Mud, Oil and Bribery in Baku

Mud, Oil and Bribery in Baku
Baku, Azerbaijan
August 27, 2007
By Dan Murdoch


THE cop pointed his red flag at our car and blew his whistle hard.
I felt like I’d been pulled over while go-karting.
Our entire convoy had just followed J Love into a U-turn on the motorway, a manoeuvre that would be illegal in most civilised countries, and Azerbaijan was no exception.
Ziggy and Gunther the Merc had managed to get away, but I was left to face the music with the occupants of Fez.

My experiences in Azerbaijan over the preceding day and night had all been good. The people seemed friendly – one family had flagged us down on the motorway to insist we join them for dinner, and in the foreigner-friendly capital of Baku I expected the police to be reasonable.

The cop ambled over in his own time, and I took my sunnies off, grabbed my identification and left the car to meet him with my best silly but harmless foreigner smile.
“Salam” I offered my hand, which he took firmly. The bones in my knuckle have yet to heal from our incident with the thief and I winced as the pain shot through my palm.
“a’lekum a Salam.”
He seemed affable enough, but spoke no English, and I used my handful of Russian words to explain what we were doing.
He let me know there was a problem and led me back to his car where he sat me down in its relative privacy. He took my details and made a great show of writing out a ticket.
The BMW felt shiny and new and smelt of leather – it was strange being in a proper car after so long in Trabants.
The cop sucked the air in through his front teeth, making a gurgling sound. He seemed to be weighing me up.
He flipped over the ticket and wrote on the back:
$150.
Three cars, fifty dollars each, he communicated through the universal language of hand.
I pulled a face which I hoped conveyed confidence in my position but respect for his, and shook my head.
“Nyet dollar. Nyet.”
There was a silence at this impasse. He looked more disappointed than angry.
“Ya rabotayu journalista v’London”
I work as a journalist in London, I told him as casually as I could, hoping the latent threat would come across without sounding challenging.
“Journalista?” he raised his voice, then tried to work out my age from my passport.
“24,” I tried to help him, raising my fingers.
Again using sign language, he asked whether I was married or had children, and was surprised when I said no. Then he asked if Zsofi, who had been in Dante with me, was my girlfriend. I said no and he made a crude gesture to ask if I was sleeping with her.
I laughed in a ladish way and said no but he nudged me and winked all the same, apparently adamant that two people could not share a car without fornicating.
He looked down at the back of the ticket where $150 was neatly written.
“Ya rabotayu journalista v’London,” I repeated, pulling my press card out of my wallet and handing it to him. He grunted, and shouted out of the car window to a colleague who had a few more stars on his shoulder.
He showed him the card and they exchanged words.
$50 was written on the back of my ticket.
I found it ridiculous that he was writing the amount he wanted as a bribe on the back of the official ticket and, to hide any compliance on my part, scrawled $10 in my notebook.
He seemed to give up.
“Ok, Daniel.” He waved me away and I left the car.
Dan 1, Cops 0.

“Baku is oil. That’s why everyone’s here,” the man shouted into my ear, spraying the side of my face with spittle. He was northern and drunk, but it was late and I was in an Irish bar – what could I expect. The only locals in Finnegan’s Irish Pub in Baku were hired hands – barmen, doormen and whores.
A live band was playing and an Azeri was singing Dancing in the Moonlight, but he clearly couldn’t speak English because evabadey waz danswing in the moonliy.
The Trabbi girls didn’t seem to care, frolicking and having drinks bought for them.
“It’s boom town. The oil’s bubbling out of the ground. Everyone wants a bit. It’s the English that have got it though.”
I wiped my cheek. There are a lot of ex-pats in Baku, enough to warrant two English language newspapers, and British Gas has a large interest in the city.
Oil platforms hover just off the coastline and stretch out into the Caspian Sea. Pipelines crisscross the surrounding countryside.
People have been going to Baku for oil for their lamps for thousands of years. Marco Polo said there were different coloured oils in different areas, blue, red, green and yellow, with yellow being the most popular. The world’s first offshore well was drilled here in the mid 19th Century.
The city is a strange mix of neo-classical, neo-neo-classical, and dilapidated. But you can tell the money’s here –construction is everywhere, McDonalds is everywhere.

The following day I was sitting on a step in the shade of a Birch tree, reading and waiting for Brady and Zsofi to finish in a shop. I heard shouting and looked up to see a cop demanding I move. I stood up, put my bag back on my shoulder and moved to the side of the road. There’ll be no sitting on the street in Azerbaijan.
Dan 1, Cops 1.

The departing cop was pulled over by a well-dressed local at the restaurant I had been sitting near. They argued, the cop left, then the man called me over:
“You can sit there,” he said, then gestured at the policeman: “He doesn’t know the rules.”
I sat down and the cop glared at me as he shuffled off.
Dan 2, Cops 1.

The man was dressed in a well-fitted suit, with gold cufflinks and an expensive watch, and dining with men of similar attire.
“Why did he move me?”
“He thinks it is still Soviet times. Beggars used to sit on the ground,” he shrugged, “but it’s ok.”
I looked a little like a beggar. Dirty, stained shorts, rolled up over my knees, sweaty, creased shirt and long, unkempt hair that had taken the shape of a thatched roof.
“Are you a tourist?”
I explained my mission.
“What was Armenia like?”
“They told me all Azerbaijanis were evil,” I told him in a horribly miscalculated comedy gambit that only served to get his back up.
The two countries are at war.
“We are all Caucasian, we are the same people.”
And he returned to his business.

Baku is hung with pictures of the country’s former president Haydur Aliyev, and its new one, his son Ishmail.
Despite Azerbaijan being a ‘democracy’, arrangements were hastily arranged for a hereditary transfer of power when Aliyev Snr became ill a few years ago. He son was quickly promoted to prime minister and thrust into the public eye.
When old Aliyev popped off, the power of his political and electoral machine was handed to his son, who waltzed into the hot seat at the subsequent presidential election.
Images of the two of them are everywhere: paintings in shops and homes, billboards along the roads, signs in police stations, shrines by the road. Another personality cult.

But stability in oil rich Baku is vital to the west, and world leaders are happy to overlook the Aliyev’s abuses of power to ensure their fuel supply remains uninterrupted. As long as Baku is needed for the world’s oil then the world has an interest in Baku’s stability. And the Aliyev’s are good trading partners.

We visited the ‘mud volcanoes’, where liquid mud bubbles and belches from the peaks of hills. The fractured landscape looked like the moon, the mud had been erupting for thousands of years, forming a dry, cracked landscape of mud-flows and shapes.
Later I went out to the cars and found a gaggle of cops looking over them. I took one off them, Captain Sayeed, up to our host’s apartment for a chat.
“That’s the nicest cop I’ve ever met,” our host said, “Six years ago they were like beggars – they went round asking for money. That was the system, even with the big guys. Now they make the salary higher so they don’t have so many problems.”
But they still ask for money.
“If you make a little mistake then yes, they make you pay. But before, whether you made a mistake or not, they would ask for money. Everyone pays, I pay, my father pays.
“People do not know any better – this is how it has been for years. People don’t know how much a speeding ticket should cost, so they pay whatever they are told.”

“There is corruption on every level,” an Azeri friend later told me, “example, the government says in the budget that it is spending so much on repainting buildings, but this does not cost as much as they say. So where does the excess go? In their pockets.
“We have so much oil, we could be such a rich nation, but look at the statistics, a teacher earns $100 a month.”

In order to avoid Iran, we needed to get a ferry from Baku, across the Caspian, to the Turkmen port of Turkmenbashi.
There were no fixed prices on display at the port and we were resigned to entering into negotiations.
Four cars and nine people. How much to Baku?
The price started at an extortionate $1,350 but OJ and I negotiated it down to $1,100 over two sweaty hours.
It felt infuriatingly expensive so we took a break to talk about it, and phone the British Embassy for advice.
I got through to Sayeda Zayeva. She agreed that the fee seemed expensive: “But this is private matter, we cannot get involved.”
“Do you think I'm being bribed?”
She laughed, “Of course. This is Azerbaijan. This is how it works.”
“Well, is there anyone I can complain to?”
Another giggle, “No, this is Azerbaijan.”
“So what should I do?”
“Do you have any other way of getting to Turkmenistan? Do you have any other choice?”
“No.”
“Then you pay. This is Azerbaijan, this is how things work.”

We grudgingly paid up, but on our way from the ticket office we got hit for a random $30 ‘road tax fee’, presumably for using the strip of tarmac between the port gates and ferry, a $44 bridge fee for a goon to open a gate onto the ferry, a $10 per car loading fee, and $10 per person to be shown to our cabins (which we refused to pay).

They told us the boat would take 12 hours.
It took three days.

Ends
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Tony P has found his passport

Tony P has found his passport
Baku, Azerbaijan
August 27th, 2007
By Dan Murdoch

Tony P has been reunited with his passport. We are all celebrating. Someone found it and turned it into a hotel, from there it was mailed to the US Embassy in Baku.
It’s a major relief, and we remain at nine.

Ends
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One in, One out?

One in one out
Baku, Azerbaijan
August 27, 2007
By Dan Murdoch



WE PICKED up Brady in Baku. He’ll be with us for the next month, which is a great addition- fresh blood.
We met him at the airport shortly after 3am, took him for an expensive beer at the terminal, then treated him to his first night as a trekker – camping on a patch of debris yards from the runway.
He’s from LA, good company and a talented photographer and designer. A front man in a decent band, I spent a good week with him in Germany last year.
One in.


But Tony P lost his passport somewhere on the 500km drive through Azerbaijan a couple of days ago. It was loose in Dante and probably fell out along the way.
He thinks he’s narrowed the spot down to a few miles of road where everyone got split up late in the evening.
OJ went back with him to retrace their steps yesterday, they spent all morning searching, but came back empty handed.
One out.

The passport can be replaced relatively quickly.
The visas are a different matter. Russia in particular takes a while to sort out, and he will need a new letter of invitation – not easy to get.
One option is that we go ahead through Turkmenistan, hopefully he will be able to fly to Tashkent in Uzbekistan to meet us next week, then travel to Kazakhstan with us. Then he will probably have to fly over Russia and met us in Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia.
But the extra flights and replacement visas are expensive, and they could mean he runs out of money towards the end of the trip and doesn’t make it to Cambodia anyway.

Another option is to bail.
His insurance will cover him for his lost passport and a flight home.
He admits he’s tempted.


It is a major blow.
From a social perspective Tony is a steady hand. A calm, easygoing character who gets things done. He’s someone I find easy company, and he knows how to handle Lovey. He’s struck up a particular friendship with Zsofi – the two of them get on well and usually travel in Dante together.
We joke that it’s harder to get into Dante than China. You need a letter of invitation and a visa, and even then you’re unlikely to get more than a day.

And TP’s also our mechanic. Over the last six weeks he has got to know each of the Trabbis intimately. While we’ve been out filming, he’s often stayed behind to work on the cars, and knows the nuances and character flaws of each.
It’s rare that more than a couple of days go by without him fixing one of them, and his expertise will be sorely missed. Particularly now, when we’re heading into the unknown of Central Asia and the ‘stans’.
So the group is changed again. Since we started we’ve lost Justin, which we expected, and Tony and Istvan, which we didn’t.
But we have gained Marlena and Brady – for now at least.

Ends
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Leaving Georgia: Hospitality, Davit Gareja and St George

Leaving Georgia: Hospitality and St George
Tbilisi and Davit Gareja
August 24, 2007
By Dan Murdoch


We left Tbilisi to head towards the Azeri border, which we hoped to cross before nightfall.
Vaguely along the way was Davit Gareja a famous old monastery out in the hills that we’d heard was worth a visit. Looking in our patchy guidebook map it looked like a short detour…

I guess England has its fair share of industrial wasteland. But on route we passed failed industry on an epic scale. Enormous factories with shattered windows and semi-collapsed roofs loomed up from the plains. Twisted metal, broken fencing and rusted pipes adorned the slumping ruins of Five Year Plans. Whole industrial towns left to rot.
But there was some activity in there. A long, straight chimney belched yellowish gas high into the atmosphere. Up close I hardly noticed the clouds, but from 50km away I looked back and saw that thick smog was lying over the whole area, all emanating from that one industrial minaret.

As we continued the view became more natural. The land turned to pastures, miles of fertile grazing, sandwiched between rolling mountains. Bright green foliage followed the basin of a once powerful river now reduced to a trickle, by nature or man I don’t know.
After stopping for directions at a strange shop, we turned off the main road onto dirt tracks that we would follow through the fields for the next three hours.
The mud paths were better suited to horse, cart and cattle. But the scenery was spectacular, we met some interesting shepherds along the way, and driving the Trabbis in those conditions was fun. The little machines handle like rally cars, and because they only go 50mph, you can try and drive them flat out, and laugh as they skid through the dust.

Our path was constantly blocked by herds, crossing the road in huge groups, like pedestrians in cities. One horse tried to race us, despite having its front legs bound loosely together to stop it running too far. It was a surreal moment, gunning the Trabbi across the dirt with a horse in full flight along side.


It was nearly nightfall when we arrived at Davit Gareja and the old monastery was locked up, so we scrambled up a steep rock face to try and get over the walls.
“So now you’re breaking into churches?” OJ asked, but after driving all that way we had to peek inside.

After half an hour of clambering about, a monk arrived and opened the doors. He asked us to cover up, then took us on a tour in the fading light.
The stunning and remote centre is carved out of the porous rock – a cave system surrounded by high walls and steep cliffs.


St David founded a Christian church in a cave at the site in the fourth century, and it has been an important Church ever since.
At its peak 6,000 monks lived at Davit Gareja. But in the 16th Century the Shah of Iran took an army to the place and slaughtered them all.
Now 45-year-old Padre Antimoz lives there with three other monks and a few ‘guests’. A bridge engineer during Soviet times, 20 years ago Padre joined the ‘spiritual academy’ and became what he calls an ‘air monk’. He has lived in a cave for the past four years, just at St David did.
He showed us around the main church by candlelight. The grave of St David lies in there, and a fresco dedicated to the 6,000 slaughtered monks.


I was stunned when Padre explained that one painting depicted St George slaying the dragon. The dragon wasn’t the winged, tailed beast of English legend, but a armoured man of Asian descent.
According to Padre this ‘Dragon’ was a Byzantine soldier who was loyal to Pagan Rome at a time when the Emperor Theocritian (Theocletio) worshipped Zeus and hated Christians. He had killed ‘many, many Christians’ Padre said, and so earned the name ‘Dragon’.
But George, a Turk from Kapadoccia, slayed him in 303AD, earning sainthood.
It was strange to hear the story of England’s patron saint, told from this side of the world. Padre had no idea what links George to my island.

It was late and Padre offered us a place to stay, but we were behind schedule and needed to press on to the border, so we said our goodbyes.
Within a few hours Fez had broken down, he would run, but wouldn’t start. No big deal as push starting the light little fellow is a simple process (we have got to the stage where we can reverse push start a Trabbi against traffic up a hill).
Standing by the side of the road while TP checked Fez’s engine, tired and hungry in the Georgian night, a truck saw us and pulled over. The driver stepped out and gave us three giant watermelons, then drove off into the darkness. The gift raised morale, brightening everyone’s mood and we messily gorged ourselves in front of Ziggy’s headlights.

Within a couple of hours of leaving, Gunther the Mercedes got a flat. His fourth in a month. We think he may be overloaded.
Every passer by stopped to help despite it being the early hours of the morning, then, when we’d finally replaced the wheel, after struggling with the jack on uneven ground, the hydraulic suspension failed. We decided to limp on to the border and try to tackle the problem there, but the last 100km took two and a half hours to cross.
We rolled into the checkpoint and the guards slowly came to life. One went around kicking lampposts to get them to work. We showed our papers, chatted a while, then an official in his early thirties, with dark hair and a handsome face, called me to one side conspiratorially.
“Hey Dan, come here.”
For a second I thought he was going to demand money to let the Merc through – old Gunther was clearly broken – but from somewhere he magiced up a giant, dusty, plastic container of syrupy, brown liquid.
“Take this,” he slid it towards me in the shadows, “Georgian wine. My friend in Karkheti made it. It is the best around.”
I was overwhelmed.
We had always planned on tasting the famous delicacy, but ran out of time. Once again Georgian hospitality left me stunned.
“I'm sorry we only have five litres to give you. Drink it. Drink too much you will be drunk.”
Maybe he knew we had a long night ahead of us.
It took eight hours to cross the 100m border, but that tub of bitter moonshine made it all bearable.

Georgian hospitality.

Next Azerbaijan:


Ends
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The return of Love

The return of Love
Armenia and Georgia
Late August, 2007

J LOVE seems to have regained his sanity.
His health has improved, his conversations aren’t accompanied by a ratchety cough anymore, he no longer looks so tired, drawn and miserable.
I asked him pointedly at a group meeting when he was planning on leaving us.
“I'm not definitely going,” he replied, “That was just an option.”
I shrugged and thought it best not to push the point, but at back in Yerevan he sounded like his mind was made up.
I hope his good mood holds – he would be a sad loss to the group.


I spent a few days driving with him and he’s been good company. We enjoyed leading the convoy through the dirt tracks to Davir Gareja, and sharing responsibility for our border crossing into Azerbaijan.

Now Istvan’s gone there seems less pressure on us. We no longer have to stick rigidly to the production schedule, we can take more enjoyment from filming, knowing it is for ourselves, not anyone else. We can go where we please, and film for fun, without concern for Travel Channel’s audience.

Old Isty was a good person to have along for a month – helped to teach us about shots and filming and angles and direction. But now we can take it our own way, and it feels more natural.

ends

Sightseeing and war on the Armenian border

Sightseeing and war on the Armenian border
Armenia
21st August, 2007
by Dan



“Um guys, this village is not abandoned. I can see people,” Tony’s voice crackled over the walkie-talkie.

We were heading for the Armenia-Georgia border and driving through some stunning scenery. In the early evening we noticed a succession of abandoned villages. Dozens of houses stripped bare, their windows and doors gaping lonely holes in crumbling brickwork.
Fascinated, we decided to divert to the next one we saw for some filming.

Tony and Zsofi lead our caravan down crater marked road. They were driving Dante, fifty metres ahead of the rest of our convoy.
We carried on up the rough dirt track towards the crumbling ruins of what looked like a ghost town, high in the Armenian hills.


“I say again I can see people,” the walkie burst into life again, putting me on edge, what had we stumbled into?
“There are people here,” the voice from the walkie distorted, paused, then came across loud but calm, “and they have guns.
“There are people coming with guns. Back up people. They have guns.”

The voice didn’t betray a hint of panic, but in Fez, which I was riding with Megan, we slammed on the brakes and squinted through the windshield.
In the distance I could see a man in scruffy shirt and trousers, with someone behind him wearing all green.
Are those fatigues? What is he carrying?
“They are waving at me, they want me to go to them,” warbled the walkie.
“One of them has a gun. I think we should go back.”

Panic in Fez.

Fuck. There was a man with a large gun walking towards Dante.
“I think he wants me to go to him,” came Tony’s still relaxed voice.
“LETS GO. Reverse Tony. Go, go.”
Megan rammed the stick into reverse and little Fez made a horrible scraping sound. We both looked out of the back window. Ziggy was behind us, already reversing, and I could see Lovey and Carlos, by Gunther the Merc, filming the whole thing.

“He has a gun and he wants me to go with him,” said the walkie, still calm.
“Fucking reverse mate, lets go, come on, lets get out of here. Lets go,” was my advice.
But Dante sat motionless.
Thoughts raced through my head.
Do we leave Tony and Zsofi here? Do we stay and face up to this with them? The adrenaline kicked in – fight or flight, but there was certainly no fight option.
I wanted to flee.
“Tony lets go. Come on.”
No movement from Dante.
I watched as the man with the gun reached their car and then broke into a run as he went past it.
He was clearly in my view now. Wearing a metal helmet, green army fatigues, body armour and carrying a machine gun.
Terrorist? Insurgent? Revolutionary? Hostage taker?
The thoughts flew through my head and he was nearly on us.
We weren’t moving and, probably through fear-induced paralysis, it was clear we weren’t leaving Tony behind.

I’ve never been run at by a man with an automatic weapon before.
It is truly frightening.
There was going to be a confrontation, we were in a lot of trouble, but best it be a verbal onslaught than a bullet based discussion.
“Hide the laptops.”
Megan and I began stuffing anything of value in the most obvious of hiding places- under the seats.

The man with the gun ran past us, past Ziggy, and it became clear who the focus of his attention was – Carlos and the camera.
The Merc was fifty yards away, and Carlos hurried towards it to try and stash the camera, but to no avail, we were busted.
The men got out off the car and we went to face our fate.



It quickly became clear they were military, and I found it a relief. I didn’t fancy dealing with insurgents. There was a lot of shouting and radioing. I was worried they were about to bring their cohorts down and march us off.

But a civilian vehicle arrived, and three men stepped out. They too were from the military, but you could immediately tell the difference between them and the squady who’d chased us. They wore loafers not boots, had beer bellies instead of armour plating, caps instead of helmets, and stars on their shoulders. They were officers, and I didn’t know if this meant we were in more trouble or less.

Initially there was shouting, but OJ spoke his simple Russian.
We saw these abandoned villages and thought we’d investigate.
We’re doing a charity trip.
We’re going to Cambodia.
I showed our flier to the man who seemed in charge, but he wasn’t interested and spoke no English.

OJ translated for them:
We had stumbled onto the Armenia-Azerbaijan border. Turns out the two nations are still at war.
The villages weren’t ghost towns; they were a war zone.
They hadn’t crumbled under the ravages of time, but been blown apart by Azeri shells.
The hills were fortified by both side’s militaries in a tense stand-off.
Not the ideal location for sightseeing and a spot of filming then?
The officers said that if we had gone further up the dirt road we would have crossed the disputed Armenia-Azerbaijan border.
He said the Azeris would have shot us if they had seen us coming over the hill.

The filming was the biggest issue. We showed the head honcho what we’d shot and he demanded it be erased. We did this by pointing the camera at the ground and filming over it, but when we showed him the result - a three minute film of Armenian rocks- he went into a rage and shouted and demanded it be erased.
So we closed the lens cap and filmed blackness.
Anything but give him the tape, which had some good shots of us driving through the scenic countryside.

Tony passed cigarettes to the officers and they seemed to relax. They looked through our passports and laughed at our stamps, inquired about our Azerbaijani visas, but seemed to accept we were just stupid foreigners, rather than enemy spies.

I didn’t realise at the time, but Megan and Zsofi, who had sensibly opted to stay in the cars, were covertly filming the Armenians with a handy cam.
Megan subtly took a snap of them in the wing mirror of Fez.

After an hour they escorted us back to the main road and sent us on our way.
One of them gave Tony a peach.

Another brush with disaster under our belts.

Ends
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"Err..and please, big problem"

"Err..and please, big problem"
Yerevan, Armenia
August 20, 2007
By Dan

Our cameraman has left us.
Old Istvan pulled the plug, threw in the towel.
To be fair on the guy he gave it a fair crack.
He tried.
But we are a disorganised rabble. We wake up late, drive through the night, spend an hour refilling petrol, make painful progress through the hills, breakdown constantly, stick to a schedule intermittently, change plans every few hours, discuss much, resolve little.

He was almost the prefect candidate to follow us.
With a military background, he was a hardy chap with bush skills who could sleep anywhere and drive well into the night.
He’d shot for news channels during the Kosovo conflict, along with big budget feature films. He had a good eye for a shot, and would climb up crumbling buildings to get an angle.
He liked a drink, a smoke, had a sense of humour and some crazy left wing conspiracy theories.

But he didn’t speak more than a dozen words of English.

“Problem”, “Big problem,” and “No problem’ were his most common phrases, helping us judge the scale of our fuck up.
“errr...and no light, filming, why? Please. No light. Why? No filming. Big problem. Please. No filming, big problem.”
That means that we’ve wasted the day by being disorganised and lost the light just when we hit the good scenery.
“err....and please Dan, please, speaking, please.”
Means I should do a to camera piece.
“errr...and Benzine and no and why? Why and no? fucking problem”
Means we’ve run out of petrol again.
“errr...and fuck and Zsofi, FUCK. Big problem, Andrew, FUCK, and telephone, FUCK, (garbled Magyar), no speaking, FUCK, big problem.”
Meant he couldn’t get through to Andrew, his boss.
“errrr...and fuck and fuck, big problem, please, Zsofi, Zsofi.”
Meant he couldn’t adequately express his displeasure with his English vocabulary and he would wait to rant at Zsofi, our Hungarian trekker, so she could interpret.


The main problem with this is that, not only could we not understand him for some help and direction with his shots, but he couldn’t understand us to film the dialogue.
When someone’s telling a good story, or there’s a little bit of comedy, he didn’t know when to jump in and start filming.
Plenty of important side stories were missed because he didn’t know what was going on.
Plenty of potentially good narration wasted because he didn’t have his camera out.

To be fair to the poor guy, he tried to learn English in Ireland. Not sensible.
He announced his departure in Yerevan, and kindly gave us a three hour tutorial on how to use the cameras, what he thought of the film and how we could make the best of the rest of the show. He wants us to succeed, but he can’t be a part of it.
He’s a good man, even though we may have demonised him.
He said he missed his two young children.


Istvan gave me a powerful hug and walked away.
I don’t know where he planned to fly too, but he told us he is not welcome in Hungary, where he has somehow upset the politicians with his work.
Maybe he’s back in Ireland, waiting tables and scrubbing pots.
Who knows.
I miss him.
The crazy Hungarian camera guy.

We’ve lost our cameraman, but not our camera. So we film on.
We’ve lost our producer, but not our production. So we’re sticking at it.

I think the end result will be less scenic, cinematographic shots.
Less stunning camera work and sweeping images.
But more dialogue.
More story.
More chat.
And shots are useless without a story.
But if we’ve got a good story, and we do, then we should be able to find the shots.

Ends
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Bribery and corruption in Christianity’s first nation

Bribery and corruption in Christianity’s first nation
Yerevan, Armenia
August 19, 2007
By Dan

“To cross the border it is $255 for each car.”
Stunned, we asked the Armenian customs official for a break down of the costs.
He looked up from his peeling lacquer desk and grinned, “That’s $180 for the bank and $75 for me.”
Welcome to Armenia.


Armenia is proud to be the first country that declared Christianity its state religion. It converted in 301, and the world’s first Christian church is here. The country is fiercely Orthodox, despite the attentions of neighbouring Muslim Turkey, and the cities and countryside are littered with old churches and carved stone crosses.
We camped our first night on a patch of debris beside the road, then headed to the capital, Yerevan, which lies in the shadow of Mount Ararat, where Noah grounded his arc.

Unlike other former Soviet cities, Yerevan hasn’t pulled down its Communist monuments. They sit at the end of the main streets- huge rectangular slabs topped by giant muscular men wielding scythes, or strong boned busts of workers and leaders.

The Armenian women divided opinion: tall with slender legs and curved chests, but broad shouldered, with large, strong noses. Ladies with full moustaches were a common sight, and some of the older women sported freak show beards.
I spent a day trying to get metal plates welded beneath Gunther the Mercedes, to protect the oil pan and petrol tank from the Caucasian roads. All the mechanics had gold teeth.

We went on a day trip to the city of Echmiadzin, famed for it’s many churches. Goha, our Armenian contact, was our guide, and brought with her Marco, a Serb, and Albert Poghosyan, a 27-year-old Armenian who had spent the last three years studying in Salford.
An impressive and stout character, with a full stomach, a jet-black beard, and a shaved head to make best the receding hairline he inherited from his father.

He was studying eCommerce in Manchester, but had broad interests and a confident grasp of English- I found him stimulating company.

In the sweaty, crammed bus ride to the city, I I told Albert about our experience at the border and asked about corruption in Armenia.
“Oh yes, the corruption on a low level is very high. Here is an example: I want to set up an organisation here. I fill out the paperwork and go with the $20 fee. But the officials demand another $250 to stamp the paperwork. If I do not pay then they say there is a problem with the paperwork, that I have not done it right and they send me back to do it again. I come back with it, but again they want money, and I don’t pay so they send me away. This will carry on for 10 months or so and they let me know that if I don’t pay, they will never stamp the paperwork. So I pay, and it takes two days, not a year.
“The problem is people don’t care, they don’t want to finish corruption. They understand that the corruption is practical. If you pay then things are ok.
“When I say I will not pay, people are amazed. I say ‘why should I pay? I pay my taxes, you should go by the rules.’”

Don’t people go to the police to complain about corruption?
“No people don’t trust the police. The mentality is the same as the Soviet times when there was the mafia so nobody spoke to the police.
“Back then all the money came from Russia so if you stole the money you were a hero. Mafia were heroes. They were not stealing from Armenians, they were stealing from Russians, so they became heroes. People loved these guys and these guys protected them. Intelligent guys you know, speak many languages, can talk to you about Da Vinci, about Tolstoy, very clever people.
“Ordinary workers got two holidays a year, they could go to England or see their family anywhere. People were happy.
“But a free state had always been a dream, people wanted to be free from Moscow.
“In 1991/92 when the Soviet system collapsed the teachers and professors came to power in Armenia. They gave the mafia bosses three days to leave the country. But these guys are so powerful they don’t believe them. Then guys with automatic weapons come and just kill them. Maybe a dozen of them.
“But the mafia used to run the city, now who runs the city?
“The police. In small country like this it is the police people are scared of. The state has become the mafia. The police can take you away. They can take you to prison. The police are the new mafia. The state is the new mafia.
“Then the war with Azerbaijan and for five years we have a blockade. No electricity, no proper food. I had to read by candlelight, and I read a lot. It was the 19th Century.”

So what can be done?
“I don’t think there can be a revolution, there must be an evolution. We need to change the minds of the young people. Engels and Marx revolutionary theories are complete shit. They’re not working. Marx made his theory so good, so clever, with everything in it, Kant, Hegel, even Adam Smith, you have to respect him. But it is all lies.”
I suggested Marx only had a theory, it wasn’t a practical solution, it was Lenin who put it into practise. Albert nodded: “And Lenin was a German spy, sent by the Kaiser to cause a revolution in Russia.”
Bit of a bombshell: “So you’re saying the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 was planned and funded by the Germans to try and end Russian involvement in World War One?”
“Yes.”
I thought I’d best leave that one.


We arrived at the church where they claim to have the spear that a Roman soldier used to stab Jesus when he was on his way to Calvary.
I was enraptured by the rusty, old spearhead. Did it really pierce God? It felt very strange to look at.
Deep in the bowels of the church is a door that leads to an underground pagan temple. Apparently the building’s designers decided to hedge their bets, just in case the old gods tried to reassert themselves. Strategic thinking.

Ends
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J Lov's Tantrum

Lovey throws his toys out of the pram
August 21, 2007
Yerevan, Armenia
By Dan

The Georgian road to Armenia is probably the worst we have travelled, little more than a crater strewn rock track. Luckily there were few other vehicles on it, and we had the ‘roads’ full width to weave around the trenches and chasms.
When we finally hit the border it took three hours of passport stamping and document checking to get across, so once again we arrived in a strange new country in the early hours and pitched on the side of the road.
Luckily we have contacts in the Armenian capital of Yerevan. Carlos had made a friend through the Hospitality Club website, Goha, and the next morning she found us an apartment to rent. That evening we went out to meet Cheryl, who the boys call Cherkyl. She travelled with Lovey, OJ, Tony and Carlos in South East Asia last year, and is now working in Armenia as a volunteer in the Peace Corp.


So we went out for a hearty dinner together – the Armenian national dish of BBQ. There were such delicacies on the menu as brain and tongue, along with lamb’s testicles, but I opted to play it safe with pork.
At dinner Lovey announced that he was going home- the project’s not what he wanted, no one listens to him, we haven’t got any donations, noone cares about the kids.
He gave a stream of truth and half-truth that thoroughly enraged me and left me feeling distinctly distrustful of him.
“I just don’t think people care about the kids,” he told me, like he’s Mother Theresa, “where are the donations?”
We have had very little corporate sponsorship and the personal donations I’ve managed to attract amount to £20 from Tom Shaw and Goolistan at the Herald. In total we have $5,000, though he hasn’t raised an extravagant amount himself.
But the people who have travelled with him the most, Tony, OJ and Cheryl, said he always claims he’s going home.
“He’s a drama queen,” Cherkyl explained, “One night when we were in Asia last year, he told us not to be surprised if he was gone when we woke up. Don’t take him seriously. He just wants people to tell him he’s needed.”
But it is not in my nature to pander to drama, I find extravagant but empty threats infuriating. He was the instigator of the whole trip and now he plans to dump us all out in the middle of Asia. What a dick.
He should surely be offering some kind of leadership, instead of threatening to turn tail and run when things get a little difficult.
Logistically, losing him would be a nightmare. Two of the cars are registered in his name, so he needs to be with them for every border crossing. Trying to change the registration of cars with Hungarian export plates, while we’re in Central Asia, would be a terrifying process. He also has a lot of the contacts we need along the way, especially for sorting out of China visas, which is the biggest headache we have yet to face.
That night He continued laughing and joking with the group, and I was left to skulk. He told OJ he can get reasonably cheap flights from Almaty, so he’s staying with us till Kazakhstan, but his outburst has seen him sink in my estimation.


The next day I spoke to Tony P, who knows Lovey best, and he confirmed that he regularly throws tantrums.
I have resolved only to be as concerned as Tony – I can use the little Mexican to gauge just how much bull shit Lovey’s talking.

Ends
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Ballroom dancing, handguns and thieves

Ballroom dancing, handguns and thieves
14th August, 2007
by Dan

ARRIVING in Batumi was disappointing.
Vast areas of slums punctuated by an impressive church and nicely lit synagogue.
There were no hostels willing to let us in at 3am, but we have learned that if you drive brightly coloured cars in circles around a city long enough the police will eventually pick you up and find you somewhere to camp. If you’re lucky they’ll check on you throughout the night.
We pitched on a tyre strew, heavily littered, tarmac car park, to the sound of bass rolling over us from a nearby park.

After circling the wagons, Lovey, Carlos, OJ and I followed the music and found a Brighton-esque sea front full of clubs and bars. By now it was 4am and most partiers were heading home, heavily intoxicated, and the clubs were closing. But I did find a shack selling beer and hotdogs.
It was there I met George.
We had no local currency to pay for drinks, and my attempts to use dollars were getting a little heated, when George intervened and insisted on paying.
He was Georgian, but he had a Texan drawl, a symmetric youthful face, that should mature to become handsome, and the confident, assured manner of the privileged.
I never did work out what his father did, but five years ago young George had gone out to Texas to visit his sister. He ended up going out with the daughter of a ‘multi-billionaire’ who owned some American Football franchise, so he stayed out there to study.
He claimed to be the number one ballroom dancer in Georgia, and when he arrived in the US he quickly established himself- coming sixth in the US Ballroom Dancing National Championships.

As the police had found us a place to stay, we asked George if they were ok.
“The police are fine. They’re not really corrupt anymore. They want to encourage tourists, so they protect them.
“Anyway if they bother us we tell them to piss off. We have the Georgian FBI with us.”
He gestured towards a short stocky guy in his thirties who was at the hotdog stand. He was taking a backseat, but I could tell he was part of the group.
“My friend’s father is a minister, so he has a guard.”
“Right,” I said, wondering what state the country’s security was in when politician’s families needed bodyguards, and whether George had drunk a little too much. I think he sensed my scepticism.
“Hey, come over here.” George beckoned the guard, they conversed in Georgian, then turned to me: “Dan, do you want to fire a gun?”

I have mixed feelings about guns. I'm pleased we don’t really have them in England, it seems to work – in order to kill someone you have to something far more primal than just squeezing a trigger. You need to knife them or bludgeon their life away – not an easy thing to do.
But I'm still fascinated by the things. Maybe their inaccessibility adds to the mystery and allure.
The burly guard pulled out a handgun, loaded a round into the chamber, removed the clip, then pushed the thing towards me.
“What here?” I looked around, we were in a public area of beach front and parkland, a hundred yards from the emptying clubs and metres from an open hotdog stand.
“Yeah, just fire it in the air dude.’
I took it, it felt lighter than I’d imagined, though the clip wasn’t in it. The metal was chipped and the paint had flecked off. It still felt robust, but the cosmetics had faded. Was this guy really in the secret service? Or the mafia?
“Point it into the air, dude.”
“Ok”
I waved it towards the sky. How do you stand? Do you hold it with one hand, like in the movies, or two like safety would suggest? Did safety really come into it?
I opted for two hands, holding it at arm’s length like a dangerous but limp sausage. I gritted my teeth, locked my elbows and squeezed.
A jet of sparks shot out of the barrel like a firework, and it sprung back at me with a loud airy ‘pop’ like a champagne cork, rather than the bang I’d imagined.
The guard quickly took it away, reloaded the clip and disappeared the thing into his jacket, while my new Georgian friends cheered.



I was strangely affected, my heart pumped adrenaline quickly round my body, I felt a little light-headed and very excited. Maybe it was the danger, the stupidity, or the illegality, I don’t know, but it felt good and I wore an inane grin for the next hour.

The drizzle we had been loitering in grew to a downpour and George was insistent we return to his friend’s hotel rather than our dirty campsite. We dried off and he, Carlos, the bodyguard and I went to get drinks.
When I saw the bodyguard’s car – a top of the range BMW, with dark tinted windows, I genuinely believed he worked for the secret service. But as he sped off, pulling donuts in the car park where we were camped, I again had my doubts, and put my seatbelt on, much to the amusement of the Georgians.

George was a good host, and the bodyguard was fun. You wouldn’t want to piss him off, but he laughed easily and did what George told him to do.
Night turned to day, and the beer and wine flowed, interspersed with dips in the warm Black Sea, and traditional food at various eateries, all at George’s considerable hospitality.
“George, please, let me buy this round.”
“Dan stop it,” he’d throw his arm round me, “in Georgia we look after our guests, stop asking.”
“Well I'm getting the next one.”
And of course I never did. It got to the point were I took it for granted that I was being taken around Batumi on an epic bender with my own armed bodyguard at the expense of the national ballroom dancing champion.
By 4pm George was done in, and wanted to head back, so we arranged to meet again in five hours and I headed to a beach café to sober up with some light beer, maybe a snooze, and some time to write.

I chose the wrong cafe.
The local men, with seemingly nothing to do but drink on a damp Wednesday afternoon, inundated me with questions in Russian about my country, my Mac, my girlfriend, my travels, whether I would go to see women with them, and finally demanded that we drink vodka together ‘like brothers’.
We knocked back shot after shot of the stuff, with salted slices of cucumber,
hunks of bread and beer chasers.

I stumbled back to the campsite around eightish waving a large reed at passers by and muttering piecemeal Russian. The rest of the gang had slept off their excesses and were gearing up to go out again, so I made an about-turn and headed back out for a full dinner with more vodka and then VIP seating at a beach front club with a seemingly limitless bar tab.
We knocked back cocktails and went dancing, but something went wrong with George, maybe Marlena or Zsofi rejected his advances, maybe he drank too much, but he disappeared without a goodbye, and the bodyguard brusquely ordered the girls out of the club.


In the early hours of that morning, 24 hours since I had met George, and 42 hours since I had last slept, I found myself riding a small quad bike that I had commandeered from a youngster near the beach.
I had just finished speeding around the car park where we were camped when I noticed a fat skinhead looking the cars up and down. It is a sight we’re all well used to, and I went to explain to him what we were doing. I was surprised when he grabbed the door and shook it violently, as if testing its durability. I thought him odd, but was in no state to make a firm character assessment and so let him be.
A few minutes later Lovey turned to me: “That blokes stealing our cameras,” he said in a matter of fact tone.
I was standing with Megan and Marlena and we all looked up in unison. The skinhead was sprinting flat out across the car park towards an old abandoned shopping mall.
“So he is.”
We stared at him for a while, an incongruous sight his stumpy legs furiously propelling his squat, fat body while clearly holding our cameras out to one side.
“Lets get him,” said Lovey without a trace of panic.
The girls sprinted after him and Lovey and I jumped in Ziggy, but he had been sleeping and took a few precious minutes to start. Finally we sped off towards the old mall, which was surrounded by a couple of acres of overgrown wasteland.
We did a few circles, but couldn’t see him, so jumped out of the car and made our own separate searches.
From behind me a heard John shout and turned to see him sprinting after fatty. I gave chase and it dawned on me that I was barefoot and sporting boxer shorts, “Where are my trousers?” went through my head as I saw Lovey tackle the skinhead to the ground, kneel over him and start laying into his face.
When I arrived the guy had clearly had enough and was cowering, so we pulled him up and demanded our cameras, which he was no longer holding.
He knew what we wanted, but I could see him looking for an escape route, so I threw a right cross into his face, felt the bones in my knuckle crack and fracture as they connected with his eye and nose.
He looked stunned but started scouring the ground for the cameras.
From the darkness Megan appeared, she had given chase on foot and arrived high on anger and adrenaline. She flew straight into him in a tangle of curly blonde locks, knocking him to the ground, punching and slapping. Then Marlena appeared and gave him a kicking with her bare feet.
It was vigilante justice, mob rule and I felt, and still do, a little bad.
We found the cameras on the floor near where we had got fatty, one of them was broken, and I wonder where the story would have gone if the police had not arrived en masse. The fat thief seemed relieved they were there.


Initially we thought he would be able to buy his way out of trouble, but like George had told me the previous night, they want to encourage tourists, and protect them. The guy was a pathetic sight, sitting awkwardly on the ground, hands cuffed behind him, breathing heavily though a broken nose, puffy eyed and split-lipped, his giant gut hanging over his shorts.
None of the cops spoke English, but after half an hour they brought out a young lad who worked at a local hostel to interpret for us.
By 6am things seemed to have reached a conclusion, but they insisted we go back to the police station to give more statements.
“Three hours maximum” they told us.
Liars.

The station was more of a complex, with a couple of checkpoints to get in, and a mix of military and police uniforms inside.
We were shown to a large, almost empty building that felt like an abandoned school – one long echoing corridor with rooms coming off it. There was just a couple of computers in the whole place and not a thing on the walls, it felt barren, unused and unloved. Plug sockets were heavily overloaded and the toilet had a leaky roof, the sound of water dripping into buckets reverberated along the hallway.
During eight hours there I had the chance to explore. The place was devoid of any personal affects, as if all the cops were hotdesking. Not a picture or decoration in sight. I found the armoury and counted at least 20 AK47s in a rack and a cupboard with maybe 40 sidearms.
I tried to sleep, but they wouldn’t let me put my feet up on the sofas, I think it’s a Georgian thing, so I ended up pacing, numb with exhaustion, and examining my swollen hand.
After eight hours of bureaucracy, they said they would let us go, but they were keeping our cameras as evidence. We couldn’t believe it and kicked up a fuss, threatening to call the embassy, telling them I was a journalist and anything else we could think of. We didn’t go through all that to lose our cameras to Georgian police.
After an hour of telephone calls we came to a compromise. We would provide them with a couple of photo’s off the cameras to prove that they were ours.
So I downloaded this one onto the police computer.
Here’s your evidence.

They finally dropped us back at the site at around 3pm. I hadn’t slept in days and was feeling it, so I lay in the back of Fez and quickly lost consciousness. I woke up deep in the Georgian hills.

Ends
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Turkish Socialism

Socialism in Turkey
Turkey - The town of Hopa, in the district of Artvin. 10kms from the Georgian border.
By Dan
August 13th, 2007

DRIVING through the Turkish night to try and hit the Georgian border, Lovey and OJ noticed some kind of festival and pulled over.
I had been asleep in Fez and felt groggy.
“It’s a corn cult” OJ said.
Ok, I thought, it certainly felt liker a cult, surrounded by strangeky dressed Turks, with the sound of chanting in the air. Later I would learn they had called it a corn cult because of the high cornfields that surround the place. But at the time I thought it must be some kind of religio-social celebration - a bit like harvest festival.
I was horribly wrong.

An amphitheatre had been created in some urban wasteland, with four rough wooden stands set up for the crowd.
A old man at the front played sitar and chanted in a deep voice that carried down my spine and earthed through my feet. The organisers had faced the stage lights towards the crowd, so the singer was impossible to make out behind the dazzling brightness. It felt like I was watching a performance by the sun, or the Son.
It was a lot like a festival- damp, crowded, with loud music and men and women in a state of ecstasy, looking ridiculous in rain macs, arms aloft singing at the top of their voices. The smell of tobacco smoke hung in the air, but there was no alcohol on sale.


I separated from the rest of the group but quickly attracted the attention of the locals who first attempted to interrogate me in Turkish, then wheeled out an English speaker.
Anil Yenigul, a 19-year-old English student, told me that in fact it was the fourth annual socialism festival, organised by the local communist party. An occasion to celebrate and spread socialism, which was strangely popular in this small border town of 20,000.
He acted as a translator as I quizzed the leaders of the party.
What are people here for?
“They believe in a society in which socialism lives.” He didn’t say ‘we believe’ so I guessed he wasn’t a member of the party.
“They are not a party”, he explained, “they are a movement, a group, but still they want to govern society.
“They want revolution. Their main aim is to achieve revolution to organise Turkey into a socialist society.”
But how will you achieve that, I asked.
“With the fire of revolution.”
I tried to get an explanation but I looked up from my notes and saw I was surrounded by angry, spitting, young men, shrieking in Turkish demanding that their voice be heard.
My translator was overwhelmed.
“We are Mao’s people.” I heard above the melee, and a Turk thrust his face into mine. “We are Mao. China’s people. Mao, Mao, Mao.”
I could tell that the finer pints of Turkish socialism were beyond my translator, so I asked what the music was.
“Ahhh,” he said, a broad smile forming across his pussie top lip, “Nurettin Rengber. Traditional Turkish folk music. I love him.”
Never before had I seen communists attempting to ferment revolution through the power of traditional folk. Firebrand socialist folk activism. Quite a sight.
Many people were wearing orange, so I asked them whether there were any similarities to the Orange Revolution that had swept through the Ukraine, but they, or I, didn’t understand.

The police were out in force, young recruits wearing full body armour, looking primed for action. They had formed a blockade with trucks near the entrance to the square.
“They are protecting us,” my guide explained, “because fascist attacks may happen. But also, they are the fascists you know,” he grinned.
“In Turkey socialist are in small groups, but here they are very popular.”
One of the police carried an AK47. The army were there too, carrying what looked to my naive eye like a sub-machine gun.
“MP5”, Lovey told me later, “Heckler and Koch.”
Americans know about guns.


I wandered through the crowd with a growing entourage.
They wheeled out the local girls and suddenly I was dancing. Everyone joined hands, insistent that I form a circle with them – not my forte, but I smiled and tried to hide my embarrassment.
“Are you a socialist?” I asked one of the girls, in an effort to gauge the political activism of the women.
“What?” she lent in closer, and I hunched down to meet her ear.
“ARE YOU A SOCIALST?” I shouted above the twanging sitar and booming voice.
“Thank you,” she replied, fluttering her lashes and retreating to giggle with her friends.
“Where are you staying tonight?” one of the braver girl’s stepped forward.
“errr…Georgia.” We were planning to cross the border, thinking it would be quicker late at night.
“Yopra?” more giggles.

My new friends left me with a traditional Turkish goodbye – touching each cheek against mine, an intimate and welcome gesture. I withdrew just in time from kissing Anil’s oily skin; we’re not in France.

As we left the police appeared ready to break the place up – riot gear and shields at the ready, standing in formation near the blockade. They were only kids – late teens at most, but you could tell they were ready to crush what ever they were aimed at – socialists, fascists, liberals, Islamists. They would use their batons as they were told to.
And that’s what we pay the police for.

It’s illegal to film the military in Turkey, and they shouted when I tried to photograph them.
A local journalist, Sener Aslibay, saw my clumsy attempts, and took my arm: “It’s better that you leave now. I think there could be a problem with Gendarme.”
“Why”
“They are on opposite sides you know,” he replied, meaning the socialist festival-goers and the ‘fascist’ police and army.
“What will happen?”
He shrugged and declined to elaborate, but the growing roars of the departing partiers, and the sight of the gendarmes armoured and primed for a clubbing was enough. I imagined them sharpening bayonets.
My new friend offered me a place to stay, and a meal, but I told him we were heading to Georgia tonight.
“You know in Georgia it is not safe?” a statement phrased as a question from Sener, who looked unsure about us leaving.
“Why?”
He shrugged, “They are poor. They are thieves. You just be careful.”
But then he revealed his hand: “Have you ever been to Georgia?” I asked.
“No. I know nothing of Georgia.”
Just another scare merchant. If I had listened to all the people who gave me similar advice I would probably not have got out of bed in Shepperton.

There was a split in the group over crossing the border. It was late, nearing midnight. The ground was soggy and we had made many socialist friends who, with typical Turkish generosity, had offered us food and shelter.
Why cross into an unknown and possibly dangerous country late at night, with nowhere to stay, only to pitch a tent at the side of the road?
Timing, schedule, quicker to cross now, scare stories- ran the counter argument.
It won.
We crossed late and headed to Batumi.

Ends
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Asmara

Asmara
August 10, 2007
by Dan



WE drove from Izmit through the night, aiming for the Black Sea. The winding mountain passes would be better suited to rally cars, and we could only crawl up the steep inclines in low gear – our little engines screaming in pain.
“Shh shh shh, come on Fez, you can do it.”
We would nurture the cars to the top of a hill, then be at the mercy of the Trabbi’s brakes as we free-wheeled down. Every few hours the smell of burning brake fluid would waft into the cabin, and we’d stop on the side of the road to let the plates cool.

We found the sea shortly before 3am, drove right up to it and the team pitched our tents in a stony car park while I went to hunt celebratory beer in the small coastal town of Asmara.
We had a few drinks before bedding down, but the moment we had settled, and the swishing of polythene sleeping bags being adjusted had died down, our silence was broken by a cacophonous call to prayer.
5am. We had to laugh.


I always prefer to breakfast alone. I'm not at my best in the morning and small talk makes me irritable. Witnesses of my morning ire can wrongly take it as a personal affront, which sets out a bad stall for the rest of the day.
I prefer to shake of the sleepy remnants of my subconscious with a coffee, plate of eggs and newspaper.
Of course, in little Asmara few people speak English, there are no British papers, and they do breakfast their own way. So I settled down at a café with a beautiful view over the small, cliff ringed bay, and admired the hardy bushes and trees clinging to the rocks, surviving on the surplus of sun, despite the weakness of the thin, stony soil.
I had a traditional breakfast- wrinkly olives, a hard-boiled egg and salty feta with fresh bread, sticky honey and a salad of tomato, cucumber, peppers and onion, washed down with bitter, black tea.
It felt like any town on the English coast – souvenirs and hawkers on the sea-front, overpriced cafés with wonderful views, holidaying families splashing in the water.

We drove the Trabbis onto a rocky section of beach and made a shelter from the wind and sun so we could play a board game and relax, de-stress and unwind from the last two weeks of perpetual motion.
Everyone enjoyed a lazy, sleepy day, and most retired early following a few late afternoon drinks.

Ends
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Izmit

Leaving Istanbul
August 9th, 2007
By Dan

“Do you ever feel like we’re duping these people?” OJ asked me, “I mean, I want to be good, I want to seem professional. But we are all such fucking idiots.”
Wise words as we arrive at a hotel room, paid for by a local charity, after managing to turn a simple 60km journey into a three-hour nightmare.
I sometimes feel the same. Should we be accepting the charity’s hospitality? We’re not raising money for them specifically, though I guess the press attention we’re attracting, and their stickers on our cars, may help in some way.
They were certainly very keen to help, arranging for us to meet the city’s ‘president’ or mayor, Halil Yenice.

Mayor Yenice is an important man, we were told, he runs a city of two million people, bigger than Budapest, and one of the richest cities in Turkey.
As we were already running late, and on a tight schedule, Dante’s battery decided it was a good time to throw in the towel. After ten minutes of trying to defibrillate the thing TP decided to full on change the battery.
We were in a tiny back alley while this was going on, with trucks trying to weave past, the Trabbis facing in opposite directions and a growing crowd forming to point and laugh.

Maybe it was because we were holding up so much traffic. Possibly it was because we were aiming the wrong way down a one-way street. Whatever the reason, the police showed up to escort us to the ‘President’.
They closed off streets along the route and when we arrived we were greeted by a mob of photographers and journalists, snapping away enthusiastically, and the big man himself, Yenice, who came down to shake hands, pose for pictures and look over the engine.
We were called up to his office for more photos and a press conference, and a chance to quiz him about the city.

He explained that Izmit was the former capital of the Eastern Roman Empire, and in the Fourth Century was the fourth biggest city in the world. Then called Nicomedia it was far more important than nearby Constantinople (Istanbul) as a staging point for Roman armies and navies heading along the Bosphorus. It was a perfectly placed administrative centre, and, surrounded by what was known as the ‘Sea of Trees’, it had a prolific shipyard.
But, explained Yenice through an interpreter, 80% of the Roman architecture remains buried underground. Yenice wants to bring it to the surface to attract tourists and help re-establish the city.

As a mark of how big a job he has, I told him that, despite Izmit’s imperial past, the city does not even get a mention in our guidebook – not so much as a paragraph. He nodded and said he hoped our presence in the city would help attract attention to it.
For a moment I felt like a British emissary at the court of a far-away king, rather than a scruffy, slightly odorous crackpot on a hair-brained folly across the world.

Mayor Yenice insisted we see Izmit’s museum, which was very modern, but extremely dull. Yenice’s face appeared on a poster at the entrance, and multiple time on monitors within the museum – Yenice opening something, Yenice handing a check to someone, Yenice at the mosque.
In fact, his image appeared throughout the city. Bemused by the constant site of Yenice, I asked our contact and guide, Adam who was from the local NGO, whether he was a life president or a particularly successful one.
“Oh no. Yenice has been president for three years. He has a four-year term.”
“So how come his photo is everywhere?”
“You have to ask him. It’s always the same. Whoever is president they put their picture up.”
‘But if Yenice loses the next election all this will have to be changed? The museum, the posters, the videos?”
“Yes. It is expensive. No-one is happy with it. You have to ask him.”
Unfortunately my chance had gone.

I did mention that I fancied a kick about with some kids – maybe from the NGO that was putting us up. I’d imagined a friendly footie game, bit of exercise for me, fun for the kids and shots for the film.
But Yenice can obviously pull a few strings. We were taken to a fully blown football academy, where forty or fifty kids were training. They were involved in a practise game, and it was clear when we arrived we were going to be horribly out of our depth, but there was no backing out.
After two minutes of being hounded by the little Turks, who seemed to be everywhere, my lungs burnt and I felt sick. OJ had given away a penalty with a handball, and I’d equalised directly from a corner.
Just when I thought I might feint, they brought on another team. Then after ten minutes another team. Then another. We were shattered, and by the end were being run ragged by 10-year-olds. Only some goalkeeping heroics from J Lov stopped us getting slaughtered. He reminded me of Sly Stallone in Escape to Victory.
Finally they equalised to make it an honourable 3-3 draw, suitable for both side, and the whistle went.
Damn that Yenice, I was knackered.

For lunch Adam showed us to a stunning mountain restaurant; where we feasted on his NGO’s generosity before retiring to a cool room built into the rock face to smoke hookahs, drink bitter Turkish coffee and nap.
Carlos had his fortune read from the dregs off his coffee – he left someone who loves him at home, he had a tough decision, the career opportunity he was hoping for will not present itself, but something else will come up.
We’ll see.
I left the city once again stunned by Turkish hospitality.

Ends
mrdanmurdoch@gmail.com

Aya Sophia and The Blue Mosque

Aya Sophia and the Blue Mosque
August 7th, 2007
By Dan

Istanbul still stuns me. It really is a beautiful place with a vibrant atmosphere. It straddles the Bosphorus, meaning it is the only city in the world on two continents – Europe and Asia. Its history is linked to the great empires of both continents, particularly the Romans, Byzantines, and Ottomans – all of whom have ruled here and left their own fingerprints.

The city is crammed with mosques- like pubs in English cities there’s one on every block. Spires and minarets reach out majestically from the base of elegant hubs to pierce the sky and inspire the heart.

Perhaps the best way to tell the story of this great city is through the tale of one of its greatest buildings, the Aya Sophia or Hagia Sophia- the Church of the Holy Wisdom of God.

There has been a church on the site of the Aya Sophia for millennia. Excavations around the site have found the ruins of Christian churches from the fourth and fifth century.

The last of these was destroyed in a riot in 532AD, and the Byzantine Emperor Justinian immediately commissioned a new Orthodox Christian church on an epic scale.

The result was a colossal domed structure, a wonder of 6th Century engineering, which took 1,000 skilled builders, and 10,000 labourers just five years to complete – although the intricate interior mosaics and paintings would take a further 40 years to finish.
The Aya Sophia, 53m tall with a 110m-wide dome, was the largest and probably most important Christian church in the world for almost 1,000 years.
It was the pride of Constantinople, a city dubbed the New Rome, and the capital of the Greek-inspired Byzantium Empire, which had broken away from the rest of the Roman Empire 200 years before.

The church is so impressive that when conquerors of various religions overran Istanbul they converted the building to their own purposes, rather than destroy it.

During the Roman Catholic Fourth Crusade of the 13th Century, the city, then Constantinople, was taken and the church, then called the Hagia Sophia, desecrated, with artefacts including a stone from the tomb of Jesus, the Virgin Mary's milk and the shroud of Jesus looted and sent West. The Romans occupied the city from 1204-1261 and used the church as a Roman Cathedral, until it was retaken by the Byzantines and reconverted to Orthodox Christianity.

In 1453 it was overrun by Ottoman Turks under Mehmed II (the same Sultan who turned away from the city gates of our old friend Vlad the Impaler).
Instead of sacking the building, he ordered it converted into a mosque, and during the next 500 years of Islamic rule over Istanbul the former Christian church was developed into a major Muslim shrine.


As iconoclastic Islam forbids the depiction of living creatures, the ornate mosaics were plastered over. The altar was torn out, the pulpit replaced with a mimbar, the bells removed and washing facilities installed outside.
Four minarets were added at the corners of the building, and the crumbling walls were buttressed in the 16th Century.

The Sophia’s use continues to be linked to the religious stance of its political masters. Turkey became a secular republic in 1923, and 12 years later head-of-state Mustafa Kemal, ordered it turned into a museum. Who knows to what use it will next be turned.
Since it has been a museum, much of the Ottoman plasterwork has been stripped away, revealing the stunning mosaics which had been hidden for five hundred years.



Aya Sophia is faced across Sultanmet Park by the Blue Mosque, built on the orders of Sultan Ahmed, and also known as the Sultan Ahmed Mosque. Completed in 161, it was built as a rival to the Aya Sophia by a sultan who had failed to win any notable military victories and hoped to placate Allah with a spectacular church.
The two giant buildings flank the park, a stunning site, and strolling along the path I could feel the historical weight of the kings, emperors and sultans who had gone before me.

As the Blue Mosque still serves the community it is closed to visitors at prayer time. It being close to five, when the city explodes with the distinctly Islamic melodies of the call to prayer, I headed there first.

In my mind there is little doubt that the Blue Mosque has a more visually stunning exterior than the Aya Sophia, with its arrow-like spires rising to pleasing points and its core bubbling up in half domes to the perfectly formed central bulb.

The courtyard, with identical dimensions to the interior, is paved with giant but uneven stone slabs. The August sun was baking, tugging at my exposed shoulders, the only respite the shaded perimeter, unfortunately occupied by screaming kids and shushing mothers.
To add to the sacrilegious feel of tantruming infants, a large official looking Turk shouted “Entrance other side” in at least half a dozen languages.
I put my flip flops in a plastic bag to carry through the mosque, rolled my shorts down over my knees and was asked to wear a greasy aquamarine shawl to cover my shoulders.

It’s certainly tall inside. Four giant, rather graceless, grey pillars support the huge dome, but, unlike the exterior, there is little elegance about the interior geometry. The sheer scale of the thick-set arches and columns leave little illusions as to how the dome is supported.
The mosaics are pretty, but not awe inspiringly intricate. The gold leaf altar is small in contrast to the rest of the building, and slightly garish.

The smell of feet wafted through the air with the cries and stamps of children who threw hissy fits in the manner of the spoilt – lying face down on the floor, sobbing and bashing the ground with their fists until their parents withdrew the silent treatment and scooped them up for a pampering.


Strolling the short walk across the park to the older Aya Sophia it is clear that fifteen hundred years have not been kind to the building. War, conquest, defeat, riot, fire, earthquakes and religions have left their scars on the Sixth Century structure.

It cannot boast the same elegant exterior as the Blue Mosque. The minarets, mismatched after earthquakes forced rebuilding throughout the centuries, are chubbier, less gravity defying and rise to a blunter point. The main dome bears none of the exterior elegance of its opponent, clearly being supported by buttresses, and the flaky remains of the brick colour paint leave it looking washed out and sun baked, unlike the cool greys and blues of the Blue Mosque.

The excavated remains of the original St Sophia church (404-415) sit outside the entrance, and that too must have been impressive until destroyed by a riot. Much of the recovered stonework bears striking Christian crosses.

Inside, the Sophia’s dome rises to a neck-craning height, its giant diameter supported subtly and gracefully by half domes on two-sides and arching walls on the others.

The walls are polished granite and marble of such exquisite natural beauty they belie the need for mosaic or painting until the upper echelons of the building, which are now mostly painted in the flowery Arabic geometry.

Admittedly the restoration work obscures some of the buildings scale – the cavernous 55m tall interior dominated by scaffolding. Back in the 6th Century it must have been beyond belief that such a space could be covered so elegantly, when finished it had the biggest dome in the world.

A millennia and a half of feet have left the paving slabs polished, but cracked and splintered, often into tiny pieces.
The solemn stone still seems to echo the millions who have worshipped here. The newly exposed mosaics look fresh and bright, despite being under plaster for so long.

I regret my camera could not do the place justice. So I cheekily snapped a few photographs that were on display in the gallery.

Ends
mrdanmurdoch@gmail.com