In northern waters

Grey seas, icebergs, wrecks and whales. 

A voyage to the St Lawrence, 50 years ago

One of the odder things about aging is that one may enter a room, forget why, and suddenly recall what one was doing 50 years ago to the day instead. It happened to me this morning. I noticed that it was August 21 and a series of images came unbidden into my head; then I started playing one of those mental newsreels of a past time that are always incomplete. It flickered into life with the image of a train. I was in the dining car with my parents and sister. A flat stretch of late-summer countryside was flashing by, black-and-white cows in a field; a white-jacketed waiter emerged through a swing door with oval windows, a large silver tray at shoulder-height. I wondered why we had been in the dining-car; my parents were the sort who found sandwiches quite adequate. But perhaps it was all part of our ticket, for this was a boat train.

*

The Empress of Canada in her original livery (Canadian Pacific postcard)

The boat train was once a quite usual feature of international travel, speeding you from Euston or Waterloo and taking you, not to the main station for the port, but straight into the docks, where one climbed down and entered the terminal building or shed to surrender your baggage. This would be labelled as needed, to be taken to your cabin or stickered “Not Wanted on Voyage” and swung into the hold in nets that hung from cranes or derricks. In this shed, too, one would undergo passport formalities before striding up the gangway and into the doors let into the side of the vessel. On one’s return to Britain one went through the same process in reverse, assuming one got through customs in time.

On one occasion some years earlier, my mother had missed the boat train. Disembarking from the Holland America Line’s much-loved Nieuw Amsterdam at Southampton with a two-year-old (me) and my seven-year-old sister, she made the mistake of giving me an orange as we waited in the queue, enraging a customs officer who lectured her about the phytosanitary dangers of American oranges and proceeded to examine our luggage in minute detail. The boat train left without us.

“He was very small. A pipsqueak,” she remembered years later, thought for a moment and added, outraged: “He was Welsh”, as if this somehow explained the man’s behaviour. I remember someone – I believe it was John Treasure Jones, the last captain of the mighty Queen Mary (and himself Welsh) – telling a magazine interviewer how to avoid trouble at customs. Look for a chap with a loosely-knotted tie, he said; a tight, small knot indicates a small, tight mind. It is advice I have carried through life ever since.

*

But back to the late summer of 1968.

The train rolled into the docks at Liverpool and came to rest outside a cavernous shed. We entered it, and through the open doors at the other side I saw a huge wall of white steel, punctuated by row upon row of portholes. It seemed a leviathan.

The Queen Elizabeth at New York (date and photographer unknown)

In fact, at about 27,000 GRT, the Empress of Canada was dwarfed by the Queen Mary and Queen Elizabeth, which at over 81,000 GRT were for a long time the largest man-made moving objects on earth. I had sailed on the Queen Elizabeth, too. In what I believe to be my earliest memory, I am in the children’s playroom on board, pushing a toy car along the art-deco ventilation grilles at the edge of the room and annoying a little girl trying to play with one of the doll’s houses set against them. Then I look up to see my mother standing above me in a Dior-like New Look skirt. If I am correct, it was August 1958, and I was just 15 months old, so it does not seem possible – surely it must have been another ship, probably the Nieuw Amsterdam – but old black-and-white pictures of the Cunarder’s playroom seem to match my memory.

If the Empress of Canada could not compare to the Queens, it was still very large, and was one of the most modern liners on the North Atlantic run, launched on the Tyne in 1960. Designed for the Liverpool to Montreal route, she could carry about a thousand passengers. In the 1960s there was still demand for cabins. Atlantic flights had been offered since the 1940s, and were having an impact on shipping. Jets had offered a transatlantic service since October 1958, a British-built airliner beating the Americans by a matter of days. But jet travel was still for the very well-heeled; older planes often had to refuel at Gander, and the journey to New York could take 12 or 14 hours. And all air travel was still very expensive. All this would change with the arrival of wide-bodied jets in 1970. But for now, ships remained the best choice for many, for Australia as well as North America (many of the British emigrants who went to Australia as part of the assisted passage scheme in the 1960s made the six-week voyage by sea).

We walked up the gangway and into the entrance in the ship’s side. The first thing one noticed was the flooring; often in this ship, it was a light blue rubberised surface with raised buttons, from which water would drain, and on which one would not slip in rough seas. The first place one called was one’s cabin, where hopefully one’s luggage would arrive too. The cabins were small but not cramped and had their own bathrooms and toilets. I took the upper bunk above my sister. I was sleeping right by a porthole and could sit up in bed and look out at the sea.

I was 11, and old enough to wander around the ship alone; in fact I had just been given my first watch especially for the voyage, so that I would know when to turn up for meals. On this first day I went on deck and looked over the side at the docks. I was in a crush of other passengers, many waving goodbye to friends and relatives on the docks far below; some held coloured paper streamers that ran over the side, with the other end held by those below. As the ship pulled away the streamers would break or fall. In those days many passengers on a ship to Canada would have been emigrants, and I suppose the streamer represented the ties that were being broken in a rather poignant way. In fact I remember that everyone was in quite a cheerful mood, despite the greyness of the English summer sky. One passenger may not have been so happy – the owner of a large steamer trunk (yes, we had them) that was bobbing up and down between the ship and the water. A pair of stevedores tried half-heartedly to retrieve it with grappling hooks. “I say, I hear the poor chap’s PhD thesis is inside,” said someone. There was general chortling. And then the hawsers were unwound and we began, ever so slowly, to inch away from England.

*

At Greenock (date and photographer unknown)

In the morning all had changed. The ship had steamed up the Irish Sea in the night and had entered the Clyde estuary, and was standing off Greenock, waiting for the tender that would bring the last mail and passengers for Canada. We went on deck. It was a quite brilliant, still summer’s morning, the mountains to the north standing out green against the wonderful cloudless sky; the water was flat calm and the ship lay on a mirror in a room of deep blue. I have travelled widely in the half-century since, but I do not think I have seen many scenes to rival that strange and beautiful morning.

We did not stay long. In due course the tender nosed out to meet us, a small motorboat with a dozen or so passengers and some mailsacks. I suppose the sheer white walls of the ship must have reared hundreds of feet above them. They came up a ladder and the tender went about its business; we pulled away. I wonder what became of passengers who had booked their passage from Greenock to find that the weather had been too bad for them to transfer to the ship in this way – as must surely sometimes have happened.

As we left the Clyde behind, the weather dulled. The coast of Ulster was a low grey-green smudge in the distance. We settled into the ship that would be our home for the next week.

Shipboard life acquires a rhythm. Dinner was taken in a large airy dining-room below, at a shared table, served by a waiter in evening clothes, a very small red-headed man from the Shetland Islands; he was quiet but friendly and every night he handed us a new elaborate menu, great white creations of heavy card, with embossed letters and each night a different picture of a sailing ship’s stern on the front. The menus delighted me and the Shetland waiter, noticing that I liked them, kindly brought me a large white envelope marked “A Souvenir of a White Empress”, with a sample of each menu used on the voyage. I had it for many years and believe it may still be among my papers somewhere.

A 1950 poster by Roger Couillard

Between meals there was not that much to do. One could shop at the duty-free. One could play deck games, weather permitting. One could visit the cinema (we did, once; the film was the latest hit, The Cincinatti Kid. It bored us and we walked out). There were lounges and, of course, bars. My parents made little use of these and did not mingle much with the other passengers; my father, though not unfriendly, was not a clubbable man and was rather self-contained. In those days English people were more reserved than they are now and were cautious with strangers until they could place them, or identify a common relative or acquaintance. I made one friend on board, but apart from that I can remember few friendships being forged. We did meet a young woman who was travelling with two unfeasibly slender borzoi dogs. I had a plastic box-brownie camera (I have it still) and she posed for a picture with the dogs, which sat on a bench beside her; her legs were crossed and her skirt quite short and her leather raincoat unbuttoned, and in the picture there is an elegant expanse of thigh.

And of course one looked at the sea.

If one stood at the stern one could see the wake of the ship, a huge white maelstrom, fading at its edges to green and then grey. Seabirds wheeled and screamed above it. The volume of water displaced must have been enormous as the 27,000-ton ship ploughed through the water at 23 knots. One wonders what the wake of the Queen Elizabeth was like; three times the size, and rather faster – she made well over 30 knots, about 33 MPH.

When one tired of looking at the wake, there was the vast seascape around us. As anyone who lives by the sea can tell you, it has many moods. There was none of the glassy tranquility that we had seen at Greenock. Further out the fresh wind whipped up whitecaps. As it was summer, we followed the Great Circle route some way to the north; it grew cold, and the sky was a dirty light grey and the sea gunmetal with crests of white. One day an announcement on the PA told us that we were near what was thought to be the last position of the Titanic (it had yet to be found). Late that afternoon we saw icebergs in the distance.

At that time, no British person could cross that stretch of ocean without remembering that it was also a graveyard. The U-boat battles of the second war had reached their climax in 1943, just 25 years earlier; plenty of people on board would have remembered them, and perhaps some of the crew had sailed through them – in fact I am sure they had, for the ship was crewed in Liverpool. My father was quiet and mildly irritable throughout the voyage and I know he disliked the sea. I did not understand why, but now I realize that he must have spent weeks on a troopship to what was then the Gold Coast in 1941, a tense voyage; the vessel would have swung much of the way out towards Brazil to avoid U-boats. Many were sunk off West Africa, including a previous Empress of Canada; she was torpedoed by an Italian submarine, but by a twist of fate the ship was carrying Italian prisoners, nearly 200 of whom died.

A few years ago I wrote about crossing the Atlantic, then and now – a piece I later included in my 2014 book The Nine Horizons. It included this passage:

A convoy in 1942 (US Navy picture)

Some journeys on this ocean always have ended badly. You are in your cabin; it was a five-day voyage before, but now it's three weeks as you limp along at the pace of the slowest ship, and you zigzag and dogleg, and destroyers and corvettes fuss around like smoky sheepdogs. It's early morning and you're still in your bunk when there is a soft thud and a jolt and the ship falters and seems to have come to a stop. There is an odd silence. The lights flicker but stay on. You can hear the footsteps of a steward clanging on the steel floor of the passage outside so you open the door. No, probably nothing to worry about, but perhaps you wouldn't mind going topside, sir, do you have warm clothing? – good, sir, if you can get it on quickly. On deck everything's quite calm, but the other ships have moved on ahead, leaving a black smoke stain on the horizon; and you're alone in the early morning between a still, solid grey sea and a gunmetal sky, and there's a cool breeze. It's very calm and it must be only your imagination that the ship is settling slowly to starboard. In fact everything is so calm that you cannot envisage the jagged hole below and the cold water streaming in across the hot boilers and the lascars and stokers screaming in agony from the superheated steam.

When I was young, many older people hated the sea.

*

On the fifth day it was still dull and cold. In the early afternoon I was standing on the deck when someone pointed in the distance. A school of whales was passing us a mile or so away, their bodies breaking the water, huge, but very small in the distance. I went up again at dusk, which came late (we were a long way north, and it was still summer). On the far horizon in front of the ship was a long, low shadow, and it was not a cloud. I wonder if it looked the same to Leif Ericson a thousand years ago, or to the first of the Breton and Iberian cod-fishermen not long afterwards. Or maybe to St Brendan, 500 years earlier. Many believe he made it. Should we be so sure he didn’t? The American explorer Robert Marx once claimed to have found amphorae from a Roman shipwreck in Guanabara Bay, off Rio de Janeiro. Who knows who first saw that shore from the sea?

That night, there wasn’t much to see. But the next morning we had passed Belle Isle and into the mouth of the St Lawrence.

The sheer size of this river is hard to comprehend. It drains the Great Lakes into the Atlantic and, if one counts the estuary, is not much less than 2,000 miles long. To make landfall at Belle Isle and then spend two days steaming to one’s destination is to comprehend its size and that of Canada itself. Of course, there was now other shipping. Before long that morning a bulk carrier of Manchester Lines slipped past on its way to the ocean, and as the ship ploughed on towards Quebec, the traffic became more frequent. We were some way out in mid-stream; as the day wore on, however, we started to see small white houses nestled in the wooded shoreline. Bit by bit we sailed back into the human world.

The Empress of Ireland (Bibliothèque et Archives Canada)

The St Lawrence had its own harsh history for Canadian Pacific. On the night of May 29 1914, near Rimouski in Quebec, just inside the river proper, the Norwegian collier Storstad hit the Empress of Ireland in fog. The Storstad remained afloat, despite a damaged bow. The 14,000 GRT Empress of Ireland did not, sinking in just 14 minutes with the loss of just over a thousand lives – a disaster quite comparable to that of the Titanic, yet hardly known; perhaps the outbreak of the Great War two months later overlaid it in memory. The rapid sinking was attributed to the use of longtitudinal watertight compartments, which allowed one side of the ship to fill very quickly with water while the other did not, causing it to capsize rapidly. Many of those who did escape the ship died in the water, which at that time of year was still very cold. The exact circumstances of the collision were disputed at the enquiry, and remain so now. (The Storstad was repaired and returned to service, but seized by Canadian Pacific after a civil suit. She was torpedoed southwest of Fastnet Rock three years later.) I did not know it then, but we must have passed the wreck site in the St Lawrence during the sixth day.

In the evening we tied up at Quebec City. It was not yet time to leave the ship, but we went ashore to stretch our legs, striding along the dock below the towering mass of the Château Frontenac, built by Canadian Pacific themselves in 1893. It was there that Churchill had met Mackenzie King and Roosevelt in 1943 to discuss strategy. On this evening in late August 25 years later, there was little activity on the dock – it seemed empty – and even the other passengers seemed to have stayed aboard. At length we returned to the ship. But we had stood on North American soil. Well, concrete.

The next morning I pulled back the curtains above my bunk and saw an odd view. We had come to a halt at Montreal and were tied up near Man and His World – what had been Expo 67, the very successful World’s Fair the previous year. It was over but one could still visit the site, now called Man and His World. I was looking at Habitat 67, the strange cuboid flat complex that had been part of the exhibition and was still lived in, and is to this day.

We were chivvied off the ship by our parents and a Montreal metro train with big rubber wheels took us to an American-style train that took us to Ottawa. We rode upstairs in the observation car. The train rattled slowly along, seemingly right through people’s backyards. We left the Empress of Canada and its great white walls behind us at Montreal. I never saw her again.

*

From the 1930s

A year later, my father’s work in Canada was done. This time he flew. The rest of us returned the way we had come, in almost the same week. But this time we sailed on a sister ship of about the same size – the Empress of England, also built on the Tyne. The weather was markedly worse and the ship, although only slightly older, was less modern in design. It pitched and rolled. I had been ill before we went aboard and for the first and, so far, last time in my life, I was seasick. After two days for which I had vomited uncontrollably, my mother summoned a nurse from the dispensary in the bowels of the ship. The nurse unsheathed a very large needle that looked as if it was used to tranquilize horses. “Turn over,” she barked, and thrust it into my rump; I could not see but I think she was holding it aloft with both hands, as if sacrificing a goat. It did make me better, but not well enough to go to dinner. Instead, while my mother and sister went to eat, a friendly Belfast steward brought me some rather nice sandwiches and stayed with me until they returned, telling me all about the Mini-Coopers that he rallied in the winter season. It was a cheerful act of kindness that I still remember after nearly half a century. I recall little else about that voyage, except that we tied up at Liverpool’s Gladstone Dock on a cold and drizzly afternoon, I think the first day of September. I looked over the rail at the rows of cars parked on bombsites near the dock, their windows streaked with rain, and felt a strange sense of being grounded, of being dragged home to England against my will. I would feel it later, as an adult, many times.

The Empress of England would not make people vomit for much longer. In two years she was off the route; in five she was scrapped. But the Empress of Canada would work on. Her own life as a transatlantic liner was nearly over; 18 months later the first of the wide-bodied jets entered service. A very few vessels staggered on for two or three years, but soon the QE2 was the only liner left on the route. The others found new lives as cruise liners. For the Canada, this was nothing new; although her sister-ships stayed on the Atlantic route the year round, she herself had always spent the winters cruising.

Twenty years later, as a volunteer in Sudan, I met a man who had been one of the crew in the ship’s heyday, and had been aboard when we made that crossing. He had fond memories of the cruise season. Every woman loves a sailor, he said, and recalled a Hollywood star who had liked to go ashore with them and have sex with them, one by one, against a palm tree. “Funny, she was always sort of unfriendly once you’d done her,” he mused, nursing a glass of the local firewater. He then identified her as someone who was, in the 1960s, a household name. She has long passed away, but I shall take that name to the grave.

The ship was sold in the early 1970s, becoming the first of the Carnival line’s cruise ships. As the years went by, the North Atlantic survivors were replaced by purpose-built cruise ships, vast, slow, soulless floating malls that meander slowly through the water, pausing now and then to unleash thousands of holidaymakers on some defenceless Caribbean island; were our Hollywood star still living, she would find it hard to find a palm tree to herself. But the Empress of Canada somehow survived into the new century, latterly on gambling cruises in the Gulf of Mexico.

Final fate: The Empress of Canada broken at Along, 2003

In 2003 she was finally sold for scrap and was run ashore at the great shipbreakers at Alang Beach, Gujurat – one of those places where men swarm across a huge ship in their hundreds and break it with axes and saws and the sweat of their brows. In a few months, there was nothing left of a great ship that had been home to thousands for days or even weeks at a time, on which some men and women would serve for years.

But that is the fate of the things we use, isn’t it? The year I sailed on the Empress of Canada, British Rail finally abandoned steam, and thousands of engines were left in long lines at a huge yard in Barry, South Glamorgan. One moment they were living, breathing monuments to human ingenuity. The next they were rotting hulks in the drizzle. And the same happened to typewriters, to record players, to valve wirelesses, to cathode-tube TVs and to the car that once picked you up from school; and one day it will happen to your phone and to your tablet and your microwave and the laptop on which I am typing this. Later, someone will look at one in a book or online or in a museum and wonder, yes, but what did it do? And few will know what it was to forge through a vast grey sea, peopled by ghosts of Vikings, Breton fishermen, men o’war and submarines, to see icebergs pass astern or whales in the distance, or see a low grey line on the horizon at dusk and wonder if it was a low cloud, or the New World.

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Mike Robbins's collection of travel writing,  The Nine Horizons, was published in 2014 and is available as a paperback, as a Kindle download and in other eBook formats.

If it's Tuesday, this must be Bishkek

A trip through Central Asia. The Tien Shan, cycling pants, Tamerlane, a painting, and a sex tourist with one ear

An extract from The Nine Horizons (2014)


The phone brought me in from the tiny terrace where I had been taking a beer before dinner. It was Saturday; I had been walking in the Forêt de Soignes on the edge of Brussels, trying not to think too hard about tomorrow. The summer evening light lit the leaves of the trees that sheltered my third-floor flat and played upon the surface of the Ixelles lake, just visible through the gaps in the buildings. I had taken the flat at least in part because the lake was nearby. I did not know then that it was infested with botulism.

I picked up the phone. “How’s morale?” asked David. “Not bad,” I said. “Pretty much packed.”

“Good,” he said. There was a moment’s silence, then: “Before you go, sit. In the hall. With your bags. That’s what Russians do. Just for thirty seconds, a moment of stillness, before you leave.”

I thanked him for ringing; it had been thoughtful. David was a polymath who had taught himself Russian, chaired a London borough council and was now writing a doctoral thesis on Jews and the opera. (He later finished it.) In between he searched for the tombs of the famous and the uploaded pictures to a site called Find a Grave, to which he was a leading contributor. I went back onto the terrace and had another kriek, or cherry, beer, deceptively moreish and sweet. Hangover juice. I picked up the Lonely Planet guide to Central Asia.

II

David and I had arrived in Brussels nine months earlier, in the autumn of 1998. We were on contract to the European Commission’s Tacis programme. Tacis was Technical Assistance to the Confederation of Independent States – to wit, Russia and the rest of what had been the Soviet Union, plus Mongolia. We were to find out about the programme’s projects and disseminate examples of good practice so that others could follow suit, either with or without Tacis assistance. (I naively thought we should also tell people what had not worked. I was quickly discouraged from this.) Tacis often took the form of making former Soviets do things the Western way. I quickly concluded that was not always wise. Yet in some areas, especially in the social sphere, much good was quietly done.

We recruited two Belgian colleagues, and took offices in the rue Breydel, a few yards from the Berlaymont, the hideous 1960s EU headquarters building on the east of the city centre. Our office was in an attractive early-century building that had been sympathetically converted. In that we were lucky, for the EU’s vast headquarters buildings were technocratic warts thrust down in the midst of 19th-century Brussels, large parts of which had been torn down to admit them. Fortunately the Berlaymont was encased in sheeting for the entire two and a half years that I was there, having been found to contain asbestos. It looked as if it had been wrapped by the Bulgarian artist Christo. But our own office had its drawbacks. On one occasion the office handyman removed the toilet to fix a plumbing problem; unable to find it, he left the toilet standing in our kitchen for nearly two months. I asked the office manager (who happened to be his wife) if this was the Belgian school of surrealism. She looked at me blankly.

The project began slowly and went on that way, despite our efforts. However, we decided to make as many contacts as we could with the Tacis projects in the CIS. David, who had contacts in parts of Russia, travelled frequently. I did so less often, but visited Moscow and Kyiv; the latter turned out to be enchanting, studded with churches and monasteries, the city centre perched on a bluff above the great glistening expanse of the Dniepr, alive with shades of Vikings and of Kievan Rus.

One day in June David and I were in the slightly soulless Italian restaurant where we often had lunch, surrounded by eurocrats. We were eating a large closed pizza each. We also drank wine, usually a small carafe, although there was always a bottle on the table that the restaurant hoped one would buy. It was, almost always, Aglianico del Vulture. This takes its name from Mount Vulture, a volcano in Basilicata, but always struck me as comic; I suppose not much else did in Brussels.

“This Vulture,” I said, “goes well with grey meat.”

“Yes, doesn't it,” said David. He reached into his pocket for his diary. “I was thinking. Could you pop over to Central Asia next month? See a few people. A week or two should be enough.”

Back in the early 1970s, when Soviet Central Asia, or Turkestan, was still largely closed to foreigners, I had read Fitzroy Maclean’s Eastern Approaches. As a young diplomat in Moscow in the mid-1930s, he was told by colleagues that he would never get permission to visit Central Asia. So he didn’t ask for it. Instead, he bought a railway ticket to Novossibirsk, where he changed onto the then newly-built TurkSib Railway. He was shadowed all the way by NKVD officers, sweating in their city suits, who will have cursed him roundly. The Soviet authorities must have assumed he was a spy, and indeed he likely was in it up to his neck. He eventually succeeded in visiting Alma Ata (now Almaty), Tashkent, Bokhara and Samarkand, and even crossed the Oxus into Afghanistan, reaching what was then the North-West Frontier of British India. Spy or no, Maclean was a wonderful writer and ever since I had read the book as a teenager, the region had fascinated me.

“Yup, okay,” I said.

III
I changed planes in Munich’s sparkling new airport, all glass plate and steel-wire braces. I was struck by the coffee machines at some departure gates, each with a notice warning the traveller that their flight was too short for coffee to be served and they should take it now. I tried to imagine rioting Germans enraged by lack of coffee.

Almaty was different. I queued for two hours at immigration and customs, then walked out into a dark, unsurfaced area, deserted but for a single taxi. I was then asked for $50 taxi fare to my hotel. After some discussion this became $20, at which point I gave up and got in the car. The ride to the hotel took over half an hour through dark, bare streets. In the hotel, the clerk could not find my booking in the file although I could see it quite clearly, on top. Having reached my room on the 25th floor, I then did battle with the sheet sleeping-bag, a Russian invention which consists of a small aperture into which you insert yourself with difficulty. It resembles a straitjacket. I finally sank into bed with relief at about three, to be woken a few minutes later and offered a massage, which I declined.

Everything improved in the morning. I threw back my curtains to find myself looking straight at the snowcapped peaks of the Tien Shan – the Mountains of Heaven – glistening in the sunshine; further down the slopes were bright green alpine meadows and thick woods. The mountains come so close to Almaty that a mudslide in 1921 wrecked the city and killed 500 people. In the opposite direction, the ground sloped gently down to the brown, semi-arid steppe, stretching, featureless, for over 1,000 miles north into Siberia. It was a crucial economic resource, providing grazing for the sheep that vastly outnumbered people in this, the world’s tenth largest country. Yet in the last decade the number of sheep had dropped catastrophically.

I had arranged, through a mutual friend, to meet a western World Bank official in my hotel first thing; he had been friendly in emails, but seemed oddly withdrawn when I greeted him in the lobby, and refused all offers of coffee or breakfast. He said very little. I never found out why. After a half-hour he left, and, disconcerted, I set about my business, making for the Tacis liaison office in the town. Here too I found an oddly strained atmosphere. The office consisted of a single large room; the young Italian in charge of the office took me out into the corridor to talk, and I sensed that he did not trust the Kazakh staff. Yet he was friendly enough, and promised to set up appointments for me for the rest of the day.

Later, his English colleague, a bluffer, more relaxed type, took me to lunch. Almaty seemed to me to be still rather Soviet; the USSR, of course, was only eight years gone. All the street signs seemed to be in Russian. But there were also increasing signs of Turkish influence. There were Turkish restaurants, Turkish banks, Efes and Turkish Tuborg beer and frequent flights to Istanbul and Ankara. At that time, the Turks as a matter of policy seemed to be reaching out to their Turkic neighbours as the Silk Road reopened for business.

It was an attractive place in some ways. In 1999 there were few high-rise buildings apart from the Kazakhstan Hotel (it’s a severe earthquake zone). But there was much early-Soviet architecture, for example the Academy of Sciences, which, I was told, was magnificent within. There were many, many trees, watered by ditches fed from the Tien Shan above, and plenty of shade; the temperature was a balmy 30 degrees C. Foreigners lived well, with trekking in the Tien Shan in summer and superb skiing in the winter. In the evening I went for a drink and a meal with my English colleague. We went to a restaurant that advertised itself as Tex-Mex; it had a choice of eight or nine beers and a very long menu. The tables were crammed with well-dressed young ethnic Russians armed with mobile phones.

But below the surface, I was told, all was not well. Unemployment had spiralled, especially in the dying industrial towns on the steppe; no-one knew the figures, but one source estimated the number of jobless as about a million (in a country of 10 million). One street in Almaty functioned as an informal labour market; the pavements were crowded with women carrying cheap grips, in which they carried working clothes for different types of jobs, from secretary to toilet cleaner – they’d take what was around. It was part of change. Everybody in the old Soviet Union had a job, but some of them did little in practice; those “jobs” no longer existed.

One European official told me bitterly that, as part of a poverty-alleviation scheme, they were helping to institute what was basically a 19th-century workhouse. This was an oversimplification, but it seemed it did indeed provide indoor care for the families of unemployed workers in the steppe rust-belt, who would themselves remain outside and would work in the project’s enterprises so that it would be self-supporting. I was told that there was considerable interest in this locally, because the state no longer had the funds to look after people the way it had. I was scandalized by the idea that the EU was helping fund a workhouse, but was unable to meet the people from the project or get further details. It did not help that my contacts were mostly expats. Anyone who has travelled knows that they love to tell tales to the visitor or the new arrival. I was told of much else that I could not confirm, but it was very hard for a foreigner to verify such stories, or to get an accurate picture of conditions in a country, in a short visit or even, sometimes, a long one.

IV
Late on the afternoon of the second day I left Almaty in a hired car, bound for Bishkek, the capital of Kyrgyzstan. It was a three-hour journey. Like Maclean 62 years earlier we followed the foot of the Tien Shan, and I was reminded of a journey of my own some years earlier from Siliguri to Jaigaon, across the Bengal plain; the great massif formed by the collision of India and Asia rises quite suddenly from the plain, and equally suddenly, tumbles back into it on the other side. Once again I wondered at the fact that one can swelter on the plain in tropical summer heat, and see snowpeaks that seem so close one could reach out and touch them.

On the far side, in Bengal, the plain had been fertile. Here there was steppe, nearly as flat, but semi-arid. Land with perhaps 100-350mm annual rainfall is not desert, but to plant it is to ask for trouble, for sooner or later the crop will fail, the organic matter in the land will have been depleted, and the native vegetation will have been destroyed. This in effect was the fate of Kruschev’s Virgin Lands scheme. Left alone, however, such land will support a shifting population of livestock. In Kazakhstan, some of it was in fair condition; certainly better than some of the steppe land in East Asia and North Africa that had been grazed nearly to extinction, and was turning to desert. Nonetheless livestock production was falling.

We stopped once on the journey, where a Kazakh police officer had all the passing cars lined up on a quiet stretch of road and was calmly turning over the drivers for a few dollars each. My Kyrgyz driver simply took his slush fund out of the ashtray and went to pay up. He made no comment; his face was a mask, and I wondered about the future.

After a couple of hours we turned south, towards the mountains and Bishkek. There were no border formalities; one just drove straight through. Kyrgyzstan is about two-thirds the size of Poland. Unlike Kazakhstan, it is virtually all mountainous, with peaks of over 7,000 metres. There is only a small area of semi-steppe in the north. It is here – again, at the foot of the Tien Shan – that the capital is sited. Bishkek, known in the Soviet era as Frunze, had about 900,000 inhabitants. Again, it was mostly low-rise, with a series of parks and plazas in the city centre. And many trees; it claimed to have more natural shade per head than any other capital in the world. It was clearly an Asian city. Ethnic Russians, however, were still said to be about 40% of the population and there were also a fair few Koreans. The ethnic Germans, however, had largely gone, and many Slavs were planning to go; a recent survey had suggested that between 190,000 and 280,000 people expected to emigrate “at some point in the future”.

The town was in good condition and seemed moderately prosperous; there was a new Hyatt-Regency under construction. A splendidly loopy Soviet touch was a large, ornate opera house. Unlike most places in the CIS, they still had an enormous Lenin. He stood in the big modern square in the city centre, leaning forward, arm in the air, in a pose of fraternal exhortation.

Bishkek women dressed to kill. Typical outfits include Lycra cycling pants (I did see one bicycle) worn with much lipstick and big funky earrings. The Russians seem to favour very, very short print dresses, and very, very high heels. A variation on this theme was the skirt that was ankle-length but split nearly to the waist and was so thin that it was almost completely transparent.

In fact, I liked Bishkek. As one now knows, some trouble did lie ahead; but in 1999 the city felt relaxed. There was freedom of speech. I called on the Kyrgyz editor of The Times of Central Asia, the excellent new English-language daily that covered the whole region and had correspondents in Almaty and Tashkent. The government wouldn’t stop her from publishing what she wanted, she said; indeed it tolerated a Russian-language paper which was heavily against it. Inevitably, she was subject to less formal censorship from the paper’s owners. “They do set the general editorial policy,” she said frankly. But it did not seem to bother her. She made a request for assistance which was revealing. She did not want staff training in newspaper production (the paper was extremely well produced), but in Western attitudes to journalism. “We want to understand how you think,” she explained.

In order to find out how she thought, I read the paper. It was well-written, lively, and covered a broad spectrum of politics, industry and the arts. One regular page carried quotes from the three Parliaments. “The difference between erotica and pornography is understood by everyone to the extent of one’s putrescence,” thundered the Speaker of the Kazakh Mazhilis. Quite. I turned to the small ads. “For sale: Genuine Kyrgyz yurt,” said one.

An example of democracy in action was the public row about the national currency, the som, that was going on while I was there. The national bank was under heavy attack from the Government and the public for failing to defend the value of the som, which had been sinking. The national bank kept a dignified silence but allowed a British consultant working with it through Tacis to write a spirited defence of the Bank’s policy. Emptying the national coffers by shoring up the som, he argued, would only destroy its credibility. He told me he was delighted with the article’s reception; it seemed to be changing people’s perceptions of the mechanics of currency and helping them to face up to reality.

Bishkek was not ideal. A consultant for a British firm, a very large Dutchman, had been badly beaten a few months earlier by a group of young men – one of them allegedly a policeman. I was strongly advised not to go out alone at night, and to avoid groups of youths. Exhaust pollution was hideous. The transition to the free market, and the break-up of the Soviet system, had brought real problems. Electricity consumption by industry had dropped, but the number of private connections needed was greater, and although ample power was being produced from the country’s big hydro-electric schemes, the grid could not deliver it. As elsewhere in Central Asia, the departing ethnic Russians and Germans were taking their skills with them. And no-one had had hot water at home for three months, since the communal heating system was switched off for the summer. (It was inefficient anyway, delivering about 25% of the hot water to the consumer.) In the countryside, the end of the state collective farms had left people with their own land. But few holdings were over 20 hectares and in the south of the country, few were over five. These were often not large enough to be viable, or to generate profits for investment. World Bank and EU projects had persuaded many people to form credit unions and to borrow communally, both for working capital for seeds and fertiliser, and for such things as storage facilities. New, more profitable crops had been introduced, such as leeks and red cabbage. But, for many people, life was a struggle to adjust and survive.

Yet somehow the atmosphere was much better than in Almaty, and the city seemed cheerful and open. (It helped that the Tacis office was clearly a happier place, run by a quiet but likeable Englishman.) Kyrgyzstan has had its troubles since, but on my brief visit, I liked it; and I wish it well.

I reserved judgment on my hotel. Sixties-built, once well-appointed, it had been allowed to slide. The towel-rack in the bathroom was heated, although it was 30-32 degrees C outside. The bathroom itself stank of diesel oil. The bed was rock-hard, and the bedside light had no chain; it was switched on and off with a piece of frayed string. There was an air-conditioner, but it made much noise and achieved little. Opening the veranda door instead simply let in the noise of the traffic nine floors below, along with clouds of exhaust fumes. And, worst of all, there were the whores. They sneaked into the lift with you on your way upstairs. They rang you at two in the morning. One knocked on my door after midnight.

None of this is funny. If I ever thought it was, I didn’t after meeting George (not his real name). George was an American pharmacist, from deep down in the Bible Belt. I had met him the previous October in Moscow, where he was staying in the same hotel. He was about 45 and had one ear. He had come to Moscow for his annual sex tour; I forget where he’d been the year before, but he gave me a run-down on what/who you could get there and through which orifice, and how much it cost. He’d chosen Moscow this year after arranging to meet women on a Web site. The women were, ostensibly, looking for marriage. George attended social events with them during the day. At night he had the hotel whores. In between, he sat on a stool in the lobby bar and mused on picking up a Russian wife to take home. “I met quite a nice one today, but she’d be no good – she doesn’t have any qualifications,” he said one night. “I’m hoping to get a doctor. Her earnings would be useful.” George was a friendly sort of chap but a bit dim, and there was not much point in lecturing him on sexual colonialism.

One night we got chatting to a tall, elegant whore, an ethnic Russian from Estonia. She was probably about 30. As a very young woman she had trained as a pharmacist herself, and had been sent to Angola to help provide basic medical care. She was shocked by the poverty, the poor water and the extent of infection. She met an elderly Portuguese, married him and travelled with him to Portugal, where the family ignored her. Then he died, and they virtually kept her prisoner. She escaped back to Moscow. She could have become a pharmacist again, but it paid about $150 a month. In the tourist hotels, she could charge $90 for 45 minutes. “What would you do?” she asked me over her shoulder as she led the slavering, drooling George to the lift.

When I returned to Brussels I ran a Web search with the keywords Russian, dating, introduction; and turned up a host of sites, some very dodgy, others just sad. Usually there were panels and panels of attractive Russian and other Slav women, often with professional qualifications, all seeking Western husbands. Most had a child, and most were either divorced, had never been married – or, in a number of cases, were young widows. Russian men lose their jobs and drink themselves to death, and their wives are carried off to the Bible Belt by men called George with one ear. Could this be why the Russians don’t like us very much?

V
After a few days I left Bishkek. Unable to find a flight to take me to Tashkent, I had planned to hire a car and driver. Probably we would have gone through Osh and into the Ferghana valley, home of the Heavenly Horses sought by the Emperor in Bruce Chatwin’s memorable article. We would also have crossed a bit of Tajikistan on the way. It would have been a beautiful journey, but gruelling; seven or eight hours to the Uzbekistan border, where I would almost certainly have had to leave the car and cross on foot, meeting another car on the other side in which to drive the remaining hour or two to Tashkent. So I was pleased when the travel agent told me she had secured a ticket on a flight from Bishkek. I told my English friend in the Tacis unit. “Kyrgyzstan Airways,” he echoed. “Oh, well I’ve generally got there eventually, I suppose.” We went out for a large Korean meal. The next day I got up at 5.15 and drove the 25 miles to the airport with a young man called Oleg in his Mercedes.

Oleg was about 25, short, stocky, with very high cheekbones, a shaven head and very light grey eyes. In fact Oleg was the sort you see on newsreels raising red flags on the tops of Reichstags. He was also one of the nicest, and most helpful, people I met on my journey. He had three children and was worried about the future; like so many ethnic Russians, I think he felt a stranger in his own country now, although he had been born in Bishkek and had always lived there. His parents, he said, had already gone “back” to Russia, and he was not sure what to do. Probably he would follow them.

I enjoyed the ride through the thin golden light of the early morning. Oleg helped me check in before he left and then we were driven out across the tarmac, less than 20 of us. Ahead of us was a small, very short trijet a little bigger than a Learjet, with a huge tailplane, and a round nose that stood higher off the ground than the rest of the plane. This was the YAK-40. We trooped up the tail stairs under the tailplane to find a large luggage rack; there was no hold. There were no doors to the rack, either. I pushed my briefcase as far in as I could, hoping it would not decapitate someone in an accident. The inside walls of the aircraft were unlined, and looked like the unfinished fibreglass you see on the inside of a kayak. The seats were very small, with low backrests and no head restraints. But they were covered with a very pretty chintz material.

I strapped myself in beside a large American evangelist in shocking pink. Three smartly-dressed crew members disappeared into the cockpit. The flight attendant stood up and did her safety briefing in Russian, then, noticing that there were foreigners aboard, smiled nervously and said something like this: “Well come on board, ladies and shentleman. Our flight time to Tashkent will be one whore, fifty minuets. Hev a, er, have a heppy plane!”

What followed was one of the most memorable flights of my life. There have been a few. Landing at dawn in Dominica, amongst the Stratocruisers and Super Constellations; a light aircraft in the Ecuadorian jungle; circling the crater of Cotopaxi; nosing down the Paro valley in Bhutan, looking for the airstrip during the monsoon. But the flight from Bishkek to Tashkent was the best of them all. The little YAK-40 rolled gently, and quite quietly, down the runway and eased itself imperceptibly into the air at a very low speed, so that I only realized we had taken off when I saw the fields falling away from us. I have flown in many aircraft, and once I was learning how to glide; but never have I been in an aircraft that felt so utterly at home in the air as this one did. They must have had to tie it down on the tarmac. We seemed to float through the air like a soaring bird, utterly stable, as we climbed up the side of the towering Tien Shan. As we drew level with the first high peaks, we drifted to the south, and the real magic began. Snow-capped summits rose to meet us, then fell away into deep valleys carved by glaciers. Long lakes snaked down the deeper valleys; mysterious tracks traversed the hillsides; here and there was a square enclosure of drystone walls for animals, in the middle of nowhere, that could have been there for one year or five hundred. I saw a group of bright blue and turquoise and bright green lakes like semi-precious stones in the morning sun. Slowly we glided across the Tien Shan until, in the far distance, I could see the gap where the Ferghana Valley must be. In the very far distance beyond, I wondered if I could see the High Pamirs at the junction of Tajikistan, Afghanistan, Pakistan and India. Then I looked back a little and realized that I must be looking into China. The mountains turned away from us; below was the northern slope of the Tien Shan, deeply scored by erosion, and the fertile strip of land at its foot. Then the ground started to flatten and turn brown; towns started to appear, and factory chimneys. We were over Uzbekistan. But, just for an hour, I had felt again that sense of wonder that I had thought I would not feel again, because I had been travelling too long.

VI
Tashkent airport had a dire reputation amongst travellers, with rumours of three-hour queues for immigration, and customs declarations that required your great-grandmother’s birth certificate to be attached in triplicate (with photographs). I left the happy plane with regret. I need not have worried. I have never got out of an airport so quickly. The immigration officer was young and pretty and she smiled at me.

The first person I saw as I left the terminal was a fleshy young Uzbek waving a placard with my name on it. “My name is Timur. My job is to take care of you, and if you like I will take you around Tashkent tonight and show you the sights. Now, this is our largest hotel. Note the excellent modern design of the buildings, the wide streets. That is Friendship Boulevard. Our people here are noted for their friendship. For their traditions...” Unremarked, a spectacular bright-blue Russian cathedral with silver onion domes flashed past. “...Which go back to the time of etcetera, down there is the Museum of Fine Arts, this is the park which we consider the centre of the city...” There was a large equestrian statue in the middle. “Who’s the guy on the horse, Timur?” I asked him. Timur collapsed with laughter. “The guy on the horse!” It was obviously the funniest thing he’d heard since Genghis Khan left sacks full of skulls all over Europe. “The guy on the horse! It’s Amur Timur, of course. The guy I’m named after.” Timur. Timur the Lame. Tamerlane. Ah.

Tamberlane would recognize little of Tashkent; neither, sadly, would Fitzroy Maclean. Indeed, the only older building I saw was the charming Romanov Palace in the central park, built for Grand Duke Nicholas Constantinovich, who was exiled to Turkestan in the late 19th century for womanising, swindling and generally being well dodgy. (He fathered a string of children by various mothers in the city.) Everything else was gone, for on April 25 1966 the city was shaken apart by an earthquake that left few buildings standing. So the Soviet authorities decided to rebuild this city of (today) 2.3 million as a showpiece of the system. In many respects they succeeded. To be sure, some of the blocks of flats I saw were depressing, but they were at least low-rise (for obvious reasons). And the city centre was one of the greenest I have seen. It was also one of the most alive. It was designed to be lived in, to be a meeting point, a social focus, for the city’s people. It seemed to have succeeded brilliantly.

I decided to explore without Timur, telling him as politely as possible that he would not be required until Monday morning, 48 hours hence. In the meantime, I decided to catch my breath.

I had been intending to stay in the Uzbekistan Hotel, but when I mentioned this to a colleague in Tashkent he issued a whore warning. “I’ll book you into the Meridien,” he said. “Unless, of course...” “No,” I said. The Meridien was totally lacking in character. It was also clean, cheerful and air-conditioned. And I arrived in time for breakfast. (Tashkent is an hour behind Bishkek.) So I sat down with a plate of ham and eggs. Then I tried to work out how to get to the park with the guy on the horse. It was not far away but of course, without Timur, I got hopelessly lost. Eventually, however, I turned a corner and found myself looking straight at the horse’s arse. Still, that was better than being stuck with one all day.

Timurlane stood at the post-Soviet centre of the city. The old one was Lenin Square, about a mile away. Between the two ran Sayilgoh, also known as Broadway. It was a straight, narrow street through the park, closed to wheeled vehicles and bordered by trees and grass, full of small stands selling shashlyk and drinks and surrounded by tables with parasols where one might linger at will. On the path crouched traders of several kinds, selling cheap jewellery and related tat. But most were selling paintings. It must have been one of the largest open-air art markets in existence. Most of the art was a disappointment. There were gauzy young girls communing with nightingales; faux Monarchs of the Glen before stylised mountains; strangely static rushing rivers; crumbling mausolea of Timurlane with dodgy perspectives and luridly blue domes; kitschy, busty nudes masquerading as tasteful eroticism. But it was cheerful enough stuff, God knows. I wandered slowly past the stands, stopping now and then, enjoying, after a hectic week, the sensation of not being in a hurry.

Then I saw a small, dark canvas, perhaps a foot square. It was conifer green, roughly finished; offset to its left, two figures scurried through the gloom, poorly-defined, but one clearly male, the other female; the man carried a candle which threw a luminosity around them. There were few details, but the sense of urgency and movement was such that one could almost feel a slight breath of air as their garments flowed around them and see the wisps of smoke from the candle drifting into the clear Central Asian air. I knew I had to have it.

The artist’s name was Bakhtiar. The matter was settled soon enough. He wanted 6,000 Uzbek som, about $40 at the official rate, perhaps $15 at the real one. I offered 3,500 som. (In Central Asia, unlike the Arab world, one does not demand extortionate amounts, or offer the derisory; opening bids will be about a third above or below the final price.) In the event, we settled on 4,000. Later I felt guilty. I had paid a man $10 for an oil he had painted, and had the nerve to shake his hand having done so. “I don’t know what you are worrying about,” someone told me later. “It’s not much it’s true, but I bet it’s more than he’d got if you hadn’t shown up.” Maybe. Later I made a more prosaic purchase: a local cassette of Joe Cocker. An Uzbek Joe Cocker bootleg. Every home should have one.

That evening I stayed up long enough to watch the news on CNN and then I collapsed into bed, realizing as I did so that I had not slept properly for exactly a week. Confused images hopped through my brain, like a monitor that has been left on for too long. Elena was sitting on Timur’s horse in the park waving at the passers-by; then it turned out the horse had only one ear and was grinning as it cantered off to leave a yurt standing on the plinth, then the flap of the yurt flipped back to reveal a Kyrgyz Airlines flight attendant standing demurely in the entrance, hands clasped in front of her. “I will now demonstrate the safety features of the YAK-40 yurt,” she said. She faded away to be replaced by a colleague from the EU office in Almaty, brandishing a bottle of vodka. I fell asleep.

The next morning I felt rested and ready to explore further. The soul of a city is best seen on a Sunday, when people are doing what they like doing, and not what someone else thinks they should be doing. I spent part of the morning with ex-colleagues from Syria at their office in the diplomatic compound; later, after three, I had nothing to do but wander through Tashkent (but slowly, mindful of the 40-degree heat).

Sayilgoh was just as busy. Everyone ambled through it in a relaxed fashion, dressed in an amazing variety of clothes. Like Bishkek, Tashkent is partly Russian and Orthodox, and partly Asiatic; but the Muslim influence is much stronger. There were plump, quiet Uzbek girls in black, unveiled but with their hair covered, their skirts below their knees. Tall blonde Russian girls with high cheekbones strode along on block heels wearing light cotton summer dresses. Studenty girls of both races stood on corners in jeans and tee-shirts. The constant, slight, smoky whiff of shashlyk combined with the warmth and the slight smell of dust in the air to remind me of Africa.

At the end of Sayilgoh, a large circle of people gathered round a barker who was introducing his teenage son, a contortionist. Dressed only in tracksuit trousers, the boy stood on his hands with his feet resting on his shoulders before cheerfully twisting himself into less and less feasible forms like an exhibition of knots at a naval museum. It was too much to watch, so I moved slowly on through the shade of the neem trees and across to the concrete plaza across the road, where two large, shallow lidos were separated by a narrow walkway; this walkway was sprayed by a row of water jets that shot ten feet or more into the air and cast a fine cooling moisture through the sunlight. Crowds of people, mostly young, splashed about in the lidos or sat together under the parasols by their side, next to the inevitable shashlyk stands. Every now and then a group of children or teenagers decided to brave the walkway, shrieking and giggling. A young Uzbek woman of startling beauty, dressed in a simple white cotton shift, stepped along it like a cat, laughing and holding her little boy by the hand.

Above the lidos, up a short ramp, was what had been, in Soviet times, the town square. In a sense it still was, as the most important Government buildings lay at its far side. But the heart had gone out of its great windswept expanse and in the soft summer afternoon it looked slightly forlorn, like a set for a film that has long been made, shown and forgotten. At one side was a plinth, surmounted by a globe. Until 1991 it had held the largest statue of Lenin in the Soviet Union. From below the ramp came the sound of splashing and laughter. People preferred Sayilgoh, shashlyk and the lido to Lenin Square.

To the right of the square was some wooded parkland. In the distance amid the trees was a low wooden building. Policemen milled around it, but that was not unusual; there were policemen everywhere in Tashkent, a legacy of the previous February’s bombings by Islamic dissidents. When I came closer I found that the building was one of two attractively-proportioned structures of young, blond wood, still with a resinous smell; they enclosed a graceful ornamental garden. At the far end of the garden was a plinth, and on the plinth a small orange flame guttered in the light breeze. The wooden structures were pavilions; on the inside walls were large, thin plates of steel inscribed with names. Above each plate was the name of a province, or vilayet (Uzbek is related to Turkish). The name Namangan caught my eye, as I had recently written a piece about a furniture manufacturer who worked in that town in the Ferghana valley. I remembered his name, and looked for it on the plates for Namangan Vilayet. Sure enough, there were four or five who shared his name, simply inscribed with their names and dates, 1919-1944, 1921-1942. I liked the memorial, with its flowers and grass and smell of fresh wood. It was not the Menin Gate, but sometimes less is more.

Behind the monument, a hundred yards or so away, the ground seemed to fall away sharply. I went over to the edge and found myself looking down a steep grassy bank to a pathway that ran beside a fast-flowing, yellow-green river, perhaps forty or fifty feet wide, between heavily-wooded banks. On the banks were young men in trunks, most sitting peacefully and watching the water. Now and then the water erupted briefly as someone belly-flopped into it and swam like crazy against the current for a minute or two, then grasped an overhanging branch and hauled themself out, to sun themselves contentedly on the bank again. I wandered slowly down the riverside path and found that it ran right below and behind the grandiose buildings that fronted Lenin Square; though they were less impressive from this side, with dirty windows filled with junk, and surrounded by sheds. The river was more interesting. Every few hundred yards there was a fountain stuck into the water so that great clouds of gossamer-thin spray drifted across the path and cooled me down. I rounded a corner to find a square of tennis courts where large numbers of young people were batting balls across the net. They wore trunks or sundresses, and made little noise, but they were laughing and smiling. I felt as if I had stepped back in time and was walking along the towpath of a river in a North British town in the 1950s, before there were computer games or Sunday supermarkets, and people strolled out after Sunday lunch to play with a ball and swim in the canal or take the sun. The atmosphere was contagious. And then I emerged from another cloud of gossamer spray from a fountain to find a kingfisher standing peacefully in the grass by the path, digesting its dinner. I came closer and closer but it made no move until I was five or six feet away, at which point it flew away, but slowly, not because it was frightened but because it thought it was somehow supposed to be. I liked Tashkent.

VII
But the next day was Monday, and it was time to do some work. Timur was supposed to pick me up but of course he didn’t, so an EU official, Mark, came himself in his own brand-new right-hand-drive Land Rover with British plates. At the office Mark hired a driver called Hassan who drove a Lada with a front passenger seat that rocked backwards and forwards. I perched on this and tried to look like a European Expert.

Today, Uzbekistan has a very dark reputation in the West, but in 1999 this was not so, although the first signs of trouble – including Islamic dissidence, potentially violent – were beginning to be more visible abroad. I reserved judgment at the time. I did find that Tashkent reminded one far more of Moscow than Bishkek or Almaty, both of which were acquiring Western overtones. This was no disrespect to Tashkent. Indeed, the cars in the street were, if anything, newer and smarter than they had been elsewhere; it was just that they were all Russian, whereas in the other capitals they no longer were. It was a detail, but telling. And again, the trams and trolleybuses; they were a lot older than they are in other cities, but were a lot more numerous, were not sprayed with graffiti, and were moving. This did remind me of Moscow, where the Metro trains were ancient but swept into the magnificent stations every 90 seconds without fail. (Tashkent also has a Metro with similar marble halls for stations, but I did not go on it. I did see the ventilator shafts, the tops of which, to my delight, were disguised as large red mushrooms with white spots.) However, Russian was no longer an official language of Uzbekistan. Uzbek is a Turkic language but is influenced by Russian, Farsi and Arabic and quite a few Turkish words are of Arabic derivation, too. (A project manager gently upbraided his tea lady for not bringing me water. “Abadan moya?” he asked.)

Westerners working in the curious admixture of nationalism and bureaucracy found themselves confused. A few said that they found working in Uzbekistan profoundly difficult, but people in Kazakhstan had told me much the same thing. Indeed, one Western expert told me that he had an excellent relationship with the responsible Uzbek minister, who knew a great deal about his work and provided constant guidance and support. I spent a pleasant hour or two with a Danish banking advisor who explained how his national counterparts had regarded him, at first, as a more-or-less useful way of getting their cronies onto overseas study tours. Danes are not noted for their patience but he found some, and after some months, a modus operandi emerged. He had a charming, attractive and very young Uzbek-Russian assistant who came to meet me at the front gate on heels like shooting sticks, wearing a dress that ended somewhere around her hips. It must have been awfully uncomfortable, but it certainly made an impression.

I called, too, at the temporary office of a new Swedish-run EU project. Their brief was to monitor the relationship between agriculture and the environment by means of remote sensing and Geographic Information Systems. This was all high-tech stuff, but my Swedish colleagues had little equipment so far; indeed, as yet they had no access to a toilet. “We hope to have the keys tomorrow,” they told me, “but, being on the 13th floor, it’s a bit inconvenient.” I sympathized. “I expect you can hang on,” I replied. They’d have their toilets tomorrow, or if not, soon thereafter; they were, quite rightly, not very worried about it.

I returned to the EU office to meet Mark for lunch. Afterwards, we were sitting at his desk when a water-pipe burst in the UN Development Programme office on the floor above. We charged around moving computers and pictures and siting buckets all over the floor, muttering about inter-agency cooperation. As the flood worsened, I developed a nosebleed, and had to slump down beside Mark’s desk between the jets of water. The flow of water increased along with the flow of blood. I fled into the courtyard, handkerchief at my face, and headed for Hassan’s Lada. Hassan, of course, had not been in it. He had been over the road reading the paper, and had left the windows up. We climbed into the fiery furnace and lumbered off down the track between the neem trees to my next appointment. I wondered what the kingfisher was doing.

VIII
Hassan appeared at the hotel at a quarter to two in the morning, just as I had asked him to. In the one day I had known him, I had come to like him a great deal. I settled into the Lada’s rocking chair and watched the night streets of Tashkent flash by. We shook hands at the departure gate and then an Englishwoman and I helped a confused young ethnic Russian through emigration. “This is first time I do this. I frightened,” she confessed.

We took off at half-past three, climbing in a rapid, tight spiral – I was told, for security reasons. Most of the passengers went to sleep. I watched the steppe appear below. We were flying west and it was a slow dawn, with ample time to admire the slow change of colour in the clouds and the orange tint spreading across the upper atmosphere. Below, huge salt pans drifted past at the north end of the Aral Sea, a wrecked, tragic landscape; two tiny gas-flares remained in sight for a long time, lost in the vast hazy plain. Slowly the steppe gave way to the Russian countryside with its great woods and patchwork of fields. Later, flying over the Ardennes, their woods and gorges soft in the summer morning, I reflected that I had fulfilled a long-term ambition; I had seen, albeit briefly, a region that was effectively closed until I was in my thirties.

When I got back to my Brussels flat, my first action was to take Bakhtiar’s painting from my briefcase and to set it on the mantelpiece. It stayed there until I left the city a year or two later, and today it hangs on the wall of my office in Manhattan. It is a little dark-green oil, about a foot square. Out of the gloom come two indistinct, flowing figures. They are in a hurry; that much is clear, but do they have an assignation? Or are they running from something in the green gloom behind them? Sometimes the painting catches my eye as I put on my coat at the end of the day, before I head out into the cold winter New York night, and I remember throwing back the curtains that first morning in Almaty to see great white peaks floating above emerald-green Alpine meadows. I remember Bishkek too, with its neoclassical opera house in the centre of Asia, and people in their summer clothes walking arm-in-arm under the shade of the trees past an enormous Lenin. I also remember that wonderful flight, gliding across the high yak-meadows past patches of snow with 7,000-metre summits in the distance, and glacial lakes set into the landscape like bright green and turquoise eyes. I can also smell shashlyk and dust, and see a green city with pools and rivers and people swimming in the sunshine, a kingfisher in the city centre, and a beautiful laughing young Uzbek woman in white, stepping like a cat between the fountains, with her child in tow.

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Mike Robbins's collection of travel writing, The Nine Horizons, was published in 2014 and is available as a paperback, as a Kindle download and in other eBook formats.