Kilroy was there

Hanoi-Manila-Singapore

2009-07-03T08:17:00.020-04:00

A video in three parts-- from (1) Vietnam, (2) Philippines, and (3) Singapore. I just got back from doing consultations on an Urban Strategy document for the World Bank. In Manila the Mayor introduced me from the podium as "very young", but accidentally deleted this priceless footage...anyway, there's some other nice bits instead.

It's five minutes long, but if you only have 1 minute 20 seconds then the middle bit on Manila is my favourite, from 03:26 to 04:46.

Some people were asking what equipment I use: it's filmed on a Sanyo Xacti HD700, and edited on Final Cut Express.

Click on HD if your internet connection & computer can deal with it.

If YouTube is being temperamental, you can also get the full works on Vimeo too: http://vimeo.com/5438064

Music is my own edits of:
1. Symphony Electrique, by Freak Electrique
2. Level 8, by Ardath Bey
3. Visible Light Eater, by Outlier

How can we change the UN?

2009-07-03T07:26:00.004-04:00

Eloquent arguments and practical recommendations from my friend Hugh, published in The Guardian:

Radical reformers first look backwards. Remember one UN staffer, Ralph Bunche. Once, in Cyprus, he negotiated a simultaneous peace between Israel and her four neighbours which lasted a decade, then attempted to turn down the Nobel Peace prize. Remember Dag Hammarskjöld, the secretary general who could out-negotiate Congolese separatists from the cockpit radio of his low-circling plane. Once, he helped the security council to reach an agreement by 4am and established a peacekeeping mission by 7am, then appearing unruffled for his morning meetings.
These men guarded their impartiality. And impartiality is not neutrality: the UN is not the Red Cross. The only point of the UN staff is to act with the legitimacy conferred by a universal membership and universal principles. In good hands, developing and acting creatively in the space of international consensus, this legitimacy can help lance contagious problems of daunting complexity, poisoned by mistrust.

Original article here: http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/jun/28/united-nations-reform

A snapshot of international urban thinking

2009-03-21T22:54:00.003-04:00

Some of my notes from the World Bank’s Urban Learning Week 2009, held on March 9th-12th in Washington DC...

Jeb Brugmann

Why don’t real cities reflect urban ‘best practice’? Unlike military strategy, public health strategy, etc, ‘urban’ may have planning, design etc, but much less of a strategic component. Cities which have adopted a strategic approach have achieved great things: witness the resurgence of Barcelona, Chicago, or the rise of Curitiba. Rather than tailoring their incentives to the building industry, they reshaped the market to meet strategic objectives, and fostered a local development industry around their own plans.

Alain Bertaud

On ‘land shortage’: city mayors often complain about land shortage, but “I’ve only ever seen a real land shortage once—in Male, capital of the Maldives—which is built on a 3km2 island and they’ve built on all the available land already. Everywhere else, the ‘shortage’ is man-made”. The high land prices which are generated by artificial constraints on land development are the main determinant of the informal housing sector. Look at the effects of artificial constraints in Seoul, Karachi, or London—they drove up land prices. In particularly perverse cases, artificial constraints are combined with low FARs and high minimum plot sizes, which mean people must consume more land than they want to!
However, there’s also the other extreme, where for example Cairo expanded land supply too much, and in the wrong place. For example, the ‘10th Ramadan’ new town was built 65 kilometres from the centre of Cairo. You can see there now the great infrastructure and roads, but that it’s pretty empty of land development. The informal sector meanwhile got it right, and expanded close to the existing city.
Meanwhile, why on earth do we use the word ‘sprawl’ both for Atlanta—which has a density of 6 persons per hectare—and for Mumbai, which has 400 per hectare? There are problems in both, but of a totally different order of magnitude.
On informal housing: note that there is no novelty in ‘getting the private sector involved’ in the informal housing sector... Private developers are already the ones building for the informal sector and urban poor! “I’ve never seen the government building for the informal sector.. The houses may look like it!—but it’s not!”

David Satterthwaite

It’s worth dwelling on the observation that most urban centres in Africa have no sewers. They have no sewers. That’s no surprise when you look at the funding situation: recently he was talking to a neighborhood councillor in Dar es Salaam in an area of 800,000 population, which has an annual sanitation department budget of $3,000. But the solution isn’t just increased funding: there aren’t yet good enough institutions to know how to use it either.
The World Bank must find ways to work with local governments, shack dwellers federations, etc—the big money must find its way to those with the most ingenious people doing something about it.

Marianne Fay (working on the World Development Report 2010, on climate change)

There’s a misconception that greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions increase as people move to cities: remember that it’s actually the middle class lifestyle (not urban living itself) which generates GHGs. Cities themselves actually limit GHGs, since people are closer together and need to use transportation less, there are economies of scale in buildings, etc.
In order to support this argument, they ran some regressions with %urbanisation as a coefficient on GHG emissions. Actually it seems to have a zero effect. “I’m a little disappointed: I thought it was going to be a negative effect. So...we’ll play around with the regression a bit.” [joke]

Eduardo Moreno, UN-HABITAT:

Not all slum dwellers are equal. Remember that a slum dweller in Cairo can actually be better off (in terms of income, health etc) than a non-slum dweller in Luanda or Lagos, because of the way that slums are defined in terms of water & sanitation access and housing quality.
HABITAT’s recent State of the World’s Cities report found that 10-12% of cities in the developing world hava declining population. And this is likely to increase. So there’s a need for policies for urban decline as well as urban growth. Sometimes this ‘decline’ is just because people are moving to the suburbs, outside city administrative boundaries, but still.

Tim Campbell

Where do city governments get their policy ideas from? How do they learn? According to his web-based survey, the most important means—more than inhouse seminars, consultants’ advice, training courses, or reports—is city-to-city exchanges. So, these are really not ‘junkets’ but instead opportunities to see how others are doing it. [However, it wasn’t clear from his descriptive statistics whether differences in the ratings given to these various methods were significant or not, especially given some bunching.]

Andrew Norton, World Bank

Urban governance is a front-line in promoting citizenship—citizens begin to see themselves as participants rather than beneficiaries.

David Dowall, USC

Finds it astonishing that so many urban people in the Bank [and, presumably, in international development organisations in general..] focus on slums and slum-upgrading rather than housing markets in general. It’s distortions in housing markets which are generating the structural defects which cause slums!

Billy Cobbett, Cities Alliance

‘Slum prevention’ is a misnomer because it’s unrealistic. What you’re really aiming to do is help governments prepare for slums, or to prepare for better slums, which will be upgraded over time.
“If 80% of your city is slums, it means you don’t have a ‘slum problem’, you have a city problem, and hence the whole system which is causing it needs to be rethought, from top to bottom.”
One of the keys is to get the private sector investing in its own future, and that means on-budget commitments form the municipal administration. “When a mayor says they’re committed to action on slums, we don’t look at the last speech, we look at what’s on budget”—what is the administration doing, regardless of external donor commitments?

George Peterson

Dexia—which was previously the largest subnational lending institution in the world—has now withdrawn from lending outside France and Belgium owing to heavy losses. Some of the details of loans they made before this portfolio shrinkage are totally astonishing: for example, the interest rates of loans to Lyon in France were tied to the price of a barrel of oil! It could have been even more bizarre: at one stage the idea was discussed of linking loan interest rates to the price of a barrel of champagne! As Junaid Ahmed then quipped, “You wouldn’t see that in an Islamic banking system..”

There are some lessons for municipal finance:

Simplicity of loan structure: go for fixed-rate, long-term loans
Develop a specialized municipal credit market, perhaps using special lending institutions, on a low-risk low-return model.
Develop domestic credit markets too, so you’re not dependent on external credit, and not subject to foreign exchange risk.

Гулять in the North Caucasus

2009-02-08T11:49:00.013-05:00

Decaying concrete towerblocks. Beige satin curtains. "Soup" of sheeps' lungs floating in fatty water. But also: freshly-squeezed pomegranate juice. Girls in thigh-high leather boots. Music that fuses accordion duets with Russian techno.

What's not to like about winter in the republics of Kabardino-Balkaria and North Ossetia?

--click the little X next to 'vimeo' to get it full-screen.

Cities: 0:54 to 2:57
Mountains: 2:58 to 4:10
People: 5:02 to 6:24
Soviet: 6:43 to 8:45

If you get stuttered visuals or clicks in the sound, try the low-defn version instead:

Dystopia on the Arabian Peninsula: Yemen, Oman or Dubai?

2008-08-21T00:08:00.017-04:00

Yemen 0:00 – 3:51; Oman & Dubai from 3:52
[And if anyone correctly guesses the number of hours it took me to edit this video I'll buy them a beer.]

--click the little X next to 'vimeo' to get it full-screen.

Yemeni women are beautiful, I think. Of course I can’t be sure, since I’ve never actually seen one—only the black silhouettes which sweep along the street in groups of two or three, either following a husband or with small children in tow—wrapped totally in black except for their eyes. But some of them have very beautiful eyes, and so I’m an optimist about the rest. Yemeni men are pretty impressive too. Mostly dressed in white cloaks, adorned with a curved dagger, held in place by an embroidered waistband. There are also a lot of children; but it’s difficult to tell how Yemenis get the money to fund so many. A lot of time is spent negotiating, buying, and then chewing bag of qat—the mildly hallucinogenic green plant—which seems to render the population good-natured but pretty lethargic. One bag costs between $3 and $5 per day, even though the national per capita income is somehow only $2.50 per day.. Some have their cheeks so full they can’t even talk. Bits of green leaf sometimes drop out the side of their mouth.

[Big fat qat. (and Yemeni bling.)]

I postponed coming here by a few days since the government was digging in its soldiers around the airport, expecting mortar fire from the hills around. Earlier this year the US Embassy got attacked by mortar rounds, several people got blown up by a suicide bomb, tourists got shot dead in the east of the country, and the government are fighting a civil war 50 miles north of the capital city, Sana’a. So—putting travellers’ bravado aside for a minute—I was pretty scared, even though Sana’a itself was apparently OK to visit.

But I also surprised myself with how much my own feelings about the Middle East have changed after three years watching TV footage of Iraqi carbombs and kidnappings. I had such great memories of backpacking through Iran, Syria, Lebanon and Gaza in 1999—people welcoming me warmly, inviting me into their homes, telling me with great dignity about their lives. Middle Eastern hospitality is legendary. But these memories underwent a kind of attrition since then. Now, in a taxi from Yemen’s international airport towards the centre of the city, I lock my door to guard against kidnappers (as though that would help!) and peer nervously through the dirty windscreen at scrappy shopfronts and graffitied walls that look like a down-at-heel version of Baghdad. Even if these people haven’t changed since 1999, my perceptions got infected by mental association.

[Petrol pump in one hand, cigarette in the other.]

Anyway, then I got walking in the old city, and things felt very different. The streets are positively medieval: cobbled; quiet; shielded from the sun by tall stone buildings. Occasionally the calm is broken by a beaten-up 1970s Toyota pick-up truck careering round the corner and swerving to avoid a motorbike coming the other way. It took me an hour to get 200 metres from my hotel, after stopping to answer the questions of each person I passed about where I’m from, accepting gifts of bread and pistachio nuts, hearing the mantra: “welcome to Yemen”, being invited into shops for sugared tea.

My hotel—a palace with stained-glass windows and panoramic roof terrace—is almost completely empty. The flow of tourists has slowed to a trickle, and there are three power-cuts just in my first day here. Somehow Yemenis still take this deteriorated situation with good humour—perhaps gallows humour: when all the lights go out, the shopkeeper I’m with exclaims “Ah! It is good. They are conserving electricity for us!”

[Sana'a is added to my list of honeymoon destinations.]

Three weeks earlier I was in Oman—next-door to Yemen on the peninsula—visiting my friend Lamya. Everything seems to flow smoothly there. Lamya drove me around the city in her silver Mercedes Benz, driving with one hand, swerving us between construction lorries. The capital city, Muscat, is incessantly white, and hot, and humid; we dive between air-conditioned car and air-conditioned restaurant, house or glamorous hotel. Smooth roads weave between barren rocky mountains, on the way to Shangri-La hotel, between stopping at the regal atrium of the Hyatt, or the seductive elegance of the Chedi. The sultan of Oman—who apparently may be gay—lives some of the time in a squat blue-domed palace; however, he was out of the country in his holiday home. The other mini-sultans—those in the oil and gas industries, including many chubby expatriates—were still there, sliding through the marble-floored shopping centres.

Finally, when I wrote this, I was in Dubai. For me, Dubai was the real dystopia. The streets were blisteringly hot: a thick heat, which drips off your skin and soaks through your clothes. It was a Friday, so bus stops were crammed with Indians, Bangladeshis, Pakistanis and Sri Lankans on their day off, waiting for buses which pass without stopping, also full of South Asians on their day off. Finally we were rescued from this sidewalk on a 6-lane freeway by a bus with standing room only, and we crawled through traffic into Deira—the closest thing Dubai has to a city centre. The place felt like something in between Brave New World and The Handmaid’s Tale: society is sharply stratified by economic category—an ‘A’ (Arab in his SUV), ‘B’ (sunburnt Brit or other Westerner trying to hail an air conditioned taxi), ‘C’ (Canny Nigerian buying up stocks of clothes and watches to sell in Lagos) or ‘D’ (Dazed south Asian, after many hours of work). Meanwhile there’s a tension in the city, continually raised by the distant roar of the outside world: perhaps the nearby war in Iraq, but most immediately the stream of Boeings and Airbuses hauling themselves up into the heavy blue sky.

The whole place is a jumble of the brand sparkling new and the rusting mouldy old. A dirty tiled kiosk sells samosas and fresh squeezed orange juice; its customers’ shirts have turned transparent through sweat, and a Visa card payment machine in the corner is strapped with an elastic band onto a Chinese four-way electricity socket, already worn and faded. The inside of Burj al-Arab, hotels in Jumeirah, luxury villas—or even the indoor ski slope in the ‘Mall of the Emirates’—are a different story; but the temporary paradise they provide seems even more surreal when it is supported by such a mass of struggle and sweat.

visiting Ethiopia

2008-07-29T09:05:00.005-04:00

High-bandwidth video here. You can get it full-screen if you click the little X next to 'vimeo' when the video loads:

If you get stuttered visuals or clicks in the sound, try the low-bandwidth version here:

Yesterday I had dinner with a guy named Brandon. A couple of weeks ago he was in the Democratic Republic of Congo, backpacking through a warzone. Having refused to pay a bribe to one of the Congolese soldiers who wanted to fine him for photographing a river, he hung out with them instead, and got a lift with their military convoy going into North Kivu. Apparently he was useful as a white guy, since they claimed to each checkpoint they were escorting him and needed to rush through without paying bribes. When they stopped in a village to eat papaya and peanuts, he found himself holding their AK-47s—even though a loose rock on the road while driving would prompt everyone to release their safety catches and prepare for a rebel ambush. All this reminds me about the exhilaration of proper backpacking: the delicate nexus of bravery and cavalier stupidity.

Anyway, that’s a bit different from my own experience here in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. I’ve been here for the last 3 weeks, living quite regally in a hotel room dating from the 1890s. It is large, with high ceilings, a huge veneered wardrobe, velvet armchairs, a porcelain sink, and a hatstand. My balcony overlooks a tiered lawn below, with waiters shuttling trays of drinks when there are customers, and a view of the jumbled city stretching out towards an extinct volcano in the distance. I’ve been staring at this view quite a lot while struggling to finish a report on African cities for the World Bank, and am now studying for MIT exams. The only downside of the room is that there’s no bathroom, and I have to be careful of absent-minded mistakes with the two water bottles I keep in the room instead; one for drinking, one not.

It rains regularly twice a day. Storm clouds gather on the mountains opposite my balcony, the sky darkens, and rain starts running in streams down the streets. This is normally the time I play Verdi’s Requiem at full volume, revelling in this simulated apocalypse. But Addis remains very relaxed: not much commotion, everyone very polite. The rain and muddy streets make good business for the hordes of shoe-shine boys sitting on their little crates waiting for business. I duck into a small shop for a mix of papaya, mango, guava and avocado juice. Avocados really do have juice! Outside a few children pursue me down the street for money; when I hand some over they—like almost everyone else in Addis—take it by supporting their right forearm with their left hand, as a mark of politeness.

I wanted to come back to Ethiopia next year to study what happens when members of different ethnic groups—who may hold strong prejudicial views out in the regions—trade with each other in the city. Do urban economic interactions promote a reduction in intergroup prejudice? Fortunately for Ethiopia (but unfortunately for my research) Addis seems like such a remarkably peaceful city (of between 5 and 9 million people—no-one knows quite how many), that I’m now thinking I should choose somewhere else. Even if I just studied how and why it is ethnically peaceful, I’d need some variance in the outcome to be sure what was causing it; but there are very few instances of ethnic rioting elsewhere in Ethiopia too.

Last night after dinner with Brandon I stopped by a couple of bars on my street for beers. Incredible (albeit drunken) warmth from Ethiopians in the bars. Yes, every single place was such a crowded sausage-fest I began to wonder if I’d walked into a gay bar by mistake. But the atmosphere was still great—each bar was darkened and loud, raucous dancing, with softly flashing multi-coloured lights, and a range of music from Ethiopian tunes to ‘King of the Dancehall’ playing on the speakers. People instantly gave up their seats for me, offered their space at the bar, pulled me on to the dancefloor. Then, when I got home I read a newspaper article from Ireland, which is currently causing consternation in Ethiopia, titled “Africa is giving nothing to anyone -- apart from AIDS”.

safe returns to Mali

2008-01-28T17:54:00.000-05:00

[click on the play button and you should get Sierra Leone's current top of the pops playing while you read... The sound quality is evocative of tinny speakers in a beat-up taxi with its back door held on by a bit of string.]

So, I write this from Sierra Leone: a brief holiday from Mali. I’ve been in Bamako—Mali’s capital city—for the last four weeks asking myself and various Bamakois themselves: what happens when a city of 1.5 million people is growing fast enough to double in size every fifteen years? Memorable days have been trooping round slums on the outside of the city, chatting with people over sugared tea about their choice of residential location and job. I recruited a sparky 22-year-old translator for the Bambaran language, since even my crappy French is better than most people’s here; and last week we also interviewed a gang leader in one of the city’s poorest districts—though it must be said that he was 14-years-old and quite small owing to malnourishment.

[A merry bunch inside of one of Bamako’s minibuses.]

Each day has the feel of a fairly regular routine: I wake at 6am with the sound of crying infants drowning out the muezzin calls, itch my mosquito bites, carry a plastic kettle of water to the toilet, and ‘shower’ with a bucket of cold water. I ease on my old pair of New Balance which are totally coated with red African earth, and emerge out into the daylight. Most of the women from four families sharing the same house are already up and about, cleaning or cooking. Out in the street I face a barrage of exclamations “toubabou!!” from neighbourhood children always delighted to spot a white person, and pop my daily malaria pill with a sachet of yoghurt from one of the small shops.

[Two of the approximately 17 children living in my house.]

Mornings are spent in dusty rooms at one of the myriad government ministries, consulting their documents, or turning up a municipal office to arrange a meeting and getting speedy treatment because I’m ‘un blanc’, or trying to follow through on one of the meetings with an NGO worker or civil servant (which they may have forgotten was on their schedule and left for lunch at 11am already). Lunch is likely to be rice. Probably from one of the market women selling plates of it with sauce from huge buckets containing mixtures of various animal parts. Most of the time I’ve maintained my pescatarianism, but have a couple of times accidentally chosen chicken cunningly disguised as fish.

[One of the chickens I might’ve eaten.]

Afternoons are more of the same, though probably involving a visit to the fluorescent-lit internet café, bumping into my friend Nouhall on the way, who waits every day from 7am to 7pm outside the bank for customers to buy telephone credit or change money with him. As the sun goes down at 6pmish, the burning and dusty streets begin to take on some of the bleakness I enjoy, with detritus of the immense market strewn all over the ground, and many layers of stray plastic bags covering up the road surface of rocks and dirt. Along with most of the rest of Bamako’s population, I join the exodus from the central market area to one of the transport hubs, and dive into a green minibus crammed with stallholders and shoppers heading back out to one of the peripheral neighbourhoods.

[Bleak streets at dusk.]

[Me, having just crossed part of the River Niger with my friend’s death-trap moped, which broke down 8 times that day.]

[Happy days when I was living in a hotel room.]

[The view from that hotel window.]

Then there’s Sierra Leone.... I could write about the warmth of the people and the repose of speaking English of sorts. But the poverty is truly wretched, and the country is filled up with people scrabbling money for food and shelter each day. I travelled from 6am until the most bewitched hour of the night, traversing the palm-treed hills, through towns with burnt-out buildings resurgent only with cassava, bananas or Indian glucose biscuits. A rusted tank. Bullet holes. Ubiquitous NGOs and their incongruous white SUVs. Mobs of children selling Vimto at sweaty roadsides. Sleeping 3 hours of the night in a town with no electricity or water, and starting again at 6.30am on the back of a motorbike bound for the Guinean border. Two hours of dirt tracks in the jungle, and greeted at the frontier by a smiling soldier in a red beret. By 11am I was carried across the calm river by poled canoe, arriving again in Guinea—a country sickly with corruption and oppressed by its battle-hardened military government. The village sells cassava, bananas and Indian glucose biscuits. And some glass bottles of petrol. The police ask for money, whether sitting under a tree or in their fly-infested concrete hut. I pay a soldier to scoot me over more hills to the nearest town, and cram in a northbound taxi with 9 adults, 7 children and two riding on the roof. The soldier wants my phone number so he can get a visa and get out. The road is a succession of potholes and ditches. I can barely concentrate on the dusty copy of Hamlet I cradle in my palm.

[Fast food at the Malian roadside.]

[Excess baggage on the Sierra Leonean border. Contents of the car itself will include 3+4+3 adults (in 3 rows), innumerable babies, and a chicken.]

[Vital signs in Sierra Leone.]

On a lighter note, I saw Toumani Diabaté and Amadou & Mariam on New Year’s Eve. Admittedly I didn’t know they are world famous until my friend Serena told me, but they were definitely two quality acts. More recently I went to Bamako’s Palais de la Culture, and found 2,000-3,000 people crammed into the immense music hall for a concert starting at 9pm and ending at 1.30am. A veritable feast of larger-than-life Malian women were decked out in larger-than-life colourful outfits, singing to a backing band of multiple kora, ngoni, guitar and drum players. Each would come on stage for 20-30 minutes, sing their hearts out, and then give way to the next one. But during all this, an almost constant procession of women from the audience clambers up onto the stage, almost as large but somehow negotiating the rickety stage steps in their tiny high heels, joining the singer on stage for a minute or two to hand her several monthly salaries’ worth of crisp bills. It turns out the songs are actually successions of generous praise heaped on Bamako’s most prestigious families (“Mr. Keita’s grandfather [yaaaahhhahhhhaaah] was a warrior [laaaalaaahhaaah] who killed 800 people”, etc), who then appear on stage to reward the singer with large wads of cash. I reckon I watched at least 3 million CFA get handed over (i.e. about £3,000). My taxi driver on the way home told me it’s not just the prestigious families: it’s actually a way of appearing prestigious when you’re not, accepting praise and throwing cash around: a good way of building the family name. People even take out loans from the bank to spend it like this. Meanwhile their housemaids at home have monthly incomes between 5,000 and 10,000 CFA ($11 to $22).

OK, that's all for now. Hello to everyone! Don't feel obliged to post a comment on this site-- you have to register and it's tedious.

Shenzhen biennale 2007

2007-12-10T12:16:00.000-05:00

As I sit here in a World Bank office in DC, news reaches me of the Shenzhen biennale:
Yes it's Neville Mars up to his usual completely-nutty self!-- Good work Neville!

http://burb.tv/view/Shenzhen_2007

Meanwhile at MIT...

2007-11-12T11:41:00.000-05:00

(name obscured)

From: S_____y H__g
Date: 12 November 2007 11:35:02 GMT-05:00
To: cis-all@mit.edu
Subject: [Cis-all] flooding on 6th floor

The god known as the 6th floor coffee machine is angry. Apparently
not enough undergrads were sacrificed this year, so on Saturday
night, it showed its wrath by attempting to drown all of us heretics
by flooding the kitchen and hallway. Fortunately, I discovered this
at around 9pm. My attempts to soothe the god by unplugging him were
unsuccessful, so I summoned the priests of the temple (aka,
facilities ops), who appeased the angry god and his consort the water
machine by turning off the water supply from the sacred fountain (the
sink). The priests sent their slaves to clear the flood and summoned
the wind gods (aka, giant floor fans) to dry the marsh that the
hallway carpet had become.

The priests suggest not returning the god and his consort to their
thrones or restoring their power until their anger abates, whether
through blood sacrifice or the summoning of the repairman-priests.

Your humble servant with wet shoes,
S____y

_______________________________________________
Cis-all mailing list

Monday night in Manhattan...

2007-10-24T00:04:00.000-04:00

...was Justice at Terminal 5

Saturday night in brooklyn

2007-10-21T22:10:00.000-04:00

...was Erol Alkan and Justice at Studio B, Greenpoint.

last night in Brooklyn

2007-10-19T14:48:00.000-04:00

...was Simian Mobile Disco

China...

2006-04-14T00:15:00.000-04:00

Highlight of the month was flying almost 1000 miles west from Shanghai, over lush tropical vegetation and terraced rich paddies. Shrouded in yellow mist, and stepping off the plane into thickly hot air, I arrived in Chongqing city. It's far enough up the Yangzi river to feel like a Chinese version of Heart of Darkness, but already sports freeways and flyovers performing physical contortions crazier than in Monaco. A monorail system whisks some of the 5-million-strong population from Chongqing's 'Technology & Economic Development Zone' to department stores and new skyscrapers in the centre. The city really felt like the physical manifestation of China's 9% annual GDP growth.
I've been here to write a book chapter on Chinese urbanisation and economics for http://www.dynamiccity.org/ based in Beijing. My boss Neville won't be parted from his dog Lulu, and has an obsession with Chinese women which may partly explain his plans to stay here until 2008. Most jokes in the office revolve around Belgians or smoking crack, said in a mild Dutch accent or occasionally a South African one when Nico joins in before swearing at his computer and putting his headphones back on. Learning a few words of Mandarin has been a total minefield: 'ma' means 'mother', but get the tone wrong and it's 'horse'. Even after two weeks in Beijing I still couldn't say the name of my road (GuLouDongDaJie) with the right tonal inflections to avoid my taxi driver first laughing in my face then getting out of the car to decipher my map in the car headlights.I've been living in one of Beijing's remaining hutongs: old dusty lanes not yet demolished to make way for yet more towerblocks and freeways. Many Chinese themselves apparently like the towerblocks - considering them 'modern', and with the utility of private bathrooms - and there's maybe an argument they're necessary in a country aiming to urbanise 80% of its population but needing to do so in a way which doesn't deplete more of its scarce arable land. Or...

[before][during]
[after]

Anecdote-wise the most bizarre one is probably from the first weekend here when I went snowboarding with Phil (who drove to Mongolia in a Ford Fiesta) a couple of hours north of Beijing. Across parched fields and in sweltering sunshine we reached Nanshan ('south mountain') ski resort, which was actually a smallish hill with some grey snow slowly turning to water. The security guards at the deserted gate asked what we'd come for, but the staff cranked up the chairlift for us, and five workers carried on obediently shovelling one small snowdrift into another one. We had the whole slope to ourselves, with some of the workers stopping work as we attempted a few 180s and crashed into the grass verge (grainy video here and here). On the way back into Beijing our bus got stuck in a traffic jam between the fifth and fourth ring-roads, and I had a quick snooze remembering the seaweed kebab I'd had for lunch.

BUILDING CITIES FOR CONSUMERISM--HOW ELSE TO EMPLOY 250 MILLION 'SURPLUS' WORKERS?

[rural China][old-school "urbanisation of the countryside" - focusing on production][new-school urbanisation: consumerism in Beijing][part of urban Chinese consumer culture...]

DIFFERENTIATED URBAN EXPERIENCES--

[migrant workers - some of perhaps 150million in the 'informal' economy in China][spatial implications of economic paths: 'ISO9001' factories co-located with migrant workers' dormitories.]
ATMOSPHERES--

[Beijing subway][chopping cabbage in the train kitchen][me with a big fish in Shenzhen, Pearl River Delta]

respublika Abkhazia

2006-01-19T05:10:00.001-05:00

I'm writing in slight pain, having gone to the sulphur baths in Tbilisi and paid for the inaptly-named 'Kissr' service, where a large man laid me on the marble altar and rubbed off several layers of dirty skin - without taking care to avoid my left nipple which now feels like it's become partially detached.

It's been a long and eventful journey. After flying to Poland for £15 courtesy of Ryanair, I crossed the Ukrainian border with a few hundred cigarette smugglers going in the other direction, and took an overnight train back to Moldova. I met a lovely girl called Irina, enjoyed the first of their Christmases (Moldovans celebrate both 25th December and the Orthodox one on 6th January) and eventually left on a train for the Black Sea port of Odessa. The festive spirit of giving & receiving was interpreted absolutely by two Transdniestrian border guards who got me off the train, locked me in their office and demanded I pay them $35 for some fabricated (though "seriouzniy") reason.

[Subway under Dnepropetrovsk city, Ukraine.]
I had time for a mini-tour of Ukrainian industrial cities before catching a huge cargo ferry across the Black Sea to Georgia. The three-day voyage was enlivened (enloudened) greatly by the contingent of thirty-odd truck drivers living on a diet of vodka and backgammon, two of whom shared the single upper bunk in my room. The Black Sea itself was true to its name: not even the moon pierced the thick cloud at night and there was a tarry blackness in every direction away from our slowly-moving island of light. In the mornings I jogged around some of the 190-metre deck length; and while the captain gave me batteries for my radio I couldn’t find the BBC on any frequency: only China Radio International's English-language service (changing times...)

[The back half of our 22,700-metric tonne cargo ferry, Black Sea.]
My mother helped me across the border to Abkhazia - an unrecognised republic the Foreign Office advises against all travel to (like parts of Iraq and Chechnya) - though where the kidnappers use horses & carts as getaway vehicles, and sometimes provide good Georgian hospitality and alcohol while they wait for their ransom. A steady trickle of people were trudging more than a kilometre in the rain to cross the border from Georgia; and I passed UN military observers from Bangladesh, Sweden and South Korea, and CIS peacekeepers from Russia.

[Sar, from Bangladesh - a UN military observer on the Abkhazian border.]
On finally reaching the small metal huts under an Abkhaz flag, an Abkhaz soldier found no paperwork permitting my visit ("bumaga nyeto"), and not even my elementary Russian could persuade him I was legitimate. I reached for my trusty mobile phone, but found the Georgian cellphone networks still bar calls across this disputed border. So I called back to north-east Hampshire: my mother called my Abkhaz friend, who called her friend the Abkhaz deputy-Foreign Minister; he travelled to his office (even on Christmas Day here: 7th January) and suddenly the border guards' bakelite phone started ringing. A high-volume argument followed, owing to the poor phone lines rather than aggression, and I was permitted to pass.

[Me just after crossing the same border; notice I have adopted Georgian mufti, i.e. black.]
I spent the night with a friend-of-a-friend in Gali district, amongst derelict dream villas from the Soviet era, and hazelnuts and mandarins growing nearby. Meanwhile Charles Kennedy made the evening news, and I see my smartly-suited friend Gupreet (his aide) on the TV screen in this rather unlikely place.

[That's me with friend-of-a-friend Eka in Gali, where some of the 250,000 Georgians who fled during the Abkhaz war are returning.]
Further up the road in Abkhazia's capital city, Sukhumi, there was running water only three times a week, and everyone including me was dressed in woollen socks & cardigans indoors. The city is still spattered with bullet holes, but things are gradually being renovated, painted, prettified, as thousands of Russian tourists venture back in each summer. Palm trees coexist with Ladas.

[Here are the palm trees coexisting with Ladas, in Sukhumi, Abkhazia.]
Still, things felt more normalised there than in South Ossetia - another separatist region of Georgia. I travelled to the border out of curiosity, but soon found myself the other side, having been squished out of sight in a minibus full of elderly women and their shopping bags, and thus waved through the checkpoints where foreigners are obliged to have applied weeks ahead. Getting back out was pretty nerveracking, since I had to pass on foot the menacingly balaclava-ed Ossetian militia, dressed all in black, and possibly rather surprised to find a foreigner coming back out when they'd never let him in. With Ealing-comedy timing, a large lorry appeared demanding all their attention and I snuck round the back of it as it passed, diving into a minibus on the other side. Nerves quickly turned to quasi-farce, since we still had to return through the Georgian checkpoint, and my lack of paperwork was now exacerbated by the fact my pockets were being hurriedly stuffed with illicit cigarettes by the babushka sitting next to me (in order to dissipate her own stash). Luck, and God, were on my side, and soon I was on a train from Stalin’s hometown to Tbilisi.

Returning to the sulphur baths - an anachronistic experience, to see such large, hairy, macho Georgian men, strip off and soap up communally with as much joy as hippopotamuses in mud - I picked up a copy of 'Georgia Today' and realised this ablutionary oasis itself was the scene of recent scandal.
(Page 4):
"The incident started with the detainment of Alexandre Kurasbediani and other criminals in the sulphur bath in Tbilisi. Kurasbediani was being treated in the Tbilisi First Hospital and was guarded 24 hours a day by a special watch. For as of yet unclear circumstances he was found in the bath with three of his guardsmen.
"Ministry of the Interior representatives say that Kurasbediani made a deal with his justice ministry guards, who for a certain price took him to the bath where he met with Tariel Kurasbediani, another representative of the criminal world. During the arrest both criminals and their guardsmen from the Justice Ministry gave armed resistance to law enforcement officers.
"'The reason why there are no attempts to escape from prisons lately is that whoever wants to go out in the city can do so without needing to escape,' stated deputy public defender Akhalaya."

[Scene of the crime: Tbilisi bath house.]
[Mandarins galore on the Abkhazian/Russian border.]
[Aliona's grandmother insisted on ironing my socks before I went out.]

[The Halo Trust, a British NGO, doing amazing work to remove landmines in Abkhazia. Some of the Soviet 'anti-group' mines were suspended in trees with trip wires, with fragmentation explosions which kill everyone within 50 metres, maim up to 100 metres, and injure up to 200 metres. This is Ali (from Chechnya), Izmit (an Abkhaz, who lost his left arm while demining) and boss David (from Ireland).]
[Wacky border guards on my way back to Georgia. I look a bit pale but I promise I have been eating well.]

Transdniestria and Jonathan Seagull

2005-12-07T20:58:00.000-05:00

It's been pretty cold in Moldova, and I write this looking out through a single-glazed window onto some spindly hawthorn trees and clusters of apartment buildings. I've been keeping warm by jogging around the muddied paths circling concrete towerblocks in the morning, and going with my host Tania Tiutiun to the Israeli Embassy for dance classes to some sort of Zorba's-dance/techno fusion...

I'm on my way back from a few days in Transdniestria: a republic which declared its separation from Moldova in the final days of the Soviet Union. You can catch a minibus there from Moldova, squashed between women snuggled in their padded coats, debating whether the foreigners' entry permit to Transdniestria will cost $20 or perhaps even $50. One of them asked the driver whether he could drop me off in a nearby field so I could smuggle myself across and avoid paying, but in the end the major hazard was delays while various soldiers took me to their offices to ask me what on earth I was doing visiting them.

Arriving in Tiraspol city - and being careful not to photograph any of the Russian 'peacekeeping' troops - you notice the number of Lenin status occupying prime sites, and the Soviet trolleybuses rumbling along the streets. I've been staying with the Gavrilov family in a small house by the Dniestr river, where bitter redcurrants grow in the garden, and the toilet is a cold wooden hut past two fearsome wolves (on rather weak chains) which somehow they are convinced are household dogs.

Yesterday I had a couple of meetings with local NGOs: one involving a rendezvous by the river and a conversation in the backseat of a Lada; the other lasted some time because the person thought I was a DfID representative and rather important. Igor, one of the Gavrilov sons, took me to see his medical college, and without warning I found myself presented to a class full of white-coated 17-year-olds as a "real English man". Some of them doubted whether this was indeed the case, mainly owing to my Swiss family background rather than questions about my masculinity (although my hair is several inches longer than the Russian crew-cut in fashion here, and I was asked "what do you think about gays?" just to check).

Has anyone else read Jonathan Livingston Seagull? It seems to mean a lot for people here - a bit clandestine though.

[it's me on the train from Budapest to Sighetu Marmatiei (Romania)]
[Ceaucescu's palatial balcony in Bucharest - though he was executed before he managed to speak from this new one]
[my hosts Tania and Alex in Chisinau, Moldova]
[election time in Transdniestria, but all the posters have a strange similarity]
[if this is the first Englishman they've met, I apologise on behalf of my country]
[selling pumpkin seeds on the road in Tiraspol]
[that's the Sheriff casino, owned by President Smirnov's son, just like all the petrol stations, and various other lucrative bits & bobs]

[Moldovan wine - good in moderation?]
[last night's meal]
[Igor is learning English]
[view from my Moldovan window, where I started this email!]

"I recommend the chicken fajitas, Sir!"

2005-10-20T14:37:00.000-04:00

Well it's been two weeks in Kosovo: countless white UN Land Cruisers, construction everywhere, expat bars and money in Pristina, horses and carts elsewhere. My favourite moments have been sharing a café lunch with a US Army major, lieutenant and sergeant all in full camouflage ("I recommend the chicken fajitas, Sir!"), shooting some pool in a starkly-lit hall with Albanian techno turned up loud to hide the roar of electricity generators outside, and listening to the Kosovar-Albanian I was staying with describe how the US's foreign policies are based on their need to fly to Mars (they need a lot of oil for that).

I've heard Kosovar-Albanians detail the persecution they suffered under Serbian rule, in the same sentence as dismissing the persecution they dish out to Serbs now. Empathy seems to have been eclipsed by a self-righteous push for independence, and now that Kosovar-Albanians themselves are the majority not minority, it's their turn to see minorities as an inconvenience. All this is fed by the arrogance of knowing they're supported by hundreds of NGOs, 30+ militaries, the UN, and most of all their "saviour" the USA.

[lunch on the train from Budapest to Belgrade]
[the pharmaceutical factory outside Belgrade we bombed in 1999, with a Serb Orthodox monastery uncomfortably in the middle of it]
[the Yugoslav Ministry of Defence, crumpled from a NATO missile]
[riding a tram with my friend Maja in Belgrade]
['No Negotiations, Self-Determination!' in Pristina, Kosovo]
[the UN and OSCE blending-in effortlessly]
[Kosovar-Albanian souvenirs - war heros and Bill Klinton [sic]]

[Kosovo-Serb souvenirs - war heros and France]
[destroyed houses in the Roma district of Mitrovica]
[shopping for televisions in US Camp Bondsteel's department store (between their Burger King franchise and the Thai massage parlour-- seriously)]

8 miles to the gallon

2005-03-22T03:16:00.000-05:00

Today finds me on a train from Illinois through Nebraska. The landscape looks like 'The Wizard of Oz' before Dorothy gets swept up by a tornado: flat for the last three-hundred miles, and it looks like staying that way... The occasional farm, with barn and silo, appears on the horizon then slides into the background again. It's been a great trip! Yesterday I was in Detroit - probably the most striking bit so far: 5192 square-kilometres in area, but one-third of it derelict. I rented a Ford and drove around the centre, past the Motown Museum, which stands amidst whole blocks of houses being reclaimed by nature or destroyed by vandals. The city has been hollowed-out: population from 2 million to 1 million since 1953; meanwhile the suburbs ooze further like a spreading ants nest. Four-lane highways under a completely clear blue sky, crammed with standard-issue SUVs: driving for miles but only reaching another Burger King, Taco Bell or Wendy's. I sat in my car, automatic, pressing stop and go on the pedals. It felt like a game; I could drive anywhere but get nowhere. Unending space made me want to consume - perhaps to prove I exist. Consequences are invisible: fumes evaporate into the sky, buildings are demolished and new bigger ones are built, waste is thrown into the trash and taken someplace else.

[driving along 6-mile road, Detroit]

[Highland Park district in Detroit, where '8-mile' was filmed]

[me near the waterfront, Detroit]

mountains, money and sausages

2004-12-05T00:13:00.000-05:00

I planned to go to Abkhazia this week*. Instead I have spent most of it in bed, completely debilitated (in an ironic way) having eaten some 'Abkhazura' - a delicacy from Abkhazia of minced meat wrapped in a stomach. It is a kind of mini-haggis, which I had fondly imagined was pre-cooked, but was not. Raw stomach was not very good for my own stomach, and by the time I'd heard from the Deputy Foreign Minister of Abkhazia that my visa application had been refused while the Presidential stand-off continued, it was probably a good job -- I couldn't manage much more than a trip to the sulphur baths, full of hairy Georgian men (nakedness mandatory), which kind of revived my senses.

Recovery was slow, partly because I'm staying with a septogenerian widow (and ex-German teacher) who lives in a house preserved beautifully from the 1950s, faithfully lacking any heating. She is an inveterate tidier, shuffling around the house while people are out, arranging their messy but memorable piles into confusing new ones, and throwing away any loose bits of paper, including those containing the only record of my new-found friends' phone numbers. She also threw away my rehydration salts and told me to take some of her "house medicine" instead (which I think is basically elderflower juice left for 6 months in her unpowered fridge). Anyway, I have certainly lost a couple of inches around the waist...

So, I'm coming to the end of the Caucasus part of my trip. It has definitely been a reality-check on aspirations for 'conflict resolution'. I switch between wondering what an outsider can offer (since ultimately the conflicts have to be resolved by the people themselves) and then, listening to the opinions of many people I meet, wondering how on earth anything's going to change if the situation's left in their hands (it seems to be entirely socially-acceptable to write-off an entire people as 'bad' - in particular Armenians with respect to Azeris and vice versa). There's a kind of democratic dilemma, where one ends up thinking that some kind of paternalistic help will probably be necessary.

Some people put their faith in economic progress, reasoning that people living comfortably are less likely to resent their neighbours. Even if that's true, there seems little chance of progress being significant enough in the near future. Armenia is completely stifled by its corrupt regime and sealed-borders wıth Turkey and Azerbaijan; Georgia has a more positive atmosphere following the 'revolution', but is putting much hope in the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan BP oil pipeline even though it'll only provide $50million/year in transit revenues; Azerbaijan has massive oil resources but, like so many oil-rich countries, seems to be lining the pockets of the 4WD-driving few while still paying its schoolteachers $30 a month. Those teachers have to supplement their incomes, either by finding other work in the evenings or by accepting other payments in return for good grades. Other public officials supplement their incomes in a similar fashion, and none of this helps the climate for foreign investment or domestic progress.

All this brings me cheesily to my final anecdote, which combines my customary near-death experience with a serious message. A couple of weeks ago I was in the Azeri mountains bordering Daghestan. I was keen to reach an (apparently) picturesque mountain village, and in a fit of highly-misguided optimism somehow convinced myself that the village would be above the cloud line and out of the snow which was falling gently on the bitterly-cold base station town. There was a collection of old men in furry hats waiting for transport, but none wanted to go to this village, and so I had to negotiate with the gaggle of jeep-drivers and charter one for myself. My driver looked absolutely identical to one of the baddies in 'The Untouchables': I can't find a picture on the internet, but imagine a spherical head with grey balding hair, glazed eyes, buck teeth (one of which is gold), a long sheepskin coat and gold rings on fingers.

On the way out of town we stopped (in order of priority, more or less) for petrol, then cigarettes, then engine oil, then a warm jacket, then strong cord and a kitchen knife (I'll get to this in a minute). We turned off the main road and started ascending through small villages, all blanketed in snow. The road became a track, which became a path, which became a field. And soon we just seemed to be driving up a river bed; banging our heads on the ceiling of the jeep as it crashed over the stones hidden by the snow. Everything was white, and it was hard to see since the little windscreen wipers kept freezing up. Soon we stopped and put chains on the back tyres. 10 minutes later we stopped again and put chains on the front tyres; many of
the chain-links were broken and so we had to improvise with the cord, fastening the chains to the wheels and cutting the cord with the big knife. I was pretty cold, with snow leaving my trousers sodden from the knee down; Seftar (my driver) was colder, with his fingers made raw by the rusty chains and snow. We started driving again, and visibility was down to ten metres. Large boulders emerged through the fog, cliffs began overhanging our path, and still we continued uphill. We'd been driving one-and-a-half hours; I asked Seftar whether we were almost there - he said we still had two-thirds of the way to go. After negotiating a series of hairpin bends which were so tight we had to do 3-point turns around each one (with the back wheels hanging close to a cliffface), sanity won through and Seftar recommended we turn around.

We started back towards the base station with a sense of relief, and probably driving far too fast. The hairpin bends were negotiated without problem, but by the time we were racing back through the outer villages, Seftar was getting a bit ahead of himself, singing along to the radio and shouting at the woman-with-potatoes we'd picked up along the way. We completely lost traction on one of the bends, slid off the road, through a fence into someone's front garden, and hit a tree hard enough for me to cut my head on the windscreen. Anyway, apologies having been made to the fence's owner, we started on our way again -- and soon met a much worse accident, with another jeep completely written off on the side of the road, and a group of men standing arguing next to it. There were bits of bonnet and engine scattered across the snow, some dazed-looking passengers inside, and for some reason (expect the unexpected in Azerbaijan) also a live cow sticking out of the boot. The Soviet UAZ jeep had met a new American Chevrolet coming the other way, driven by some rich Bakunians up for the weekend; it was the jeep's fault, and the Bakunians were suggesting settlement by the modest sum of $1000 to mend the bonnet of their Chevrolet (which was much less badly damaged than the jeep). The jeep's passengers were paying $6/each, and $1000 is way-over the yearly income for the jeep driver who'd already suffered a written-off vehicle. If I was writing a newspaper article I'd say "It was a vivid illustration of the inequalities of Azerbaijan's new economy." It didn't seem very fair.

P.S. I've just finished reading 'Death and the Penguin' by Andrey Kurkov (a Ukrainian). It is brilliant; I recommend it. You can see it here (even if, hopefully, you don't actually buy it from Amazon):
http://www.amazon.co.uk/exec/obidos/ASIN/1860469450/qid=1102176048/ref=sr_8_xs_ap_i1_xgl/202-6621089-3769422

*Abkhazia is an autonomous republic within Georgia, which declared outright independence following a war in the early 1990s, during which 250,000 Georgians were expelled by Abkhaz forces (supported also by Russia) - see http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/europe/3261059.stm and http://www.c-r.org/progs/caucasus.shtml

nihilism in Azerbaijan

2004-11-18T22:27:00.000-05:00

I'm not sure whether travelling is an 'art' or a drug, but either way it does strange things to your perception of the world. The more places I see, towns I travel through, people I watch through the window, the more it begins to roll into one. My transient dealings in each place give a kind of overall clarity.

After a while I begin to see humanity as one huge and elaborate self-perpetuating machine. The self generating, self-justifying nature of our world is normally hidden, during normal life. We busy ourselves with hundreds of little tasks and worries, generating necessary complications to obscure a simpler truth. The obscurement is more complicated in the UK: branding, advertising and a greater wealth of distractions prevent it being obvious. But somehow the former Soviet Union has made me feel this way. I've seen tens of thousands - even millions - of cars, trousers, toothbrushes, bars of soap: sold on every street corner but ultimately consumed and then forgotten. People argue in a language I don't understand, hurrying about, looking worried, or happy, tiring themselves out and then going to bed. The next day it all begins again. Some wealth is accumulated but, like money in a bank, it has value only as long as everyone doesn't decide to cash-in their lot at the same time. And, in countries where most possessions are old, deteriorating, or of poor quality, the value is conspicuously less in any case.

I suppose it makes you realise that genuine meaning is derived from people rather than things. The pattern of my day can be identical from one to the next, waking up in a blank hotel room, eating three meals and riding on buses, but the value of the day is determined by who has been nice to me, or who I smile at, or who I've felt empathy when talking to.

So, what has happened? Well, I've just arrived in Baku, busy capital of Azerbaijan, from a rain-sodden village in the mountains. A bitterly cold wind is blowing in off the Caspian Sea, and dried leaves cover some of the pavements. People are walking along the street in armour-like colours, mostly blacks and greys as in Armenia (though Azeris would be the first to deny any similarity: the enmity between the two countries seems to run very deep). Many of the buildings in the centre are garishly-embellished mansions, dating from the first oil boom 100 years ago.

On the way here, in a bus crammed with men in woollen hats and women (sitting separately) in floral headscarves, we passed tens of squished Ladas in compounds by the roadside, serving as a visible reminder of the dangers of driving as fast as Caucasians seem to like doing. When we weren't passing beige-bricked houses or stark metal electricity pylons, there was usually a large sign erected with some words of wisdom from "H. A. Aliev" - the country's former leader who succumbed in his later years to creating a very pervasive cult of the personality. His son's portrait, to whom power was passed in a nepotistic transfer worthy of the Khans who used to rule here, is hung inside many shops and restaurants. And there are so many photos of him inspecting cafes, opening sports centres and admiring parks (surrounded by numerous heavies) that one wonders how on earth he still found the time to govern.

I'll keep this email shorter than the last one, but I should probably end on a lighter note. After writing from Nagorno-Karabakh, I spent a couple of days seeing the wreckage still apparent from the 1990s war between Armenia and Azerbaijan - wreckage both psychological and physical (especially in Agdam, where an entire Azeri town of 60,000 has been reduced to an empty shell, its buildings now stripped of window frames, doors, plumbing and electrical wiring, and left just as stone skeletons). I talked to an Israeli ex-bomb disposal expert now working for the Halo Trust, who are efficiently but slowly removing some of the anti-personnel and anti-tank mines still scattered over Karabakh and causing injuries to farmers driving their tractors or children playing near their houses.

Soon I was back in Georgia, seeing the friends in Tbilisi I met last time for another club night with a British DJ (General Midi, from Bristol). This time there wasn't enough money for vodka in a bar, so four of us (Bacha, Dato, Nik and me) bought a couple of bottles and stood drinking it on the street. There's a kind of elation which comes from surviving another day in Tbilisi (whether because of roads or guns - you got the picture last time...), and I took a picture to record the moment - the photograph is a blur of car lights and smiling faces which accurately represents the feeling. Suddenly a man appeared round the corner, and I hurriedly hid my camera. "What are you doing??" Dato exclaimed, "you do not need to worry." "But sometimes it's dangerous in Tbilisi," I started to explain. "Don't worry," he emphasised, "the people in Tbilisi know us. /We/ are Tbilisi!" Behind him there was a loud screetch and then a thump as a black Mercedes went into a full 180-degree skid and came to rest violently against a roadside kiosk.

dispatch from Nagorno-Karabakh

2004-11-10T01:20:00.000-05:00

So, the route so far (for those without time to read more): Athens(Parthenon) - Istanbul(fish) - Kars(dusty) - Borjomi(sulphurous water) - Gori(Stalin) - Tbilisi(very drunk) - Kazbegi(border with North Ossetia) - Batumi(almost got shot in minibus) - Gyumri(earthquake city - people still living in metal cargo containers) - Vanadzor(ancient monasteries) - Dilijan(mountain retreat, currently snowed in) - Yerevan(see below) - Nagorno Karabakh.

Today started at 4.30am, in a tower-block apartment in downtown Yerevan, when the elderly woman I was renting a room from went to the toilet through the paper-thin wall behind my bed, and emptied one of the buckets of water into the pan: no running water until 7.30am. By the time the sun came up, I was in a minibus shooting down the southern highway - 'Careless Whisper' blaring from the loudspeakers - and jolting noisily over the potholes in the road. The marshrutka was full of leather-jacketed Armenian men, playing cards and snatching every moment the minibus stopped to leap out an light-up a cigarette. I was wedged in at the back, between a large woman feeding me chicken, and a social worker asking if I knew Baroness Cox. Arriving six hours later in Stepanakert (capital of the self-declared 'Republic of Nagorno-Karabakh') I found my bed for the night, in another concrete apartment block, courtesy of another elderly woman who was selling sunflower seeds by the roadside. [I seem to have latched on to the babushka network: they all give out each other's addresses.]

It's been an eventful few weeks. When I haven't been preoccupied by the worryingly accelerated rate of my hair loss (perhaps owing to a diet of cheese pastries and fruit juice when I can find it), or been edging my way in the darkness down yet another street with no lighting and plenty of man-eating potholes, I've covered a fair bit of ground in Georgia and reached Armenia at the beginning of last week.

First stop was Athens, where I had a day to look around the Parthenon and then catch the night-train to Istanbul. There was time for a very picturesque fish sandwich (literally a slab of tuna cooked on a grill and thrown in a large bap) on the Bosphorus, eaten in the pre-dawn blueness while watching a line of men hang fishing rods over the bridge into oily waters. Catching a ferry from the quayside, and watching Europe slip away, I boarded a train in Haydarpasha station on the Asian side of the city, and began my 36-hour 1933km trip along the length of Turkey to the barren east. The train was almost empty because of the beginning of Ramadan, and I had the end compartment on the last carriage all to myself, watching the track disappear over the horizon from the rear window. We finally reached Kars - a small dusty town amidst rolling brown hills - and I took a daytrip to Ani, ancient capital of the Armenians, now constituting a few beautiful but crumbling churches which tragically ended-up 100 metres out of Armenia on the Turkish side of the border, covered in Turkish graffiti.

The next day I left Turkey through a small border post in the mountains, stepping symbolically through a large metal gate in the barbed wire, to be greeted by a group of young Georgian soldiers keen to pass around my novelty passport and then return to their cigarettes. The tarmac roads of Turkey become rutted tracks in southern Georgia; imported cars are replaced by the ubiquitous Lada Zuguli; and the atmosphere of bustle and commerce one senses even in Eastern Turkey dissolves: groups of young men stand around watching the passing traffic and arguing with each other.

On reaching Borjomi, I found a Soviet-era sanatorium, sadly out-of-season and empty except for its two female managers sitting in room 33 and filling out miscellaneous forms. The town was famous all over the Soviet Union for its mineral water, and there's a park - carpeted in autumn leaves, which fall gently on rusting fairground rides - where one can drink directly from a small tap rising from the source. Now the tap is used mainly by elderly people who queue to fill up their water containers, and lug them back home where the plumbing's no longer working.

Gori was the next stop, further along the valley, famous for its large fortress and also as the birthplace of one man in particular: Stalin. His small family house is preserved like a temple, at the centre of a large square which flattened everything not fitting with the plan - it seems the Stalinist ethos lives on even after his death.

Reaching Tbilisi (pop 1.7 million, shambolic capital of Georgia), I needed a bit of R&R, and spotted a couple of London DJs playing a breakbeat set in the 'Adjara Music Hall' - Tbilisi's most fashionable. The 25-Lari entrance fee almost constitutes half the official monthly salary for many government officials, and there are hints to the type of money which is funding those who can afford it: everyone has to pass through a metal detector and body search on the way in. I'd met some people outside in the queue and, since President Sakashvili had somehow decided to hold the last part of his summit with Armenian President Kocharian in the Music Hall, we went to a bar for a few warm-up vodkas. Naturally (in Georgia) the bill for all drinks in one sitting was paid for by a single person. We took a rickety lift up to the room of 'Mikhoo', one of the organisers for the club, who was renting one of the suites in Hotel Adjara not already occupied by refugees from Abkhazia. He entertained me with stories designed to show how Westernised his nouveau-riche young friends are. For myself, I moved onto Kazbegi 'beer', not realising it was 12.5% until I staggered home at 7am wondering where the night had gone.

My meetings the next day were not an incredible success, but I soon had a bit of spare time to head-up to the Caucasus mountains, spending the night in Kazbegi town under the towering silhouette of Mount Kazbeg (5047 metres), which gives its name to the beer and marks the border with North Ossetia. Beslan is 40km up the road, through the tunnel to Vladikavkaz which was shut by Russia before it was admitted that the Beslan perpetrators probably came from Russia's own republic of Ingushetia. There was no electricity in the town when I arrived; Nano Sujashvili, who I was staying with, had wired-up a single lightbulb (together with his mobile phone charger) to a large truck battery, and we spent the evening in his kitchen eating boiled potatoes. His house was on the outskirts of town, and the night felt pretty cold and lonely. I pulled three blankets over the top of me, listening to dogs barking in the distance and the wind whistling around the eaves as I fell asleep.

Not many hours later, I was on an overnight train bound for the Black Sea coast. My destination was Batumi, a moderately-sized port city, strategically important to Georgia and reclaimed by its central government a few months ago, after years being run as the personal fiefdom of Aslan Abashidze. The atmosphere was sultry, and a couple of Ukrainian freighters in-port meant that the town's population was temporarily supplemented by sailors looking for a good time. I sat down in a cafe for dinner, and a sparkly-eyed lady offered me meat stew, cheese pastries, or girls (in that order). Enterprises like those strike a delicate balance: it makes good commercial sense to relieve sailors of their money, but Russian-speaking outsiders are not made to feel too welcome. There's huge resentment in Georgia about Russia's perceived neo-imperialist policies in the region, even to the extent that Georgians - all of whom, over the age of 30, can speak fluent Russian - clearly resent doing so, and indeed sometimes resort to random abuse of those speaking the enemy's language in the street.

I met with Alex Rondeli, a veteran of Georgian politics, to talk to him about Russia's interests in the region. "Look at the map," he said, "it's all written there. Where is South Ossetia? Right in the middle." [President Sakashvili, heady with early successes (the 'rose revolution', unseating Abashidze), is now trying to reexert control in South Ossetia. It's a delicate business. The fear is that Russia will use Sakashvili's moves as a pretext to send its own forces in, possibly cutting the main east-west road in Georgia which lies just south of the South Ossetian boundary.] "Georgia is an orphan," Rondeli observes, "Azerbaijan is supported by Muslim countries and Turkey; Armenia has its diaspora; Moldova has Romania; the Baltics are already out. Who does Georgia have?" If Russia wants to regain some of its old sphere of control, he has a point that there are few better places to start. And few more lucrative consequences. "If Russia controls Georgia, then Azerbaijan and the Caspian pipeline is at its behest, it has a buffer against Turkey and NATO, it becomes direct neighbours with Armenia, and gains a gateway to the Middle East." This may be a slightly exaggerated view, but it's true enough to cause serious worries - and is one of the main reasons why Georgia is declaring loudly its intention to join the EU and NATO, however realistic those aspirations may turn out be.

Meanwhile, the Georgian 'mainland' is by no means under control. Violent crime is less frequent than in the 1990s, and the police are being reformed (now with a new fleet of cars in Tbilisi, with flashing-lights permanently on), but the Liberty Institute in Georgia has documented more than 500 cases of physical abuse by Georgian police since Saakashvili took over from Shevardnadze at the beginning of this year. Enough weaponry still remains in private hands for someone to pull a gun on me while in the back of a marshrutka in Batumi. I was on the way to the train station, wedged in at the back of a minibus, and trying to humour this guy who had clearly consumed quite a lot of heroin. His eyes kept rolling to the back of his head, but he was happy to know I was from England. Then he reached round under his leather waistcoat, and pulled something out to hold against my bag. I thought it was a knife, maybe cutting into the fabric. Looking over I saw it was indeed silvery, and metal: in fact a gun pointing somewhere between my knee-cap and stomach. I managed to talk him into putting it away again, more fearful of it going off by halucinogenic-accident than by him deliberately shooting it.

I left Georgia for Armenia with the intention of going back, but relieved to enter a country where dire poverty and conspicuous polarisation of wealth has, for some reason, /not/ led to high levels of street violence. It's unexpected but true that I'm safer walking home at 11pm from this internet cafe in Nagorno-Karabakh than I would be in Hackney.