dispatch from Nagorno-Karabakh

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.