A Winter In Arabia by Freya Stark is not a straightforward book to read, but it is extremely rewarding for anyone with an interest in history, archaeology, the Middle East, and kick-ass female explorers who make it look easy.

The book was published in 1972, some 45 years after it was written. In it, the author chronicles the season that she spent – along with her companions – searching for the ancient city of Shabwah, the capital of the southern Arabian state of Hadhramaut. Long since lost, the city had been a capital of culture and trade in the region; Pliny catalogued it thus:

Almost in the very centre of that [South Arabian] region are the Atramitae [Hadramis] – the capital of whose kingdom is Sabota [Shabwah], a place situated on a lofty mountain. At a distance of eight posts [days' travel] from this is the incense-bearing region inaccessible because of rocks on every side, while it is bordered on the right by the ocean, from which high plateaux shut it in. The forests extend eighty miles in length and forty in width.

In search of this city, Stark travelled through pre-Westernised Yemen, detailing the culture of the people with whom she interacted and the landscapes through which she journeyed. Her heroics are matched by the land she describes; Hadhramaut is a particularly dramatic part of Arabia. Comprised of an immense valley, which runs for 160 km from open plains in the west, where the cliffs of the rocky plateaux to north and south close in about it, near Shabwah, towards the dry and inhospitable Wadi Masilah in the east, the area is a curious mix of desert and fertile river plains. The main Wadi (Wadi meaning river or river-cut valley) Hadhramaut itself is 12 km wide in some places, and is fed by innumerable tributaries, but beyond the city of Shabwah one quickly reaches the desert of Saihad – ‘an empty desert, a wilderness where the winds blow in all directions, a country where crows are king ‘. Only after travelling west across this desert for three days would one come to irrigated fields and settled lands once more, the beginnings of highland Yemen. This is the country that Stark describes.

The first thing that should be said about this book is that it is deeply poetic. Stark’s writing is fluidly lyrical, and is as evocative as it is enlightening. Her voice is not that of a dull-but-worthy academic, in pursuit of esoteric potsherds, any more than it’s an echo of the manly heroics of Thesiger and Lawrence; it’s… well. It’s a voice the deserves to speak for itself:

In the dry bed of the canal, close to where it takes off from an ancient “damir” or dam, we pitched our camp. A lithab tree (ficus salicifolia) hung above with long and pointed leaves; from its boughs my mosquito-net and the guns of the beduin were suspended… As I lay in bed I could hear Sayyid ‘Ali entertaining, and the entranced laughter of the company: he was imitating the
sayyids of Meshed, and the voices murmured on into my sleep; till a shock-headed man, creeping round my bed for his gun, woke me – the last inhabitant of Radhhain going home. I lay then, enjoying the warm delicious night. A sickle moon was shining; the pointed leaves of the lithab hung black before it, in Chinese loveliness; a small wind woke suddenly from nowhere, flapped the leaves against each other and died as it had come. The moon sank. Voices of foxes echoed in the cliffs – echoed and re-echoed, like some lost chorus high above the world. When I woke again it was to the singing of birds. The branches, so lovely against the moon, were the everyday branches of the lithab. Only their enchanted memory remained.

Stark’s writing conveys deep knowledge and understanding, but also profound affection for the land, the people, and the life that surround both. It’s not necessarily easy to read; you have to concentrate, or otherwise after an hour or so it all starts to elide into a formless mass of undifferentiated beauty. But this is a book to dwell over, and it rewards the persistent reader with keen insight and human detail.

The star of the book is the character behind the narration, however. Stark was an incredible woman. This book doesn’t document her first trip to Yemen; a previous expedition had failed due to an illness that almost killed her. Before then, she had already travelled extensively throughout Arabia, notably completing three dangerous treks in western Iran and being the first European to reach Alamut, the long-lost fortress of the Assassins. She was more than just an explorer, however, and A Winter in Arabia is littered with passages expounding upon her own philosophy (of which a lengthy excerpt can be found here). She continued to travel until her death, at the age of 100, in 1993. To experience Arabia with the benefit of her perception, humanity and fierce intellects is one of the great draws of this book.

This book deserves to be regarded as belonging to a corpus of European works which, when taken together, provide an overview – albeit Eurocentric – of pre-Westernised Arabia. The aforementioned Thesiger’s Arabian Sands is perhaps the most famous of this body of work. In many ways, Stark and Thesiger had a great deal in common. Thesiger was an explorer, too, most famous for crossing the Empty Quarter of the Arab peninsula – several times. He was only the third Westerner to do so, and often operated contrary to the wishes of the local and international authorities, but with the respect, admiration and friendship of the local Bedu – a respect that lasts to this day; an adventurer in the classic sense of the word, but also a gifted social observer. He shared Stark’s dismay at what he perceived as the growing Europeanisation of Arabia and its indigenous culture. A major theme of both books was the deterioration of an old order, just as it was about to be swept away: Thesiger’s last journey across Arabia’s sands was from the oasis of Al Ain to the trading port of Muscat, now a city in the UAE and the capital of Oman respectively. He spent nearly two months in 1949 in that interior. It now takes just under 4 hours to drive from the Hilton in Al Ain to the Sheraton in Muscat; I know because I’ve done it. Thesiger would have hated it, and the power of the book is such that it made me hate it, too, even as I was doing it.

Stark’s work evokes a similar sense of deterioration, but unlike Thesiger, the bland, monied future that she feared, cleansed of all of its identifying features by a glut of RAF bases and oil revenue, didn’t come to pass. What did come to pass was worse; an awkward halfway-house between modernity, with its guns and narcotics, and tribalism, poverty and alienation. Unable to resist the world that developed around it, and lacking the resources to preserve its heritage, the Yemen of today is a much-changed beast.

An alternative perspective on the issue comes from Geoffrey Bibby’s Looking for Dilmun. At the outline level, these books have a great deal in common; like Stark, Bibby was an archaeologist seeking the remains of a long-lost civilisation. Bibby’s obsession was the empire of Dilmun, a long-lost – and supposedly mythological – empire which was mentioned in Sumerian legend but never geographically placed. Contemporaneous with the Indus Valley civilisation, Sumer, Babylon and Akkad, Dilmun was found by Bibby on the island of Bahrain, although hints have since been found of an earlier civilisation on the same grounds; it is thus one of the oldest sites of human civilisation that we know of.

Unlike Stark, however, Bibby was an oil man himself, based in Bahrain and gifted only with an intellectual curiosity and a slightly more moralistic outlook than many of his contemporaries. Where Stark and Thesiger detailed an Arabia as yet unsullied by the graft of Europe’s finest grubbers, Bibby’s story is all about the cracks in the façade as they slowly spread, and the desperate attempt by Arabia’s last traditional rulers – such as the Sheikh of Abu Dhabi, who distrusted Bibby enough to eventually exile him despite Bibby’s professed academic and historic mission. Compare that with the reaction earned by Stark and her companions in the excerpt above!

Many of the characters and locations appear in two or even all three of these books. Between them they chart a heartbreaking story of the decline of an indigenous way of life, albeit – and this has to be stressed – from the somewhat Eurocentric perspective of a motley band of explorers and outsiders. Their value thus exceeds their individual conceits; these are more than just travelogues or historical diversions. They are records of a way of life that has deteriorated over the course of a single lifetime.

In that capacity, Stark’s work immediately stands out as the most successful. The human warmth and compassion that she has for her Yemeni and Bedu hosts is apparent on every page (“We cannot be completely isolated, like European delicacy in cold storage”), and her relationships with the people that she encounters transcend the vignette. In an early passage, she returns to one of the sites of her earlier journey, and “wonder[s] uneasily which of the many delicate causes that ruin eastern relationships could possibly have ruined my friendship with those two, Sa’id and Husain;”when, a few pages later, they reconcile, there is a sense of human connection that overcomes cultural barriers.

For me, this was a wonderful, nostalgic read. As an account of an a culture that has long since passed on, it’s stimulating. But what makes the words jump off of the page is the lucid, witty prose of Stark, and the character that lies behind it.

Jon tells me that I sounded surprisingly calm while this was going on, but the guy driving the car started shouting almost immediately. “POLITZIA, POLITZIA,” he shouted, while I looked back in wide-eyed terror. They drove me to a nearby alley and continued shouting. “PASSPORT. PASSPORT!” Stupidly, I had left all of my documentation at home, but had no really effective way of communicating this other than shrugging and looking bewildered. They carried on shouting for a while and I carried on looking confused, but I quickly realised that we were at an impasse.

They were apparently unwilling to do anything to me other than shout, thankfully, so I called the manager of the school and asked him to translate for me, in order to help move things along. He had a word with the cops and explained to them that I didn’t have my passport with me, but almost as soon as he’d hung up they started shouting again – “POLITZIA! PASSPORT!” This didn’t seem like a promising sign.

After a while, the record changed. The larger of the two turned, looked me in the eye, grinned, and – pointing to himself – started repeating, “Mafia. Dollars! Mafia!” At this point I actually relaxed a little. Up until this point I hadn’t been sure what was going on, but a shakedown is much more of a known quantity – it was surreally hilarious, but in general, you know what to do when a massive crooked cop is asking you for money. He clearly wasn’t actually Mafia; I’d been walking around with a laptop, a camera, an iPod and my credit cards, and if this guy had really been mafia he wouldn’t have bothered with a shakedown for twenty bucks. So I continued to act dumb (I’m a natural) until he got bored, which happened surprisingly quickly. After about 5 minutes, he visibly deflated, said “Bye bye”, and stared morosely out of the window. “Spasiba!” I said before climbing out of the car and hauling ass.

My boss was livid about the incident. Apparently, despite being a bit of a Russian cliché, crooked police shakedowns are rare in Nizhnevartovsk, and he promised to give the local PD hell (I’m sure that he pays enough in protection money to be able to expect that his teachers are unmolested). Me, I was… one-fifth terrified, two fifths confused and two fifths entertained. As soon as I realised that I wasn’t in any real danger, the whole thing became a bit of a pantomime. There is an extent to which I brought it on myself – by walking around without a coat I stuck out as a foreigner like a sore thumb (I also attracted a fair bit of gopnik attention – ‘gopnik’ being the local variety of chav, redneck, bogun, whatever). But it makes for a good anecdote and we had a few laughs about it over the roasted chicken, so it could have gone down much worse.

Spring is a treacherous time in Siberia. The snow on the ground can take weeks to melt, and will, more often than not, re-freeze overnight, leaving the dreaded, perilous black ice to bewitch the ankles. More hazardous is the prospect of falling ice, which – its grip loosened by the heat which escapes from inefficiently-designed concrete roofs – plunges at near-terminal velocity, in chunks the size of a paving stone, from eight to ten storey buildings. This is easily enough to kill a person; so, for the first weeks of Spring, the residents of Nizhnevartovsk tend to stay away from buildings as much as possible.

Meanwhile, I’ve been getting my teeth into teaching. Do I enjoy it? I haven’t decided yet, but it’s certainly an experience. I teach six separate groups – four of children (mostly between 13 and 17, although one group is 8-11) and two groups of adults. Teaching the adults is okay, but teaching the kids requires a discipline I just don’t have, and behind it all is the nagging suspicion that I’m just not very good at it. Still, two weeks is a bit of a quick judgement, so we’ll have to see how I feel after three months.

Society is different here. I haven’t quite gotten my head around the way that it works, but it’s very different. Russian women outnumber Russian men by a significant margin, but yet are as unequal as in parts of the Middle East; but that inequality seems to be consensual. I met a girl from Zim who worked fairly high-up in one of the oil companies, and she said that – as a foreign woman in a position of authority – he got a fair amount of hassle, but no more than she would have gotten anywhere else outside of western Europe and the US. Russian women in positions of power are rare, but they don’t seem to attract the same social opprobrium that enfranchised women elsewhere do. I can discern no social pressure that prevents women from working and succeeding, should they wish to, which doesn’t mean that it doesn’t exist – in inarguably does. The social levers of oppression here are either extremely subtle, or the female population is being co-opted in some other way – either through residual conditioning or something even more obtuse. I’m not sure what yet. That this is a grossly unequal society is not in question; the manner of the inequality is of a certain academic interest, though, and will certainly bear further thought.

Meanwhile, getting used to the surrounds continues apace. One of the sad things about the school in Nizhnevartovsk is that it doesn’t seem to have the same tradition of adventurous group activities as the school in Tyumen exhibited. There is some talk of another banya trip, which could be jolly, but I’d like to get out of Nizhnevartovsk and see what there is to be seen in the remote Siberian taiga; hopefully I’ll get an opportunity before long.

At the end of the last episode, I was in Tyumen, freshly birched and awaiting transportation. All told, I had a pretty good time in Tyumen. The people there were good people, and I had a chance to teach a couple of individual students, which was at least a first step in getting a bit more confident at this teaching lark. One of the students was a 16 year old girl, and it was encouraging to note that Russian 16 year old girls are the same as 16 year old girls everywhere, i.e. capable of delivering an unholy mountain of scorn at very little provocation, and that this is an occupational hazard that I can cope with, albeit with an acceptable degree of flapping.

I finally left Tyumen behind me on Sunday 15th. I had been looking forward to it, but in the event, to call the journey a chore would be an understatement. Trouble started when trying to rustle up a taxi. For a start, actually finding a taxi was an uphill struggle. In Moscow and, to a lesser extent, Nizh, it is usual to find that 90% of the cars on the road are being driven by someone who is happy to be a “freelance” taxi driver – you negotiate a price and jump in. Not so much in Tyumen, where I stood with my arm up like a dork for over an hour waiting for a cab. It was so cold that I had to go back to my flat two or three times, each time tracking mud back onto the floor that I had laboriously cleaned, to restore circulation to my extremities. When I finally did manage to flag down a cab, I of course had no idea how to negotiate a price in Russian, so of course – to add insult to injury – I got reamed on the cost at the other end. At the time this was vexing, although I can now put it into perspective and realised that I was being charged about £6 for a 20 minute ride with luggage, which is hardly a reaming by London standards.

However, at least my adventures with taxis done, for now, I was met at the train station by one of the other teachers called Rob, who made sure I was well supplied and put me on the right carriage. At this point I was already headachy and slightly irritable, but I’m glad that someone came out to see me off; I know that Amanda would have done, but she was struck down with some virus that is currently sweeping the nation, so it was kind of Rob to make the effort.

On board the train, I quickly found my seat and stowed my luggage. The train itself was an interesting beast: a kind of rolling dormitory, spotlessly clean but somewhat cramped. Each carriage has 54 beds, spread over two bunks and arranged in clusters of six. The other passengers on board were very kind, choosing to treat my foreignness as an unfortunate disability that couldn’t be helped, and thus giving me every assistance, which I was grateful for despite essentially wanting to be left alone – the headache had by now developed into a mild migraine, which necessitated occasional bathroom trips to vomit – but once the train was on its way I was mercifully left to my own devices.

I didn’t sleep that night, as the combination of crowded dormitory, rocking train and retching headache is a bad one, but it gave me an opportunity to look out of the window and count my blessings. An opportunity to watch Siberia go by without having to experience the cold is certainly something to be thankful for, because Siberian landscape is an oddity. For a start, an awful lot of it resembles nothing more than sand dunes. The temperature doesn’t get high enough here for the snow to coagulate for another couple of months, so the snow on the ground is all sand-esque powder, and is shifted around by the wind in a similar manner. More than that, though, the flora – struggling with snow and permafrost in the same way that beach scrub has to cope with barren sand – is the same kind of skeletal gorse and shrub that you see on British beaches all year around. It was slightly surreal, as a part of me half expected to see surfers and kite-fliers at any moment.
The snow dunes alternate with patches of countryside – disused for the winter – which could have been lifted from rural anywhere: fields demarcated with hedgerows, copses of trees, mild hills – except, of course, still covered in snow. In many respects, that is the overwhelming aesthetic here.

Finally, there is the tundra that I imagined before I came here: forests of evergreen pine, larches with silver bark, and the brightest stars I have ever seen. This was the dramatic Siberia that I had partly hoped for, home to wolves and bears, an image which I was sure was anachronistic, although I was happy to be disproved.

I rolled into Nizh at 11am the following morning, feeling surprisingly fresh. I was met at the station by Jon, who trained with me for a while in Tyumen and who is one of the nicest people I have ever met, and Tom, who will be my new boss and who seems like a really kind and pleasant guy. They showed me to my new flat and left me there to gather my thoughts for a few hours.

Since then, I have started at the school, taught my first few classes and found my local supermarket. Hopefully I’ll have a chance to write some about all of those things a little later on.

Because many of our students are working adults, a lot of our work is conducted outside of office hours – i.e. evenings and Saturdays, although the school is thankfully closed on Sundays. This weekend was a public holiday, however: International Women’s Day, which, despite the moniker, is largely only celebrated in the ex-Soviet Union. Originally instituted by the UN in New York, it was envisaged as a holiday celebrating women in the workforce; the Soviets picked it up as part of its adoption of organised labour, and it gradually fell out of fashion in America and the West for much the same reason. Its celebration in Russia has mostly lost this context, and now serves as an all-purpose celebration of women, although this is largely theoretical in Russia’s hyper-masculinised society.

Anyway, the upshot of all of this is that we shut up shop early on Saturday and resolve to head for the local banya. A banya is the Russian equivalent of a sauna – a log cabin in the woods, about a mile outside of the city, on the edge of a (very frozen) lake. You get about five hours in the hut – the ten of us arrived at around 8 and left just after midnight – a functioning barbeque, to which we bought our own meat and expertise, and a handy hole in the ice of the lake, to which we will be returning. Oh yes.

We started out by cooking the food we’d bought – chicken, beef and pork chunks were skewered with vegetables, and Rob, Dan, Amanda and myself took it in turns to watch the meat and occasionally prod at it to see if it was done. In the meanwhile, those who weren’t involved in the cooking watched the greatest hits of the Eurovision Song Contest in the hut and drank very expensive vodka. We cannot be accused of not having conformed to local culture.

Food dispensed with, we explored our facilities. The banya had three rooms. The first was a normal room, in which we played cards, ate food, and messed around with the provided satanic backgammon board (don’t ask). The second is a kind of hot lobby; although there was no fire in there, the heat and steam from the banya itself kept it at sauna temperature. It was a good place to cool down after the banya itself and a good place to acclimatise when going in the other direction. Finally, the banya itself was a small-ish room with tiered levels of slat seating. One wall was taken up by a furnace which belched heat and humidity. The temperature in the room was, at a guess, around 45C, but the humidity was intense. I don’t cope well with saunas so it was an effort of will for me to stay in there, but I enjoyed it once I’d found my feet.

In addition to the above, we also had the services of a banshick, a man who comes into the sauna, pours various liquids onto you (beer, cold water, honey, you name it) then slaps you with a laurel branch while you lie face down on the slats. This is actually an extremely pleasant experience and a quite unique way to have a massage, although you’ll still find bits of laurel between your toes weeks later.

After around twenty minutes of this, you have generally had enough. The tradition is to then run down to the lake, which has had a 2m x 1m hole cut into it with an axe (the ice, for context, was about a foot thick), and plunge yourself in. The hole itself was a good hundred yards from the banya, a mad dash over slippery ice down an unlit path through the trees, at the end of which: some ice, and a hole. The water was sub-zero; if you left it alone for more than ten minutes or so it would start to re-freeze. After plunging yourself into the frozen water, you then scramble madly back up the hill, back into the hot then bolt for the safe heat and humidity of the banya, all the while shivering uncontrollably and scraping ice out of your hair. I took one look and thought: Nah. Fuck that.

Of course, that resolve didn’t last long.

And the bizarre thing is: it was brilliant. The heat from the banya stayed with me for the entire plunge, and by the time I got back into the sauna I was still wondering when the pain was going to start. Not only was there no real pain; the rush of endorphins was immense. I ended up going twice; Jon went three times and ended up staggering around with a spinning head. Totally worth doing, though, and great fun as a group outing.

Sunday was quiet – I took the opportunity to see a bit more of Tyumen, which was somewhat underwhelming. Monday started with brunch at Amanda’s, along with Rob, from the school, and two friends of Amanda’s from around town – which rapidly turned into lunch, then afternoon tea, before I made my excuses and ducked out at around 5. All in all a good weekend. In the next few days, I’ll teach my first class and get ready to relocate to Nizh, so I guess you have some or all of that to look forward to in the next gripping installment.

Tyumen airport was an exercise in contrast. Which isn’t to say that it was good, because it wasn’t; more that it was… austere. It was really more of a train station than an airport. Upon touching down at 6am, we trudged across the snowy tarmac to be disgorged into a car park via a gate held closed by a rusty padlock. That was it; no arrivals building to speak of at all. A little while later, an ante-chamber was unlocked, in which I found my baggage. No further officialdom seemed to be forthcoming, so I went on my way – slightly bemused by the experience, nonetheless.

Happily, I was met from the airport by Amanda, a pleasant American lady who is also the director of studies of CET in Tyumen. Her assistance on that first morning was fairly vital, as my own capacity at the time was somewhat sub-par. I later found out that this was a case of the blind leading the blind: Amanda had herself arrived in Tyumen after a 15-hour trek from the States only a day or so previously, and spent much of the following day in deep, deep sleep. But that notwithstanding, she still managed to take me to my apartment, thrust a handful of cash and groceries into my hand, and force me to make my bed before collapsing into it. For this I am grateful.

I forced myself out of bed at around noon, having slept for about 4 hours – enough to take the edge off, but not enough to ensure that I would be body-clock-distortingly alert at 2am the following morning. This was the first point at which I properly stopped to check out my surroundings. My flat – fine, clean, tastefully decorated and spacious, with as much kitchen as I could possibly wish for. Located on the tenth floor of a Soviet concrete block, it provides some scenic views of a pair of radio masts, which are actually quite pretty when lit up for night.

Meeting Amanda and another new colleague, Rob, for a pizza lunch provided an opportunity to see Tyumen itself in daylight. On first impressions, it’s like a Saudi city but snowier – lots of wide, straight roads in a grid system, lots of concrete blocks, and lots of cars. A slightly fairer eye will realise that this is fatuous; for one thing, Tyumen has bars, and restaurants, and pavements, and people bustling about the place – not many, but enough to prevent a sense of desertedness. The concrete blocks are interspersed with some charmingly ramshackle old wooden buildings, most of which have electricity but none of which have plumbing. And if you’re persistent, you can find some items of real interest – a small central park with a fair, for example, complete with ferris wheels and merry-go-rounds, and a collection of very beautiful ice sculptures, or some of the oldest churches and cathedrals in Russia.

Pizza was a slightly lazy affair, if only because Amanda and I were persevering under the effects of travel tiredness. Once fed, however, I was taken to the school to meet the other staff and get a sense of the premises. The school in Tyumen isn’t big – 6 permanent teachers, plus myself and Jon, both pending for Nizhnevartovsk – but it is friendly, and the welcome I received there was very warm. At the end of the day, Jon – who is literally the friendliest, most cheerful man I have ever met – took me out to dinner at a diner in town. Along with Dan, another recent arrival, we cheerfully ordered Deluxe Moccasin with no idea what that entailed (in the event, a fish fillet fried in batter with a potato fritter) and a nice big slice of cake to follow. I got home in time for an early night, but sat up bolt upright at about 1.15am, realising that I had left my satchel at the restaurant. After ten minutes of internal wrestling, I sighed, booted up and headed back out into the cold. After half an hour of trudging, was extremely fortunate to discover that: a) stories of the probability of getting stabbed in Russian cities at 2am are overblown, at least in Tyumen; b) the restaurant is not in the UK, and thus stays open until a sensible hour – in this case, 2am; and c) apparently no-one else had been in the restaurant since I left, as mu bag was undisturbed where I left it. All of this is extremely fortunate, as losing that bag – and its contents – would have been catastrophic.

Yesterday was mostly spent at the school, although I did brave my first visit to a Russian supermarket (which was, uh, remarkably similar to supermarkets anywhere else in the world. Who would’ve thunk). Plans are being drawn up for a weekend trip to the hot springs, and hopefully I’ll have my ticket sorted out for my train ride to Nizhnevartovsk by early next week. I shall no doubt keep you all informed in the next thrilling installment.

Well, I hope you are all well, because I’m fantastic. Istanbul!

Lyrical is like a bald man’s head – it should prepare itself to be waxed.

This city is amazing. The youth hostel I am in is situated roughly twenty feet from the Aya Sofia and the Blue Mosque, and on my first night I was fortunate enough to – by chance – be standing directly between them just as the Call to Prayer began. It occurs to me that, while Christianity shows its faith through the awe inspired by choirs, organs, heavy gilt and gothic architecture, Islam (or what I have seen of it here) relies on light furnishings, delicate buildings, and the power of one man, his voice and his soul and a big microphone, at the top of a minaret to convey their sense of the holy. Both are based ontradition, so it would be too much to try and apply these ideas to more general trends, but I do find it to be an interesting difference in approach.

Istanbul is staggering. Of all of the European cities, it is the one the wears the pomp of its glorious past most comfortably, neither ignoring it nor allowing it to overwhelm its optimistic present. The Grand Bazaar is a sensory overload, a covered market covering a square mile and packed to the brim with a mind-boggling array of colours, smells, and less intangeable concepts such as products and haggling – and, after today’s excesses, somewhat more significant overdraft withdrawl than I had hoped for – but utterly worth it. Haggling is an amusing experience for one reared in Britain’s somewhat more restrained social system. I saw a chess set which I fell in love with, but for which the asking price was 180 YTL (Turkish Lira) – about a hundred pounds. Half an hour of haggling brought him down to 100 YTL, which was more reasonable, but part of the joy was that it was a win-win situation; he enjoyed haggling, expected that to be part of the process, and inflated his initial price to adjust for that. I bought a few gifts there – not for everyone, I warn you all now, as money is spare right now, but if I’ve missed a birthday or I usually get you a christmas present then something from either Turkey or Sofia will be forthcoming.

Istanbul has its menaces, though. The most annoying is the street touts, who aren’t so much dangerous as annoyingly persistent. I am pretty much obviously a tourist in Istanbul but in general I am prepared to seek out things like taxis and restaurants for myself, and slightly resent having pushers force their paymasters upon me every hundred paces. More dangerous are the fraudsters, who will promise single men that they will take them to bars with beautiful women then stiff them for a $3,000 dollar bar tab – fortunately not the kind of thing I am succeptable to, but still annoying.

But yes. Still, I shall share stories when I get home. To tide you over until then, my flickr account has had a bit of an update, including some elusive hints of Megan from Budapest. Enjoy those.

This, of course, is my last update, as I’ll be back in the UK as of next Saturday. Hopefully I’ll see you all (or all of you for whom it is practical – i.e. not Viv, Tim, Lise etc) at some point soon and tell stories. Until then, hope you are all well. I look forward to seeing you.

Good times.

Probably the most amount of leg-work I’ve managed to squeeze into a seven-day period so far. So, let’s see, I sent the last email from Zagreb, and since then have ben to Split and Dubrovnik on the Dalmatian coast, Bar and Belgrade in Serbia, and now Bucarest in Romania, a city I’ve had a mild desire to visit for most of my life, seeing as I lived on a road that carried it’s name for seven or eight years.

So let’s start with New Years. I actually had a pretty good time, which is unusual, as New Years is usually something of a let-down. New Years in Zagreb takes the form of some 4,000 Croats in the main square, jumping up and down to some age’d-rocker band (think Bon Jovi fronted by George Galloway in a ponytail), and letting off fireworks with an absolute disregard for safety procedure. The fireworks were pretty incredible, though – the Croatians sure know how to put on good pyrotechnics, and the lack of police presence meant that they could be… creative about how they were letting them off and allowing them to go. So that was exciting. New Years Day was a proper vegetatian day; the Croats actually know how to do January 1st TV, meaning that I spent the day watching (in no particular order) The Great Escape, Beverly Hills Cop 1-3, Eraser and the last James Bond travesty. I had a good time in Zagreb. It’s an odd little city, somewhat lacking in charm, but it did know how to party.

The train down to Split was actually new, which was a novelty – I had kinda gotten used to trains being covered in cigarette ash and non-functional light fittings. Split itself is a fun little city. It is quite definately orientated towards the tourist, since it’s main raison d’etre (trade routesand sinking Venitian ships) dried up a couple of hundred years ago. It is dominated by a fort-cum-castle that is like the inspiration for every fantasy movie ever – masses of tiny winding passages flanked by tall, tightly-packed yellow-washed houses, interspersed with broken courtyards, gaping chasms and tall towers. It’s incredibly dramatic; wandering around it makes me feel a bit like a child, as I tend to let my imagination run away with me in such situations. I think that the main attraction of Split, however, is that it appears not to even have a McDonalds, which I think is probably a first. For a while it also seemed like it didn’t have a youth hostel, either; I was wondering aimlessly through a back alley looking for one which allegedly existed but could not be found through conventional means, when a man saw that I had a backpack on and came and asked me if I was looking for someplace to stay. Normally I would be wary, but I was tired and it was dark, so I just said yes. To cut a long story short, I ended up with a vacant apartment – double bed, kitchen, the works – for just under £10 per night, right in the middle of the citadel, and thus right on top of all the action. Outside the window this morning there was a vast market, selling fruits, dried meat and honey. Yeah, I fell like I did pretty well. I know it could have ended up much worse but for now I’m not complaining.

Split, however, is the end of the train line as far as Croatia goes. A bus journey to Dubrovnik wasn’t too traumatic, but it did act as a precursor for what was to come. Dubrovnik is an amazing city. Sheathed in white marble, perched on an outcrop over the Mediterranian, and ringed by mountains and forests, it is a city that demands awe. Like Split, it’s military function is ancient history now, which is why the shelling of the city (and its entirely civilian population) by Serbian battleships in 1991 caused such consternation. Happily, the damage has been pretty well repaired, although the odd gutted building still lurks around. Actually, that’s pretty much a feature of the Dalmatian coast. The train and bus rides down wielded some stunning views, but the countryside is still scarred by the odd derelict with its roof shelled off.

(Incidentally, the winter is the wrong time to visit Dalmatia. Wrong wrong wrong. Dubrovnik was gorgious but it would ahve been unreal in the sun.)

So, that was the fun part of the week. Unfortunately the rest brought varying degrees of discomfort and stress. The plan was to head from Dubrovnik to Belgrade; at first, I was set on backtracking to Zagreb and taking the train from there. However, the train lines in Serbia terminate in Bar, which is a small town on the south end of that country’s coastline, near to the border with Albania. Realising that it was but a hop, skip and a jump from Dubrovnik, I resolved to take the bus to Bar and catch the train to Belgrade from there. Bad idea. For a start, the bus journey was actually in the region of eight hours long, and then to add chaos to misery the train from Bar didn’t leave for Belgrade until about seven hours after I arrived there. Let me assure you that there is nothing to do in Bar. I used those seven hours to read Lolita, with annotations and seventy-odd pages of waffly analysis, and shivered in the unmitigated cold.

The train, when it finally left, was not a sleeper, despite the fact that it was leaving at 11pm for a city ten hours away. Also, the doors didn’t lock. Being as I was certifiably the only English speaker on the train, there was no-one to buddy up with. So I stayed awake all night, and judging by the incidence rate of people poking their heads through my door that was probably sensible. I did get to see soem of the Serbian landscape, though, which was nice, although as the train line plotted a course that contrived to approach both the Bosnian and the Kosovan border, the view mainly consisted of craters from landmines.

Belgrade is ugly. Don’t ever go there. I left after only six hours, and it’s the only city in which I didn’t take a single photo.

(It does have an amazing bookshop though. At some pioint I’m going to have to tote up the amount of books I’ve read over this trip. I’m pretty sure it’s around 25 now. Ouch, that’s a lot of money on books.)

And would you believe it? The train to Bucarest is also not a sleeper. The night train community in Romania is actually surprisingly zesty; no-one appeared to be sleeping, let’s put it that way, and if they weren’t then I sure as hell wasn’t. The train alternated between overzealously heated and ludicrously cold, the conductor kept on laughing at me which I found undescribably creepy, and to top it all off I made myself sick again – dehydration, over-exertion and exhaustion combined to produce an interestingly insistent fever and a scorcher of a headache. I’m coming to realise that I’m not a teenager any more and a diet of Coca-Cola and metabolism cannot be made to support power-walking up hills with large rucksacks. When I think about the three times I’ve been laid low on this trip, they’ve all been exhaustion-related. Perhaps I need to work on my diet.

Anyway, it wasn’t all bad. The train did wend its way through Transylvania, and I had an Awesome Travelling Moment – looking out of a window at an opportune moment, I happened to see a castle perched on a hill, surrounded by trees and illuminated by the full moon. Then the train took a corner with a screech of brakes and the whoel scene was obliterated by darkness. The fact that the train was roughly circa 1898 added to the whole Bram Stoker feel.

(Can you tell that I’m getting sick of travelling? No so much the seeing new and exciting things business, that never gets old. It’s the periodic 12-hour breaks in between, sat on dirty trains and cramped coaches, that are starting to chaffe.)

Anyway. I arrived in Bucarest (back above the snow line, le sigh) at roughly 5am this morning, found a youth hostel and have ben sleeping until now. Next is to take a poke around the city, although the main focus of the next few days is to get ready for my train jounrey to Sofia, which no doubt will be equally pleasant. My next email will reach you from Istanbul – and, my friends, will probably be my last, as my return flighty to Blighty is booked for Saturday the 21st of January. Keep an eye out for it, same Bat-time, etc etc.

Anyway, I’m looking forward to hearing all the New Years stories, which I’m sure some of you must have. I hope you all had a good one, anyway. Let me know!

Hello chaps and chapesses!

Christmas was slightly lame this year, although, as discussed previously, I don’t consider Christmas to have occured until I am sick of the Pogues’ Fairytale of New York, and seeing as I haven’t even heard it this year I feel like I can justifiably claim not to have had Christmas at all.

Which is lucky, as Christmas itself was sort of lame. The youth hostel was pretty much empty apart from a horde of Latvians, who descended on Christmas afternoon, made the place smelly, then disappeared on Boxing Day morning. There were a few sketchy things going on – there was a kind-of pseudo flea market going on by the river, and some folk-singing on a stage in the main square, but that was about it. The cinema was open, but it was only showing King Kong and some Eastern European thing. In the end I went slightly further out to another cinema, which was again pretty limited in range, and watched A History of Violence, which was poo. And that was Christmas.

But judged apart from that, Slovenia was great. I choose to regard those two days as a sort of haitus, a rest-stop if you will, because the rest of my time in Slovenia was packed with action. I took a day trip to Bled, a beautiful little town on the Italian border, which is surrounded by the Julian Alps and has a church on an island that can only be reached by Gondola. I also tramped through two sets of caves, one of which was UNESCO listed and very pretty indeed; and on top of all that, Ljubljana itself was worthy of a fair few days worth of exploring, and looked particularly scenic in the two feet of snow which feel on Boxing Day. Slovenia was left pretty much unscathed by the Yugoslavian armies when it declared independence, which is fortunate, as the Old Town of Ljubljana and its surrounding villages are particularly nice. Boxing Day also saw the arrival of a bunch of Canadians, so I even had some company for my last few days there. So, yes, I actually had a really good week in Slovenia, if we discount Christmas Day, and that only because every other place was closed.

I’m in Zagreb now, capital of Croatia, which is about two feet deep in snow and only just above freezing at midday. It took me three hours to find my hostel yesterday, partly because it was dark and snowing, and partly because the Croatians seem to have a problem with road signs – maybe they think it will confuse the Serbs? Anyway, by the time I got here I was very cold, very exhausted and somewhat emotional, but happily I’ve regained some of my humour, and went to do some sightseeing today. Zagreb seems pretty functional, not terribly pretty but with a good atmosphere. There’s a pretty big party of French guys here, who seem decent, and quite a few Italians as well; oddly, no Australians, which I don’t really know what to make of, nor any Americans since the last ones went this morning. So I’ll be surrounded by Latinate folks for New Years, which should be amusing.

Speaking of New Years, I’m not really sure how I’ll be spending it yet. Chances are a small group of French and Italian people will go in search of a party, and I will probably join them. But I am sure you will all be having a far more glamorous time, so let me know the festive-season goss!

I must go as my feet are cold. A Happy New Year to all, and all the best for 2006.

I met Megan in Gdansk in Poland. Hit it off pretty much immediately, so she invites me to stay with her in Budapest, where she’s doing a foreign exchange year. I do so; we spend about 10 days in Budapest together, before she goes home to the US and I move on.

We tried to keep it going as a long-distance relationship for a while, but for one reason or another I couldn’t do it – my head just wasn’t there. She offered to move to London for me but I was pretty sure that I didn’t want to be in London either. I didn’t see how it could work out, and I told her so. Gradually we drifted apart.

Sometimes I feel guilty, like I used her for that period, but I know that I meant it at the time. In different circumstances, I think that she and I would have been great for each other. Either way, I hope she’s happy now.

Budapest – again, undersold here but an amazing place, lovely enough that I am going back under my own steam. Also unmentioned in this post: Rachel, a really nice Australian girl (with whom I had an entirely platonic relationship, for those who are sniggering at the back ¬_¬ ) and stayed in touch with for a few years after that. Haven’t had an email from her in a while, but hopefully she’s doing well too.

Haha, what an amusing couple of days.

So, Krakow was pretty cool, although I probably stayed way too long there. It’s the kind of place that sucks a person in – a guy missed three planes in two days trying to leave, and it was basically a once-a-day occurence that someone would end up coming back to the youth hostel after failing to make it out fo the city. As it happens, I managed to get out first time, but only after 8 days of procrastinating and general timewastery. Met a whole slew of awesome people, though, and managed to see such interesting sights as Wawel Castle (one of the seven Chakra points, no less), the Salt Mines (the world’s oldest active mine), and a big man-made lump of earth, which may sound dull but was actually mildly impressive. Of far greater interest was the fact that the youth hostel I stayed at had its own private cinema, which, as far as I was concerned, was utterly incredible.

Of course, I also took in Auschwitz, and got pretty heavily submerged into the Jewish history of the area. The experience was bleak and somewhat depressing. Obviously, worthwhile, though. I guess I’m still mulling the whole thing over. More on that as it comes to me.

Something else relevant happened in Krakow, but I can’t remember what it was. Ah, yes, Team England! Four English boys descended on Krakow over the weekend; one got arrested on his first night for smashing a window but that was just the beginning. On the second night an Australian went out with them – and this was a pretty serious Australian, you know, 6’2″ with a pleanty impressive beer capacity of his own – and woke up the following morning missing “300 Euros, his wallet and his cock-ring”. Apparently, all he remembers was that Team England left him puking outside a brothel at 5am, and that the cause of the subsequent losses are unknown to him (although I can probably hazard a guess). Another Australian, incited by them, jumped out of a second story window. I’ve never been so proud to be English. In their honour, an English girl I met called Cath and I entered the hostel’s pub quiz on Monday night as Team England, and won conclusively. Being as I’m a non-drinker, this left Cath with the task of dealing with twelve pints of beer by herself; I hear that she aquitted herself well.

As Cath and I were travelling in the same direction we took the night train together. The night trains in Poland are awesome! They have a sketchy reputation for theft and violence, but we splashed out (haha, splashed out – the entire exercise cost about fifteen pounds) and got a private two-bed, and just locked and dead-bolted the door. It was super-comfortable, so we were happy.

Daylight found us in Budapest, jewel of the Danube. In Budapest I met up with Megan, a I girI met in Gdansk who I have stayed with for the week that I’ve been here. I have had the best time – ice skating, turkish baths (which are amazing, incidentally), the lot. Budapest is a beautiful city, if somewhat lacking in charm. It reminds me a little bit of London, actually. It’s like a mini-London; the people are slightly friendlier, the pollution less noticable, but the atmosphere similar.

This morning I took Megan to the airport and put her on a plane back to America. I’ll probably only be here for another day or so myself. Ljubljana and Slovenia are waiting.

I will almost certainly not be sending out another email before Christmas, so I hope you all have a wonderful festive season. Those members of my family who are doubtless already on the French coast, for when you get this, I hope you had a good time and I (was/will be) thinking of you; for everyone else, enjoy and be happy.

Love to all.