Calling all tomb-sweepers

Calling all tomb-sweepers, Maronites and subjects of King Taufa'ahau Tupou IV: go on, spoil yourselves, take the day off

JEREMY ATIYAH 

Sunday, 2 May 1999

You are working tomorrow on the May Day bank holiday? Oh sorry. You must be an ambulance driver. So you will have to take another day in lieu to remember the toils of the working man.

Well why not. I know someone who makes Christmas lunches and sets up a tree with presents under it every August. It fits in better with her schedules. And we all know how inconvenient it is to arrive in, say, Tonga only to find out that it is the birthday of King Taufa'ahau Tupou IV and that all the shops are closed and there's nobody to fix your washing-machine. Why not let individuals choose their own holidays?

Once freed from collective holidays, the only remaining question will be how many each country should allow us. The UK currently has eight, which seemed reasonable to me until I once had the pleasure of working for a few months in Beirut. There the rule was to take as many holidays as possible in order to avoid the risk of giving affront to any rival sect, which, as the Lebanese know, can sometimes be a dangerous business.

During my brief stay I enjoyed two Easters (Roman and Orthodox), two major Islamic holidays (Eid al-Fitr and Eid al-Adha, both lasting several days) and the Shi'ite holiday of Ashura. Then there were holidays for the Druze, the Maronites,the Jacobites, the Syrian Orthodox, the Protestants, the Armenian Catholics, not to mention the really minor minorities. On the very few days where there was no holiday the country used to close down for a general strike instead. All in all I found it an excellent place to work on a short-term contract.

China is another place where a lack of consensus leads to a healthy double helping of holidays. The government in 1949 decided to replace traditional Chinese holidays with new secular ones like the Birthday of the People's Liberation Army or The Birthday of the Chinese Communist Party. Any excuse for a holiday I suppose. But in recent years the Chinese people have unilaterally reverted to celebrating all their ancient holidays as well. Woe betide you if you expect to get a plumber round in Peking on Tomb-Sweeping Day. As for Chinese New Year - never do so many couplets on so many red posters avert so many malevolent spirits. In other words, steer well clear of the Chinese world when a billion people are taking the entire week off work (next February for example).

The rest of the Far East, on paper, is equally well-endowed with holidays. The Japanese for example have fifteen official holidays per year, and the South Koreans have no fewer than seventeen. The only snag is that people in that part of the world prefer to carry on working during their holidays.

Another difficulty about collective holidays arises in those countries where everybody knows a holiday is coming, but nobody can tell you exactly when. In places like Bhutan astrologers have the power to shove in extra holidays at the last minute (these remarkable people can also authorise things like the skipping of inauspicious months).

By the way, the other end of the scale is that country not best known for holiday fun, Saudi Arabia, where there are only two official holidays per year and where you certainly don't worry about everything closing down if you happen to be visiting over Christmas.

Memories of a land

Memories of a land I found disappointingly homogenous and unexotic, apart from this one mountain place called Kosovo

JEREMY ATIYAH

 SUNDAY 25 APRIL 1999

Years ago, before nationality had become a reason to be killed there, I travelled through Yugoslavia as a naive backpacker.

For most of the time, one was only vaguely aware of the fact of multi- ethnicity. There were those who called themselves Serbs and those who called themselves Croats, but everybody knew that such vestigial differences were preserved mainly as quaint relics of the Ottoman empire - partly to amuse tourists and partly to perpetuate the Communist myth that the Yugoslavs were a voluntary union of disparate ethnic groups.

Disparate ethnic groups? If only! Yugoslavs, as far as I could see, had turned into modern Europeans whose national language was Serbo-Croat. If anything, in fact, they looked drearily homogenous. Under the mighty walls of Diocletian's Palace in Split I found housewives buying fish wrapped in newspapers. In the cobbled backstreets of old Belgrade I saw office workers in raincoats. There was nothing "ethnic" in sight.

The irony was that, as a tourist, I could have done with a few sharp differences between the ethnic groups. Why ever would I want all those endless old Communists in trilbies when I could have had - say - a warring hotchpotch of swarthy Montenegrins, moustachioed Serbs and feuding Albanians instead?

On only one tantalising occasion did the Yugoslavia I had been hoping for show its face. In the middle of a long bus journey over the mountains between Dubrovnik and Skopje (now in the independent state of Macedonia), we stopped for a break at the local equivalent to a motorway service station.

It was the dead of night and bitterly cold. Walking into the bar, I expected to find, at best, a fat Eastern European truck driver or two on a vodka break. Instead I seemed to step through a time warp. At dozens of small tables were sitting crowds of furtive men in black hats playing cards and drinking Turkish coffee. Oriental music wailed through the cigarette smoke. Where on earth was I? The last thing I knew I had been boarding a bus in European Dubrovnik. Suddenly I had landed in an orientalist's fantasy world.

Here at last was plain evidence of Yugoslavia's multi-ethnic identity: exotic, diverse, colourful. Just what I always wanted. It was only a few days later that I discovered we had been driving through a place called Kosovo.

Just hop on the bus to Kashgar

He could have flown there. But to Jeremy Atiyah, crossing the Karakoram Highway in a bus sounded like much more fun

Jeremy Atiyah 

Sunday, 25 April 1999

In the 1930s, the journalist Peter Fleming took five months traipsing overland to Kashgar from Peking, and then, once he was there, he just spent his days reading ancient copies of The Times that had been carried over the 15,400ft (4,700m) Khunjerab Pass by six-week donkey-treks from British India.

Surely these days it couldn't be that much fun getting to Kashgar? From Peking you can fly there in a day. Even the Karakoram Highway from Islamabad, Pakistan, built right across that same Khunjerab Pass, can be covered by bus in less than four days. If you agree with Sir Aurel Stein, who at the beginning of the century was already dismissing the trip across the pass as an "excursion for the ladies", the expedition to Kashgar might seem hardly worth the bother. Unless you really want to go to Kashgar, that is.

The fact that buses now ride over the pass does not however mean that the journey is entirely safe or adventure-free. The road, still the only land-route allowing public transport from China to the Indian subcontinent, suffers frequent earthquakes and landslides and is closed from November to May each year. Even when the road is open, falling rocks pose a constant danger. A soft option? I decided to try it for myself.

The first day, boarding the bus at Rawalpindi in the plains of the northern Punjab, I felt so horrifically hot at 8am that it was quite impossible to believe I was going somewhere cold. Even after we had started climbing into grassy hills, my clothes continued to engage in nuclear fusion with the plastic seat.

At first brilliant green, then progressively more barren, the scenery gradually contorted itself into the hot, gloomy Indus gorge, where we spent the entire afternoon suspended halfway up cliff-faces with the black river below and boulders menacing from above. Meandering on and on up the gorge towards Gilgit, we drove late into the night.

By the time I awoke in Gilgit the next morning, the heat of the plains had dissipated into a cool drizzle. I found myself drinking apricot milkshakes for breakfast in the company of Japanese backpackers. Mountains loomed through low mists. Horizontally, I was already halfway to Kashgar - but vertically I was barely one third of the way up to the Khunjerab Pass.

The next (vertical) 4,900ft (1,500m) required a second bus-journey through the Hunza valley to the Pakistani frontier-post at Sust. I sat with cheerful Punjabi traders riding to China. The way was lined by pot-bellied scree slopes, wobbling thousands of metres up into the clouds. Down below, grey expanses were interspersed with fertile terraces, wet fields and orchards, reminders of civilisation under the wildernesses above.

The bus filled with mustachioed men smelling of wood-smoke and wearing flat felt hats. Nobody spoke anybody else's language. Locked in by mountains, the area of Hunza has become a veritable Tower of Babel, a confusion of Wakhi, Barushaski, Shina and other ancient tongues. But these mountain people weren't going to China, they were just hopping on and off for short rides up the valley; when I arrived at Sust, the bus had emptied to a sinister extent. At over 9,800ft (3,000m), this was the end of Pakistan, the end of the subcontinent: dark, swept by freezing wet winds, a place to bunker by the hurricane-lamp and play cards with American college kids.

The next morning everything went to pot. At Pakistani emigration on the edge of town, I joined the American backpackers mingling with Chinese Muslims returning from Mecca. Under pelting rain and ominous black skies we queued up to be stamped out of Pakistan.

The scenery along the road up to the pass was like a vision of Hell. We crept under threatening cliff-faces. Shattered rock shut out the sky and stretched up to leering peaks. It was inevitable. The rain had rendered the road unsafe. Our driver kept having to slam on the brakes to avoid sliding rocks. The time had come for all of us to reflect on the fact that Khunjerab means "River of Blood".

After an hour we were practically falling off the cliff in our driver's increasingly desperate attempts to get the bus past fallen rocks. Impasse was inevitable: trapped both in front and behind by piles of rock - and in constant danger of being hit by flying debris - we were about to get stuck on the Karakoram Highway.

Rescue, several hours later, involved an ignominious walk back to Sust in a blizzard. The Pakistani traders remained good-humoured. The college kids and I discussed hot showers and plates of fried noodles. The Chinese Muslims, fresh from Saudi Arabia, plodded through the snow in their sandals.

Well, at least Peter Fleming's five- month journey was beginning to look a little more credible. For the next three days we lodged in Sust, exploring the tiny villages of the valley, before setting off for a renewed assault on the River of Blood.

Second time lucky. Riding through the rocky gorge, we made it this time to the top of the pass, where we entered a newer, brighter world. A frozen white river ran through a valley nudged by glaciers; pastureland appeared through melting ice. In silence we crossed the highest point, marked by a stone decorated with a red star. We had entered the People's Republic of China.

We inched into a vast bright plain grazed by yaks and camels and rimmed by mountains. Drowsy from altitude sickness, I seemed to be floating above the mountains. The first Chinese checkpoint soon disturbed this dream: two wild-eyed teenage soldiers, who must have done something very bad to get posted here, entered the bus counting heads. They stood awhile smoking, further depleting the oxygen in the bus.

And then it was on to the next night-stop at Tashkurgan. Here, the Pakistani traders suddenly appeared at Chinese customs dressed in ladies' fur coats, hats and gloves, presumably insisting that they were transvestite tourists rather than smugglers. Apart from the daily sprinkle of travellers, Tashkurgan must be the loneliest place on earth, a frozen crossing-place. At night, I found Tadjikis, Uigurs, Chinese and Pakistanis sitting in the dark, drinking and thinking of other worlds.

Another day, another bus - this time the bus to Kashgar. We spiralled down, past the fissured flanks of Mount Muztagata and along the banks of icy Lake Karakul surrounded by pale green pastureland. Further on, bare dunes of sand and gravel snaked in the wind, before our descent turned precipitous. Far away a warm, green valley came into view.

The mountains were receding behind us. In no time I felt the heat of old Chinese Turkestan. We were already passing men in skullcaps, poplar woods, donkey carts, rice plantations and mud-built houses.

Had it all been too easy then? Perhaps it had - except that our bus was about to fall apart, 24 long miles short of Kashgar. Another night on the road beckoned. Kashgar, it seemed, was still one of the world's most remote cities.

KARAKORAM HIGHWAY

GETTING THERE

Return flights to Islamabad with Pakistan International Airlines (tel: 0171-499 5500) cost pounds 655, plus tax, until 14 June. Return flights to Islamabad with British Airways (tel: 0345 222111) cost from pounds 567 return, including tax.

Explore Worldwide (tel: 01252 760000) offers an 18-day guided tour for pounds 1,145, including return flights, transfers, transport, tent and b&b hotel accommodation, and a guide. Departing 8 May, the tour takes in Peshawar, the Khyber Pass, the Kalash Kafirs, Hunza, and the old caravan trail on the Karakoram Highway.

VISAS

UK nationals must have a visa for travel to Pakistan and China. Embassy of Pakistan, 35 Lowndes Square, London SW1X 9NJ (tel: 0171-235 2044). Embassy of the People's Republic of China, 49-51 Portland Place, London W1N 3AH (tel: 0171-636 9375).

Stay a while in Stalin country

Jeremy Atiyah is seduced by the beauty of Georgia, once the Tuscany of the USSR, now fallen on hard times

Jeremy Atiyah 

Sunday, 11 April 1999

The Caucasus seem to be more metaphor than mountain: The wild place on the edge of the world. The barrier between Christian Europe and Islamic Asia. The corridor to the exotic south. The oriental inspiration for two centuries of Russians - from romantic poets, bums and adventurers, to traders, imperialists and militarists. But what a place to be born.

Frequent, devastating earthquakes throughout recorded history have been bad enough, never mind the clash of empires. How can it possibly be that anything up to 100 tiny nations of people still inhabit these mountains, jammed in between the Black and Caspian Seas? Georgians, Tatars, Chechens, Ossetians, Azerbaijanis, Mingrelians, Khevsurs, Armenians, Abkhazians, Svans, Ajarans, Pshavs, Kakhetians... no wonder people have dreamt of squashing this chaos. Soviet Man and Soviet Woman would have been so much simpler.

But I found it hard to imagine a more attractive country than the former Soviet republic of Georgia, dropping from the peaks of the southern Caucasus down to the Black Sea. Along with neighbouring Armenia it had been a Christian state for longer than Rome. It still retained its unique language and alphabet, relics from the ancient world. It had been cut off from the rest of Europe by the withering away of Byzantium - and yet had miraculously survived to the modern age as a tiny independent state.

Better still, until 10 years ago, this had been the Costa del Sol and the Tuscany of the Soviet Union rolled into one. Millions of Russians came annually to enjoy the Black Sea beaches, the mountain scenery, the spicy cuisine. Georgians were known in Moscow as the Italians of the USSR: open, child-like people, good lovers, who knew how to relax, who drank good wine rather than gut-burning vodka, who painted eccentric frescoes in their churches. Never mind that this little nation of bon viveurs had also produced Stalin, the greatest killjoy of them all. In the end, Georgia was the one republic that ordinary Russians missed after the collapse of their empire.

But had it yet become a place where you or I would take a holiday? Georgia may have reminded the Russians of Italy, but when I arrived last week it reminded me more of Russia. There were the whiffs of cheap tobacco and dodgy exhaust systems; there were the leather jackets, the potholes, the beggars in headscarves, the constant power cuts. As in Russia, the only people earning real money appeared to be "businessmen" and racketeers.

I was staying with a family in Tbilisi where luxury or privacy were not on the agenda, but where good humour, deep intelligence and drunkenness probably were. My host, Merab Gogberashvili - a theoretical physicist and former chess champion - told me that he lived off a negative salary. But was he an optimist? "Of course I am," he retorted. "Only a pessimist would imagine that things could possibly be worse than this."

Had this country of music and blood feuds sunk so low? In fact Tbilisi still shows its character, even in these sad times. Walking along Rostaveli Avenue in the centre of town I found beautiful people, busy cafes, mature trees on the pavements and European 19th-century plaster facades above shop windows. Under the castle fortress overlooking the Mtkvari River, I saw village greenery, shanties, painted house fronts, rickety balconies and staircases, puffs of smoke from chimneys. Church towers and minarets pierced the skyline below the mountains. Only maintenance was lacking: around the mosque I noticed a house that had fallen in half - a chicken was strolling the exposed living room floor. "Such are the remnants of our civilisation," commented Merab gloomily.

To a degree, he exaggerated. In the Museum of Fine Arts in downtown Tbilisi I found a series of stunning icons and pieces of jewellery dating from the 4th to the 19th centuries, the repository of Georgia's nationhood in gold and silver. In 1921 Lenin had ordered this dangerous treasure to be destroyed; against all odds, a local hero, one Ekvtime Takaishvili, had managed to spirit it all away to Paris instead. In 1945, having survived the Nazi occupation of France, it was returned to Tbilisi under the supervision of General de Gaulle and that other local hero, Stalin.

Merab took me for a drive out of town to show me more evidence of Georgia's enduring spirit. As we drove west, the main Caucasus range - a land of eternal snow - soon came into view on our right: no fewer than five 5,000m peaks lie within the borders of this tiny country. On the roadside, we passed fresh grapes. Vines alternated with grassy meadows; shepherds with bear-like dogs watched over their flocks. But the fruit orchards for which this country was once famous were now overgrown and neglected: the vast Russian market, which Georgia once supplied with apples and apricots, has ceased to exist.

As I later discovered, there can be advantages to economic catastrophe. The quality of the Georgian diet, for example. At home, Merab was constantly serving me exquisite home-produced wine, honey, yoghurt, cheese, bread, tea and sausage as well as all sorts of vegetables. Why waste money on buying food when you can make it yourself? The local ecology has also benefited from the cessation of industry (except insofar as the shortage of fuel forces people to cut down trees to use as firewood).

We drove into Mtskheta, the spiritual heart of Georgia, where the country's biggest church guards the junction between the roads to Europe and to Russia. For centuries the road north over the mountains from here - the Russians call it the Georgian Military Highway - has been the sole land route linking Moscow with Persia, Arabia, India and the rest of the Trans-Caucasian world. No wonder the towering vaulted church ceilings, the suns with rays like spears, the bull-heads on the gate posts, and the curiously irregular niches and buttresses have acquired such mystic significance for the people of Georgia.

Another 30 miles to the west of Mtskheta lies another town of almost as much spiritual significance for Georgia: Gori, the birthplace of one Josef Vissarionovich Dzhugashvili, better known as the Man of Steel - Stalin. It was curious to drive into the only town in the whole of the former USSR where a gigantic statue of the great dictator still stands in the centre of town. We approached down Stalin Street, towards Stalin Park. A fragile spring sun shone on to streets lined by blossoming trees and low brick buildings. Suddenly a huge structure of Oxford stone loomed up, surrounded by colonnaded walkways: the Stalin Museum.

With growing incredulity I mounted a grand staircase along a red carpet to a booted statue of the man himself, in white marble. Stained glass windows added a religious dimension. This was not a museum, but a museum of a museum. There had been no reconstruction here, not even a hint of perestroika.

I walked past pictures of Stalin as a boy, and as a trainee in the seminary ("Stalin later had all his fellow trainees murdered," Merab told me). I passed poems that Stalin wrote about the moon and the mountains, from the time when his soul had not yet turned to steel. I saw Stalin as a rugged, rather handsome young man, attempting to organise the failed 1905 revolution, largely financed by Germany as a means of toppling the Tsar's empire. (Ironically for Germany, their objective was eventually achieved with all too much success. Forty years later, Stalin's armies occupied Berlin.)

As a Georgian, could Merab feel proud of Stalin? "Certainly not," he told me. "But I am not particularly ashamed of him either. Lenin, Trotsky and the rest: they were all destroyers. Only Stalin was working to build something. Of course he built it with slave labour. But he made the USSR into a great power. And the man spent nearly 50 years living in the Kremlin. You try to match that."

According to my host Merab, Georgia's excellent record in producing dictators springs from the traditional role of Toast-Maker, or tamada, which socially ambitious young Georgians are required to practise: to rule, dominate and control a table of drunk Georgians, you need to develop special skills. These were skills which Stalin later brought to bear on 200 million subjects.

Later, in the grounds of the museum, I visited Stalin's cottage (now canopied by a Greek temple-style structure) and Stalin's train carriage, a 19th-century model, made in England, with an interior of polished wood. The main compartment had Persian carpets, armchairs and heavy curtains. Was this where Stalin planned world history while eating his home-made yoghurt? "Perhaps," cautioned Merab. "But don't forget what we used to say about the USSR. This is the only country in the world with an unpredictable history."

The next day I took a bath in one of Tbilisi's famous sulphuric springs in the Islamic part of town to ponder over that history. After lounging in the sulphurous smelling water for a few minutes, I was suddenly ordered to lie face down, naked, on a slab by a masseur, who jumped up on my back and began wrenching my arms and legs, before tossing buckets of boiling water over me. Shades of Stalin?

"Cheers!" As if from nowhere, Merab suddenly whipped out a couple of large plastic bottles. We wrapped ourselves in sheets and sat perspiring in the steam room, laughing over home-made beer and eating salty, oily fish with our fingers. This, I believe, was how the Georgians were meant to live their lives.

GETTING THERE

Jeremy Atiyah flew with Swiss Air (tel: 0171-434 7300), which flies to Tbilisi from Zurich on Wednesdays and Saturdays for pounds 353.80 including taxes.

PACKAGES

Interchange (tel: 0181-681 3612) offers three nights in Tbilisi, including flights from London Heathrow, transfers and half-board accommodation staying with families costs pounds 495. With a three-day excursion up the Georgian Military Highway the total price comes to pounds 699, based on two sharing.

VISAS

Apply in writing to the Georgian Embassy, 3 Hornton Place, London W8 4LZ.

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?