet!, the Russian couple in front if us would surely have exclaimed.

They sat in pole position, in the front right-hand corner above the Grand Canal. Below them, moored gondolas bumped prows in the wash from water traffic. To their right across the canal rose the illuminated white dome of Santa Maria della Salute. Gondoliers sang cheesy arias through the darkness.

The Russians smoked furiously - not just between courses but between mouthfuls - and canoodled like love birds, shamefully neglecting their food in the heady fumes of love and tobacco. I was reminded of them the next morning when I met the Bauer's owner, Francesca Bortolotto. 'Venice is a dream city before anything,' she said. 'So you have to meet the expectations of what a dream meal should be. You want something for that special mood.'

When Francesca took over the running of the hotel in 1997, 'the restaurant had no identity. There was no gourmet restaurant in Venice. It was a difficult path.' But, as the owner of what she called the largest independently owned hotel in the city, 'I have a task, which is to start things others will follow.'

In the case of the Metropole, they have followed a bit too assiduously for the Bauer's liking. When I mentioned the Metropole's Michelin star to Francesca there was the merest inclination of the head, then she pointed out that the L'Espresso guide had just put De Pisis at the top of the Venice tree. I thought momentarily of alpha males clashing saucepan lids but then, as I looked at Francesca in all her imperturbable chic-ness, the image dissolved.

'Venetians have habits,' Francesca had told me. 'They don't like too much of a formal ambience.' Which is why the city abounds in simple places like that day's lunch stop, Il Nuovo Galeon, where the idea for this article took root. We sat outside, drinking a carafe of house white and watching real Venetians shopping and chatting, before burying our heads in the glorious 'mixed shells soup': razor shell clams, clams and mussels in a powerful broth that rattled around like nails in a bucket.

Zazou, the Jack Russell, came and went, Sergio, the grumpy waiter, warmed up as he tends to, and Giorgio Galardi, the co-owner, explained the Galeon philosophy. 'We negotiate directly with the fishermen every day. Everything we do is simple and plain but very good. Good food and service at a good price.'

Then he added, somewhat surreally, 'The Queen of Belgium comes here. Rutger Hauer comes here.' The visitors' book revealed other names: Bono ('Just like Dublin only warmer'), Matt Dillon, Natasha Richardson, Gianni Versace. This unassuming little place, with a boat sliced in half lengthways for a bar, that we had congratulated ourselves on discovering, is evidently a poorly kept secret.

Galeon had been the obvious place to meet Gloria but she was away that day, and the following day (Tuesday) it was closed. We arranged our rendezvous at one of her favourite bars, Naranzaria, instead.

So there we are, clocking every elegant, young-ish woman who passes, until one of them stoops, takes off her large sunglasses and smiles - and we realise that we have remembered all along what she looks like.

Over a glass of prosecco Gloria rights a misconception about Venice. 'Venetians know good food,' she says, 'but this is not an international city as you may think. In Venice you always eat in the same way. Good fish quality but very simple. It was out of fashion to eat in hotels but things have been changing in recent years.'

Thanks, she may have added, to the likes of the Bauer and the Metropole. She touches briefly on the, er, creative rivalry with Francesca's Bauer and the question of who was going to get the Michelin accolade: 'They said, 'We will get the star.' I felt so bad for them [when we got it].I thought, My God they will hate us!' She smiles, as saucepan lids clash deafeningly in my head.

Then, smooth as a water taxi, Gloria moves on to entertaining tales of the celebs she gets to hang out with as one of Venice's top hoteliers: an account of an evening out with Elton John, David Furnish, Grace Jones and the hat designer Philip Treacy morphs into a story about Elton and David at Harry's Bar; then the occasion on which Grace Jones, a regular at the Metropole, 'took off her fur coat in St Mark's Square in the middle of the night and started to sing.'

We drain our glasses. Next to us, a photo fashion shoot is wrapping up. Now, where shall we eat? We are in Gloria's stylishly be-ringed hands. 'Alla Madonna,' she says. 'My father loves that place. In the mornings you always see the waiters, sleeves up, peeling the gamberetti [baby shrimps].'

Madonna is a Venetian institution which features in all the guidebooks, so it's hardly breaking news. But some stories bear repeating. Copper buckets hang from the ceiling and, in time-honoured bohemian fashion, the walls are covered in paintings donated by artists in lieu of payment.

Gloria's been going since she was a little girl. 'I used to come here once a week minimum. I had my own menu - folpetti [little octopus] followed by risotto. I like places that are quick, good and real. They go buy the fish [round the corner in the market] and they serve it, and it is gone by the end of the day.'

It is fast and exciting and wildly efficient. The white-jacketed waiters swarm around Gloria, who is practically an institution here herself. We have the painstakingly de-shelled gamberetti, delicious schie - grey shrimps - with polenta, spider crab ('Our speciality,' says the waiter proudly. 'We prepare every morning with olive oil and lemon and a little bit of pepper'), crayfish, the juicy flesh scooped from its unzipped back, squid eggs, a scallop grilled with olive oil, white wine and brandy and served piping hot in its shell, folpetti, and powerfully flavoured sardines, best left till last, which have been fried with onions then marinated.

And then: 'Ah, the famous risotto has arrived...' ('Divine,' says Miren.) Afterwards, over espressos, Gloria says, 'Now I am absolutely happy because everything was perfect.'

Because the Venetian lagoon is like an endlessly replenished fishmonger's slab it's easy to forget about meat in Venice. For our last evening we try out Gloria's intriguing final recommendation, Trattoria da Arturo, near the Fenice opera house (it tends to fill up at the end of performances). 'We are here 33 years with always the same menu,' says Hani Beniamin, originally from Cairo. 'No fish, only meat and vegetables.'

It's a narrow, funny little place with just seven tables, like a railway carriage - which, indeed, is what it's known as. We order salads for starters - one spinach, one flagelot beans. Noticing we may be about to mix and match, Hani's partner, Ernesto Ballarin - a Barker to Hani's Corbett - signals his purism by saying in passing, 'If you share, have this before [he points to the spinach], then this [ he indicates the beans].'

We watch my bistecca alla campagnola fizzing and browning in the tiny kitchen, which is as industrious as the footplate of a steam locomotive. 'Come through,' says Hani, and we squeeze in. Cupboards and fittings are raised off the floor to combat the aqua alta. An alcove is the ghost of an ancient doorway that opened on to the canal behind.

Our bloody slabs are sumptuous but the non-meat options are not just there to make up the numbers. For spaghetti ai carciofi - with artichokes - the sauce is cooked for five hours. 'People wonder what it is,' says Ernesto, pulling a quizzical face. 'Sometimes they say, 'Is it cuttlefish?' '

We have eaten half of Venice in three days and there's not a cubic millimetre left for any more. But when we ask for the bill Ernesto insists we try his own-recipe tiramisu, which is not made with sponge fingers. 'Probably you no like,' he says archly when he brings the plate and two spoons, 'but, prego...'

Published in The Daily Telegraph on March 3 2007

Braining up on the Euston Road

Sat, 10 Nov 2007 -1:00:00 GMT

As our institutions and attractions dumb down in search of popularity - think of Kylie's hotpants at the V&A - it is exciting to find a new museum that is unashamedly 'braining up'. Wellcome Collection - like Tate Modern, it modishly shuns the definite article - opened free to the public this summer on the Euston Road in north London. Along with the new British Library building, the reglorified frontage of the former Midland Grand Hotel at St Pancras and the arrival of Eurostar, it is part of the regeneration of a neighbourood that someone, soon, will surely dub 'Noho'.

It is also a wonderful and stimulating addition to the capital's cluster of world-class museums and visitor attractions. Combining three exhibitions, a cafe and bookshop, the Collection is 'very much about the connection between medicine and art and the rest of life,' according to Dr Ken Arnold, the Head of Public Programmes. Standing in the foyer, Dr Arnold demonstrates his point.

In a glass box lies a work by the artist Marc Quinn: the figure of a woman, Silvia Petretti, who is HIV positive. The sculpture has been cast from wax mixed with a day's dose of the drugs Silvia takes in order to stay alive. Nearby one of Antony Gormley's human figures hangs upside down from the ceiling.

There is, says Dr Arnold, 'a ricocheting of ideas' between the 'medicine and art' of Quinn's figure and the 'art and life' represented by the Gormley. This may sound a bit highbrow - pretentious even - but Arnold makes no bones about the complexity of his thesis. The Collection offers 'a generous, open-minded approach to medicine' embracing 'anthropology, art, history and design'. Unlike most science exhibitions, with their shiny interactiveness, it does not court the under-14s, though Arnold is quick to say they are welcome.

That it works is principally down to the startling juxtapositions of objects and concepts that cast familiar ideas in a new light. The first, temporary exhibition, entitled 'The Heart', celebrates the heart as the putative 'seat of the soul and the home of love' as well as the machine that pumps blood around our bodies.

In a display case fragments of papyrus show scenes from the Ancient Egyptian 'Book of the Dead' in which the gods�can be�seen weighing the heart of a dead man against the 'feather of truth' in order to judge�his suitability for the afterlife. Next to this display a sound chamber sunk into the wall plays "Your cheatin' heart will tell on you" by Hank Williams.�

In a small dark room, a Leonardo da Vinci drawing of heart valves is shown next to a cabinet containing artificial heart valves used in surgery today. Most provocatively, an artwork combines bloody video footage of a chest cavity being sawn open, prior to heart surgery, with a recording of the evangelist, Billy Graham, talking of the metaphorical shedding of God's blood in the evil that men do.

One of the co-curators of 'The Heart', Emily Jo Sargent, indicates an empty space in the wall. 'We have a gap here where we're waiting for human heart to arrive from a young woman with heart disease who's just had a heart transplant,' she says. By now the diseased heart will have found a home that actually wants it.

All this is very much in the broad-minded spirit of Sir Henry Wellcome, who died in 1936, and the charitable trust which takes his name. Wellcome was an American pharmacist and philanthropist who set up the Wellcome Trust in order to fund medical research. Its original headquarters now houses Wellcome Collection, while the Trust has moved into new state-of-the art premises next door. The neoclassical facade of the old building is intact, but the interiors have been opened out in contemporary gallery style, with what Dr Arnold calls 'long sight lines and a sense of transparency'.

Wellcome, who was also passionately interested in archaeology and ethnology, was an avid collector of anything vaguely medically related. 'He collected collections rather than collecting objects,' says Dr Arnold, and in so doing amassed 'one of the world's great museum collections'.

It is this hoard, gathered from all over the world and every era of civilisation, which forms the core of the permanent Wellcome Collection - though only a fraction (500 objects) of Sir Henry's entire collection of more than a million are on display.

This 'Medicine Man' exhibition, celebrating the life and legacy of Henry Wellcome, features, inter alia, torture chairs - one, leather bound, would not look out of place in the Garrick if it wasn't for the hole in the seat - phantom limbs, strands of George III's hair, a 4,000-year-old trepanned skull with a finger-sized hole in it, bullet extractors, an 18th-century metal-plated artificial nose, the death mask of Benjamin Disraeli, a shrunken head, a Peruvian mummy, Florence Nightingale's moccasins and a guillotine blade which beheaded one Jean-Baptiste Carrier during the French Revolution.

While the presentation is slick - you open discreet drawers and cupboards for background information on the exhibits - the atmosphere in 'Medicine Man' is studiedly old-fashioned, with subdued lighting and wooden panelling to emphasise the eclectic Edwardian nature of the collection.

Next door the third exhibition space, 'Medicine Now', is brash and bright in reds and whites. Here, as its title suggests, the subject is contemporary medical topics explored through science, art and popular culture. There are transparent and cutaway models of the human body and a giant pink sculpture by John Isaacs depicting human obesity, entitled 'I can't help the way I feel' and looking like an offcut of the Elephant Man. If you sit on one of the white chairs facing the sculpture this will trigger a recording of an obese woman talking of her struggles with dieting.

'Medicine Now' also looks at genomics and genetics, which is fitting seeing as the Wellcome Trust is the major funder of the sequencing of the human genome in the UK. Dr Arnold points at a floor-to-ceiling bookcase of white ledgers. 'The 3.4 billion letters that constitute the human genome have been printed out in 4.5 point size and they fill 120 volumes,' he says.

I pull out one of the 1,000-page volumes, open it at random and, radically adjusting my focal length, read: 'caaacctgac...' and 'gacctggg...' and variations thereon: the secrets of the human body expounded in alphabetic terms. Revolutionary and extraordinary as this science is, it has an antecedent in art.

On the wall nearby are headphones in which one may hear a reading of the poem To His Mistress Going to Bed by the metaphysical poet John Donne. This is the one where he compares his lover's body to a landscape: 'Licence my roving hands, and let them go/ Before, behind, between, above, below./ O, my America, my Newfoundland...'

A wall panel explains that 'In the 21st century the Human Genome Project has mapped this land and located many of its secrets...' Ah yes, but which would you rather read, an endless minestrone of consonants, or Donne's sublime erotic verse? And how far does the answer to that question tell us we have come, as a species, since Donne wrote his poem 400 years ago?

Wellcome Collection, as we must call it, may make your brain hurt on occasion. But you will spill back on to the Euston Road feeling both exhilarated and ever so slightly more intelligent.

Published in The Daily Telegraph on June 30 2007

Rockin' all over England

Fri, 9 Nov 2007 -1:00:00 GMT

A fellow drinker in The Grapes pub in Liverpool explained why the wallpaper behind me was covered with Perspex: 'Because people kept robbin' it.' He shrugged. This patch of patterned tat has relic status. It features in a photograph of the Beatles.

Taken in the pre-moptop era, the photograph hangs nearby. Paul looks geeky in glasses - presumably Lennon's as John isn't wearing any. The four of them (Pete Best, not Ringo) are sitting on a bench drinking stout, with that wallpaper behind and above them.

Forty-five years later, I was sitting on the same bench. I thought I was immune to this kind of nostalgia, but the back of my neck was tingling ever so slightly. They. Were. Here!

The Grapes is in Mathew Street, a few yards down from the Cavern Club where the Fab Four performed hundreds of times between March 1961 and August 1963. After gigs they'd come to the Grapes for a pint.

Their first manager, Allan Williams - known as 'the man who gave the Beatles away' - still drinks here, though he wasn't there the night I dropped in. Neither was Paul McCartney. But I was happy to be with Pete Wylie, founder member of the 80s band The Mighty Wah!, collaborator with members of other famous Liverpool outfits such as Echo and the Bunnymen and The Teadrop Explodes, and genial musical ambassador for his beloved home patch (he has just narrated a musical tour of the city for MP3 players).

'The Beatles fixed Liverpool as a black and white city,' he said, nodding at the old photograph. 'And with Eric's the [legendary nightclub] and punk rock we made the city go colour.' Liverpool, he averred, is a place of urban myths. But the 'pool's greatest story - how four lads shook the world - is no myth.

The admittedly improbable tale of the Beatles is the turntable upon which Liverpool continues to spin its idea of itself. It's the reason why almost every tourist visits the city - and the undisputed chart topper in a new national tourism initiative.

The 'England Rocks!' campaign, which launches formally on Monday, identifies the holy sites of English rock 'n' roll: musicians' birth- and resting-places; their lyrical inspirations; the places where songs were written, album covers were shot and pints were sunk.

If you're on a musical quest you can't not come to Liverpool of course - it's like the Vatican of the pop religion. But before 'travelling on the one after 909' I started my pilgrimage at one of the quirkier and more arcane of the locations featured in the 'England Rocks!' campaign.

It's a straggly sycamore tree, permanently pinned with tributes, next to a busy road called Queen's Ride in south-west London. I must have driven past it a thousand times without stopping or even looking properly. But now, finally, I paid it the attention it deserves. For this is where, on September 16 1977, Marc Bolan of T Rex fame was killed outright when his purple Mini GT, driven by his American girlfriend Gloria Jones, crashed just before 5am. The spry and charismatic glam rocker, who'd started out as a mystical folkie, was two weeks shy of his 30th birthday.

'I've been visiting the site since six days after he died,' said Fee Warner, whom I'd arranged to meet at the tree. 'I was a sufficiently fanatical fan to change my name to Bolan. Much to my father's disgust.' Fee, a 47-year-old web designer from Hove, is the founder of TAG, the T Rex Action Group, and official guardian of the Bolan tree - she leased the land on which it stands from Railtrack.

We talked in Gipsy Lane, on the opposite side of the tree from the busy road. Due to Fee's efforts, the site is smart and dignified. There are steps made of railway sleepers in the bank that slopes up to the tree, and a bust of Bolan which was unveiled by his son, Rolan Bolan, in 2002.

The noticeboard Fee put up next to the tree - to discourage people from pinning things on the tree itself - is covered in poems and pictures. One message says: 'I meet [sic] you in a restaurant in the King's Road some few months before you died. I always remember that. You are my precious star. Luv Clive X.'

Nobody knows just how many people are drawn here. 'But I'd say it's into the thousands each year,' said Fee. 'We rarely come here and not see somebody.'

By happy coincidence a fan was already here when we arrived. Billy Sharpe, a 51-year-old musician from Leytonstone, east London, was sitting on the crash barrier next to the tree strumming his guitar. Resplendent in Crombie overcoat and pinstriped strides, he sang Hot Love, Get It On and Cosmic Dancer (which was used to such good effect in the film Billy Elliot). 'You feel a lot of peace,' he said. 'A lot of people have put a lot of love and prayers there. And when you play you get inspiration. A funny sort of feeling.'

It's the same feeling I had on the back of my neck, sitting in The Grapes in Liverpool, and it's the reason why the 'England Rocks!' campaign is such a good idea. Rock 'n' roll is now old enough to have a past, a venerable history. The places associated with it deserve the tourist treatment, being rather more interesting to the baby boom generation than, say, ruins where dead royalty lived.

When I got to Liverpool - for only my second visit to the city - I quickly realised I'd brought a bag of preconceptions with me, and I spent the next 24 hours shedding them. Why, for instance, did I think the rebuilt Cavern Club was a cynical tourist trap that bore little relation to the original, which was knocked down in 1973?

In fact the new Cavern, which opened in 1984, retains the original address of 10 Mathew Street though the entrance is 15 yards or so from the old one. It is located on roughly 75 per cent of the original site, using many of the old bricks to recreate the cellar arches but sensibly forgoing complete authenticity by adding toilets.

Those old bricks are covered in tributes from across the world: 'In my life I love you more. Jorge from Mexico'; 'Donna Sykes from Bolton'; 'Finally at the Cavern - Liverpool!!! Daniel Lozano (Colombia).' But the Cavern is not simply a monument - new, fresh bands continue to come out of it, most recently The Coral.

Why, equally, had I suspected Liverpool would be a bit of a dump? Its Georgian quarter is glorious, its municipal waterfront visionary and grand - it looks like a mini-Manhattan from the Mersey ferry - while the dug-up pavements and skyline of cranes testify to a frantic smartening towards next year's tenure of European City of Culture.

Pete Wylie, my drinking companion in the Beatles nook at The Grapes, had a theory for such mis-perceptions. 'It's a lazy stereotyping thing,' he said - Liverpool has never been properly understood by the rest of England because it's always felt apart.

This would explain why one of my companions on that day's 'Magical Mystery Tour' of Liverpool had been so pleasantly surprised. Dorothy, from Atlanta, Georgia, said she was a 'huge huge' Beatles fan. The tour had been a birthday present from her husband.

'I've so enjoyed it,' she told me, 'but what surprised me is that I thought they came from just slums. I only came to Liverpool because of the Beatles, and I never expected the town to be as nice and pretty as it is.'

Two prejudices in one, in fact, and I'm afraid I shared them both. Another prejudice to be comprehensively demolished was that the 'Magical Mystery Tour', which takes in all the key locations of the Beatles story, would be naff. Actually it's a revelation though, like Hey Jude, it takes a while to lift off.

On a bitterly cold afternoon I had boarded an old Bedford bus with eight other hardy - you might say, rubber - souls: three Americans, three Brits and an Italian couple. Past Netto, Iceland and Matalan we drove, into the suburb of Wavertree, where we disembarked and cut down a cul de sac of two-up, two-downs called Arnold Grove.

'This is it,' said Neil Brennan, who's a DJ at the Cavern when he isn't doing his amusing turn as a scally tour guide. 'Number 12. George was actually born in the downstairs front room [on February 24 1943].'

It was faintly embarrassing to be mooching around outside. People live in George's old house. A Liverpool FC flag hangs from an upstairs bedroom window. There's a hanging basket of plastic flowers by the front door. We shuffled back to the bus.

Beyond Mosspits Junior School, from which Lennon was expelled, we reached the leafy suburban village of Woolton, whose evident affluence had Dorothy and me metaphorically scratching our heads. The Victorian sandstone parish church of St Peter looked more Vicar of Dibley than Lady Madonna, but Neil pronounced it 'one of the most important places in the history of rock 'n' roll music.'

For it was here half a century ago - on July 6, 1957 - that Paul and John first met, when John's band, the Quarrymen, were playing at the Church Summer Fair. 'First thing Paul did was pick up John's guitar and tune it,' said Neil. Eleanor Rigby's grave also happens to be here.

Outside the locked, red-painted iron gates of Strawberry Field (no 's' on Field, unlike in the song title), a former Salvation Army orphanage, Jim McDowell, who works in the music business in Seattle, asked me to take his picture. 'It's all cool,' he said wonderingly.

We paused, but did not disembark, outside the smart semi called Mendips in Menlove Avenue where Lennon lived with his Aunt Mimi. 'John's bedroom was the little one above the front door,' said Neil, who couldn't resist divulging that NBC had filmed in the house while making making a movie of John's life and that he, Neil, had been in it (both the film and the house).

Paul lived in nine different houses in Liverpool, but he spent the longest time, nine years, at 20 Forthlin Road. With its original cream sash windows, taken from another house in the street, and lilac coloured drainpipes, it looks like a piece of preserved heritage - which is what it is. Now owned by the National Trust, along with Mendips, it is accessible by guided tour only, from March to October.

'The front room is where the Quarrymen used to rehearse. And then the Beatles,' said Neil. 'Over one hundred songs were written in that house - the majority of them in the bathroom because the acoustics were better there apparently.'

It was unexpectedly moving, seeing this little terraced house where Paul continued living with his dad, even when he'd achieved world-wide fame (he didn't leave till 1964). Colin Marriott, from Nottingham, stood and stared, feeling chuffed and choked. This tour was a birthday present for him, too. 'I think they were just nice people, and people could relate to them,' he said.

Penny Lane is a nondescript road of red-brick terraces: we trundled past the wine bar with the song lyrics painted up outside, the boards advertising student accommodation, the chip shop ... 'Penny Lane is in my ears and in my eyes,' sang the Beatles over the bus loudspeakers, and I felt that tingle on my neck.

It is touching that such a funny and proud song could have been written about such an ordinary place. In those couple of minutes I understood more clearly than ever before how this music must have exploded into the drab England of the early 1960s. To turn Pete Wylie's analogy on its head, the Beatles put colour into black and white lives.

The tour bus dropped us in Mathew Street, which is really the heart of the story. Here tourists pose by the statue of John with its too-big head, and gaze on the Liverpool Wall of Fame, which commemorates songs by local acts that reached number one - starting with Lita Roza's How Much Is that Doggie in the Window? in 1953 and including I Like It by Gerry and the Pacemakers and You're My World by Cilla Black.

Limbering up for my appointment with Pete Wylie in The Grapes, I had a drink with Neil, the DJ and tour guide, in the Cavern Pub (not to be confused with the Cavern Club on the other side of Mathew Street). There, among signed guitars and other Cavern Club memorabilia, I met the Liverpool musician known as The Amazing Professor Longhair, who told me a story that sums up Liverpool and the Beatles. It may be apocryphal but, hey, this is the city of urban myth.

Paul occasionally returns to his childhood home in Forthlin Road, apparently. On one such visit a local scally saw McCartney's car parked in the road and, surmising he was a fan, tapped on the window. 'Hey mister,' he said, 'if you give us a nicker I'll show you where Paul McCartney lived.'

Published in The Daily Telegraph on February 3 2007

The timeless landscape of Edward Thomas

Wed, 31 Oct 2007 -1:00:00 GMT

Edward Thomas - the country poet, the war poet, the poet whom Ted Hughes called 'the father of us all' - didn't care for the second house he lived in in the village of Steep in Hampshire. He recalled 'Nights of storm, days of mist, without end;/Sad days when the sun/Shone in vain'. His poem The New House made it sound like a spooky hovel so it was a surprise to find that the real thing is charismatic - mansard roof, chunky arts and crafts chimneys - and in a location that must add a few quid to estate agents' valuations.

The Red House - named after its bricks and tiles - perches on the lip of a steep escarpment with wonderful views across to the South Downs. But Thomas, a contrary and gloomy chap, was not easily pleased. 'He could be difficult, and that's putting it mildly,' Colin Thornton told me. Thornton, a retired engineer from the Isle of Wight, is the Honorary Secretary of the Edward Thomas Fellowship, a body dedicated to the memory of the poet, which each year stages a commemorative walk around Steep, near Petersfield.

The 2007 walk is a significant one as it marks the 90th anniversary of the poet's death in the First World War. When he was killed at the Battle or Arras on April 9 1917, Thomas was 39. Men his age didn't have to join up but even though he disagreed with the fighting he found it unconscionable to do nothing while his compatriates were being slaughtered.

His early death robbed the world of a poet who had barely got going - Thomas had only been writing poems for two years (his friend, Robert Frost, suggested he give it a go) and his first collection wasn't published till after his death. What he left behind - besides a canon of some 140 poems conceived in a two-year whirl of creativity before he marched to war and death - is a locale that is precisely mapped in his poetry.

The detective work of matching words to places is hugely enjoyable, and there's a considerable bonus - one of the south of England's finest old pubs is a compulsory part of the itinerary. I'd arranged to meet Colin Thornton and another Fellowship committee member, Stephen Turner, in the charmingly ramshackle and remote White Horse, one of Edward's favourite alehouses. 'The first poem Edward wrote, Up in the Wind, explains everything about this pub,' said Colin. 'It's a wonderful starting point. Edward used this pub quite frequently.'

As indeed have I been doing for several years. Edward's poem tells the story of the inn sign, supposedly stolen by a thief and thrown in the pond, never to be replaced - which explains the White Horse's local nickname, The Pub With No Name. Colin, Stephen and I sat in the Edward Thomas Bar, 'that forest parlour,/Low and small among the towering beeches', and talked about Thomas and Steep.

Edward and his wife Helen moved there in 1906 and left in 1916. Most of his poems were written here; much of their subject matter is also found here. The houses they lived in and the things he wrote about remain - the world has changed less in this discreet and affluent backwater than in most places.

The village sits at the base of a steep, wooded escarpment, or hanger, which is known locally as Little Switzerland on account of its vertiginous beauty and marvellous views towards the South Downs of Sussex. It was in these woods, on these steep chalky paths, that Thomas walked and drew inspiration, finding parallels in nature for the carnage on the Western Front.

In late 1909 the family moved from their first house, Berryfield Cottage, to the house at the top of the hill that he disliked so much and where their youngest child, Myfanwy, was born. Stephen, Colin and I paused outside it - we'd driven over from the White Horse - before continuing our walk to Edward's favourite spot, Shoulder of Mutton Hill.

'This is what Edward was talking about when he wrote about 'Sixty miles of South Downs',' said Colin as we gazed on the panorama of distant hills. 'He used to run down here with Myfanwy on his shoulders. She used to whoop with joy.' The grass plunged downward, as steep and wide as a glacier. Buzzards soared above, violets peeped through the undergrowth at our feet.

Here is the site of the memorial stone, a sarsen stone from Avebury which was dedicated in 1937. On the octagonal plaque is a quote from the final sentence of one of Edward's essays: 'And I rose up, and knew that I was tired, and continued my journey'.

Continuing my own, I raced against the twilight to reach a medieval farmhouse that is the subject of one of Edward's most famous poems. The Manor Farm, built of tiny Tudor bricks and 'duskily glowing' tiles, lies at a remote T-junction a couple of miles north of Steep. Opposite are a church and a yew tree which also feature in the poem.

No one was there; no one ever is. The weathercock on the church creaked, rooks cawed through the dusk; otherwise, silence. In the perfection of this scene Edward found a kind of 'bliss' that seemed to him unchanged 'since/This England, Old already, was called Merry.' You'll know exactly what he meant.

Edward Thomas walk

Park outside the church, follow green Hangers Way sign (opposite church), through wood and round field to Mill Lane; turn right along road, take footpath by waterfall and go uphill through Ashford Chace. Turn left at road: Berryfield Cottage, the first house the Thomases lived in in Steep, is second on the left among a complex of estate buildings. Continue along the road till Hangers Way sign which points off to the right; take this path, following Ashford stream with ponds on your right. Beyond seat take left fork; where path rejoins main track turn left and bear left uphill, ignoring right turn onto Hangers Way. The path which continues upward is the subject of the poem The Path. At top of hill turn right into Cockshott Lane and go past the Edward Barnsley furniture workshop. Beyond that is the Red House, the Thomases' second house in Steep and the subect of poems including Wind and Mist and The New House. Continue to just beyond junction with Old Litten Lane, then follow Hangers Way sign down to Memorial Stone. Continue downhill to lane near Berryfield Cottage and retrace route through Ashford Chace. When you reach Mill Lane continue along it to junction with Church Road (Thomas's name is on the First World War memorial there). Turn right along Church Road. Their final house in the village, 2 Yew Tree Cottages (also known as 23 Church Road), is accessed by a narrow lane that runs between numbers 19 and 25 Church Road. The poem Old Man was written about the common wormwood bush that still grows by the front door. Return to church where two engraved windows by Laurence Whistler commemorate Thomas.

The White Horse is near a cross-roads on the B-road that runs between Steep and the A32: look out for empty sign bracket. The Manor Farm is between the hamlets of Hawkley and Colemore.

Published in The Daily Telegraph on April 8 2007

Plague pits and lechery

Wed, 31 Oct 2007 -1:00:00 GMT

There is no mistaking it; the ground looks replete, like a stomach after a blow-out. Samuel Pepys noticed it too. “I was much troubled at it,” he wrote in his diary entry of January 30, 1666, “and do not think to go through it again a good while.” He meant the spooky churchyard of St Olave’s, in the City of London, which literally - still - bulges with the bodies of plague victims.

In his sheer grabbing of life, Pepys is arguably the greatest ever Londoner. His voluminous Diary takes us inside nightmares and dreams - plague pits, public disembowellings, women’s underwear - his old stomping ground being the throng of fetid streets and alleys between the Tower of London to the east and and Fleet Street in the west.

All perished, you may think, in the Great Fire of 1666 that followed the Great Plague. All sunk, at any rate, beneath the super-modern city. But the ghost of his world lives on; and, on the basis that if you know the man you will understand the city, I wanted to discover it.

With the help not just of the periwigged lecher himself, but also of Sue Jackson, a Blue Badge guide and expert on medieval and Restoration London, I worked out a circular walk taking in Pepys’s places of birth and of burial, not to mention sexual adventuring, starting at Blackfriars and following the river east.

The waymarked Thames Path East - follow the brown signs with the acorn logo - is a beautifully thought-out trail with landscaped viewing points and stopping places. Squinting downriver against the low winter sun, the first imaginative adjustment I made was to screen out all bridges bar one.

London Bridge - incorporating ramshackle wooden houses - was London’s only bridge in the 17th century. Boats teemed between “stairs” and Pepys, who worked for the Navy, spent half his life on water. “Downstream were the dockyards,” said Sue Jackson. “Upstream was the Admiralty. He went between the two.”

His house and office were in Seething Lane, a few steps from the Tower of London. Not a trace remains. On the site is a rectangular garden frequented by office workers nodding to iPods. It was here that on the morning of September 2, 1666, Pepys’s maid, Jane, told her master the city was on fire. He hurried to the Tower and from “one of the high places” looked west to see houses aflame on the end of London Bridge.

Pepys’s subsequent account of the Great Fire, “a most horrid malicious bloody flame”, is one of the great prose passages of English literature - not just because he was an eyewitness to one of the most famous events in British history but because he brings to his description such telling detail.

He writes of “sick people carried away in beds” and a “poor Catt ... with the hair all burned off the body and yet alive”. And, most famously, he buries his wine and “my parmazan cheese” in a hole in the garden - though in the event the fire never reached his house.

It’s this rare eye, along with a happy propensity for giving too much information, that makes Pepys such fine company. Opposite his old dwelling stands St Olave’s church where he was buried in 1703. During the spring of 1663 he was gripped by a terrible suspicion that his wife fancied her dancing teacher, called Pembleton (a rare case of the boot being on the other foot). On May 24, in St Olave’s, his jealousy reached fever pitch when “I espied Pembleton and saw him leer upon my wife all the sermon”.

Pepys would take a short-cut to church through the graveyard. Standing at the gate, Sue Jackson pointed out the obvious convexity of this burial ground, where the corpses of 365 plague victims were piled in the second half of 1665. “And of course you see the memento mori,” she said, indicating the macabre triumvirate of skulls with spikes in the top which embellish the gate. “Dickens called it ‘the churchyard of Saint Ghastly Grim’,” Sue said.

Plague and Fire did for medieval London but the city that rose in its place - much of it in Pepys’s lifetime - was built on the old street patterns. The names, even the cobbles, remain - Lovat Lane, for example, where the old surface is barely the width of a plague cart’s wheelbase and the gutter still runs down the middle.

On the east side of Lovat Lane Sue opened a door, and ushered me into a miracle of light and proportion - a Wren church I had no idea existed, called St Mary At Hill. Wren shoehorned many such churches into tight city spaces. The effect is reminiscent of Venice - you stumble down a gloomy alley, turn a corner, push at a door, and step into a work of genius.

The truth is, London is negligent of its history and treasures. Pepys himself is all but unknown to the people who work, drink and eye each other up where once he did the same. There is, in Stew Lane, a pub called The Samuel Pepys, but its name has recently been modishly shrunk to “tsp”. In the Novotel near Seething Lane, the diary quotations on the wall of the Pepys Bar compete for attention with Sky football on the flatscreen TV.

But Pepys, being as heedless and go-ahead as the city he still embodies, would be relaxed about that. The last I saw of him was in the church of St Dunstan’s in the West on Fleet Street, not far from the house where he was born. The date was August 18, 1667, a Sunday, and Pepys had stopped off at the church for a rest en route to Whitehall.

As the rector preached “an able sermon”, Sam positioned himself next to a “pretty, modest maid” and tried to grope her. She didn’t shriek “Pervert!”, and, alas, she wasn’t able to invoke sexual harassment laws that would take several more centuries to come into being.

Instead, in a mime-show of elaborate coolness, she produced some pins from her pocket and threatened to stick them in his hands. And Sam, entirely unabashed, simply moved on to “another pretty maid” to try his luck afresh.

Pepys’s patch

NB Take a good ‘London A-Z’ with you.

From Blackfriars tube station take exit 4 on to Thames Path East and follow brown signs to Tower of London. At the Tower concourse head away from the river to All Hallows church, from the tower of which Pepys also surveyed the Great Fire. The entrance to Seething Lane is opposite the church, past All Bar One. Seething Lane Gardens are on the right, St Olave’s churchyard opposite. Entrance to church is round corner in Hart Street.

Left out of church down Mark Lane. Right on Great Tower Street, left down St Dunstan’s Hill to Church Garden. Through garden to Idol Lane. Left then right on to St Dunstan’s Lane, to St Mary At Hill. Duck under skull-and-crossbones archway on other side of lane, follow path to Lovat Lane. Entrance to St Mary At Hill church on right.

Cross Lovat Lane into Botolph Alley; cross Botolph Lane into St George’s Alley. Turn left down Pudding Lane to plaque on wall of office block marking where Great Fire started. Wren’s Monument to the fire (open every day 9.30am-5pm, adults £2, children £1; 311 steps) is just to the west.

Take pedestrian subway at Monument tube station to Cannon Street exit. On Cannon St, take 1st left into Martin Lane. Ancient smugglers’ pub, The Old Wine Shades (good for drink/lunch), on right. Right after pub into Lawrence Pountney Hill. Follow it back on to Cannon St. Cross Cannon St, up Abchurch Lane to St Mary Abchurch. Cross churchyard to Sherborne Lane and left into King William Street.

Royal Exchange on right, Mansion House on left. Left past Mansion House into Walbrook, to St Stephen Walbrook church. Right on Bucklersbury, left on Queen Victoria Street, right on Watling St to St Paul’s. Down Ludgate Hill, across Ludgate Circus, to Fleet St.

St Bride’s is set back immediately on the left. Salisbury Court is next left - a wall plaque marks Pepys’s place of birth. Continue to the Pepys exhibition in Prince Henry’s Room at 17 Fleet St (currently closed [as at jan 06] but usually open 11am-2pm Mon-Fri, admission free). Cross Fleet St to St Dunstan’s in the West (open Tues only). To return to Blackfriars, retrace steps to Ludgate Circus and turn south on New Bridge St.

Published in The Daily Telegraph on February 18 2006

William Blake's London

Sun, 24 Jun 2007 -1:00:00 GMT

THE poet and artist William Blake was forever having visions. At Peckham Rye he saw a tree full of angels and in South Molton Street - now one of London’s most chi-chi shopping thoroughfares - he saw the devil. “He was walking up the staircase here and - it’s a bit like a blues song - he met Satan,” said Niall McDevitt.

Pointing at the door of number 17, now an employment agency, Niall began to whirl his arms and declaim in an other-worldly voice: “‘It is the gothic fiend of our legends - the true devil - all else are apocryphal’.”

A passer-by laden with glossy shopping bags paused, mystified. “Are you with us?” said Niall. “This was William Blake’s house. England’s greatest poet? ‘Tyger, Tyger’?” The woman looked blank. “It’s a bit of a happening anyway,” he said drily as she walked off.

The happening in question was one of McDevitt’s regular guided walks through central London in honour of one of the city’s greatest sons. This year marks the 250th anniversary of Blake’s birth in Soho and no literary figure - bar Pepys and Dickens perhaps - is more closely associated with the capital than this awkward genius of a man.

Blake lived his entire life in London except for three years he spent on the south coast near Bognor. He was a London tradesman - he made his living as an engraver - and he knew “each charter’d street” of the place. Superficially, London has changed greatly since Blake’s day. Only one of the five houses he lived in in central London - 17 South Molton Street - has survived the demolition ball.

Yet the spirit of his time, and of the man himself, hovers still in the alleys and air. To conjure them you need to follow Blake and trust to vision and spirit rather than “corporeal’ reality. As Blake said himself, and Niall McDevitt demonstrates on his walks, “He who does not imagine in ... stronger and better light than his perishing mortal eye can see does not imagine at all.”

McDevitt (“musician, poet, literary walker - but essentially a poet”) has more than a touch of the Blakean madman about him. Riffing on the fact that the rooms William and his wife Catherine occupied in South Molton Street now belong to the Reed employment agency, he spouted these lines from the Introduction to Songs of Innocence: “And I pluck’d a hollow reed,/And I made a rural pen...”

In this way our group of ten, including five unusually rapt A level students from Burnham-on-Crouch, stumbled in Niall’s wake through workaday West End streets as the man flung poetry and prose over his shoulder like a promiscuous arcade machine.

Blake was born at 28 Broad Street, now Broadwick Street, on November 28, 1757. The house, which stood at the north-east corner of Broad and Marshall Streets, was demolished in the 1960s (“Westminster Council said, ‘Sorry, terribly sorry’...”) and in its place is a ceramics shop which is part of a brick towerblock complex. Here the toddler Blake had his earliest vision, of God outside the window: “The vision was sublime and terrifying and set the young child screaming,” said Niall.

Here also, much later in his life when the house was his brother’s underwear shop, Blake put on the only solo exhibition of his paintings. None of the work sold and the only press review dismissed him as an “unfortunate lunatic”.

Half-running to keep up with Niall, our visionary troupe skipped round the corner into Poland Street. At number 28 (don’t get him started on the significance of this number in Blake’s life), Blake wrote and engraved the deceptively simple cycle of poems known as Songs of Innocence. “There should at least be a plaque for that,” said Niall. But the bland facade - it’s now the Eclipse Hairdressing salon - gives no clue as to the beautiful things that were created here between 1785 and 1790.

Trotting across Leicester Square (Blake lived briefly on the edge of what was then Leicester Fields) we paused to mock the busts of Joshua Reynolds and Isaac Newton - two sirs whom Blake loved to hate - while Hogarth’s likeness prompted poetry. The artist who painted A Harlot’s Progress, and whose earthy depictions of London complemented Blake’s visionary ones, was treated to the lines from Blake’s poem London about how “the youthful Harlot’s curse/Blasts the new born infant’s tear/And blights with plagues the marriage hearse.”

In the National Portrait Gallery, Niall astonished the Sunday afternoon potterers by recounting with gusto Blake’s meeting with the Archangel Gabriel, who took off through the roof of the poet’s study and stood in the sun, beckoning. “Perhaps it accounts for the rapt expression in Blake’s eyes,” he said of the painting by Thomas Phillips, completed exactly 200 years ago. Below it hangs a portait of JMW Turner, another genius accused of being mad by his contemporaries.

We completed the walk in a dingy alleyway round the back of the Savoy hotel called Savoy Buildings. In Blake’s day this was Fountain Court, where he lived the final seven years of his life, and died in 1827. In a fusion of the actual and the spiritual that Blake would have appreciated, two Polish chambermaids spilled from the Savoy staff entrance and sparked up cigarettes as Niall spoke of Blake’s happy death and how his friend, George Richmond, had closed the poet’s eyes “to keep the vision in”.

A couple of days later I visited Blake’s grave in Bunhill Fields, an unconsecrated burial ground for Dissenters in the City of London. There Blake keeps company with those other “freedom fighters of the imagination” (Niall’s description), John Bunyan and Daniel Defoe.

On the top edge of his headstone people had left coins while at its base was a bunch of daffodils - passers-by always leave fresh blooms for the man who saw heaven in a wild flower. A scribbled note had been pushed in among the stems of the daffs. It said: “Thanks for the inspiration! Nigel.” For a split second I was dumbfounded, wondering when I’d been here before. A Blakean moment.

The walk The William Blake Walk, led by Niall McDevitt, starts by the jeweller’s shop at the corner of Oxford and South Molton Streets at 3pm on occasional Sundays: for details of next walk call 07722 163823 or email thewilliamblakewalk@yahoo.co.uk. £6 per person.

The National Portrait Gallery is open daily 10am-6pm (closes 9pm Thurs and Fri): the Blake portrait is in Room 18; his life mask, currently not on display, is viewable interactively on one of the free screens.
Bunhill Fields is open Apr-Sept 7.30am-7pm weekdays, 9.30am-4pm weekends; Oct-Mar 7.30am-4pm weekdays, 9.30am-4pm weekends. Nearest tube: Old Street. Blake’s actual (unmarked) burial place is some 15 metres east-north-east of the headstone, near a tree and in front of a bench marked “The Royal Fusiliers Garden of Remembrance”.

Other sites St Mary’s church, Battersea. Blake and Catherine were married here on August 18, 1782. Until recently the Marriage Register - in which Catherine put a cross in place of a signature - could be seen by appointment but it has now been removed for safekeeping. However if you give notice (020 7228 9648, office@stmarysbattersea.org.uk) the Parish Administrator, Joan Endean, can print copies from a photograph. Look out also for the chair in which JMW Turner used to sit to paint the Thames through the vestry’s oriel window. Open Tues and Wed, 10.30am-5pm.
31 Great Queen Street, WC2. Blake lived in a house on this site 1772-79 while apprenticed to engraver James Basire. Now the Royal Masonic Trust for Girls and Boys.
Westminster Abbey. As a young man Blake sketched many of the ancient royal tombs here - including those of Edward III and Richard II. Their Gothic beauty inspired his own art throughout his life. Open 9.30am-3.45pm every day except Wed (9.30am-7pm), Sat (9.30am-1.45pm) and Sun (closed). Admission £10.

His art Surprisingly little was on display in London at the time of writing but Tate Britain and the British Museum have an extensive collection of his work which they regularly show: check on their websites (www.tate.org.uk/britain/ and www.thebritishmuseum.ac.uk). The British Library owns Blake’s notebook which includes The Tyger. When not on display the notebook is viewable online at www.bl.uk: click on the “Turning the Pages” link.

Reading Blake by Peter Ackroyd (Vintage, £9.99).

Published in the Sunday Times on June 24 2007

Lost in Tokyo

Sat, 28 Feb 2004 -1:00:00 GMT

There's a scene in the film Lost in Translation in which the Bill Murray character receives a phone call from his wife. He's in a Tokyo hotel room, she's at home in the US. "Have fun," she says, signing off. "It's not fun," growls Bill Murray of the strange city glittering beyond his window. "It's just very very different."

In part a 21st-century Brief Encounter, Sofia Coppola's film is also a study in the kind of jet-lagged alienation involved in short visits to far-flung places. And few places are more conducive to confusion and bewilderment than the Japanese capital, as I discovered during my own brief encounter with this hilariously odd metropolis.

Like a latterday Dante and Virgil, Bill Murray and his co-star, Scarlett Johansson, navigate the underworld of Tokyo nightlife - from demented pinball players to static strippers, via a karaoke rendition of the Sex Pistols' God Save the Queen.

I would endure my own dark night of karaoke and drink (the reverence with which Japan treats this excruciating singalong ritual reminded me of a Japanese tourist I saw in St Ives, inspecting a Cornish pasty as if it were a Faberge egg). But I started with a more spiritual route into the city's heart - and ended up just as perplexed as the numb-faced Mr Murray.

At weekends the Senso-ji temple at Asakusa, Tokyo's most important Buddhist temple, attracts thousands of city folk and out-of-towners who come to cleanse their souls and, afterwards, buy kimonos and clockwork novelties at the open-air market nearby. On this, my first complete day in the city, I watched as worshippers passed beneath the sweeping roof of the temple's main hall, threw coins into vast wooden receptacles and stood to attention, hands steepled in prayer. Then they moved to the right-hand side to have their fortunes told. My guide, Mr Shimizu, told me what to do.

I posted a 100 yen note (about 50p) in a slot and shook a hexagonal wooden cylinder. From a small aperture I extracted a bamboo stick with a number on it: 100. Mr Shimizu indicated a cabinet of small numbered drawers. I opened drawer number 100 and took out the sheet of paper inside.

Mr Shimizu looked alarmed, then embarrassed. "Bad," he admitted eventually. There was an English translation, which was not entirely lost on me: "No 100 BAD FORTUNE. Going over a mountain with a harp means that you have hidden yourself from the world. You will be completely at a loss with your empty heart."

Standing there in the cold and damp, I actually felt momentarily empty-hearted, the first of several Lost in Translation moments I would experience. But wait, this is Japan. It may be touchingly old-fashioned in its superstitions but it is also home to the illuminated traffic cone and lavatories with control panels.

Nothing is so intractable that a solution may not be found.

Mr Shimizu pointed at a rack of silver rods fluttering with pieces of paper. If you receive a bad fortune, you fold the offending A4 sheet into a ribbon and tie it on to this rack as a way of returning it to the gods. Then you pay another 100 yen and try again. Phew.

After putting my soul back on course I witnessed something so strange that I no longer needed convincing I had entered some sort of parallel universe. Outside the temple, I saw a tramp - a standard-issue wino with matted hair and rags for clothes - drop a piece of litter, then hurry to pick it up and put it in a rubbish bin.

The misty rain - the skirt of Typhoon Lupit then tracking across the Pacific - dropped a veil of camouflage across the city. The Bladerunner vistas of downtown neon disappeared into cloud, the cone of Mount Fuji, 60 miles to the west, never showed itself. Everywhere flowed tides of softly coloured umbrellas, like pointillism on the move.

I'd been expecting something harder-nosed, altogether faster, about Tokyo. But the traffic was gliding sedately and stopping in good time at intersections, I heard hardly a car horn in three days and the traffic cops with their flashing red light-sabres had it seriously cushy.

And where was the supposed bland conformity? "The nail that sticks out gets hammered down," to quote a Japanese adage, but many people seemed distinctive and eccentric, from teenagers in bowlers and bondage trousers to civically minded tramps.

I hadn't quite understood the extent to which the apparent unknowableness of Japan is down to politics as much as to cultural and ethnic difference. From 1600 to the mid-19th century, the Japanese operated a closed-door policy to all foreigners, or gaijin, except the Dutch. "The reason Japan closed its country in the beginning of Shogun days was to exclude the Christians," explained Mr Shimizu, "because other countries had been colonised by them. The Dutch were allowed in because they were only traders. They did not to try to propagate their religion."

After the ruling Shoguns signed the first treaty with a foreign power - the US - in 1854, the Christians certainly pitched up. In the vast Aoyama Reien Cemetery, in the heart of the bewildering jumble of districts that is Tokyo, crows cawed and bob-tailed cats slunk among headstones that commemorate missionaries such as the Rev Gideon Draper of New York, who died in 1889 and is described as "an earnest winner of souls".

With the pulpit-thumpers came Western inventions such as the railway. In 150 years Japan has moved from medieval backwater to one of the most technically ingenious and industrialised nations on Earth, while retaining a delicate unknowability. The land of the tea ceremony and the mobile phone, indeed, and it is precisely in that gap that things can get lost in translation for Western visitors.

The movie that celebrates this enigma was filmed largely in the swanky Park Hyatt hotel. That night I happened to be booked in for dinner in the 52nd-floor New York Grill and Bar, right where Bill Murray and Scarlett Johansson have their insomniac trysts.

No retina-bending vistas of the neon-lit city far below, due to the peristent rain, but plenty to clock in the dimly lit interior. The English actress Keira Knightley - in town to promote the film Love Actually - kept her head down in the corner while a Tokyo businessman was practically gnawing off the ear of a woman young enough to be his granddaughter.

You need someone to hold your hand in Tokyo. The next day my guide was Mr Kashiwagi, a perpetually smiling man whose eyes blinked constantly behind thick round spectacles. He learnt English "through early Alfred Hitchcock movies and late Charlie Chaplin ones". Thinking of that business of going over a mountain with a harp, I asked him about auspiciousness and superstition in Japanese society, and he told me about good and bad numbers.

"Four is death," he said, beaming. "Forty-two is no good at all. Thirty-three, that means horrible, terrible. Narita Airport [Tokyo's international airport] has no gate 13. However, it has a 4 gate, a 42 gate, a 33 gate. It is consideration only for foreign people, not for Japanese."

He looked momentarily put out, then smiled again. "Even numbers are not good. You will never see six place settings at a cafe table, only five." As he talked, Mr Kashiwagi steered me through a subway station. It was a Sunday and the train wasn't crowded, as I'd hoped - the white-gloved platform attendants were not required to push commuters through the closing doors. But you can learn a lot here.

That the subway carriage is a kind of microcosm of Japanese society, for instance. Japan is smaller than the UK, its population more than double - 126 million. Furthermore, some 70 per cent of the land is uninhabitable because it is too mountainous.

It is one of the most crowded societies on Earth. The so-called "love hotels" are not just knocking shops - couples living in cramped, thin-walled apartments use them too. The coping mechanisms that people have evolved in public have become defining national characteristics.

No touching (except for the notorious subway gropers), no staring, no pointing, no noise-making. It's particularly obvious on the subway, where people behave as if everyone is wrapped in an invisible force field that must not be violated. And if the carriage is so crowded that people cannot help but touch, this mortifying experience can only be dealt with by "zoning out", in the phrase of a Canadian expat I met.

I took a seat. There seemed plenty of room between me and the next passenger for Mr Kashiwagi to sit down but he wasn't happy. He stared at the space, half-lowered his backside, then frowned. "Come," he said, and led me to the far end of the carriage where the bench seats were empty.

I had planned on outdoor markets and strolls in parks but the rain was still sheeting down, so I chose somewhere indoors - and controversial: the Yasukuni Jinja, or Shrine, and neighbouring Yushukan War Museum.

The Shinto shrine, founded in 1869, commemorates Japan's war dead. As we approached it along a tree-lined avenue, an apparition loomed through the rain - a man in his thirties dressed in an Edwardian-era naval uniform. He stopped in front of us and snapped to attention. "Good morning," he said, and proceeded to spout gibberish: "Uniform of Imperial Japanese Navy. In the raining time I must be here. Fifty years ago I was the emperor. I stay in Imperial Hotel where I must now go." He bowed and marched off, leaving me open-mouthed.

My guide was also lost for words. Japan has an ignoble militarist past which has led to its present pacifist constitution. Mr Kashiwagi was too squeamish to admit that the Yasukuni Shrine, where a number of war criminals are commemorated, is the focus of a resurgent right-wingery that regards the Second World War as an heroic anti-imperialist struggle - hence our friend in the Gilbert and Sullivan clobber.

The museum nearby is equally controversial, principally for its photographic displays of "War Heroes Enshrined at Yasukuni Jinja". Mr Kashiwagi shook his head. "It should be OK to pay homage to people who die," he said, "but not to some of these people."

The museum's displays dedicated to the "Jinpu Special Attack Corps" (Kamikaze, to you and me) also come perilously close to being commemorative. There are uniforms, photographs and final letters home. Mr Kashiwagi translated these messages: "I enjoyed 20 years of life. I'm going to reward my life with my death. Will you excuse me for dying before my allotted time? Pray for the survival of Japan." And: "My pleasure is the way I go to the crimson sky ahead."

Suddenly, in the hush of the museum, Mr Kashiwagi's mobile phone went off. The ring-tone was Land of Hope and Glory. It was a moment so gloriously surreal that it eclipsed all the horrific thoughts of suicide bombers.

Next to the war museum stands an old Noh theatre. "Noh masks," said Mr Kashiwagi as we passed it, "have joy and sorrow in one face, depending on angle you see mask." It was his elegant way of saying he wanted me to see another side of Tokyo. He took me to a beautiful little ceramics museum and shop in the suburbs, on a quiet street where I imagined the hero of a Haruki Murakami novel living a life of decorous insanity. "Look. Only five together," said Mr Kashiwagi, indicating the stacked plates and bowls. "Never six or four."

And then he had to be off to feed his dogs. He produced a dog-eared photograph of two Scotties. "They are called Stephen and Ken," said Mr Kashiwagi proudly - and with that he padded off through the rain, the opening bars of Land of Hope and Glory beeping faintly from his pocket.

Published in The Daily Telegraph February 28 2004