nihilism in Azerbaijan

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.