Heat, dust and philosophy

City softy Jeremy Atiyah rides a camel, survives a storm and contemplates life as a nomad in the Oman desert

Jeremy Atiyah 

Sunday, 14 March 1999

Bruce Chatwin used to worry that if human evolution had never designed us to live in cities, then perhaps we still ought to be living as nomads. In The Songlines, a book about travels in the Australian outback, he noted, anxiously, that human beings - from the shape of their big toe to the psychology of restlessness - had clearly been designed "... for a career of seasonal journeys on foot through a blistering land of thorn- scrub or desert".

To move or to rest? To travel or to settle? To change or to remain the same? I wondered if a spell in the desert could really offer answers to these ultimate questions. A touch optimistic? Last week I visited Oman in the deserts of southern Arabia, hoping to catch a glimpse of the lost world for which our species had evolved.

The Wahiba Sands, in the south of the country, was where I planned to make my trek. The area is at least the size of Wales, and arduous enough to challenge an effete city dweller like myself. But next to the vast Rub Al-Khali, Arabia's legendary Empty Quarter some 150 miles to the north, Wahiba is scarcely larger than Blackpool Beach. But if it was good enough for Wilfred Thesiger 50 years ago, it was good enough for me.

Finding a real bedu to take me across the sands did not promise to be easy. According to Wilfred Thesiger the bedu who assisted him on his desert trips were ultimately doomed to die slow deaths as "unskilled labour" in cities for which they had not been born.

In fact Thesiger's notoriously cynical predictions have not been borne out. It is of course true that the era of noble beduin tribes dominating the Arabian peninsula has passed. Camel caravans no longer carry frankincense resin from the groves of Dhofar to the Levant. The bedu of southern Arabia no longer survive by squeezing dew from rags left out overnight on bushes. But there are still at least 7,000 bedu in the Wahiba - that is to say, people who live without permanent homes, who seasonally migrate, who live from driving sheep and goats to new feeding sites.

In modern Oman a few bedu have even found new jobs: as tour guides, employing their unique desert trekking skills. In the Jiddat Al-Harasis area of Wahiba, the bedouin who once hunted the oryx to extinction are now responsible for managing the re-introduced herds and taking tourists to see them. In my part of the sands, local bedu such as Said Sultan take tourists on good old-fashioned camel treks in the style of Wilfred Thesiger or TE Lawrence.

Despite his undoubted bedu credentials (he wears a long beard, has a dagger in his belt, carries a stick, does not speak English and is as at home on a camel as behind the wheel of a pick-up) Said Sultan is worldly enough to liaise with a regular tour firm which sends him his European customers. "I've done about four or five trips with tourists every winter for the last eight years," he told me. "Most trips are a couple of days, though I've just had a German for 10 days."

Said Sultan drove me in his beaten-up Toyota the 15-odd miles from the edge of the sands to where his family were encamped. I asked if he preferred cars or camels. "Cars are pretty good actually," he admitted, gesturing at the 500-litre metal water tank we were transporting in the back.

The camps in these sands are not the traditional black camelhair Arabian tents. Sultan Said led me to an unsightly shelter of palm fronds and plastic tarpaulins surrounded by a wire fence (to keep the camels out) and topped by a TV aerial. The whole home, I was told, could be taken apart, moved and rebuilt elsewhere in a single day - though always at least four kilometres from the nearest neighbour.

Suddenly a sequence of stunningly beautiful children began appearing from behind the dunes, ranging from cheeky nine-year-olds with raffishly arranged head-scarves to tall youths in spotless white dish-dashas. Surprisingly, even the wife and daughters dared to come and shake my hand.

"We like living here," one of the teenage sons was explaining. "It's an easy life. All we do is send the animals out to feed. Who wants to live in a town?" Rabbits and chickens scuttled under my feet, laundry flapped on a string, the March sun shone strongly but not excessively hot. Meanwhile, Said Sultan was preparing the camels, tying on the simple wooden harness and the water skins, shoving football-sized lumps of congealed dates into their slobbering mouths, before allowing them to vacuum up the water in the tank with more noise than a draining bath.

"We were riding four of the finest camels in Arabia and if necessary could travel both fast and far." Thus did Thesiger describe his entrance to the Wahiba. But until a camel has helped you cross a waterless desert, it is hard to understand the bedouin reverence for these reptilian beasts with their constant belchings, bony, articulated necks and underdeveloped bottoms. I was given an off-white female named Salmana, while Said Sultan led two males; we departed on foot, the animals plodding silently into the dropping sun.

The terrain comprised long valleys of shimmering flat gravel, divided by equally long sand hill ranges. The Wahiba is not an entirely barren desert: in places low arak trees and scrubby ghaf bushes dot the sands, providing both firewood for the bedu and fodder for the animals. We picked over waves of sand, descending into sandy crescent hollows and negotiating minor avalanches. Said Sultan skipped joyfully ahead, finding invisible paths up the dunes, while I laboured behind, unable to prevent Salmana nibbling in a leisurely manner from every ghaf bush in sight.

A couple of hours later, exhausted by the dunes, we rode: I astride my camel, Said Sultan, rather more elegantly, kneeling on his. But riding a camel, as I soon found out, is no fun for beginners. Salmana's irregular, lurching movement had soon given me an aching bum.

With the sun setting, we stopped to make camp. Said Sultan hobbled the camels to stop them disappearing, and we drank from the skins. Bearing in mind TE Lawrence's stories of drinking foully brackish or even sulphorous water in the desert, I was pleased to note that our water tasted oddly of wax and sour yoghurt without being undrinkable.

We ate in complete darkness beside the fire, sitting cross-legged on opposite sides of a dish of hot mutton stew which we ate with our hands. The highlight was the bread: a round, flat loaf which Said Sultan had cooked by burying it in the sand beside the cinders. Apart from the occasional moan of a camel, the only sound was of the wind puffing off the dunes. We had no tents, discounting the very slight dangers of rain or of poisonous animals (adders leave noticeable slither tracks, and scorpions leave ragged, asymmetrical puncture marks in the sand). Warm in my sleeping bag, having drunk too many Arabic coffees with ginger and cardamom, I lay staring at a wild moon.

The next morning, after breakfasting on sweet tea and explosively fermented milk, we began inching across a vast plain, featureless except for occasional isolated trees. After a couple of hours I noticed a distant puff of dust approaching from the far side of the plain. A car? "My brother-in-law," remarked Said Sultan. When the car eventually reached us a man stepped out and the three of us sat cross-legged in the plain to catch up on the desert gossip.

Did we discuss the question of all questions, the nature of human restlessness? As if in response to Bruce Chatwin's anxieties, the true power of the desert decided to show me its hand later that day. Shortly before dusk an enormous thunderstorm suddenly exploded over our heads.

Instantly Said Sultan had us and all our luggage buried in the sand under a clammy plastic tarpaulin. A drastic solution? Yes, but considerably better than the alternative, namely to be totally exposed to the fury of the most violent and prolonged storm I have ever seen in my life. For the next 12 hours I lay immobile and frozen in a coffin-like space, tormented by the roar of rain and thunder, and asking myself whether this was what people had been designed for: to cower alone in the primeval mud, incomprehending and terrified in the face of nature.

Possibly. Or possibly not. City life, I told myself, deserved another appraisal.

OMAN

GETTING THERE

Jeremy Atiyah flew as a guest of Gulf Air (tel: 0171 4081717) which offers return flights to Muscat for pounds 299 plus pounds 27 tax, until 31 May (excluding Easter).

WHERE TO STAY

The arrangements in Oman were made courtesy of Caravanserai Tours (Tel: 0181 691 2523), which can put together any kind of tailor-made tour in the country. For example, an eight-day tour, including a night or two in the Wahiba Sands, would cost pounds 1,395 per person, based on two travelling together. Locally based Al Nahdha Tourism (tel/fax: 00 968 799928), run by the extremely experienced Heide Beal, can also arrange any kind of travel or tourism in Oman.

FURTHER INFORMATION

Visits to Oman are not recommended during June to August when the weather is extremely hot. Visas are obtainable from the Oman Embassy at 167 Queen's Gate London SW7 5HE (tel: 0171-225 0001, or premium rate line 0891 600567 for recorded visa information).

Sometimes, you need to get away from the same old routine

JEREMY ATIYAH 

Sunday, 7 March 1999

Glowering clouds, wet window panes, a black sea, gulls floating on the storm, bandy-legged men hitching up their robes to wade through ankle-deep rivers where streets should be, cardboard boxes, old pieces of furniture and sheep heads floating through the market place. That's right. It's early evening in southern Arabia. I'm in Oman to ride a camel across a desert.

Why? It is because we all need to act the bedouin from time to time. Riding a camel over a distant horizon will, I am assured, put me in touch with the nomad and the hunter-gatherer deep inside me. It is about remembering that the sun shines in the day and the moon in the night. It is about not having to answer the telephone a hundred times a day. It is also, funnily enough, about discovering what made Genghis Khan tick and why the Great wall of China had to be built.

Except that at this rate my camel-trek will probably be rained off. Which gets me wondering what attitude self-respecting camels have to rain - I suspect it makes them feel terribly insecure and useless. What is the good in having spent millions of years investing in a giant water barrel on your back when there is plenty of water lying around everywhere in any case? The poor animals might as well look for jobs as wine critics in Saudi Arabia.

It must be the same for the bedouin. These are the people whose area of special expertise lies in surviving drought, sunshine and sand storms, whose spiritual energies are devoted to coping with the bitterness of impermanence, when they are not breaching other peoples' Great Walls of China. But when they look out of their tent flaps in the morning and realise that the desert has today turned into a nicely watered piece of agricultural land and tomorrow will be blooming like an Amsterdam flower festival - what on earth are they to supposed to make of it?

No doubt they will ask themselves all the usual tough questions about the nomadic life. Is the ability to ride for 19 days without water, or to face off a 100mph sand storm, really a more useful asset than being able to manage a medium-sized grocery-export business for example?

And by the time - say a fortnight later - that the desert is full of fat-tailed sheep and ripening tropical fruit even the thought of owning things like fridges and electric ice-cream makers will begin to seem rather less embarrassing than before. But a leaking piece of woven camel hair draped over a frame of sticks might no longer look like such a great place to spend the night.

The next stage is they'll be dropping out from bedouin society altogether. Instead of rugs designed to be rolled up and bunged on the back of a camel, they will acquire wall-to-wall carpeting; instead of water-skins they will have bottles of French mineral water. All in all, they look like finding the repressed urbanites deep inside themselves long before I ever find a single nomad. By the way, has anyone seen my umbrella?

SIR LUDOVIC KENNEDY

The writer and broadcaster recalls the tension - and the laughter - of filming in Moscow in the Sixties

INTERVIEW BY JEREMY ATIYAH 

Sunday, 28 February 1999

I've got one of those beastly new passports now, and it's empty. There are so many countries that don't stamp your passport these days.

Back in the early 1960s, it was different. I had a lovely old black passport. I was working on the BBC's Panorama programmes. When Robin Day and I went to Moscow, we were among the very first TV people allowed entry. In fact we got into trouble for filming vegetable queues and we were hauled up in front of the Board of Moscow Television. There were seven of them sitting in a row facing us. Their boss, in the middle, looking down on us, said: "The path you have chosen is the wrong one". Our producer, Jeremy Murray-Brown, just burst out laughing.

Some hilarious things happened to us in Moscow. One night, Jeremy was out very late at night by himself and he had no means of getting home. In fact he didn't know where he was. But suddenly he heard this huge rumbling noise: it was a Soviet tank coming up the street. So Jeremy decided to stick out his thumb and hitch a lift. The tank stopped. Jeremy asked: "Can you take me to the Hotel Ukraine?" And the tank driver agreed to take him home.

It was also pretty tense. Pretty grim. Climbing the steps to board the flight out we saw two men in trilbies. I thought we were going to be arrested. But they didn't stop us. An hour after take-off, the pilot announced that we were leaving Soviet airspace. The whole plane erupted into spontaneous cheers.

Another trip I did in those days for Panorama was to Saudi Arabia. The flight from Jeddah to Riyadh was extraordinary: there were sheep in the aisles and lots of clucking hens. When we arrived, a prince called Salman took me and my cameraman out into the desert and organised races for the retainers, using his starting pistol and a camera to snap them at the finish. It was like something out of Shakespeare.

We camped out, sitting under the stars with the prince, eating meat with our fingers. One sheep per night. The cameraman and I had a tent to ourselves. This may have been Saudi Arabia but there was a bottle of J&B and a pitcher of cold water waiting for us when we retired to sleep.

My first trip to India was another unusual experience. I was riding a taxi to Bombay when suddenly a man in a sky-blue suit and red teeth stopped the car, opened the door and got in. This was odd enough. Then he began asking questions. "What are you thinking of Harold Macmillan, Kingsley Amis and Charles Dickens?" he asked. There was a long pause. I asked what he was thinking.

"I am thinking of a poem about you," he said. "Happy in Love, Dauntless in Work, is Mr L Kennedy of the BBC."

I complained that it didn't rhyme, so he tried again:

"I seal with a kiss, our heavenly bliss," he began, but at that moment we arrived and I was spared the rest of his poem.

Sir Ludovic Kennedy's latest book, `All in the Mind' was published in January by Hodder & Stoughton, price pounds 18.99.

A nose for the good life

A vineyard tour is a great way to learn the difference between Bull's Blood and Bordeaux, says Jeremy Atiyah

Jeremy Atiyah 

Sunday, 28 February 1999

Have you ever wondered why the picnic wine you drank from a plastic bottle with manchego curado and jamon serrano in that orange grove in southern Spain last summer tasted so much better then than it did after you had brought a couple of dozen boxes of the stuff back to England?

If this has happened to you (and you have spent the rest of the winter languishing in a warm-beer-induced depression) I suggest a wine tour: not cheap but a hell of a way to learn about wines. Tours revolve around tastings and multi-course gourmet dinners accompanied by large numbers of wines.

The number of countries on the standard wine-tour itineraries has rocketed in recent years. Alongside the old stalwarts, France, Italy and Spain, tours and tastings of the best wines of Switzerland, Portugal, Hungary, Bulgaria, Chile, South Africa, California, New Zealand and Australia are all possible.

Two specialist operators who can provide wine tours of all or most of the above destinations include Arblaster and Clarke (tel: 01730 893344) Alternative Travel (tel: 01865 315678) and Wine Trails (tel: 01306 712111). Holidays on offer include group tours with expert guides, walking tours of vineyards, as well as virtually any kind of tailor-made package. Many wine tours take place during the harvest season, which means early October for the European wineries. In fact, tastings and vineyard walking tours can take place at any time of year.

A (somewhat subjective) list of the best wine-destinations might begin with Rioja in northern Spain. The wine is fantastic, the scenery divine, and the prices are not as high as in France: a nine-night tour with Wine Trails costs pounds 1,095, not including flights.

"Chiantishire" tours of Tuscany are also fairly irresistible: five nights in Umbria and Tuscany in October cost pounds 999 with Arblaster and Clarke. If that still sounds expensive, try Jerez in Andalusia; Wine Trails can put together a package of five nights to that area, including lots of sherry, several gourmet dinners and visits to at least one bodega each day for about pounds 450 (not including flights).

The Eastern European destinations may not sound terribly promising by contrast but the vineyards look just as nice in the sunshine. And in Hungary there are ancient traditions of wine-making: visits to the Tokaj region, from the beautiful Baroque city of Eger, are an excuse to experience the famous Bull's Blood wine, once known as the "Wine of Kings". A five- night trip next October costs pounds 699 with Arblaster and Clarke.

The more traditional wine areas of France, such as Bordeaux, can work out expensive. Another Arblaster and Clarke trip where you stay as "private guests" of Chateau Lascombes and enjoy entertainments such as visiting the First Growth of Chateau Latour, amounts to no less than pounds 1,500 for four nights and five days (with outstanding food and wine).

Do-it-yourself wine tours are perfectly feasible as long as you are in a place which has a tradition of wine-tasting. Oporto in northern Portugal is one such place: a vast number of different Port wines can be sampled by simply walking from one warehouse to the next. This sublimely pleasant experience is free.

It's different down south

Jeremy Atiyah samples the pride and despair at the heart of the slow, traditional life of Italy's Calabria

JEREMY ATIYAH

 SUNDAY 21 FEBRUARY 1999

Take one elegant Piedmontese lawyer with a very long Roman nose. Add a rumbustious Calabrian orange-grower with Arab blood in his veins, who not only makes his own cheeses, sausages and wines, but also treats disobedience as a fine art. The result? Two Italians.

At Rome's Fiumicino Airport a fortnight ago I noticed that the gates for Turin, Milan and Venice were dressed up like Bond Street boutiques. The gate for my flight to Calabria meanwhile was stuck in a basement, a sad Cinderella, hidden from view by the wicked sisters of the north.

If so, this was nothing new. It is all part of a 2,000-year-old conspiracy, stemming back to the days when the Calabria area, populated largely by disaffected Greeks, made the mistake of aligning itself with Hannibal against Rome. The result: a scorched-earth policy which has alienated the locals for more than 20 centuries.

Fortunately, I had one of those alienated locals to show me round; my friend Francesco, a typical Calabrian who has fled to the north but returns at every opportunity to eat his mother's pickled mushrooms and sun-dried tomatoes with anchovies and garlic, not to mention local delicacies like sanguinaccio, a sweet sauce made of fresh pig's blood, containing nuts, raisins, sugar, orange peel and cooked wine. You eat it with bread.

Francesco's view of Calabria is a typical mix of pride and despair. The mafia, he scoffs, are unintelligent, mediocre people who have plundered Calabria and are still preventing new funds from reaching the area. But simultaneously he inhabits the same emotional world as any Calabrian who could grow a black beard in less time than it takes to kill a pig. "If your brother is murdered," he once told me, "your life changes immediately. People see you with different eyes. You have a big baggage to carry. You must stay with your family. You must be serious. Until la vendetta." With this warning in mind we set off round the peninsula.

Calabria is a narrow, mountainous land. Tours tend to involve switching from one coast to the other, back and forth across the central spine, where once grew the timber that built Rome's navies. A linguistic remnant of these treasured forests (Latin: silva) can be found in La Sila, in central Calabria - mention this area, and locals still brighten up with talk of giant pine trees, lush pasture, deer and foxes scampering through sparkling snow.

But mention Aspromonte ("harsh mountains"), in the far south, and a sinister silence falls. This stony land of cliffs and narrow, barren valleys is where 12-year-old shepherds carry sawn-off shotguns to keep wolves at bay. Tracts of the Aspromonte are entirely in the hands of the mafia. Kidnap victims languish here, locked in mountain caves beyond the reach of the carabinieri.

In fact, much of Calabria has an untamed aspect. Strange little medieval villages hang on to rocky crags in the sky everywhere you look. Even the main centres can feel medieval: one of my first stops was in the city of Cosenza, known as Citta dei lupi, or wolf city. I found wet cobbles, half-lit balconies, fig trees growing out of walls, crumbling archways, smelly alleys and stairways. The people? All in the duomo, of course, bundled up in hats and scarves, freezing under bare columns and being harangued by the priest on international politics and the necessity of employing more priests.

Let no one say Calabria is entirely behind the times. In summertime, after all, tourists from all over Italy flood down to Tropea on the Tyrrhenian Sea, while over on the Ionian side, Soverato is compared to Rimini (except that Calabria's waters are much cleaner). But I was not looking for resorts; I was looking for clues to Calabria's non-Italian identity. And a few miles south of Soverato I emerged from olive groves on to the coast at a promontory known as Punta Stilo.

The sea was pale but smelt of fresh salt. On a temple platform by the beach, I saw remnants of plain Doric columns, where Greek settlers once prostrated themselves before the sea. Francesco paced the platform barking into his mobile phone, but it still felt like a holy place. In 1972 a pair of bearded, naked gods in bronze - the bronzi di Riace - were pulled from the water just to the south of here. These giant Calabrian gods, 2,500 years old but detailed down to the finest veins and abdominal muscles, have been seized on as evidence of early local talent: when these were crafted, Rome had hardly been more than a twinkle in the eye of Zeus.

But where does pride in the past cease and backwardness begin? We drove up a narrow mountain road from Punta Stilo to the village of Bivongi, in a smoky green valley overlooked by ruined Norman castles, where peasant women walked in single file with baskets on their heads. Popular Bivongi dishes, I was told, included dormice with tomatoes and pasta. In the hills behind the village thunders an extraordinary 300ft-high waterfall; long known to the Bivongis, it was only "discovered" by the rest of the world 10 years ago. Meanwhile, in the village centre, on a wall overlooking the piazza, is a faded but clearly visible stencilled face of Mussolini, over the word Duce. Nobody has got round to cleaning it off in 50 years.

So slowly do things move here. Until inquisitions from Rome finally killed off the Orthodox Church in the 15th century, this had remained a strongly Greek area, a ghostly vestige of the Byzantine Empire. But now, astonishingly, the Greeks are on the way back. In the 11th century Byzantine monastery of San Giovanni, which stands semi-ruined on a mountain-top overlooking Bivongi, a Greek monk with a long beard and a revolutionary black hat has taken up residence again. His name is Kosmas Papapetrou and he comes from Mount Athos, Greece's holy mountain.

"People here are interested in getting back to their roots," he explained, pouring me a grappa in a brick room cluttered with icons. "I was invited to come by the local people. So I came. I love it here. South Italy has a very special spirituality. The mountains remind me of Athos. The only noise to disturb me is the sound of running water. In a sense, yes, you could say I am trying to recreate the past, but a glorious past is not reason enough to keep me here. I have not come to impose anything. I am here to offer my work, and to promote peace between the Catholic and Greek churches, between Italy and Greece." A couple of curious Italian tourists were dropping by for a chat with the monk even as we spoke.

But the Greek presence in Italy is older, perhaps, than even Kosmas Papapetrou can imagine. Calabria and Sicily were where the Greeks and the Italians met for the first time in history 3,000 years ago, when Greek pioneers set out from their homelands in search of living space. And, incredibly, I had been told, the Aspromonte still contained remote villages where the locals spoke a form of ancient Greek. I intended to visit one.

Driving past signposts riddled with bullet holes ("This is Calabria," explained Francesco, wearily) we arrived in the mountain-top village of Bova on a desolate, rainy evening to find the place in uproar. Italy's Yellow Pages, published by a company belonging to the media magnate Silvio Berlusconi, had just appeared showing the map of Italy with a gun where the village of Bova should have been. The local Communist mayor told me they were planning to sue. It wasn't fair, he said. There weren't any kidnappings here any more. It was all northern propaganda.

"Forget about the mafia," he said. "The interesting thing here is that we are Greek. Until 30 years ago everybody spoke Greek here. Now we are beginning to lose it, but there is enough awareness to keep it alive. We are stubborn people. The Greek Orthodox religion was not shifted out of here until 1593 - we were among the very last to capitulate to Rome. Even after that we continued to hold Orthodox services in secret. Are we descended from the ancient Greeks? Of course. When we have a problem in our village we go into the square and discuss it, just like the Athenians did."

Some scholars, in fact, have claimed that the Greek presence in Calabria dates back only to the 15th century, when the Ottoman invasion of Greece drove them here as exiles. The mayor of Bova does not believe this. As evidence, he pulled out a tray of old ornamental goat collars and stamps for fresh cheese. "These geometrical designs are described in Homer," he said. "People dig these up in archeological sites in Greece. But these were made here by our shepherds in the last 30 years."

Bova is not a cheerful place. Its fantastic eagle's nest location is a false promise. The village currently comprises a muddle of alleys, a cold, crumbling church and a ruined Norman castle with one wing occupied by a Bohemian from Switzerland. Its population has declined from 5,000 to nearer 500; most of its houses are falling down; money promised by the government has been frozen in the bank for 25 years because of political and bureaucratic wrangles.

Of course, the north of Italy has had it better. But only in beautiful Calabria - until so recently - have shepherd boys entertained themselves by carving wood into patterns which were sung of by Homer.

CALABRIA

GETTING THERE

Jeremy Atiyah flew to Lamezia Terme in Calabria, via Rome, as a guest of Alitalia (tel: 0171-602 7111). Return flights cost pounds 190, including tax, until the end of March. Cars can be rented in the airport on arrival.

There are no direct flights to Calabria from the UK, although daily direct flights to Naples on British Airways (tel: 0345 222111) from London are currently available for about pounds 185, including tax. The onward journey by train or car from Naples to Calabria takes about four hours. Direct charter flights to Catania and Naples on Monarch are also available, at a variety of prices and can be booked through a travel agent such as Baileys (tel:             01933 410570      ).

WHERE TO STAY

For independent travellers, local hotels and pensions are inexpensive. Call the Italian tourist board for a list of options. Long Travel (tel:             01694 722193      ), which specialises in southern Italy, can offer tailor-made packages including return flights and hotel accommodation in Calabria, from the beginning of May. One option is a rural "agritourist" hotel (a converted farm), where guests walk, pick oranges, ride horses and enjoy fabulous home- cooked food. Half-board accommodation, scheduled return flights to Lamezia and use of a car costs about pounds 700 per person per week. You can book just the half-board accommodation for pounds 273 for the week. A hotel on the coast at Capo Vaticano is also available at similar prices.

FURTHER INFORMATION

To view the waterfall at Bivongi, visit the local town hall, Municipio di Bivongi, (tel:             00 39 0964 731523      ), where they can arrange hire of a jeep for a small charge. The Italian State Tourist Board (tel: 0171 408 1254) is at 1 Princes Street, London W1R 8AY. The Blue Guide series publishes a book on Southern Italy in its range.

Patricia Rozario - `Getting visas is a real headache'

INTERVIEW BY JEREMY ATIYAH

SUNDAY 07 FEBRUARY 1999

My passports are always full of stamps. I keep an Indian passport even though I have lived in Britain for 20 years. It's a sentimental thing. My mother still lives there and I like the feeling that I can get back home at any moment.

Getting visas is a real headache, though. In fact, I've just come back from a battle at the Spanish embassy where I was trying to renew my Schengen [most of Europe] visa. I had all the correct paperwork but the woman in the embassy still gave me an earful. She told me I was lucky next to my compatriots. She even seemed to be complaining that my job was more interesting than hers. Why do they have to speak so nastily? I told her I didn't understand why she was in a rage.

People ask why I attend embassies in person when I could get others to sort my visas out. I think it's because I want to keep in touch with normal life. I want to know how we foreigners are being treated.

I once had a difficult time flying into Athens very late at night. I had a visa but the man behind the desk didn't dare take responsibility for letting me in while his boss was asleep. My composer friend who spoke Greek protested: "She's a famous singer. She's singing at the Megaron." But his Greek was not that good so they decided to let me go and detain him instead. "You go, madam," they said. I refused. It took a lot of persuasion to let my friend go.

Which passport stamps do I remember best? A Chinese visa intrigued me. I got myself one when I was alone in Hong Kong. The visa only took a few hours to be issued and it was an old-fashioned one, which I liked. The whole experience of just going over the border was beautiful. It was lovely to see all those Chinese people.

As for India, I go back every year now. I helped start a musical festival in Bombay a few years ago, which I always attend. When I was younger, it used to be emotionally hard for me to go back - I couldn't take more than a couple of weeks. Nowadays, I am much happier and more relaxed about going.

Bombay, where I was born and brought up, carries a great sense of survival. It's such an active, tough, positive place, in spite of all the competition. People still manage to have fun even when they are up against it. I get renewed when I see my friends there. Over here there is more of a tendency just to get depressed about things.

I'm a bit of a curiosity over there. People ring up my parents when they read about me. Western classical opera isn't well-known in India, but sometimes after performances Indians come and tell me that they enjoyed my voice in spite of not understanding the music. It's great to think I might have turned them on to opera.

Patricia Rozario is an Indian soprano. She is performing on 4 and 6 February in the Canary Islands, and on 1 March at the Queen Elizabeth Hall, London.

Calabrians just don't see the bright side

JEREMY ATIYAH

SUNDAY 07 FEBRUARY 1999

HAS ANYONE ever whispered in your ear that Calabria in the south of Italy might not be all bad? I doubt it. Everyone knows this is the fag-end of Italy, the stubbed toe with chilblains, the place that all good men leave as soon as they are old enough to shave. The place that never gets any EU funds because if it did the mafiosi would get them. And I'm not just reporting the words of some snobby Milanese stockbroker in a lamb-skin jacket. This is what the locals keep telling me.

I wonder where the Calabrians lost their self-esteem. Friends who are supposed to be showing me the positive side of local life can't help lapsing into gloomy self-recrimination at the slightest opportunity. "Oh, good people don't live here," they say, pointing at some innocent passer-by with bandy legs. "We have only the mediocre ones. The ones who were left behind. It's so strange. Look at these people. Dark clothes, dark cars, dark glasses, dark houses. Everything dark. This is not a modern country like Britain you know."

If that isn't a masochistic self-perception, I don't know what is. Look at this place. It is slap-bang in the middle of the Mediterranean. It is the place - once known as Idalo - that gave all of Italy its name. What I see from where I am sitting is bright sunshine pouring on to stone tiles through an open door. Just outside is an orchard of trees loaded down with oranges. The vines are budding. The air smells of mountain pines and wood-smoke mixed with faint suggestions of Sicily, the Aeolian Islands, the Tyrrhenian Sea and the ships that once ruled the Mediterranean world. Perhaps I am insensitive but I can't quite see the badness and the loathsomeness in all this.

Perhaps the people are just bad. Well possibly, if you believe in the Hollywood version of southern Italy. And if you insist, yes: perhaps a handsome boy with a black chin and a beautiful girl with red lips and white skin will kiss somewhere in Calabria tonight, and perhaps they will have a child, and conceivably some bad godfather who had had other marriage plans for the girl will then have her shot to death, causing blood to splatter over her dress on the steps of the church.

But I suspect plenty of other people will not be shooting their friends or relatives. My experience of the Calabrian people so far is this. Last night I arrived with the address of one Calabrian in my pocket. By 11am today that friend had asked another friend to call his aunt to have a word with her lawyer to send a message to the mayor to suggest to the carabinieri to persuade the Italian military to provide a snow-plough to clear a road for me to visit the ancient forests of Sila in the mountainous interior of Calabria. Why? Because the Latin poet Virgil mentioned them, that's why.

But to judge by the way the Calabrians talk about themselves, the children are still begging in rags, the towns are still locked into never-ending cycles of self-inflicted poverty and misery. If only I could put them all into psychotherapy. I want to take them away from their oranges, their olives and their wine, and send them to England to live in a dark, draughty castle and eat dry scones for a month. Then I want to bring them back to the sunshine and see how much progress they have made in the field of self- esteem. They deserve the break.